February 2004 News Monitor - Prevent Genocide International

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Prevent Genocide International

News Monitor for February 2004
Tracking current news on genocide and items related to past and present ethnic, national, racial and religious violence.
See also Selected news reports on the Stockholm International Forum on Preventing Genocide (Jan. 26-28, 2004)

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The East African (Nairobi) 9 Feb 2004 ANALYSIS Africa's Own Security Council Means No More Pariahs Peter Mwangi Kagwanja Nairobi This is "more than a dropping of one letter", quipped BBC World Affairs correspondent, Paul Reynolds, on the historic transformation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) into the African Union (AU). Now African states have passed yet another milestone by ratifying the protocol relating to the establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union. The protocol, adopted by the inaugural meeting of the AU held in Durban on July 9, 2002, came into force on December 26 when the Charg d'Affaires of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, L.K. Iyanda, deposited his country's instrument of ratification. The approval of the protocol, which required the ratification of 27 out of a total of 53 AU member states, closes nearly 18 months of vigorous lobbying on what is perhaps one of the most innovative and revolutionary of the African Union documents. The protocol heralds the dawn of a new era of commitment to peace, security, good governance and respect for human rights, rule of law and human dignity on the continent. It also brings to a close the grim interlude in African history when pariah regimes stalked the continent and hid behind the fortress of sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of states enshrined in the OAU Charter to brutalise their citizens and trample upon democracy. One of the most revolutionary aspects of the protocol is its effort to redefine the benchmarks of the sanctity of state sovereignty for the greater good of human life, dignity and freedom. For instance, the protocol gives power to the Assembly of the African Union to make a decision to intervene in a member state in such grave circumstances as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. In a sense, this ensures that the African Union does not find itself in the same predicament as its predecessor, which stood by and watched as such unspeakable dictators as Idi Amin (Uganda) and Jean Bedel Bokassa (Central African Republic) committed crimes against humanity with abandon, and as Rwanda descended into a genocide that claimed nearly a million lives. Another groundbreaking aspect of the protocol is that it empowers the PSC to impose sanctions in situations where unconstitutional change of government has taken place in a member state, as provided for in the Lome Declaration. It also allows the Peace and Security Council to take appropriate measures where the independence and sovereignty of a member state is threatened by mercenaries, among other acts of aggression. This sounds the death-knell for the unlawful takeover of governments by soldiers and mercenaries. In spite of this revolutionary remit, the Council is hardly likely to turn out a rogue elephant. It is, on the contrary, expected to abide by the principles of peaceful settlements of disputes and conflicts. Its immediate task is to realise a common African defense policy and an African Standby Force. It is also expected to implement the OAU treaty on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism and to harmonise and co-ordinate international, continental and regional treaties on terrorism. Not only is the Peace and Security Council cast in the mould of the UN Security Council, it is also based on the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, it appears less hegemonic and more equitable and representative than the UN Security Council - where the US, Britain, France and the Russian Federation are accused of undermining global democracy by continuing to hold veto votes and permanent seats. For instance, such leaders as Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Algeria), Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Abdou Wade (Senegal) and Thabo Mbeki (South Africa) - the driving forces behind the "African Renaissance" that led to the formation of the AU and Nepad - have not sought for their countries either a veto vote or a permanent seat on the AU Peace and Security Council. When fully operational, the PSC will be composed of 15 members, 10 elected for a term of two years and five elected for a term of three years to ensure continuity. Election to the PSC will be carried out on the basis of equal rights, and equitable regional representation and rotation. The elections for the PSC take place in March to pave the way for its inauguration in April. The protocol provides for a powerful Panel of the Wise, a remarkable innovation in continental governance. Comprising five highly respected African personalities drawn from all segments of society, the Panel of the Wise will advise the PSC and the Chairperson of the African Union Commission in their efforts to promote peace and security. Like the Panel of Eminent Persons of the African Peer Review Mechanism that is currently steering Nepad's reforms on democracy and good governance, the Panel of the Wise reveals a growing trend in Africa's multilateral institutions to embrace "traditional" governance. Recently, one observer warned, rather cynically, that "Africa faces the danger of collapsing under its own weight" if it does not harmonise its proliferating institutions. Apart from the African Union and Nepad, Africa has more than a dozen regional economic communities, each with peace and security functions. In this regard, the Council needs to harmonise the peace and security work of the AU with that of Nepad's Peace and Security Committee as well as with the peace efforts of Igad, Ecowas and SADC. In the same vein, the PSC should harmonise its governance priorities with those of the African Peer Review Mechanism. The success of the PSC is a litmus test for the AU and its aim of promoting "democratic principles and institutions, popular participation and good governance". Dr Kagwanja is a researcher based in Pretoria, South Africa.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 27 Feb 2004 Millions of Africa's refugees could go home soon, says UNHCR official GENEVA, Feb 27 (UNHCR) - Millions of Africans uprooted by war are in sight of the day when they can return to their countries, UNHCR's head of operations in Africa told a press conference at the agency's Geneva headquarters today. Speaking to the media at the Palais des Nations, Africa Bureau Director for UNHCR David Lambo said that thanks to ongoing peace efforts in various regions of Africa, there are potentially more than 2 million refugees who may want to return home over the next three to five years. Noting that the world is seeing "a new dawn in Africa", Lambo said that several conflicts on the continent had recently ended while in other regions, parties were now seriously sitting around the negotiating table. He stressed that for the first time in many years, millions of refugees may have the chance to return to their countries, where they would join millions more of their countrymen internally displaced by war who are also starting to go back to their communities. UNHCR is planning a ministerial conference, the Dialogue on Voluntary Repatriation and Sustainable Reintegration in Africa, to be held in the Palais des Nations on March 8. Lambo said the meeting will bring together key African ministers, donor governments and other partners to discuss peace processes that will, over the next few years, present unprecedented opportunities to find solutions for Africa's protracted refugee problems. The upcoming meeting will be opened by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers. Joining the 14 ministers who Lambo said have so far agreed to attend the meeting will be keynote speakers Poul Nielson, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid; Julia D. Joiner, Commissioner for Political Affairs, Commission of the European Union; and Julia Taft, Assistant Administrator of the UN Development Programme. "The March 8 meeting will raise the awareness of the international community and help them to understand the potential for return," Lambo said. "We're trying to spread the message that donors must help the peace processes now underway on the continent to be sustainable." "One of the major problems is to break the cycle of repatriation and then of despair," Lambo said of situations where refugees finally make the step to return to their countries, but then lack the economic and social support necessary to become self-sufficient. The refugee agency's intention behind the upcoming conference is to spotlight countries where Lambo said UNHCR is "cautiously optimistic" about the direction of the peace process and consolidation efforts. The agency has noted that Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan all fall into the list of states already welcoming back or on the verge of seeing exiles return from neighbouring states. Lambo said the agency believes that the international community needs to seize this opportunity and take a comprehensive regional approach to ensure repatriation and sustainable reintegration in Africa. "It is very important that we make this effort sustainable and that we really do break the cycle of violence," Lambo declared. "We can demobilise combatants and help people home, but it is an entirely different matter to rehabilitate and rebuild a country." As such, UNHCR sees the March 8 meeting as an opportunity to bring senior government officials from nearly 40 African countries into contact with key donor states and humanitarian and development actors. This will give them a chance to begin outlining a coordinated repatriation and rehabilitation effort in their states to ensure that returning refugees and displaced persons can be absorbed by communities that are themselves recovering from years of neglect. In an encouraging sign, UNHCR has received the first contributions to what could be its biggest repatriation operation in the near future - Sudan. The United States has donated $2.7 million while Canada contributed $380,000 in response to the agency's November 2003 appeal for $8.8 million to fund preparatory activities for the return of Sudanese refugees.

NYT February 16, 2004 Algeria Shows Willingness to Abandon Its Violent Past By SIMON ROMERO ALGIERS, Feb. 11 — Little of note happened at OPEC's gathering here this week, other than an announced cut in oil production. There were no explosions. No kidnappings. No assassinations. That was exactly what the tough-minded military-backed government would have demanded, after a decade of fighting Islamic insurgents, a battle that has left an estimated 120,000 people dead. The government's next big test will come in presidential elections, set for April 8, elections in which some parties are not taking part, to protest the state of emergency still in effect. In the meantime, there are signs that the country is returning bit by bit to the fold of diplomacy and international commerce. A few days before ministers from the 11 members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries began arriving at an airport patrolled by commandos armed with submachine guns, the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, led a state visit that produced agreements allowing China to explore for oil and gas in Algeria's rich southern Saharan fields. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell came here briefly in December during a trip to North Africa to applaud Algeria's "exceptional cooperation in the war on terrorism." He called for fair presidential elections. In March, the French president, Jacques Chirac, accompanied by executives from France's largest companies, dropped by in a display of cordial relations between Algeria and its colonial ruler until 1962. The eight-year war of independence cost a million lives. The host of the OPEC meeting, the Algerian oil minister, Chakib Khelil, spoke of strengthening ties with other nations, illustrated by the decision of Air France and British Airways to operate flights to Algiers for the first time in years. The area around the capital is relatively safe, but attacks are breaking out farther away. "The security situation appears to have improved in some places but the Algerian military and government are still on a knife edge," said George Joffe, an expert on Algeria at Cambridge University. "As much as the army would like to declare otherwise, the war in Algeria is not over." Just this week, Islamic fighters killed seven paramilitary police officers in an ambush at a coastal city east of Algiers, Bejaia, the official APS news agency reported. In Algiers, where plainclothes and uniformed police officers keep watch, consumer trappings are becoming visible, like the Peugeots and Renaults on the streets, Korean cellphones and satellite dishes perched on balconies of crowded tenements. The government has begun a heavily publicized campaign to raise awareness of traffic safety and road accidents, adding to the impression that Algeria may finally be ready to address issues other than terrorism. The police advertise the slogan "Speed Equals Death." "The police are supposed to be fining motorists for not wearing seat belts instead of hunting people down," said Mostefa Bouchachi, a lawyer and president of the human rights commission of the Algiers Bar Association. "Traveling safely around the city or even between cities, something unthinkable not long ago, is one of those subtle achievements." The meeting in Algiers was only OPEC's second in Algeria in the organization's 44-year history. Nearly three decades ago, Ilich Ramírez-Sánchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, fled to Algiers with 11 of OPEC's ministers who had been kidnapped from a luxury hotel in Vienna. The military has assumed great powers since 1992, when the army halted elections that Islamic opponents seemed about to win, an action that began the civil war. In a later election, in 1999, the military's candidate won the presidency only after six rivals dropped out, claiming fraud. Fully rekindling the economy, which is heavily dependent on oil and natural gas exports, is another matter. But government officials insist that the nation is on its way to attaining stability that could soon allow it to join groups like the World Trade Organization. "This country passed through a very difficult period in the 90's, but it is recovering fast," Abdellatif Benachenhou, Algeria's French-trained finance minister, said in an interview. He cited economic growth that was reported to be more than 6 percent last year, largely because of high oil prices. Mr. Benachenhou said he expected the economy of this nation of 32 million people to grow 6 percent again this year. Such prospects are tied chiefly to oil and natural gas sales to Europe and the United States. Once shunned by all but a handful of American and European energy companies, the nation is expected to soon become the largest supplier of gas to Spain and one of the largest to France and Italy. Still, even Mr. Benachenhou admits that robust exports cannot easily repair the damage from a decade of civil war or bridge the hard divisions between the French-speaking elite and the mostly underemployed and underpaid masses, many of whom still receive benefits dating from the nation's once rigid socialist past. Tension over how to share the nation's oil bounty has spilled over the campaign before the presidential elections in April. Despite the state of emergency, the city's French- and Arabic-language newspapers carry fierce critiques of the administration of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was elected in 1999 with the blessing of the army amid widespread accusations of vote rigging. Under his presidency, thousands of Islamic militants have been pardoned. "Algeria and the Algerians deserve better from the present debate," La Tribune, a French-language paper, said in an editorial this week. It accused Mr. Bouteflika of using oil and gas revenues to finance social programs to win electoral support. Facing pressure to guarantee fair elections, Mr. Bouteflika has asked the United Nations, Arab League, African Union and European Union to send observers in April. The lack of strong opposition candidates has many convinced that he is likely to be re-elected, though he has not yet officially announced his candidacy. Mr. Bouteflika's government has yet to account for 7,000 or more people who, according to Human Rights Watch, disappeared at the hands of security forces in the 1990's. As if to change the topic, the government has unflinchingly endorsed the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism; it did not permit protests against the war in Iraq.

AFP 1 Feb 2004 Burundi army says 30 rebels killed in clashes in west BUJUMBURA, February 1 (AFP) - A top army commander in Burundi said Sunday that about 30 fighters from the central African country's sole remaining active rebel group had been killed in clashes the previous day near the capital. "Yesterday (Saturday) about 30 FNL (National Liberation Forces) were killed and 18 rifles taken in fighting in Nyabibondo zone," General Germain Niyoyankana, head of the army staff, told AFP. The area is about 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of Bujumbura. The general went on to "categorically" deny an earlier report that 15 soldiers and eight allied fighters from a former rebel group had been killed by the FNL in Nyabibondo on Friday. He said only a soldier and one member of the former rebel group, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy, which has made peace with the government, had been killed on Friday. The FNL said there had been clashes over the weekend but declined to give details about casualties. "There were casualties on our side, as there were with the army and their allies," FNL spokesman Pasteur Habimana said by phone. "You can see that even when they are allied, the army and the FNL are unable to dislodge us," he added. Since January 12, FDD units have been attacking FNL positions in several areas near the capital. Hopes that the FNL might, like other armed groups drawn from Burundi's large Hutu majority, reach a peace deal with the government were raised in January when President Domitien Ndayizeye met leaders of the movement for the first time, in the Netherlands. Burundi's civil war has claimed some more than 300,000 lives since 1993.

AP 1 Feb 2004 French foreign minister optimistic on U.N. peace force for Ivory Coast Baudelaire Mieux, Associated Press, 2/1/04 France's foreign minister said Sunday he was optimistic the United Nations would put together a new peacekeeping force to help secure peace in Ivory Coast and hoped it could be deployed to the war-divided country in a few weeks. Dominique de Villepin told journalists after closed door talks with Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo in the commercial capital, Abidjan, that he would press the issue at the United Nations in New York next week. "France is engaged, and I know that the international community wants to move in this direction," de Villepin said. "I am optimistic that in a few weeks this force could be put together and be deployed here." France already has 4,000 troops in its former colony, helping 1,300 West African soldiers uphold a peace deal agreed last year. Although the Ivorian government officially declared the nine-month long civil war over in July, the country remains split between government-held south and rebel-controlled north. De Villepin said French troops would stay on if the United Nations deploys troops. West African states have called for U.N. peacekeepers to replace their soldiers. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for a peacekeeping mission with 6,420 troops, but the exact size and mandate of such a force would have to be approved by the U.N. Security Council. The United States has expressed reservations about the size of the proposed force, and says it wants to examine the justification for sending U.N. troops there. A beaming Gbagbo, surrounded by a posse of bodyguards, echoed de Villepin's optimism. "I've asked Ivorians to steel their muscles so that we can get out of this crisis," he said. "France and Ivory Coast are walking hand-in-hand to make the last steps" toward peace. Underscoring the difficulty of that task, de Villepin's own bodyguards were prevented by soldiers from entering the room where he met with Gbagbo. Tensions between France and Ivorian government loyalists, who often accuse the former colonial power of favoring the rebels, have risen recent months, with anti-French mobs launching violent protests and riots in the streets. An estimated 9,000 French expatriates have fled since war broke out with a failed coup attempt in September 2002. A peace accord in 2003 ushered in a new government of national unity which included figures from the rebel factions and opposition parties. The transitional administration is due to hold elections in 2005, and French troops are supposed to depart at the same time. Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer, fueled the regional economy for decades since independence in 1960. A 1999 coup shattered its reputation as an oasis of stability in a turbulent region, ushering in a series of military revolts and violence along ethnic and political lines. The civil war began with a failed coup attempt in Abidjan in September 2003. De Villepin will visit four South American nations - Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico - next week, before heading for talks at the U.N. headquarters in New York.

UN Commission on Human Rights 9 Feb 2004 Visit by Special Rapporteur on racism and racial discrimination to Côte d'Ivoire Doudou Diene, the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, is today starting a visit to Côte d'Ivoire which will last until 20 February. The aim of this visit is to examine the evolution of inter-communal and inter-ethnic relations in the context of the conflict in the country. Mr. Diene will visit Abidjan, where the Government is situated, the Ivorian capital Yamoussoukro, as well as other regions in the country in order to gather information which will allow him to understand the socio-political dynamics in Côte d'Ivoire. He hopes to meet with Ivorian authorities, representatives of the "Forces nouvelles", members of the international community in Abidjan as well as representatives of civil society. Mr. Diene is the former Director of the Department of International Dialogue and Cultural Pluralism at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He has been Special Rapporteur since 25 April 2002. Since his appointment, he has visited Canada, Colombia, Guyana and Trinity and Tobago.

IRIN 9 Feb 2004 Tension still runs high in the Wild West [This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations] BIN HOUYE, 9 February (IRIN) - Hundreds of Liberian refugees were lining up to receive their first ever ration of food aid in Bin Houye, a small town near the Cote d'Ivoire's volatile western frontier with Liberia, when the sound of gunfire sent the inhabitants of nearby villages running for cover into the bush. The guns fell silent everywhere else in Cote d'Ivoire after the government and rebels signed a ceasefire nine months ago. But here in the "Wild West," they still talk loudly. This time it was only the garrison of government soldiers in the border town of Zouan Hounien, 20 km up the road, letting rip with every weapon in their possession to protest that their special bonuses for serving on the frontline had not been paid for three months. No-one was being targetted by their bullets. But that is not always the case. Ethnic rivalries and land disputes, marauding bands of armed Liberians, squabbling rebel warlords and the threat of Liberian rebel fighters spilling back over the border into Cote d'Ivoire all combine to make Western Cote d'Ivoire an explosive place where 150,000 people were displaced from their homes as a result of conflict. Killings and violence remain common here, nine months after a ceasefire brought relative calm to the rest of the divided country. "Too many weapons are in the hands of people and many young people have been drafted into fighting forces or vigilante groups," a security officer remarked. Even so, conditions are slowly improving. French peacekeeping troops patrol the area - they even have a small base at Bin Houye, a small town whose shops are mostly closed, but whose market has once more burst into life. And villagers who fled the helicopter gunships and indisciplined bands of government and rebel militiamen 12 months ago are gradually returning. Nearly all the 50,000 inhabitants of Bin Houye and the surrounding districts melted into the bush as the town became a battlefield between January and April last year. But the local authorities estimate that between 26,000 and 32,000 local residents have returned since July. In some nearby villages you can see new houses being built. International relief agencies have moved in to assist the returnees. Doctors of Medecins Sans Frontieres Holland run a health clinic in Bin Houye, whose quiet dirt streets are virtually free of vehicle traffic. And last month, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) distributed food to 25,000 people who had returned to the town and the surrounding area to resume farming. At the end of January, WFP also began distributing a 30-day food ration to 7,000 refugees from nearby Liberia. Bin Houye lies just three km from the border. Relief workers said the the UN refugee agency UNHCR had been slow to register these people as refugees because the local authorities were uncertain how many of them might simply be gunmen fighting for one or other faction in the conflict and looting freely for themselves. "This was the cause of the delay in the registration of the refugees and also in the relief agencies, especially the UN agencies, coming into the area," the security officer operating in the west told IRIN. But the refugees are glad that help has finally arrived. "Thank you so much. I don't know what I would eat without this," said one elderly Liberian woman as her family received its standard WFP ration of bulgar wheat, corn-soya blend, salt, beans and cooking oil. Men carried away the sacks of food in wheelbarrows and sacks balanced on their head. Ironically most of the refugees in Bin Houye arrived after the signing of a peace agreement in Liberia in August last year to end 14 years of civil war. The peace accord led to an immediate ceasefire in the capital Monrovia, but it was largely ignored for three months in Nimba county, just across the border from Bin Houye. There, Liberia's three armed factions continued to fight among themselves and harass civilians. On the Ivorian side of the border, the situation has been no less chaotic. With the outbreak of civil war in September 2002, the Guere people in the west mainly sided with the government of President Laurent Gbagbo. The Guere are closely related to the Krahn who live just over the border in Liberia and many Krahn gunmen joined hastily formed Liberian militia groups known as "Limas." These were raised by the Ivorian army to help battle against rebel forces sweeping down from the north. The rebels, on the other hand, drew strong support from the Yakouba people who live in the same area as the Guere. General Robert Guei, who led a military government in Cote d'Ivoire from 1999 to 2000, was a Yakouba. But when Guei was shot dead in Abidjan the night the civil war began, most of his people instinctively sided with the rebels. So too did many of the Yakouba's kinsmen in Liberia, the Gio, who came over the border with guns to help out on the rebel side. Pro government groups have claimed that the rebels also commanded widespread support among the Burkinabe and Malian immigrants who came to the west to set up cocoa farms in the thick forest of western Cote d'Ivoire. Since the outbreak of hostilities, some Ivorian communities have tried to seize their land. Near the town of Bangolo, 150 km east of Bin Houye, land disputes between the Ivorian and Burkinabe settlers have given rise to countless massacres since the civil war began 16 months ago. In the latest round of blood-letting there, 35 people were killed between late December and mid-January in the village of Kahin. About 7,000 displaced Burkinabe settlers have sought shelter at a makeshift camp in the town of Guiglo, which also hosts a camp for Liberian refugees. In Bin Houye, the Guere and Yakouba communities came to blows during the thick of the fighting a year ago. When government forces re-established firm control of the town, most of its Yakouba population fled north to the rebel occupied towns of Man, Danane and Odienne and few have returned. Many of Yakouba homes in the town have been occupied by Guere people and Liberian refugees. "There are people from both the ethnic groups who are afraid of going back to their original homes because they still fear for their safety," one local chief remarked. The Liberian refugees in Bin Houye scrape a living by working as farm hands for their Ivorian hosts. Many work on the cocoa and coffee farms. Others work in rice fields. Some have become petty traders, selling firewood, kola nuts and palm wine. "A few of us had relatives on the Ivorian side of the border, because most of us here are from the Gio tribe in Liberia which speak the same dialect and are related to the Yakouba in Cote d'Ivoire, " Mentuah Kayo, the head of the Liberian refugee community in the town, told IRIN. Now Kayo wants the relief agencies to provide the refugees with seeds and farm implements so that they can grow their own food. "We went to several villages and met with the local chiefs and elders and people said they were willing to give land for cultivation to Liberian refugees. We therefore need vegetable and rice seeds," he said. The international relief organisation Solidarite plans to start an agricultural resettlement programme this month in Toulepleu, 27 km south of Bin Houye which is designed to benefit 80,000 people. Philippe Guerin, an agronomist with Solidarite, said the organisation would give out seeds for both swamp and upland rice and tools such as ploughs, watering cans and knife sharpeners. Conditions are not only hazardous on the government side of the front line in western Cote d'Ivoire. The rebel-held towns of Man and Danane have seen repeated skirmishing between the gangs of rival warlords, despite the presence of French peacekeepers there since May last year. A five-day battle broke out between rival factions in Man on January 22 and was only quelled on 27 January when the rebel leadership sent a force of 600 men to restore order and arrest the ringleaders. The reason for the spat remains unclear. Some residents said it was an argument over who got to keep the "taxes" levied on trucks passing through Man and other towns in the area at a series of checkpoints. Others said it was a scrap over the spoils from a bank raid in the town. Dely Gaspard, the new rebel military commander in Man, told IRIN that the battle was simply sparked off by one military commander accusing another of trying to take his girlfriend. It is impossible to predict where the next flashpoint will occur. "We always have to be on the alert and I cannot say whether we will see more or less of these breaches of security," said the security officer attached to a relief organisation operating in the west. "I cannot tell which place is more dangerous than the other. All we can hope for is that peace returns and becomes secure and people feel more secure," he added. .

www.monuc.org 6 Feb 2004 UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo / NewsWire 06/02/2004 Gun battle reveals tensions in Congo's east Reuters Kinshasa - Government troops battled fighters loyal to a former rebel leader in Bukavu in eastern Congo, United Nations officials said on Thursday. This is latest sign of serious rifts threatening peace in the region. The hour-long gunfight highlighted the challenges facing UN troops charged with cementing a fragile peace process in the central African country's mineral-rich east where rag-tag armed groups with entrenched loyalties and separate agendas roam. Wednesday's gunbattle was between troops loyal to General Prosper Nabyolwa, the military commander of South Kivu province, and soldiers loyal to Colonel Georges Mirindi, a former Rwandan-backed rebel and now brigade leader in Congo's new army. 'This is more than just a spat' "This is more than just a spat. These are two opposing currents in the bid for politico-military dominance," said a western diplomat in the capital Kinshasa. Under a peace deal to end Congo's five-year civil war, a power-sharing government has been set up and the warring factions are being integrated into a new army. But success will depend on securing the loyalty of the men with guns - including 15 000 Rwandan Hutu rebels, many of whom were involved in the 1994 genocide in their country, who are still based in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Sebastian Lapierre, UN spokesperson in Bukavu, said one of Mirindi's soldiers was killed in the shootout and a civilian was injured when a rocket fell on a transit centre for refugees. "Today the situation is calm," he said. "The UN is present in the area to observe and deter any further action." There have been long-standing tensions between Nabyolwa and Mirindi and also between the former and South Kivu's governor Xavier Ciribanya Cirimwami. Both the governor and Mirindi are former members of the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma rebels. Congo's civil war claimed more than three million lives, mainly through hunger and disease and drew in fighters from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and other neighbouring countries. The conflict was declared over last July but sporadic clashes have continued in the east. The United Nations has sent 10 800 peacekeepers to the country.

AFP 8 Feb 2004 Tension grows in DR Congo's Ituri between UN forces and ethnic militias by Helen Vesperini KIGALI, Feb 8 (AFP) - Tension has been growing in the volatile Ituri region of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo between UN peacekeepers and local militias during the past three weeks, observers said Sunday. Relative calm prevailed in Ituri in November and December following the deployment in September of a reinforced UN peacekeeping force. The UN force took over from French-led European Union troops to restore security in an area riven by inter-ethnic violence that has cost 50,000 lives and left about 500,000 wounded since 1999. Since mid-January, however, the UN have been the target of five attacks outside Bunia, the main town in Ituri, but there were no casualties among the UN troops. No casualty information was available from the attackers. The UN has blamed the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), a minority ethnic Hema faction in Ituri commanded by Bosco Ntaganda, for at least three of the five attacks. "It is probably Bosco who is behind the attacks," Leo Salmeron, a spokesman for MONUC, the UN mission in the DRC, told AFP by telephone from Bunia on Saturday. In the most recent attack last Wednesday, unknown assailants opened fire on five speedboats carrying a UN team to Gobu, a village situated on the shores of Lake Albert, about 60 kilometres (37 miles) north of Bunia. The group of UN officials were investigating a massacre that allegedly took place in the area in January. The boats came under fire around Djo, seven kilometres (four miles) south of Gobu, and the UN team, made up of soldiers, returned fire. "We can't confirm who the assailants were, but we strongly suspect that they were Boscos's people," said Salmeron. The UPC has also been blamed for two other attacks against the UN on January 19 and 20 in Drodro, about 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of Bunia, and in Iga Barrier, 25 kilometres (15 miles) north of Bunia. Militias detained following the two attacks are said to be loyal to Ntaganda, according to MONUC, which quoted witnesses as saying that his group had committed "serious human rights violations", including rape. Towards the end of last year, the UPC split into two. One of the two splinter factions is led by Ntaganda and the other one, which is close to the government in Kinshasa, is headed by Floribert Kisembo. According to sources close to Ntaganda, who asked not to be named, Ntaganda's faction wants to take revenge against MONUC for detaining two commanders close to him -- Rafiki Aimable, a UPC commander and his deputy Etienne Nembe, who were arrested in October and December. The two men are still being held in Bunia. In the first attack on January 16, a MONUC helicopter flying over the village of Kisenyi was fired on five times. Kisenyi is situated about 50 kilometres (31 miles) south east of Bunia and the attack is thought to have been carried out by the Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI), a faction of the majority Lendu ethnic group in Ituri, according to MONUC. The perpetrators of the attack on January 21, when militiamen fired on Pakistani UN troops at Nizi, about 30 kilometres (21 miles) north of Bunia, have not been identified. Union des patriotes congolais (UPC) http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/upc.htm

AP 15 Feb 2004 Congo peacekeepers fire back IGA-BARRIERE, Congo (AP) --From positions on three hills, tribal fighters unleashed a surprise attack at sunset, their bullets smacking into the high sand ramparts around the U.N. checkpoint below. Then the peacekeepers did what the United Nations all too often is accused of failing to do: They fought back. Helicopter gunships, armored personnel carriers and infantry sent the assailants fleeing. Quiet returned, and people in this dusty gold-mining town of 15,000 breathed easier, knowing they had probably been spared another round of rape, murder and cannibalism. Peacekeeping has changed dramatically since the troops from more than two dozen nations arrived in eastern Congo in 2001 to protect U.N. installations and unarmed military observers monitoring the cease-fire lines that separate government and rebel armies. Nowadays, with a stronger U.N. Security Council mandate to pacify a volatile chunk of Congo twice the size of Colorado, the peacekeepers talk -- and act -- tough. "We need to intervene very forcefully and very quickly," said Dominique AitOuyahia-McAdams, the Frenchwoman who heads the U.N. mission in northeastern Ituri province and is headquartered in Bunia, the provincial capital 16 miles south of Iga-Barriere. The strategy may be risky, "but we all have to take risks because the price for the population is too high not to take any risk," she said. Backed by a fleet of 52 helicopters and transport planes and a $600 million budget, the 10,500 peacekeepers are helping the transitional government regain control of Africa's third-largest nation, curb armed groups and prepare for elections that could be held in less than two years. "U.N. troops first entered as peacekeepers and have been transformed into peace enforcers," said Taylor B. Seybolt of the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent, federally funded think tank in Washington. "The U.N. is responding to events on the ground in a way they have not done in the past in other countries and other times," Seybolt, who studies peacekeeping and ethnic conflict, said in a telephone interview. Seven months after the three main rebel groups joined President Joseph Kabila in a transitional government in faraway Kinshasa, peace is yet to be restored in large parts of eastern Congo. This is the region hardest hit by the five-year civil war in which an estimated 3 million people have died, mainly through war-induced hunger and disease. Hutu militiamen, who fled to Congo in mid-1994 after taking part in the Rwanda genocide, are still active in South Kivu province, attacking villages and terrorizing the population. "Congo is a huge country. It's the heart of Africa. There is no infrastructure, so the challenge for anyone to help the government to do anything is multiplied by ten," AitOuyahia-McAdams said. "We are being asked to address a country of between 50 and 60 million people, so the challenge is much bigger for us than any other U.N. mission existing today." The turnaround came in July with the new Security Council mandate "to use all necessary means" to do the job. That was after the peacekeepers were fiercely criticized for failing to stop tribal fighting in Bunia in which more than 500 people were killed, despite the presence of hundreds of soldiers from Uruguay. The present force draws armed troops plus unarmed observers from Bangladesh, Chile, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, South Africa and Uruguay. An additional 25 nations provide observers only. With most of the U.N. troops in Ituri based in Bunia, seat of the U.N.-backed interim provincial administration, the town has quieted down. Newly painted shops advertise cell phone companies, and U.N. engineers from Uruguay use bulldozers to cover the potholes. But more work remains. Although many gunmen have been disarmed and removed from Bunia, the rebels are still able to run a clandestine network extorting illegal taxes in the city, U.N. officials say. In the South Kivu city of Bukavu, blue-helmeted peacekeepers patrol, ready to use force to prevent more fighting between the private army of the former rebel governor and troops loyal to the regional military chief. In Ituri, the tribal fighters were armed by neighboring Uganda and Rwanda in a proxy war to protect stakes in the province's timber and mines. They have morphed into criminal gangs that attack U.N. helicopters, troops and civilian staff, hoping to halt their deployment in the areas they control and plunder with impunity. "There are some elements in the armed groups who have been thriving on violence, on extortion, and they want to continue with that way of living," said Brig. Gen. Mahmood Rashad, commander of the 4,700 U.N. soldiers in Ituri. Rashad arrived three months ago, thinking his job would be to peacefully disarm and demobilize tribal fighters. But the Pakistani officer now hunts them down with helicopter gunships and sends peacekeepers to arrest them because the local police have no guns, vehicles or handcuffs. There are plans to send U.N. troops in to oust the Rwandan Hutu militiamen and pave the way for the new Congolese army to secure the volatile region. "All our assessment is, whenever we've moved into an area -- and when there is a rumor that we are moving into the area -- the rebels pull out," said Lt. Col. Tim Wood, British chief of staff of the U.N. force in eastern Congo. But in Ituri, the tribal fighters aren't giving up so easily. They just shed their uniforms, hide their weapons and wait to inflict casualties on the peacekeepers. On Thursday, a Kenyan army officer was shot dead when his team of U.N. observers, sent to investigate tribal fighting in northeastern Congo, came under fire, the U.N. mission said. Troops called in by helicopter fired on the assailants and scattered them before they could make off with the dead Kenyan's vehicle. Last year two unarmed military observers, a Jordanian and a Malawian, were killed and mutilated in Mongbwalu, 35 miles northwest of Iga-Barriere. Also last year, a Russian military observer died and another was injured when they drove over a land mine outside Bunia. U.N. observers have been abducted, robbed and wounded when attacked with stones and gunfire in several places. The United Nations says it is prepared to hold its ground and fight the rebels, strengthened by battle-hardened U.N. troops from Pakistan, India and Nepal. "They can shoot at us from a distance. They can do a little bit of guerrilla-type warfare," AitOuyahia-McAdams said. Pressure from the U.N. force has split tribal fighters into even smaller groups that often fight each other for control of resources in places where there are no U.N. troops. How long will Congo need peacekeepers? President Kabila says they won't be required after the end of this year, and should start training the new Congolese army and police. Seybolt is skeptical. "In the Balkans, foreign troops have been there for eight years, and they are not likely to pull out any time soon because there is a general sense that the place will gradually fall apart in such an event," he said. "The same may be true for Congo."

The NAtion 19 Feb 2004 Silence=Rape by Jan Goodwin Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who'd disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts. "This little girl couldn't walk, couldn't talk when she arrived here. Shashir had to be surgically repaired. I don't know if she can be mentally repaired," says Faida Veronique, a 47-year-old cook at Doctors on Call for Service (DOCS), a tented hospital in the eastern city of Goma, who took in the brutalized child. "Why do they rape a child?" asks Marie-Madeleine Kisoni, a Congolese counselor who works with raped women and children. "We don't understand. There's a spirit of bestiality here now. I've seen 2- and 3-year-olds raped. The rebels want to kill us, but it's more painful to kill the spirit instead." In the Congo today, age is clearly no protection from rape. A woman named Maria was 70 when the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that led Rwanda's 1994 genocide and now number between 20,000 and 30,000 of the estimated 140,000 rebels in the DRC, came to her home. "They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me, one after the other," she told me. "Then they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted." During the attack Maria's entire family--five sons, three daughters and her husband--were murdered. "War came. I just saw smoke and fire. Then my life and my health were taken away," she says. The tiny septuagenarian with the sunken eyes was left with a massive fistula where her bladder was torn, causing permanent incontinence. She hid in the bush for three years out of fear that the rebels might return, and out of shame over her constantly soiled clothes. Yet Maria was one of the more fortunate ones. She'd finally made it to a hospital. Two months before we met, she had undergone reconstructive surgery. The outcome is uncertain, however, and she still requires a catheter. Rape has become a defining characteristic of the five-year war in the DRC, says Anneke Van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch. So, too, has mutilation of the victims. "Last year, I was stunned when a 30-year-old woman in North Kivu had her lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out after she was raped, so she couldn't identify or testify against her attackers. Now, we are seeing more and more such cases," she says. As the rebels constantly seek new ways to terrorize, their barbarity becomes more frenzied. I, too, was sickened by what I saw and heard. In three decades of covering war, I had never before come across the cases described to me by Congolese doctors, such as gang-rape victims having their labia pierced and then padlocked. "They usually die of massive infection," I was told. Based on personal testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch, it is estimated that as many as 30 percent of rape victims are sexually tortured and mutilated during the assaults, usually with spears, machetes, sticks or gun barrels thrust into their vaginas. Increasingly, the trigger is being pulled. About 40 percent of rape victims, usually the younger ones, aged 8 to 19, are abducted and forced to become sex slaves. "The country is in an utter state of lawlessness; it's complete anarchy," says Woudenberg. "In this culture of impunity, people know they can get away with anything. Every armed group is equally culpable." In the Congo, rape is a cheaper weapon of war than bullets. Experts estimate that some 60 percent of all combatants in the DRC are infected with HIV/AIDS. As women rarely have access to expensive antiretroviral drugs, sexual assaults all too often become automatic death sentences. Médecins Sans Frontières operates five health clinics offering antiretrovirals in the conflict zone of northeastern DRC, but many women don't know about the drugs and cannot travel safely to the centers. Moreover, according to Helen O'Neill, a nurse who set up MSF's sexual-violence treatment program, such drugs must be taken within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of the rape to prevent infection. If a woman has been exposed to the virus, the treatment is 80 percent effective. But in the Congo, rape victims who are not captive sex slaves must walk for days or weeks, often with massive injuries, and risk new capture by roving rebel bands, before reaching assistance. "So far, 30 percent of rape victims being treated at our hospital are infected with HIV/AIDS," says Dr. Denis Mukwege, the French-trained medical director of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. "And nearly 50 percent are infected with venereal diseases like syphilis that greatly increase their chances of contracting HIV." Rape as a weapon of war is as old as war itself. What has changed recently is that sexual violence is no longer considered just a byproduct of conflict but is being viewed as a war crime, says Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now, a New York-based international women's human rights organization. "Rape as a violation of war was codified in the Geneva Convention, but only now is it being taken seriously. But it is still not effectively prosecuted, not proportional to the extent that sexual violence takes place," she says. Armed forces now have a legal obligation to stop rape and hold the offenders accountable. "This is a major shift in consciousness. But it needs to be followed by a major shift in conduct," says Neuwirth. In the DRC, rape is used to terrorize, humiliate and punish the enemy. Frequently husbands, fathers and children are forced to watch and even participate. Women sexually assaulted by members of one rebel organization are accused of being the wives of that group and raped again as punishment when a new militia takes over the area. "It's happened repeatedly to the women of Shabunda in the far east of the Congo, every time the region has changed hands," says Woudenberg. Even the camps for internally displaced people are not safe. The barbed-wire encampment in Bunia is home to more than 14,000 people, but enemy militia infiltrate at night. Shortly before I arrived, an 11-year-old girl was dragged off and gang-raped, a not uncommon occurrence. There are more than 3 million internally displaced people made homeless by the war, many of whom have been forced to flee over and over again. UN officers admit they have nowhere near the numbers they need to be effective, or even to stay safe themselves. "The rebels are all around us here. We don't feel secure and we've seen what these guys do to people, especially to women and girls. Our own people have been killed, after they were horribly tortured," a European UN major told me. "The DRC is the size of Western Europe. We're supposed to have 8,500 troops here, but we've only got 5,000! I was in Bosnia, which is a fraction of the size of the Congo, and we had 68,000 NATO troops, and even that wasn't enough." Patrols of MONUC, the UN's peacekeeping force in the DRC, have refused to pick up wounded rape victims and escort them to medical care when they were afraid they would be outnumbered by nearby rebels. "People denounce the rapes but do nothing to bring the rebels to justice," says Woudenberg. "There isn't the political will, domestically or internationally, to make it happen. I've never seen anything like this, when war has become this horrible, and human life so undervalued." Trevor Lowe, spokesperson for the UN World Food Program, echoes this view. "The nature of sexual violence in the DRC conflict is grotesque, completely abnormal," he says. "Babies, children, women--nobody is being spared. For every woman speaking out, there are hundreds who've not yet emerged from the hell. Rape is so stigmatized in the DRC, and people are afraid of reprisals from rebels. It's a complete and utter breakdown of norms. Like Rwanda, only worse." Adds his colleague Christiane Berthiaume, "Never before have we found as many victims of rape in conflict situations as we are discovering in the DRC." Yet where is the international media coverage? The outrage? The demand for justice? During the Rwanda genocide, rape as a war crime received extensive international media coverage. Despite initial reports of 250,000 women being sexually assaulted (a third more than there were Tutsi women living in the country at the time), evidence later suggested the total number was closer to one-fifth of that. In Bosnia, where the European Community Investigative Mission concluded there were some 20,000 victims, reports of systematic rape by the Serbs first made international headlines one year into the war, and remained a major news focus for the remaining three years of the conflict. It was only after the Bosnia war, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 1997, that rape was first prosecuted as a crime against humanity. A year later, at the Rwanda tribunal, rape was found to be a form of genocide. Everyone I spoke with in the DRC and in the international UN, NGO and human rights community said they believe the incidence of rape there greatly exceeds that in both Bosnia and Rwanda, although it will be years before precise figures are available. The systematic nature of the assaults has been amply documented by the UN, humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations. Yet for the most part the media look the other way. As one editor of a national newspaper told me, "It's just another horror in the horror that is Africa." One has to ask, Does this kind of cynicism merely reflect public opinion or help create it? Says Lowe, "Look at the square footage of Bosnia, a country that is dwarfed by the Congo, and look at the enormous number of reporters who covered Bosnia compared to the DRC. Clearly, Africa doesn't get the same coverage as Europe. The reasons are racial, geopolitical interests, ease of access, etc. The DRC conflict is an extremely dangerous one, which is one reason the press is not there. Selling Africa, and being part of an agency that does it all the time, is difficult. Africa is clearly not a place where the major powers have a lot of interest. The Congo is not on the geopolitical map. And the major-league press follows that geopolitical map." There is also media faddishness, what Lowe refers to as the CNN factor. "If CNN shows up, then other reporters become interested," he says. Another factor is the complexity of the Congo conflict. In Rwanda, the media were able to present the issues as clear-cut, with the good guys and the bad clearly defined. "People consider the Congo conflict confusing; they label it tribal or ethnic, which is totally wrong," says Woudenberg. "The war in the DRC has been an international war, involving a number of different countries." Conduct a straw poll among Americans who are usually well informed and few know of the vicious campaign of sexual violence against women in the DRC. Many are even unaware that the country is six years into a brutal conflict, in which up to 4.7 million people have died--the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II. Or that six countries--Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia--have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC, and helping to plunder the country's tremendous mineral wealth to fill their coffers. The indifference, according to Woudenberg, extends to the arms of government that should be most deeply concerned with the DRC's crisis. "In November I tried to raise the issue with the US Mission to the UN in New York, and they told me fairly point-blank that they were aware rape was going on in the Congo, and it was just not high on their priorities," she says. "I had a similar response from the US State Department." Meanwhile, a UN Security Council panel has cited eighty-five multinational corporations, including some of the largest US companies in their fields, for their involvement in the illegal exploitation of natural resources from the DRC. The commerce in these "blood" minerals, such as coltan, used in cell phones and laptops, cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium (Congolese uranium was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), drives the conflict. The brutality of the militias--the sexual slavery, transmission of HIV/AIDS through rape, cannibalism, slaughter and starvation, forced recruitment of child soldiers--has routinely been employed to secure access to mining sites or insure a supply of captive labor. If that isn't enough to awaken the international community's interest, one would think it would be of concern that "blood" business practices also fund terrorism. Lebanese diamond traders benefiting from illegal concessions in the Congo have been tied to the Islamic extremist groups Amal and Hezbollah. According to a UN report, the Lebanese traders, who operate licensed diamond businesses in Antwerp, purchased diamonds from the DRC worth $150 million in 2001 alone. Such linkage between African rebel groups and global terrorist movements is not new. Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front reportedly sold diamonds to Al Qaeda, thus helping to finance both organizations. The lobbies of the two luxury hotels in Kinshasa, the DRC's capital, are full of elegant, $5,000-a-day corporate lawyers from New York, London and Geneva, and scruffier diamond dealers from Tel Aviv and Antwerp, as they while away the hours waiting for government ministers and senior representatives of armed groups to smooth their way. These institutional fortune-makers are 1,800 miles away from the nightmares of northeastern Congo. Yet they are not so far removed from the atrocities perpetrated there. Rape is a crime of the war they are fueling with their greed. Today's conflict profiteers are not the first to sponsor a campaign to ransack, rape, pillage and plunder in the Congo. A century ago, Belgium's King Leopold II amassed a fabulous fortune this way. During the monarch's genocidal reign of terror, when villagers couldn't meet his impossibly high quotas harvesting rubber or mining ore, their hands were amputated and women were taken as slaves. By the time he was finished, an estimated 10 million Congolese, half the population, were dead. Kinshasa's policy-makers, who serve in a government with four vice presidents in a misguided attempt to appease various factions, now claim a new political beginning after the so-called peace accord last year. But there is a "huge and dangerous gap" between what is happening in Kinshasa and what is going on in the northeast, says Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general. "In Kinshasa there is talk of peace and political progress, of regional harmony and democratic elections. But while the newly appointed members of government are wrangling for power and privilege in Kinshasa, in the Kivus and Ituri people are confronted daily with death, plunder and carnage. Mutilations and massacres continue. Rape of women and girls has become a standard tactic of warfare. It is absolutely outrageous that many of the senior members of the government and the political parties they represent are closely linked to the armed groups who are committing these abuses." At the time of King Leopold's predatory rule, an international Congo reform movement was formed with the support of Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad. It was Conrad who described what was being done as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." He would recognize what is happening now. For the sake of 6-year-old Shashir and tens of thousands of girls and women who have been infected with HIV/AIDS, forcibly impregnated or so badly damaged internally they will never be able to have children, and who are so psychologically traumatized they may never recover, we can only hope that a similarly prominent group of today's social commentators will find its conscience and its voice soon.

News 24 South Africa 1 Feb 2004 Ethiopians asked for mercy Addis Ababa - Thirty three former government officials on trial for genocide have asked Ethiopia's people to forgive them for crimes they committed during the former regime of exiled dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. "We, the few who are being tried for what had happened, realise that it is time to beg the Ethiopian public for their pardon for the mistakes done knowingly, or unknowingly," they said in a letter to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, published on Sunday by Ethiopia's Reporter. "We are the people who remain from the regime, our actions had the support of the majority of the people who benefitted, while we believed it was also the cause of the civil war that has consumed the life of the people and destroyed property," the letter said. Dated last August 13, the letter was signed by former vice-president Colonel Fisseha Desta, former prime minister Captain Fikersellasie Wegederesse and Major Melaku Tefera, widely known as the "Butcher of Gondar", a town 800 kilometres north of Addis Ababa. "Even though we were the sworn servants of the regime of the emperor to protect it, when the people showed their dissatisfaction against the regime, we decided to side with them, instead of protecting it," it added. Of the 108 people believed to have participated in the alleged genocide, only 66 were either arrested or surrendered in May 1991, when Mengistu was ousted by Meles, and 33 others have so far died in prison. Ethiopia has since 1994 been conducting trials of people accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, particularly during the Red Terror period, when tens of thousands of Ethiopians were killed or disappeared. Nearly 5 200 former soldiers and communist activists are due to be tried by the courts, about 2,200 are currently in prison in Ethiopia, while several key accused are to be or have been tried in absentia. Mengistu, who has lived in Zimbabwe since fleeing in 1991, was convicted in absentia. The trials that are due to be concluded next year, Ethiopian judiciary sources said. Although the Ethiopian parliament is discussing a new bill to empower the president to pardon convicted people, the current constitution bars anybody convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity from benefitting from the presidential prorogative of mercy.

IRIN 2 Feb 2004 Ethiopia: Human Rights Watch accuses government of continuing abuses ADDIS ABABA, 2 February (IRIN) - An international advocacy group has criticised Ethiopia for its continuing human rights abuses and condemned foreign donors for failing to help prevent them. Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the government "continues to deny" its citizens their basic human rights while the international community takes no action. In its 2004 World Report, the New York-based group said foreign donors who were pouring about US $1 billion into Ethiopia each year were focused on other issues. "Foreign donors have not played any role in correcting these abuses, and have been diverted by famine, the possibility of a renewed Ethiopia-Eritrea war arising from Ethiopia's refusal to honour an arbitration decision on the location of its border with Eritrea, and Ethiopia's cooperation in the US war on terrorism," the report stated. But the government insists that improvements have been made, stressing that democratic institutions were put in place until 12 years ago after the overthrow of the former military regime. "We accept everything is not perfect," the government spokesman, Zemedkun Tekle, told IRIN, "but we are trying to make the improvements demanded of us. This report highlights the problems and not the achievements we have made. It is expecting us to be fully developed, but we are beginners in everything." In particular, the report cites restrictions on the country's media, attacks on political parties, serious abuses by the police, including torture and mass arrests. "The private press leads a precarious existence, and editors, publishers and reporters are frequently arrested or harassed," the report stated. "A proposed new press law would tighten government oversight of private newspapers, despite some modifications," it said. HRW added that physical torture, including forcing detainees run barefoot and kneel on gravel, was a common abuse perpetrated by police. "More severe torture remains a problem," said the report, which was released by the organisation in January. "Excessive force has often been used to quell peaceful demonstrations. Demonstrators are subject to mass arrest and mistreatment," it noted. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who heads the country's coalition government, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, has pledged to crack down on abuses. He has backed the creation of an ombudsman and a human rights commission to tackle abuses, although neither is functioning yet. HRW criticised the delay in the creation of the commission and ombudsman despite promises by Meles, and the non-implementation of promised reforms in the broadcasting law. It said that "local leaders of political parties allied with the ruling coalition" were often implicated in physical assaults on supporters of registered opposition parties. The Ethiopian Human Rights Council (ERCHO) has been a constant critic of the government, accusing it of heavy-handedness and failing to take human rights seriously. The HRW report comes just weeks after fierce fighting in western Ethiopia, in which, ERCHO said, at least 93 people had been killed, and claimed that local security forces had played a role. Moreover, it follows a decision by the government to ban the country's free press association, a group representing the private press. Attempts by international organisations have been made to enhance the status human rights in Ethiopia. The International Committee of the Red Cross is working with the police, prison officials and the military in an effort to improve their performance in the context of human rights.

IRIN 6 Feb 2004 Ethnic violence leaves 18 dead in the east ADDIS ABABA, 6 February (IRIN) - Ethnic violence has left at least 18 people dead and several hundred homes burnt down in eastern Ethiopia, the country's human rights organisation revealed on Friday. The Ethiopian Human Rights Council (ERCHO) said fighting had erupted between the Somali and Oromo ethnic groups competing for political power in West Harerge. It noted that the violence had been sparked by plans for a referendum on who would control the Meisso District administration, 500 km east of the capital, Addis Ababa. The district, which earns substantial tax revenue from the mildly narcotic shrub, khat (Catha edulis), is located between the Somali and Oromiya regional states. Scores of ethnic groups live peacefully alongside each other in Ethiopia. But ERCHO argues that ethnicity is gradually seeping into the political arena and daily life. "Since the coming into effect of the ethnic- and language-based division of administrative units, several ethnic and religious conflicts have occurred in many parts of the country," ERCHO stated in a special report released on Friday. Its president, Prof Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, said the government's policy of dividing power along ethnic lines, was fuelling conflict. "These conflicts are becoming alarming and [are] increasing," he warned. Details of the killings in West Harerge came to light just days after a highly critical report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which accused the government of continuing to deny basic human rights. HRW also blamed foreign donors, who last year pumped US $1.3 billion in aid into Ethiopia without adequate regard for human rights abuses. In the last two years, Ethiopia has witnessed severe clashes between various ethnic groups. British government officials estimate that 150 people were killed in fighting in the western region of Gambella in December, mostly in reprisal killings against local Anyuaks. ERCHO claimed that government troops had been involved in the killings - an allegation vehemently denied by the defence ministry, which described it as "baseless". In March 2002, at least 128 people were killed after political protests by a local ethnic group in the Tepi region in the far southwest, about 700 km from Addis Ababa. The incident sparked a public outcry, with the EU demanding an "open, transparent and public" inquiry into killings of ethnic Sheko people. In May 2002, at least 17 Sidamas were killed when local security forces opened fire on a demonstration in Awasa, some 250 km south of Addis Ababa. The EU, one of Ethiopia's most prominent donors, has extended financial support for the establishment of a human rights commission and an ombudsman to help tackle abuses. But the commission, whose establishment was announced in 2001, has yet to get off the ground. Ethiopian officials told IRIN that suitable candidates to fill the posts were still being sought. The government has pledged to crack down on ethnic violence, with new legislation passed in 2003 entitling federal authorities to intervene in cases of human rights violations at the regional level and below. Diplomats say this indicates a growing willingness to accept "ultimate responsibility" for rights violations at both the regional and local levels. But opposition leaders fear that the new law will place too much power in the hands of the ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.

BBC 4 February 2004
Western Ethiopia tense after clashes By Mohammed Adow BBC, Ethiopia The town of Gambella, in the west of Ethiopia, has been tense for several months. It is a cosmopolitan town, but also home to some of the poorest people in Ethiopia. Gambella, just 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the Ethiopian-Sudan border, is inhabited by the Nuer, Anyuak, Majenger, Opou and Komo tribesmen. Other Ethiopian tribes like the Amhara, Oromo and Tigre who are locally known as the Highlanders also live in this region. And last month tensions between Highlanders and other groups over land spilled over into violent clashes. The violence was sparked off by an attack on a United Nations vehicle which killed eight people, including three government workers. Hundreds of homes were burnt down and the killings continued for several days. Desperation The Anyuak group was blamed for the attack. Eyewitnesses contacted by the BBC then said Ethiopian Highlanders, supported by the military, had attacked the Anyuaks. But army spokeswoman Major Harnet Yohannes said the soldiers were there only to keep the peace.When I visited the villages belonging of the Anyuaks in Gambella, volunteer government workers were helping rebuild some of the burnt houses. Akinyi Owuor, stood with her six children, in her compound where three huts housed them before the violence. Desperation was evident all over her face. "Five of my relatives were killed. When the raiders came to attack our village we ran away. Then they set our houses on fire. I survived only because the raiders were after the men and not the women," said Akinyi. The Anyuak men were not present when I got to the village, only women and children could be seen among the government volunteers rebuilding the torched houses. Ethiopian troops Moments later, I was led into a hut in a corner of the village where the men had gathered - perhaps for security reasons. They were drinking a local brew and playing chess when we finally located them. It is here that I met Ojullu Ochalla, an Anyuak tribesman. Mr Ojullu says that many Anyuaks have fled the violence. He says that about 15,000 of them have fled to Puchalla in southern Sudan. Many others, Mr Ojullu said, are still missing and their whereabouts are not known. One of the village elders, Akim Obara, says the problem is far from settled. " While we appreciate the government's efforts in deploying troops here to keep peace, we still fear for our lives." said Mr Obara He said their attackers were still intimidating and abusing them. 'Distorted figures' "We have even advised our children not to reply to people who abuse them," Mr Obara told me through a translator. But the acting regional president, Keat Tuach Bithow, says details concerning the Anyuaks who fled their homes have been distorted. Mr Bithow says the government is aware of only 4,000 Anyuaks who fled to the Sudan-Ethiopia border. He said that they had already dispatched two teams of government officials to convince the fleeing people to return to their homes. Mr Bithow said that there was need to speak to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) on the other side of the border to facilitate the return of Ethiopians who had crossed the border. Although up to 5,000 Ethiopian troops have helped restore calm, tension remains high. Their military presence cannot be a long-term solution to the problems in Gambella, aid agencies operating in the area have said.

UN World Food Programme 6 Feb 2004 www.wfp.org Emergency Report n.6 - Ethiopia (a) Following a number of attacks on highlanders by armed personnel from the Anuak tribe in western Ethiopia and the clashes between Government soldiers and Anuaks, UN staff (WFP and UNHCR) based in Dimma camp were relocated to Mizan Teferi on the advice of the UN Security Coordination Office in Addis Ababa. Dimma hosts about 18,700 Sudanese refugees. These security incidents come on the heels of similar incidents that took place in the Gambella area in mid December 2003, which resulted in the loss of lives and damage to property. UN staff were pulled out of Gambella and relocated elsewhere following the civil strife between Anuaks and highlanders in the Gambella Region. Highlander is the name given locally to all Ethiopians originating from outside the lowlands such as Gambella and Dimma. Although security conditions in western Ethiopia have deteriorated significantly over the last several weeks, WFP has been able to maintain food deliveries and distributions to Sudanese refugees. http://www.wfp.org/newsroom/subsections/year.asp?section=18

IRIN 9 Feb 2004 Renewed fighting reported in the west ADDIS ABABA- Renewed fighting has erupted in the western Gambella region bordering Sudan, claiming as many as 40 lives, according to UN and humanitarian sources. The clashes broke out just weeks after fighting had left up to 150 people dead in Gambella, officials told IRIN on Monday. It had broken out on Friday at the Dimma refugee camp, about 800 km from the capital, Addis Ababa, and home to 18,700 Sudanese refugees, the humanitarian sources said. Clashes had also occurred around a gold mine, 30 km from Dimma in late January, as well as in the town itself a day later, they added. The UN said that following the January attacks, staff of the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were relocated for their safety. In its weekly bulletin released on Friday, the WFP said security conditions in the region had "deteriorated significantly" over the last few weeks. "These security incidents come on the heels of similar incidents that took place in the Gambella area in mid-December 2003, which resulted in the loss of lives and damage to property," the WFP bulletin stated, but noted that food distributions to refugees had continued. The fighting in western Ethiopia has also sparked international concern. British International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, who arrived in Ethiopia on Sunday, has told the British parliament that up to 150 people died in the December clashes. "There is still a high level of ethnic violence in Ethiopia," Benn told parliament recently. "We take human rights very seriously." The US government, meanwhile, has sent a security team to the troubled Gambella region. Asked whether it had raised the issue with the Ethiopian government, a US embassy official said: "As a practice, the US government does not comment on diplomatic communications between the US government and other governments. The United States, however, is always concerned for the welfare of its citizens, and others, in cases of reported ethnic violence." The Gambella clashes have prompted a wave of Anyuaks to flee to Sudan. UNHCR says about 5,000 of them, mostly men and boys, have arrived in the Sudanese town of Pachala. Senior UN sources also told IRIN that the UN were planning to send high-profile human rights officials into Pachala to interview the Anyuak refugees. The fighting has largely been between Anyuaks on the one hand and Ethiopian highlanders, who have moved into Gambella in recent years, and government troops on the other hand. It was initially sparked by an attack on a UN-plated vehicle in which eight government refugee workers were killed. The Anyuaks were blamed for the attack, and dozens of them killed in reprisals. The Anyuaks are resisting plans for a new refugee camp on land they regard as their territory, and claim they are being forced out of the area and are losing political power. Human rights organisations argue that tensions are being fuelled by government policies which divide political power along ethnic lines. Analysts in the region say they fear that the instability in the region could reignite conflict between the Anyuak and another ethnic group, the Nuer. The two groups have traditionally fought over land rights and political representation. The defence ministry insists that troops sent into the area after the first spate of fighting broke out in December, are trying to restore calm. A spokesman of the federal affairs ministry contacted on Monday said he was unable to immediately comment on the fighting.

IRIN 9 Feb 2004 Renewed fighting reported in the west ADDIS ABABA, Renewed fighting has erupted in the western Gambella region bordering Sudan, claiming as many as 40 lives, according to UN and humanitarian sources. The clashes broke out just weeks after fighting had left up to 150 people dead in Gambella, officials told IRIN on Monday. It had broken out on Friday at the Dimma refugee camp, about 800 km from the capital, Addis Ababa, and home to 18,700 Sudanese refugees, the humanitarian sources said. Clashes had also occurred around a gold mine, 30 km from Dimma in late January, as well as in the town itself a day later, they added. The UN said that following the January attacks, staff of the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were relocated for their safety. In its weekly bulletin released on Friday, the WFP said security conditions in the region had "deteriorated significantly" over the last few weeks. "These security incidents come on the heels of similar incidents that took place in the Gambella area in mid-December 2003, which resulted in the loss of lives and damage to property," the WFP bulletin stated, but noted that food distributions to refugees had continued. The fighting in western Ethiopia has also sparked international concern. British International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, who arrived in Ethiopia on Sunday, has told the British parliament that up to 150 people died in the December clashes. "There is still a high level of ethnic violence in Ethiopia," Benn told parliament recently. "We take human rights very seriously." The US government, meanwhile, has sent a security team to the troubled Gambella region. Asked whether it had raised the issue with the Ethiopian government, a US embassy official said: "As a practice, the US government does not comment on diplomatic communications between the US government and other governments. The United States, however, is always concerned for the welfare of its citizens, and others, in cases of reported ethnic violence." The Gambella clashes have prompted a wave of Anyuaks to flee to Sudan. UNHCR says about 5,000 of them, mostly men and boys, have arrived in the Sudanese town of Pachala. Senior UN sources also told IRIN that the UN were planning to send high-profile human rights officials into Pachala to interview the Anyuak refugees. The fighting has largely been between Anyuaks on the one hand and Ethiopian highlanders, who have moved into Gambella in recent years, and government troops on the other hand. It was initially sparked by an attack on a UN-plated vehicle in which eight government refugee workers were killed. The Anyuaks were blamed for the attack, and dozens of them killed in reprisals. The Anyuaks are resisting plans for a new refugee camp on land they regard as their territory, and claim they are being forced out of the area and are losing political power. Human rights organisations argue that tensions are being fuelled by government policies which divide political power along ethnic lines. Analysts in the region say they fear that the instability in the region could reignite conflict between the Anyuak and another ethnic group, the Nuer. The two groups have traditionally fought over land rights and political representation. The defence ministry insists that troops sent into the area after the first spate of fighting broke out in December, are trying to restore calm. A spokesman of the federal affairs ministry contacted on Monday said he was unable to immediately comment on the fighting.

AFP 10 Feb 2004 Up to 70 killed in ethnic clashes in western Ethiopia ADDIS ABABA, Feb 10 (AFP) - Between 50 and 70 people were killed late last month in ethnic clashes in western Ethiopia, aid workers in the capital, Addis Ababa, said Tuesday. The deadly clashes erupted onA January 29 at a mine near Dimma, in Gambella state, near the border with Sudan, where thousands of artisanal workers dig for gold, the sources said, asking not to be named. Some sources said the fighting, which continued into the next day, was sparked when indigenous workers at the mine, members of the Anuak ethnic group, attacked so-called "highlanders", people originating from other areas of Ethiopia. An Anuak policeman reportedly killed a highlander on January 30, and the situation degenerated into widespread violence, prompting the army to deploy to try to disarm the Anuak miners. Instead, the army suffered heavy losses, according to some sources. This could not be independently confirmed and the government had not commented officially as of late Tuesday. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, have temporarily removed their staff from a camp housing 18,000 mostly Sudanese refugees near Dimma. "Following a number of serious security incidents in Dimma, WFP and other UN agencies staff at the Dimma refugee Camp were relocated to Mizan Tefri, northeast of Gambella, on the advice of the UN security Coordination office in Addis Ababa," a WFP statement said. Dimma lies about 920 kilometres (575 miles) southwest of Addis Ababa. In mid-December Gambella's eponymous capital, 200 kilometres (1209 miles) to the north, was hit by similar clashes. According to the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, 93 people were killed then. The government put the toll at 57. That episode was sparked after eight people, including a policeman, were killed while driving to Gambella town. The Council accused the state authorities of failing to take action to prevent the violence, despite clear indications of tension before the killings."As a result of the government ethnic policy, it is becoming a common occurrence to see Ethiopians who (once) lived in peace and harmony killing each other, categorizing themselves along ethnic lines," the statement said. With more than 65 million inhabitants, Ethiopia is Africa's second most populous country after Nigeria and is home to some 87 ethnic groups. Under Ethiopia's federal system, the largest ethnic group in each state -- the Anuak in Gambella's case -- are meant to control local government affairs and dictate the official language. But recently the Anuak have felt their authority has been undermined by outsiders, the so-called "highlanders" from the capital and other areas, who are accused of lording it over the indigenous population. A year ago, a UN report highlighted the prevalence of arms in Gambella and said this, as well as the tension in the state, was due to the presence of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army on the other side of the border. The same report noted that Gambella had suffered ethnic tension since the early 20th century with the principal antagonists being the Anuaks and the Nuer. Clashes between these two groups over government posts claimed 60 lives over the course of a month in 2002 and displaced several thousand, according to the human rights council. [ The Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO www.ehrco.net ) is an independent, non-governmental, non-profit making, non-partisan and non-political organization established on October 10, 1991.]

www.genocidewatch.org 18 Feb 2004 IMMEDIATE RELEASE Survivor’s Rights International & Genocide Watch Call for Immediate Steps to Stop Massacres in Southwestern Ethiopia February 18, 2004 – Survivor’s Rights International and Genocide Watch are calling on the Ethiopian Government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the United Nations Security Council, and the African Union to take immediate steps to halt escalating violence in the Gambella region of southwestern Ethiopia. Interviews conducted January 16-23, 2004 with Ethiopian refugees in nearby Pochalla, Sudan confirmed that Ethiopian government troops massacred over 400 members of the Anuak ethnic group in Gambella December 13 – 16, 2003, and that rapes and murders are continuing. On January 29, 2004, members of the indigenous Anuak minority responded with violence to the torture and execution of an Anuak gold miner in Dimma. Exemplifying the climate of gross impunity, soldiers bragged about the murder to members of the Anuak community. Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Defense Forces (EPRDF) attempted to disarm other Anuak gold miners, who counter-attacked. EPRDF forces were defeated, with scores of soldiers believed killed. The Anuak gold miners also killed highlander civilians in Dimma town. On January 30, 2004, a convoy of EPRDF reinforcements was attacked on route to Dimma, with more soldiers killed. After the January 29 - 30 battles, non-combatant Anuak women and children fled Dimma in fear of further military retaliation and atrocities by EPRDF soldiers. As of January 26, some 5,297 refugees had fled southwestern Ethiopia to Pochalla, Sudan from the Gambella region, including the districts of Gambella, Abobo, Gok and Itang. On February 3, 2004, EPRDF reinforcements in Dimma massacred 17 Anuaks, including Dimma District government officials. EPRDF troops also massacred non-combatant Dinka and Nuer Sudanese refugees from a nearby camp and wounded other Sudanese refugees. Mass rape continues in the region, perpetrated by both EPRDF soldiers and “highlander” militias. These same groups were responsible for the December massacres. On January 28, for example, EPRDF soldiers summarily executed an Anuak father for persevering in his attempt to bring to justice the men who that day had gang-raped his 10 year-old daughter. In the absence of Anuak men—who have been either executed or driven from southwestern Ethiopia—Anuak women and girls have been subject to sexual atrocities from which there is neither protection nor recourse. SRI and Genocide Watch have received reports that the Anuak Gambella People’s Liberation Force (GPLF) is planning armed responses to the ongoing repression, rape and murder of Anuak people, and to the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. Additional reports indicate that the federal government of Ethiopia may have dispatched intelligence operatives to neighboring countries to assassinate exiled Anuak leaders, including Mr. Okello Akuai, the President of Gambella, and Mr. Abulla Obang Agwa, the founder of the Gambella People’s Democratic Congress. The violence is thus already a threat to international peace and security in the region. According to Genocide Watch sources, the massacres on 13 -16 December 2003 were ordered by the commander of the Ethiopian army in Gambella, Nagu Beyene, with the authorization of Dr. Gebrhab Barnabas, an official of the Ethiopian government. The accusation has also been made that lists of targeted individuals were drawn up with the assistance of Omot Obang Olom, who is himself Anuak, but holds an official position. On 8 January 2004 Genocide Watch faxed Prime Minister Meles Zenawi a letter calling for the arrest of these officials, as well as other perpetrators of the December massacres. He has not replied. None of the perpetrators of the massacres have been arrested. Instead, the Ethiopian government has portrayed the December massacres as ethnic conflict between Nuer and Anuak, which they were not. It has also tried to minimize the number killed. Genocide Watch and SRI have eyewitness testimony that Ethiopian soldiers have dug up mass graves and burned the bodies. The government portrays conflict at the Dimma gold mines as instigated by the Anuak, though the fighting began with an EPRDF atrocity against a miner, and an attempt to disarm the miners, for whom their weapons are their only self-defense. The Ethiopian government has moved over 20,000 EPRDF troops into the Gambella region, ostensibly to “calm down” the area, when actually EPRDF troops continue to commit murders and rapes. Genocide Watch and Survivor’s Rights International call upon the Ethiopian government to remove EPRDF troops from the Gambella region, leaving regular police. We also call upon the Secretary General of the United Nations to place this explosive situation on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. Contacts: Dr. Gregory H. Stanton < genocidewatch@aol.com > President, Genocide Watch < www.genocidewatch.org > Coordinator, The International Campaign to End Genocide Telephone: 540-654-1391 Keith Harmon Snow < info@sri.org> Researcher, Survivor’s Rights International < www.survivorsrightsinternational.org > Annapolis, MD 21403 (410) 268-6988 For more information on the crisis in southwestern Ethiopia, please visit the website of the International Campaign to End Genocide (ICEG) at . The field report based on research and interviews of refugees in Pochalla, Sudan, is available on that website, and on SRI’s website at < www.surviorsrightsinternational.org>

I RIN 23 Feb 2004 Ethiopia: US Government Wants Gambella Violence Investigated Addis Ababa The US government has called for "transparent, independent" inquiries into clashes in Ethiopia's troubled western border region where hundreds have been killed. In a statement from Washington on 20 February, the US said the government must investigate allegations that its troops were involved in the killings. Adam Ereli, the US government deputy spokesman, also told journalists in Washington that the crisis in Gambella region was "deteriorating" following fighting between ethnic groups and the Ethiopian armed forces. "Fully transparent and independent investigations by the government would encourage restoration of peace in the troubled region," Ereli said in a statement. The government, however, rejected the allegations that its troops were involved in the fighting, and told IRIN that they were restoring order. The US call came as two human rights organisations condemned the international community for its silence over the "atrocities" being perpetrated in Gambella, which is about 800 km west of the capital, Addis Ababa. The US-based Genocide Watch (GW) and Survivors' Rights International (SRI) alleged that the Anyuak ethnic group was being subjected to rape, executions and torture. Clashes first erupted in Gambella in early December after eight government officials were attacked and murdered while travelling in a United Nations vehicle. The Anyuak, who make up around one-third of the 228,000 people who live in the remote region, were blamed for the attack and targeted for brutal reprisals, in which hundreds of people were killed. Gambella is a fertile, but swampy, malaria-infested area, which borders war-torn Sudan. It is however also rich in natural resources like gold and oil, which, GW and SRI say, may be serving to fuel the three-month orgy of violence, inasmuch as the Anyuaks believe that much of the land in the area belongs to them. "The Ethiopian government continues to deny, downplay and mis-characterise the massacres as justifiable responses to the Anyuak attack," said their 23-page report. "The fact is that most of the victims have been unarmed Anyuak civilians who were hunted down and murdered," Keith Harmon Snow, the report's author, asserted. "Numerous assailants have been identified, including government officials, soldiers and civilians," he added, while also calling for an independent inquiry into the killings. "Numerous reports indicate that summary executions, mass rape and disappearances continue to occur in contravention of international legal standards," he said. Snow's report was compiled after conducting interviews in January and February with Anyuaks who had fled across the porous border into neighbouring Sudan. In a statement released last week, the government said 200 people had been killed in one attack led by Anyuak at a gold mine, and 10,000 people had fled the region. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Programme say they have evacuated all their international staff from parts of western Ethiopia. The killings mark some of the worst violence for years in Ethiopia, a landlocked country of 70 million people divided into numerous linguistic and ethnic groups. The Ethiopian Human Rights Council said earlier this month that ethnic violence was increasing in the country as a result of government policies forming local administrations along tribal lines. But the government, a four-party ethnic coalition which has been in power since 1991, accused the group of being politically motivated and dismissed its accusations. "These statements from the human rights groups are not correct. The government troops are not there to kill Anyuaks, they are there to make peace. We have stated this time and again," Zemedkun Tekle, the information ministry spokesman, told IRIN The federal affairs ministry, which is investigating the violence, was unavailable for comment on the latest claims surrounding the fighting in Gambella.

News 24 Sa 23 Feb 2004 'No justice' for Red Terror Red Terror suspect cleared Addis Ababa - Ethiopia's top human rights campaigner said here Monday that the government could not "deliver justice" in the genocide trial of former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam and dozens of officers from his regime. "That regime cannot deliver justice" because it is not "democratic", Mesfine Woldemariam, chair of the Ethiopian Human Rishts Council, told AFP as the trial was set to resume on Tuesday before the federal high court. Mengistu and 65 other officials are charged with genocide and other crimes, including the murder of Emperor Haile Selasie and Orthodox Patriarch Abuna Tefelows, during the 1977-78 so-called "Red Terror" period which followed the ouster of emperor Haile Selassie by a marxist junta. The defendants are also charged with ordering the killing of 1 823 people and a forced resettlement that led to the death of 100 000 others under the Marxist regime. "At the beginnning, we have stated that if you have a trial for genocide, establish in Ethiopia a democratic system, and a genuine judiciary system," Woldemariam said. "You can't do that when you have former terrorists in power, when they have incriminate people selectively," he said, referring to the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the former rebel leader who ended Mengistu's bloody rule. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians were killed or disappeared during the two-year "Red Terror". Mengistu himself was convicted in absentia after fleeing to Zimbabwe in 1991, where he has lived in exile ever since. Nearly 5 200 former soldiers and communist activists are due to be tried by the courts. Around 2 l200 are currently in prison in Ethiopia, but several of the key accused are to be or have been tried in absentia. Last August, 33 former officials of the Mengistu regime, who are behind bars, wrote a letter to Zenawi begging for mercy from the Ethiopian people. More than 500 people have been acquitted, and 600 are to be tried between January and September of this year. The Red Terror trials are due to be concluded in 2004, according to the Ethiopian judiciary. Edited by Tisha Steyn

Daily Nation, Kenya 2 Feb 2004 www.nationaudio.com/News/DailyNation Special Report ONE YEAR OF PEACE Peace returns to 'valley of death' Hostilities between Pokots and Marakwets, fanned by reckless utterances by politicians and provincial administration officials, are now dying down and they'll even inter-marry By PETER KIMANI Deserted homesteads in Kerio Valley. Pink and white blooms dot the steep Kerio Valley, bringing life to a ridge where little grows. This could be nature's way of redeeming a region haunted by a grotesque past. Not too long ago, it used to be called the Valley of Death, with scores of villagers killed on the barren rocks. Stepping into a deserted homestead, dry leaves crackling under his feet, Mr Laxmana Kiptoo says, tears welling in his eyes: "This used to be my home." That was 26 years ago – a good number of which Marakwet families spent shuttling between the rocky plains and caves on the higher grounds. "The hills have always been our refuge, as you can see the raiders from afar," says Mr Kiptoo. "We used to live in the lowlands during the day and move to the caves at night." Kiptoo's family was finally persuaded to leave after an attack on the 1997 Christmas eve in which his cousin, Mr Richard Kinaiyo, was killed. Mr Kinaiyo, a final-year engineering student at the University of Nairobi, was celebrated in a community desperate for role models. Two shells of what once served as Mr Kiptoo's homestead stand eerily a pile of rocks cemented together by the red soil. The grass thatch has been burnt and soot covers the clay wall. But the writing on the wall is still discernible. Kiberurin enkong ngung ak terengung ne kitangware busiek ne kibwate ngatutik. It is taken from Deuteronomy 28: 5 and was written by Mr Kiptoo's mother. It is a prayer for providence to bless the utensils used in the household. "She still is quite religious," Mr Kiptoo says of his mother, who has since set up a home in nearby Kapsowar. He and his five children were taught to read the Bible sitting by the fire every evening. Such humdrum, if meaningful, family existence was violently disrupted in Marakwet in the 1990s, casting children and adults in all the four directions. In fact, attacks on the Marakwet from their Pokot neighbours were so rife that the Marakwets mark important events according to the Pokot invasion. Local places have been given new names that reflect terror and devastation: Chechan village is now known as Chechnya. Baghdad village in Tot is where children were smashed to death on the rocks. But the killings that took place on the morning of March 12, 2001, in Murkutwo village in Chesongoch – what has come to be known as the Murkutwo massacre – evokes terror of unparalleled proportions. Mr Kirop Cheboi Kiplilei recalls: "It was about 5am, and we were asleep. The people rushed out of their beds naked and ran to the caves where we all hid when the raiders came. There was gunfire in the air and I ran without knowing where I was going. In all my life, the Pokots had never ventured beyond the (seasonal Kerio) river, but this time, they came up to our homes." His voice falters when he points in the direction of the hut where his son lived with his wife and two children. His daughter-in-law, school teacher Leah Chello, fled into a cave with her two children – aged two and six – and a nephew, also aged six. Their bodies were found four days later, bringing the toll in the Murkutwo massacre to 58. "They had managed to escape, but she was discovered by a raider who was higher up. They shot her and the children dead," Mr Kiplilei says. "I'll never forgive those people." The orgy lasted three hours and Mr Kiplilei says his life has never been the same: "How can I continue as if nothing happened? They killed my grandchildren for no reason at all. If we had another place, I would go and live there. What do we have but these rocks and trees?" Land has yet to be demarcated in Marakwet district. This is one of the issues that come to the fore whenever the raids take place, with some suggesting that the attacks are meant to expel them from their land. In Murkutwo, clay huts stand forlorn among the shrubs and the acacia trees, sharp tips jutting out of grass thatch. But the facade of calm fades when you venture inside the homes and hear the men and women speak in hushed tones of things they want to forget but cannot. To fully understand this conflict, one needs to lay bare the historical antagonism between Pokots and Marakwets that underpins the struggle, fanned over the years by reckless utterances from politicians and indifferent provincial administration officials. Mr John Lochaa, 39, will never be able to live in the home he shared with his wife and four children. The retail trader at Songoch, a stone's throw away from his home in Kasang village in Murkutwo, was away on the night of the slaughter. His wife and two children were not so lucky. He recalls: "I had gone to Eldoret to see a friend and buy supplies for the shop and I wasn't able to return home. It was while there that I learnt that Murkutwo had been invaded. I arrived the following morning and somebody offered me a soda, saying I needed to get my breath back. "I had no idea what they were talking about until I asked for my wife. They told me she was no more. I asked for the children and nobody answered me. I later learnt that two had been killed. The youngest was just a few months old." Mrs Hellen Lochaa first fled to the caves as she had done whenever the Pokots struck. She was smoked out and shot at point-blank range. "Now I have to fend for the children without the support of my wife, who had a steady income as a primary school teacher," says the trader. But the greatest challenge is being able to set foot on the place he once called home. "I can't live here," Mr Lochaa says, standing outside the iron-roofed house. "How can I?" There are more questions than answers about the Murkutwo massacre. The leaders say it could have been avoided as the police and provincial administration had been warned of attacks. "The attacks were expected," says Mr James Cheboi Kimisoi, the assistant coordinator of the Eldoret-based Catholic Peace and Justice Commission. "Negotiations had gone on for one month, as the Marakwet were asked to give back 800 animals they had taken from the Pokot as they grazed along Kerio river," he says, "We spoke with the chiefs and asked them to give back the animals, but they did not. Word went round that the Pokot would strike to get back their animals." When they did finally strike, the raiders were ruthless in their mission: they plundered the land, destroyed what they could not take away and killed and maimed anyone in sight. Deserted houses were torched. Master Henry Tarus, 15, stands out among the pupils of Sangach primary school. He is wearing a black hat, which conceals the injuries left by the raiders' bullets. One long mark cuts across his head and a huge scar runs near the right ear. At the back of his head his brain juts out, the mound standing like a fisted hand. "We were on the farm with my brother and a cousin," he says with a stutter, "I don't know what happened. I just saw the men approach and open fire. My brother Kipkiro and cousin Kibor were killed. I was unconscious and I found myself in hospital." Master Tarus was in a coma for two weeks at the Moi University Referral Hospital in Eldoret. After a life-saving operation, his cranium was opened to remove a bullet. Two bullets had torn away parts of the brain. He says he is not in pain any more and is happy to be back at school. But the swelling at the back of his head sticks out, a permanent reminder of the night he nearly lost his life. Assistant chief Benjamin Sutar also had a narrow escape. He disappeared behind a cave, but his wife was killed – shot in cold blood. Others hid in latrines, shivering and fearing the worst, and are only too glad to be alive to tell the story. Yesterday's peace celebrations draw a line between that bloody phase of the Marakwet past and the prospects for peace now beckoning in the horizon. It is nightfall when we reach Tot, from where Pokotland stretches monotonously. Here, the land is fertile and mangoes and bananas are to be found in abundance. We meet Ms Paulina Loplich, a Pokot visiting her sister who is married to a Marakwet. She smiles when asked if she knows when Pokot warriors raided the Marakwet. In earlier days, she may have been treated suspiciously when she returned home. But peace reigns now and no questions are asked. She goes to the market where both Marakwets and Pokots trade. Local MP Linah Jebii Kilimo wipes her tears and smiles: "There is a baby boom with 1,360 expected early in the year. "There was a generation lost as the people fled from the plains to the caves." Now it is time to catch up.

www.kenyasomalis.org KENYA SOMALI COMMUNITY OF NORTH AMERICA Toronto, Ontario PRESS RELEASE Published: February 3, 2001 Waggalla Massacre Rally: 12th February, 2001 A rally will be held in front of the Kenya Embassy in Washington, DC on Monday February 12th, 2001 at 11.00 a.m., (2249 R STREET N.W., WASHINGTON D.C 20008 Phone No. 202-387-6101). At the same time a similar rally will be held at the Kenya Embassy in Ottawa, Canada (415 Laurier St. West, Ottawa, ON Canada). The demonstrations will be held to commemorate the Wagalla Massacre that happened in Wagalla Village, Wajir District, North Eastern Kenya on the same date in 1984. Similar demonstrations have been held at different locations all over the world since the massacre occurred, all aimed at keeping the pressure on the Kenya Government to respect basic human rights and the dignity of the Kenya Somalis living in the North East as well as for all Kenyan citizens. The Government has a past and present history of perpetrating injustice, unfair and unequal treatment and negligence when it comes to issues regarding the people of the North Eastern province. In many cases the government has been guilty of previous massacres and genocidal policies. In the case of Wagalla, the government has recently admitted at least in principle that its security forces were responsible for the atrocities and that it was an operation that had gone out of control. In this case, we demand a full investigation that is aimed at bringing to court those who were responsible for this massacre and compensation for the thousands of families who became destitute as a result of the massacre. Please consider joining us in peacefully standing for justice and what is right. For Details Contact Mr. Abdi Omar: @ (613) 521-9228 Or Ugas Jillaow @214-869-3080 Email Contact: abdi_omar@hotmail.com> Posted by SomaliTalk Feb 3, 2000

East African Standard February 11, 2004 www.eastandard.net Wagalla massacre to be probed By Maore Ithula Survivors and children of victims of the Wagalla massacre have accused the Government of reneging on its promise to compensate them. But in a swift rejoinder, Justice minister Kiraitu Murungi said the Government would form a truth and reconciliation commission to look into the circumstances that led to the infamous killings. Earlier in the day, more than 300 protesters took to the streets in a peaceful demonstration to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the massacre that left thousands of people dead. The group marched from the Freedom Corner at Uhuru Park to Sheria House, where they sought audience with Murungi. Without giving a time frame, the minister said the commission would investigate what led to the massacre with a view of seeking justice and compensation for the victims. He assured that the Government was committed to ensuring the residents of North Eastern Province were no longer sidelined "in the distribution of the national cake". Thousands of people were killed and maimed during the February 10, 1984, botched operation to smoke out alleged bandits in Wajir. The operation was conducted by regular police, General Service Unit and Army personnel stationed in Wajir. Male victims were paraded at the Wagalla airstrip where they were forced to lie prostrate on the tarmac for two days in the scorching sun. On the other hand, women were raped and bundled together with children in their manyattas (huts) before being burnt alive. Those who tried to flee were either shot or clobbered to death by the security personnel. The demonstrators yesterday claimed that they had been victimised by the former regime, and appealed to the Government to come to their assistance. Addressing them, Murungi observed that the province was prone to insecurity because it had been neglected by successive governments. The marchers had to wait for several hours at the Sheria House before they were allowed to meet the minister.

The Nation (Nairobi) 3 Feb 2004 COLUMN Wagalla Victims Still Waiting for Justice Ahmed Adan Nairobi When Mr Kibaki became our third President and promised to uphold the rule of law, many Kenyans were delighted. Part of the reason was because the many victims of past economic crimes, mass killings and other gross human rights abuses have been crying out for justice. At the very least, they expected the suspected culprits to be investigated and punished. Government may be sacrificing considerable expense and expertise investigating past economic crimes, but it seems to have neglected, or downplayed, the more crucial issue of past impunities when it comes to human rights. Besides the initial rhetoric and symbolism that characterised the exposure of the Nyayo House torture chambers followed by the appointment of a task force on transitional justice, very little movement has been noticed since. The task force's recommendations are yet to be implemented, while the Government appears to have shelved the whole idea of transitional justice for the time being. There could be practical and political constraints hampering the Government's ability to take comprehensive action against perpetrators of human rights abuses. One is that this Government represents a mix of old and new political faces who circumstances have forced to co-exist very uneasily. Putting a demarcation line between the old regime and the new government presents a dilemma for those who would like to see a clean break from the past. The magnitude and extent of the crimes committed against Kenyans in last 40 years may also make investigation, prosecution, and reparations very difficult. On the one hand, the most difficult dilemmas facing Government is deciding who to prosecute and who to forgive, or whether a blanket amnesty should be granted to perpetrators of past crimes. Criminal prosecution of human rights abusers gives the victims some sense of finality and justice; but at the same time, it discourages perpetrators from coming forward with the truth about what really happened, which is also necessary for reconciliation. On the other, adhering to democratic principles in dealing with the perpetrators upholds the basic principle of a functioning State. But since the wheels of justice turn slowly, this may seem to leave the old regime unpunished, and injustices unaddressed. The Government must decide whether to punish the leaders and henchmen of the old regime known to have abused their fellow countrymen. We argue that seeking justice and revealing the truth are the best ways to mark our society's new beginning. Though it is true that deciding to prosecute members of the old regime can be complicated, their victims expect nothing less. Besides unearthing the truth about our dark human rights past and punishing the perpetrators, the victims must be granted compensation and restitution. This serves three very important functions. First, it helps the victims to manage the material aspect of their loss. Second, it constitutes an official acknowledgement of their pain by the State. Third, it will deter the State from future abuses by imposing a financial cost to such misdeeds. The mechanisms of transitional justice - trials and truth commissions, restitution and rehabilitation - are expensive in the short term. However, failing to deal adequately with such issues will be even more expensive in the long term. To manage the process, we should not rule out sourcing some funding from private or foreign sources, though it is my considered opinion that the Government should bear the cost of compensation, which will reinforce the lesson that misdeeds are costly. Since the Government has chosen to acknowledge past crimes, it must next decide whether and how to hold the responsible parties accountable for those crimes. The main reason for prosecuting past crimes is to punish criminals and dignify the victims. Prosecutions can also help to reunify society and establish a common moral reality. One of the most brutal and despicable instance of human rights abuse is known as Wagalla massacre. The survivors of this mass killing and their families stoically waited for Kanu's exit from power for almost two decades, and not only to seek redress, but actually to come open about it. With Kanu in power, they were unable to communicate their deep grievance to anyone. Brave individuals who spoke sympathetically on their case were subjected to extra-legal power to silence them. One example is the prize-winning Catholic nun, Annalena Tonelli, who the locals veritably consider the Mother Teresa of Wajir. She assisted victims, collected bodies and buried them in a mass grave, as a result of which she was declared persona non grata. On February 12,2003, the survivors and family members of victims finally got access to "the human abattoir", otherwise known as the Wagalla airstrip. There, on that spot 20 years ago, thousands of their family members lost their lives. To the survivors, the commemoration of the day their loved ones were exterminated is of immense importance. Whether or not the Government prevaricates or takes the necessary legal and political decisions to resolve the Wagalla issue, the people of Wajir are determined to push for a full settlement of this issue no matter how long it takes. Mr Adan is a lawyer practising in Nairobi.

East African Standard, Kenya 15 Feb 2004 www.eastandard.net Wagalla massacre: The sore that refuses to heal By John Kamau On February 16, 1984, local daily newspapers carried a story about an open letter to a minister of State in the Office of the President, Hussein Maalim Mohammed, about the "persecution" and "rounding up" of people of the Degodia clan. It was the first time what was happening, or had happened, at a Wajir airstrip was being mentioned. Signed by two local MPs Ahmed M. Khalif (Wajir West) and A. M. Sheikh (Wajir East), and local leaders D M Amin, Abdi Billow and A H Hassan, the letter told the minister what he already knew; after all he was, along with fellow State minister Justus ole Tipis, privy to the operation. The letter claimed that "more than 5,000 men were gathered together, beaten up, denied water and food and some among them have either been shot dead or burnt alive". These women were among a group of Wagalla supporters from North Eastern Province who were protesting against the massacres. They are seen here at the fence of Sheria House where they were demanding audience with the Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Mr Kiraitu Murungi Pic by Jennifer Wachie The leaders also told Mohammed that "the atrocities perpetrated by the authorities have no parallels in the history of independent and democratic Kenya, and it is difficult to imagine that (such a) holocaust could take place in the country." The operation against the Degodia had started on February 5 when the North Eastern PC, Benson Kaaria, ordered all those whose houses had been burnt down by security forces to leave Wajir Town. The rounding up however started on February 10 and at the end of the day 5,000 had been arrested. Others had been tricked to go to the airport, ostensibly to welcome dignitaries. Intelligence sources say that the Degodia were suspected to be behind violent skirmishes with and ambushes against the soldiers deployed to stamp out the Shifta menace in the district and that they had links with other Somalis in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region. But when the ‘final solution’ was decided upon after a security meeting in Wajir town, chaired by Kaaria and attended by police and military personnel, the end result shocked the outside world. Ghastly "The gruesome atrocities being perpetrated against these people are nothing short of genocide. There can be no justification whatsoever for this ghastly situation," said NEP leaders in a Press statement that was downplayed. After all it was overshadowed by the ongoing Njonjo Inquiry. The story petered out and eventually died. A senior official with the Voice of Kenya (now Kenya Broadcasting Corporation) says they were instructed by the Ministry of Information to drop "the Wajir story". "The word Wagalla was never mentioned anywhere for a very long time," says the now retired executive. To downplay the story emerging from the international media, most of it leaked by Barbara Lefkow, the wife of a US diplomat, the Minister of State Justus ole Tipis released a statement in which he blamed the loss of lives to "repeated tribal feuds between the Degodia and Ajuran people". Tipis explained that the "exercise" – which covered Elben, Damba, Butehelu, Eldas, Griftu and Bura Jogoo – was "necessary to restore peace and order" and that during the operation a "number of firearms were recovered" and "as a result it was necessary to question several suspects". It was the ‘questioning’ that went wrong. With temperatures soaring above 40 degrees centigrade those arrested and taken to, or were tricked into Wagalla airstrip were ordered to strip and lie on the murram. Those who refused were shot dead and their bodies loaded onto a lorry, witnesses say. To make them confess, the soldiers kicked and slashed some of the victims and watched as exhaustion, thirst and hunger took their toll on them. Outside the Wagalla perimeter fence there was great concern about the people herded there. It is claimed that on February 15, Kaaria visited the airstrip to "review the progress". As he addressed the crowd he was heckled and some of them started moving toward him. Others, like in the Jewish Escape from Sorbibor movie, decided to make one final dash. The soldiers opened fire and the number of those who died is still not known. The Kaaria convoy left for Wajir town and official silence on Wagalla massacre started. Speaking to the Sunday Standard this week, the former PC denied ever being party to the killings. He claimed he visited the airstrip after the deaths in the company of the former Chief of General Staff, General Jackson Mulinge. Meanwhile as the convoy left, Annalena Tonelli, a nun at the Wajir Rehabilitation Centre, painted her vehicle with the Red Cross sign and followed the army convoys that were dumping the dead and the injured in the bush (see separate story). She made a list of the dead and gave it to Ms Lefkov. By that time all the bodies had been cleared from the airstrip and its environs and dumped in an area that stretched to the Kenya/Ethiopia border. Tonelli managed to collect hundreds of them and buried them in a mass grave at her Wajir Rehabilitation Centre. As the story leaked out and pressure from human rights activists mounted on President Moi over the killings, Foreign Affairs minister Elijah Mwangale, who was abroad, was faced with the task of explaining the issue. He quickly flew back to Kenya and told the world that there was "no massacre" describing the clashes as a "spillover" from hostilities between Somalia and Ethiopia. That was the official government line. However, the government was in a quandary as to what to do with the Italian nun who had collected the bodies from the bushes and talked to survivors. She had also lived among the Degodia, Ogaden and Ajuran clans since 1969. At that time, Parliament was on August recess and legislators Khalif and Sheikh could not raise the matter in the House. Back in Wajir, the two MPs were being sought for questioning. But Khalif, together with Sheikh Ahmed, then a teacher at Sabunley Secondary School, escaped and, to the chagrin of the provincial administration, held a Press conference in Nairobi where they put the number of the dead at "more than 80." As that was happening, Moi flew to the province and praised government officers and security forces in the region "for efficiency" and asked those with guns to surrender them. Wagalla was being downplayed and the airstrip had been closed to all. Local chief Bishar Ismael Ibrahim, who had witnessed the deaths, was arrested and locked up for 57 days before he was dismissed. In Parliament, Khalif attempted to raise the issue, but was challenged to substantiate by then Vice-President Mwai Kibaki. He only produced two pictures of dead people as Tipis maintained that only 57 people had died during the entire operation. Kaaria, who along with the Provincial Police Officer was quietly relieved of his duties, has a different recollection of events. The report from Garissa, he says, only mentioned 16 dead. "It was obviously a lie," he says. That number given by Tipis has remained the official figure and when the Government finally decided to talk about it, William Ruto, an assistant minister in the Office of the President, said that only 13 people were shot dead and that 381 had been detained for screening. He explained that after the killings "no action was taken since there was no criminal activity." The only thing Ruto admitted on behalf of the Moi administration was that "security standards were flouted" during the operation. The testimony of a witness who survived a massacre But within government circles, the Wagalla has been hushed and there is little official information on what really happened. Victims and government officials are afraid to share what they know, hiding behind the veil of secrecy that surrounded the massacre. Twenty years later, it remains Kenya’s worst kept secret. •••• "I was hurled into the back of a lorry and taken to Wagalla," Eyewitness Haji Warerra recalls. "Throughout the day, military lorries drove in from all parts of the district bringing in more people. By the end of the day, hundreds of men had been detained behind the chicken-wire fence. Sometime late in the afternoon, we were ordered to strip naked and lie on the hot murram in the scorching sun. We spent the night in the cold. By Saturday afternoon, people realised they would not be released soon. Some of the people were beaten badly by soldiers to extract information. We were now very hungry and thirsty. I saw people drink their own urine. Some weak ones collapsed and died. Those who resisted the order to strip naked were shot outright. That Saturday, the security men poured petrol on four people and set them ablaze. By the fourth day there was a pile of dead bodies. On February 14, out of desperation, the "prisoners" attempted to escape. They ran helter-skelter making for the fence. A few managed to climb over but the security men opened fire, killing most of them. Later in the afternoon, about six lorries drove in to collect the dead bodies and the half dead. They were piled onto the vehicles and taken to the bush where they were left for the hyenas. I was among those whom security men mistook for the dead. I found myself in Tarbaj. I was rescued by an Italian missionary who was scouring the bushes for survivors."

ICG 30 Feb 2004 Africa Report N°75 : Liberia Rebuilding Liberia: Prospects and Perils Liberia is a collapsed state that has effectively become a UN protectorate. Failure to achieve stability would have a violent spill-over effect in the rest of West Africa. The 5-6 February donors conference is an opportunity to focus on the long-term strategies, real money and hard thinking required to pull Liberia out of crisis and develop a government that can handle reconstruction. The immediate concern is the security situation, which demands concentrated efforts on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of fighters (DR). States need to bring the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) up to authorised troop strength (15,000) quicker to avoid the chaos surrounding the abortive December 2003 disarmament attempt. As two main Liberian factions are sponsored by Guinea and Côte d?Ivoire, a solid DR package would not only aid peace in Liberia but also help stabilise all West Africa. ICG reports and briefing papers are available on our website: www.crisisweb.org

This Day (Nigeria) 25 Feb 2004 www.thisdayonline.com 48 Killed in Plateau Community From Funmi Peter-Omale in Jos Fourty-eight people, including women and children were on Tuesday massacred in a church in Yelwa, Shendam Local Government Area of Plateau State by suspected Fulani insurgents. THISDAY gathered that the victims were part of dozens of people who had fled into the COCIN church for refuge following an attack by insurgents along Yelwa-Shendam road. So far, not less than 117 men, women, children and policemen have been brutally killed in renewed hostilities in the Southern part of the state in the last two weeks. Local government areas affected by the insurgence include Langtang North, Langtang South, Shendam, Wase and Kanam. State Police Commissioner, Mr. Innocent Ilozuoke, confirmed the latest development but said he could not ascertain the brains behind the attack. "I can't categorically say who carried out the latest attack. We have been having series of attacks in the Southern senatorial zone. I wouldn't want to associate the problem in Wase with what has just happened in Yelwa, Shendam," he said. Ilozuoke affirmed that the situation has been brought under control by a combined team of army and police, adding that reinforcement is being sent to villages considered to be under serious threat. "We have a joint operation and investigations are being well co-ordinated. We have moved the CIB (Criminal Intelligence Bureau) and CID Criminal Investigation Depart-ment) men to the affected areas. In fact the OC CIB and OC Mobile are both there to unravel the mystery as I speak to you." A police bulletin breakdown of villages that have come under militant attack shows that Shendam has been the worst hit in terms of casualties. So far, 52 people, including four policemen have been brutally murdered by suspected Fulani insurgents. In Langtang South, five villages have come under militant attack with 32 casualties as well as dozens of houses razed. Wase Local Government recorded 29 casualties with four villages coming under major attack. Langtang North has recorded only one death though a number of houses have been razed. In 2002, hundreds of people were killed in a genocide-type of hostilities that broke out in Plateau South. The genesis of the breakout could not be ascertained but most of the current clashes are not unconnected to cow stealing and ethnic cleansing between the Taroh people of the South and Hausa/Fulani. Trouble broke out two weeks ago when Taroh people who had fled Wase and Shendam Local Government Areas returned to their villages to discover that their homes have been overun and their cattle stolen.

Boston Globe 8 Feb 2004 Wounds of colonialism reopen in Namibia German apology for massacres poses questions By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 2/8/2004 OKAHANDJA, Namibia -- One hundred years ago, the chief of the Herero tribe grew furious over the constant raids by German settlers, who stole land and cattle. He quietly ordered an attack, and over a few days, the Hereros killed an estimated 150 settlers. But the chief's battle cry would soon haunt his tribe of cattle herders, which had flourished in southwestern Africa since the mid-16th century, after their ancestors made the long journey from the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. A German commander issued a written order in August 1904 that his troops must "annihilate these masses" of Hereros, and German soldiers went on to kill tens of thousands of them. Some historians describe it as a genocide and estimate that only 15,000 survivors escaped into the desert. The massacres slipped long ago into the recesses of history, just another colonial atrocity in Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But now, because of an apology, the slaughters of the Hereros are being brought into full view, and with that the emotional issue of colonialism's legacy in Africa. Wolfgang Massing, Germany's ambassador to Namibia, told hundreds of Hereros last month at a ceremony marking the battles that he wished to "express how deeply we regret this unfortunate past." He called the massacres the "darkest chapter of our colonial history." The statement was Germany's strongest ever expression of contrition for the killings. For many observers, these words hold significance beyond the tragedies here in the farmland of central Namibia. Several Hereros and Germans said the Germans' act of facing the past raises broader questions about the sins of colonialists throughout Africa and what should be done about them. The questions have echoes across the Atlantic in simmering debates over whether the US government should apologize and pay reparations, both to Native Americans for killings and land seizures as well as to African-Americans for enslaving their ancestors. President Bush, during a trip to Senegal's Goree Island last summer, called slavery "one of the greatest crimes of history." But he stopped short of an apology demanded by many African-American activists. The difference in Africa is that the calls for making amends are much quieter, if they exist at all. Still, some think it is time for Europeans to face the past. "It's terrifying what happened in the 19th century in Africa," Massing said in an interview in his office last week in Windhoek, the Namibian capital. "We Germans are traumatized by our history, and so we as a people need to look back at it. And our colonial history, in principle, doesn't differ from that of the other colonial powers." In another office two blocks away, Kuaima Riruako, the Herero paramount chief today, put it more directly: "These apologies should be made all over Africa." European powers began to carve up Africa with great intensity toward the end of the 19th century, seeking to extract vast mineral wealth, amass huge land holdings, and apply these newfound riches to gain power on the world stage. The main players were Germany, Italy, Britain, France, Portugal, and Belgium; the only African countries that eluded their grasp were Liberia and Ethiopia. Ethiopia, known for its fierce independence, repelled an Italian force in 1896; Liberia, formed by the American Colonization Society in 1847 for the purpose of repatriating freed slaves, held onto its independence thanks in no small part to US influence. But there is no consensus on how the European countries can make amends. In Namibia, which was called German South-West Africa a century ago, Riruako welcomed the German ambassador's remarks, saying it could lead to a new relationship between the Hereros and Germans. But Riruako said the Germans must do much more, including helping the Hereros reclaim their land and paying reparations to the tribe. Four years ago, Hereros in New York City filed a lawsuit in the United States on behalf of the tribe, demanding $4 billion in reparations from the German government and German companies. Last month in Okahandja, Massing told the assembled Hereros that his government would not pay reparations. He said doing so to one group "could reinforce ethnic tensions and thus undermine the policy of reconciliation" in Namibia. But Nahas Angula, Namibia's minister of higher education and a member of the Ondonga tribal group, a subgroup of the Owanbo tribe, said in an interview that Massing was "hiding behind a divisiveness argument. . . . It's true that everybody suffered from the Germans. But the Hereros suffered the most. The Germans decimated them." Last week, in his office, Massing, 60, who took over his post less than five months ago, said reparations "make no sense at all. This happened 100 years ago. To whom should we pay reparations? . . . Imagine paying one ethnic group $4 billion. There are 100,000 Hereros. That would be detrimental to the national unity of Namibia. There were other tribes that also fought colonial rule. What would we pay them?" Instead, he noted, Germany has been Namibia's largest donor since its independence from South Africa in 1990, giving about 500 million euros, worth more than $600 million US today. Asked why Germany would pay billions of dollars in reparations to Holocaust survivors and the government of Israel for the killing of 6 million Jews, while not paying reparations for the killing of the Hereros, Massing said the 1904 massacres "were not a systematic killing of people like the systematic killing of the Jews." In Okahandja, about 45 miles north of Windhoek, many residents disagree. "I wasn't happy with his speech," said Jejatua Omaendo Kaangundue, 29, a Herero who has closely studied the history of his people. "It came out of the blue. Think about it: You kill people, you take their land, and for 100 years you never speak to them. And now you come and say you were wrong but don't want to pay for it?" Kaangundue and a friend, Ismael Mieze, 28, showed a visitor the graves of the past Herero leaders, including Samuel Maharero, who gave the fateful order to attack the Germans. Despite the vast numbers of Hereros killed from 1904 to 1907 by the Germans, only several were identified and buried. Almost all were piled into unmarked mass graves in scrubland and desert. In fact, off a side street in Okahandja, the largest number of marked graves from the early 20th century is for German soldiers. More than 50 were buried here. The two young Herero men walked among the tombstones, reading the German names. "History can never be deleted," Kaangundue said, referring to the German graves, the German street names remaining in Okahandja, and to what happened to his people. "There's a saying, `If you don't know your history, you don't know where you come from.' We will not forget our history." .

RWANDA: Chemical weapons team visits Kigali NAIROBI, 27 Jan 2004 (IRIN) - A delegation from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is in Rwanda to explore ways of supporting the country in its ratification of a chemical weapons convention, the Rwandan News Agency, RNA, reported on Monday. "We are in Rwanda to help the government in the ratification of the agreement which the country signed in 1993," Yu Huang, the organisation's director of external relations, was quoted as saying. The organisation was set up in 1997 by the countries that have joined the Chemical Weapons Convention to make sure that it achieves its purpose. It undertakes activities worldwide aimed at convincing countries that have not yet done so to sign and ratify the agreement. The organisation also monitors activities in the chemical industry to reduce the risk of commercial chemicals being misused. Huang said that although Rwanda did not posses chemical weapons, it was important to be a state party in the fight against chemical weapons, RNA reported. "The ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention demonstrates a political will in the implementation of peace and security of the country," Huang was quoted as saying. Meanwhile, Radio Rwanda reported on Monday that a Belgian delegation led by the country's defence minister, Andre Flahaut, was in the country to ask the government to officially recognise the death of 10 Belgian soldiers who died during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The soldiers were killed while serving as part of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda. Belgium is seeking to have the soldiers be remembered among the other victims of the 1994 as they died in line of duty in a peace mission.

Guardian UK 13 Feb 2004 Murambi dispatch Guarding the horror Rory Carroll meets a Rwandan genocide survivor who is determined that the savage events he witnessed will not be glossed over Friday February 13, 2004 Emmanuel Murangira has a hole the size of a small grape in his left temple. The bullet saved his life, in a way, since he fell unconscious and was covered in blood, apparently dead. He awoke beneath a pile of bodies, climbed out and fled, scampering through hills and glades to the nearby border with Burundi, one of a handful of Tutsis to escape slaughter in Murambi, a district in southern Rwanda. That was 10 years ago. Today Mr Murangira is back in Murambi and working at the massacre site, a school campus, as an oral historian, or tour guide, for visitors. When words fail he just points. Stacked on desks in classrooms are hundreds of skeletons. At first sight it could be Pompeii but then you see the remains have been preserved with lime. Fragments of individuality endure. A small child with tattered red shorts. An adult with an orange shirt. Tufts of hair from an otherwise smooth skull. Some final moments you can imagine: arms shielding faces, others with palms pressed together, in prayer or pleading, perhaps both. Hundreds of massacre sites dot Rwanda but Murambi is unique in displaying preserved remains. Most of the 40,000 estimated to have died here are buried in mass graves but enough are in the 24 classrooms to give a sense of the horror. As the 10th anniversary of the genocide approaches, the site is due to change. A new centre, which will house a permanent exhibition, will keep the skeletons on shelves, still visible but behind glass. It is part of an ambitious plan to erect proper memorials across the country on sites which have been barely touched since Tutsi-led rebels ousted the extremist Hutu government that incited the murder of 800,000 Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus. There is fraught debate about whether to bury all remains out of dignity or to leave some displayed as a warning. Mr Murangira, 48, favours the latter, which is why every day for almost a decade, unpaid, he has guarded the classrooms. "Most people say genocide never took place in this country. That's why we keep the bodies here. So they can see what happened." In fact, very few deny the genocide, but there is a desire, not just by perpetrators, to gloss over its scale and impact. Mr Murangira welcomes the idea of moving the bodies to the adjacent Murambi Genocide Prevention Centre, where they should remain safe and visible. The centre is the initiative of the Aegis Trust, a British charity, African Rights, a human rights watchdog and Rwanda's culture ministry. "You should have seen the relief on Emmanuel's face when we told him we would build a centre," said James Smith, of Aegis. Mr Murangira looks forward to no longer being a lonely sentinel but, with all 49 relatives dead, including his wife and three children, he is not sure what he will do. "I'm old, I'm not educated," he shrugs. One task which awaits him is testifying next month at a traditional court, known as gacaca, against some of the alleged killers, a belated exercise in justice which has stoked tension. Just an hour's drive from Murambi, three witnesses were recently killed, reportedly by genocide suspects who wanted to stop their testimony. Other witnesses have been intimidated, said Ibuka, an umbrella group for survivors. The authorities say they are isolated cases. Isolated is certainly how Mr Murangira feels, one of just four Tutsi survivors in Murambi. "If they don't kill me I will testify."

Guardian UK 18 Feb 2004 Final amnesty for perpetrators of Rwanda genocide Jeevan Vasagar, East Africa correspondent Wednesday February 18, 2004 The Guardian Thousands of Rwandans accused of participating in genocide have been offered a "final chance" to be released from prison if they confess their guilt and ask for forgiveness before a deadline next month. A large proportion of Rwanda's Hutu majority were drawn into the mass murder and, a decade after the killing was brought to a halt, prisons in the tiny central African state are still overflowing with around 90,000 alleged "genocidaires". Rwanda's government, founded by the rebel movement which ended the genocide, has long encouraged suspected killers to confess in return for lighter sentences such as community service. Last year, around 25,000 suspects were freed and returned to their communities after attending "solidarity camps" to reintegrate them into society. In an interview yesterday, the country's prosecutor general, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, said the government was launching a final campaign to urge thousands of prisoners to confess before a deadline of March 15. Mr Mucyo said: "We have given people enough time, this is their last chance." Individuals accused of organising, instigating or taking a particularly zealous role in the genocide - those known as category one defendants - will not be eligible for the amnesty. Those who are freed could still face the gacaca justice system, where defendants are judged by their peers in village courts. The traditional system was restored by the government to uncover the truth of what happened from witnesses to the genocide and promote reconciliation by encouraging perpetrators to confess and make atonement. Once released there is usually no option but for alleged perpetrators and survivors of the genocide to live side by side, and the gacaca system is seen as crucial to repairing the social fabric. The prosecutor said: "It will be up to the population to decide what people have done or not done." Releasing prisoners back into a society still deeply wounded by the genocide did not mean suspects were escaping justice, the prosecutor added, explaining that it was part of the healing process. "We can't have justice without reconciliation and we can't have reconciliation without justice." Rwanda has been grappling with the question of justice since 1994, when the extremist government, known by its slogan "Hutu Power", masterminded the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in around 100 days. The Rwandan government is planning memorial services across the country on the 10th anniversary of the day the killing began, April 7 1994.

Vanguard (Lagos) 18 Feb 2004 10 Years After Genocide, Rwanda Still Scarred ANALYSIS Kigali Ten years after an orchestrated attempt to exterminate its Tutsi minority led to the deaths of up to a million people over the course of 100 days, the central African state of Rwanda still bears deep scars. The killings, organised by the Hutu government of the day, and carried out amid the total inaction of the international community, claimed up to 10,000 lives a day. The now ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took power as a rebel group in July 1994, putting an end to the genocide, and its political partners have since placed much emphasis on national security, reconciliation and poverty reduction. Last year President Paul Kagame and his RPF both clocked up landslide victories in presidential and parliamentary elections. European union observers complained of cases of fraud and irregularities but stopped short of calling the results of the elections into question. Rwanda is now one of the safest countries in Africa. In the wake of the genocide, Rwanda was frequently attacked by Rwandan Hutu forces holed up in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo -- prompting Kigali to sponsor a Congolese rebel group in that country's own devastating civil war -- but there have been no such incidents since 2001. Kigali now boasts a brand new five-star hotel which this month hosted a major summit of African heads of state. But despite these developments, the sores left by the genocide are still present. Of all of history's genocides, Rwanda's has the sad distinction of having involved the greatest number of killers. Unlike the Nazi Holocaust where victims were slaughtered with industrial precision, the Rwandan genocide was carried out by vast numbers of ordinary peasants, people who, whipped into a frenzy of ethnic hatred by the regime in power, turned on their neighbours with agricultural instruments and bludgeoned or hacked them to death. The sheer number of killers, coupled with the destruction of the country's legal system, has hampered attempts to deliver justice. Despite ambitious and innovative programmes involving group trials, village courts, and the provisional release of many prisoners, some 90,000 detainees are still crammed into the country's jails, many in conditions better suited to animals. While thousands of killers have admitted to their crimes, thereby earning sentence reductions, they have not always expressed remorse.

Reuters 19 Feb 2004 Rwanda genocide suspects could face trial at home By Daniel Wallis DAR ES SALAAM, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The U.N. court trying the perpetrators of Rwanda's 1994 genocide may hand some mid-ranking suspects to Rwanda for trial over their role in the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people, a court spokesman said on Thursday. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is under intense pressure to meet a U.N. deadline to finish investigations by the end of this year and complete all trials by 2008. The court has delivered 17 guilty verdicts and one acquittal since being set up in November 1994. But despite its hundreds of staff and multi-million dollar budget, some 40 suspects are still languishing in custody. "The Security Council allows us to transfer suspects to host countries," ICTR spokesman Roland Amoussouga said by telephone from the tribunal in the northern Tanzanian city of Arusha. Extremists from Rwanda's Hutu majority butchered some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus during 100-days of orchestrated violence that began in April 1994. Only the top suspects have been sent for trial at the ICTR, and Rwanda is currently deciding what to do with tens of thousands of lower profile suspects locked up in the tiny central African country's overflowing jails. Facing the difficulties of trying so many suspects, and opening old wounds in the process, the Rwandan government said on Monday that thousands could be freed if they admitted their guilt and asked for forgiveness before a deadline next month. Amoussouga said the transfer of high profile ICTR cases would be decided at a later date by the tribunal's chief prosecutor, former Gambian justice minister Hassan Jallow. But he denied reports the ICTR had agreed to set up a joint committee with Rwanda to look at transferring jurisdiction. Media reports said ICTR Chief Registrar Adam Dieng had agreed the move during talks on Monday with Rwandan Justice Minister Edda Mukabagwiza in the Rwandan capital Kigali. "The registrar was in no position to discuss how these transfers could take place," Amoussouga said. "It was a misquote. We have not yet reached the point where a joint committee could be set up." The tribunal has been accused of inefficiency by Rwanda's Tutsi-led government, which overthrew the Hutu regime and ended the genocide. But Amoussouga has rejected those claims, saying 66 people out of 81 indicted have been arrested, including 12 out of 19 members of Rwanda's 1994 transitional government, which is accused of overseeing the slaughter.

Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne) 18 Feb 2004 Clamping Killers and Survivors Together ANALYSIS February 18, 2004 Posted to the web February 19, 2004 By Gabriel Gabiro Shyorongi After a brief wait inside a stuffy little house in the middle of a thick banana grove, a small shy man dressed in tired farm clothes and a flat cap made of part cloth, part red mud emerges from the front door clutching a machete. One can't help but immediately try to visualize to how many uses Evariste Ahimana, 50 and a confessed killer, may have put the soiled machete in his hands. At the start of the 1994 genocide, Ahimana and a group of his ethnic Hutu friends and fellow farmers swept through the hills and valleys of this remote Central Rwanda town of Shyorongi rummaging through all possible hideouts for their Tutsi neighbours before killing them. For the 'work' - a popular euphemism for 'killing' - they used machetes, cudgels, hoes, axes or any other farm tool they could lay their hands on. Seven months ago, Ahimana, together with over 10,000 other confessed genocidaires were released after spending varying periods in detention. This followed a presidential decree issued in January 2003 for the release of suspects that had been (or risked spending) in detention without trial longer than they would serve should they be convicted, as well as confessed criminals that had served most of their time in jail. Rwanda's recently enacted genocide law provides for reduced punishments for peasants like Ahimana, especially when they confess and express remorse before a prosecutor. Confessed criminals who are not suspected of being master minders of the genocide, committing rape or having been 'distinguished' killers, serve half of their sentences outside prison doing community work in their areas. Reconciliation is the underlying principle of this law. Ahimana pleaded guilty to clubbing to death a Tutsi neighbour and erstwhile friend called Mulinda. "We picked him up from a house where he had been hiding for some days", narrates Ahimana. "Then, as you know, those were days of killing", he adds before looking away, seemingly expecting one to imagine what had followed. After a pause, Ahimana, still facing away, volunteers details of how he, in the company of five men, attacked and killed Mulinda and several other Tutsi men. "I personally killed Mulinda. I repeatedly hit his head, stomach and back using a cudgel", he says, adding, "We had been told by the authorities that we had to kill or we would be severely punished. I regret what I did". Prior to his release from jail, Ahimana like all the others were taken for a mandatory three month 'solidarity camp', a kind of rehabilitation centre. Top on the subjects taught there were reconciliation and the importance of asking forgiveness from victims and their families. 'I haven't been to their home' From the time Ahimana returned to his home after nine years in jail, he admits he hasn't visited any of Mulinda's surviving family members to ask for forgiveness. "I'm planning to go and see his younger brother and his sister one of these days", he says as he peels some dry mud from his arms. Mulinda's sister and brother live about five hundred metres away from Ahimana's house. From the yard of his house, Ahimana points at both locations. Asked again why he hadn't been to see any relative of Mulinda's as encouraged by the authorities, Ahimana remains evasive. Then, once more facing away, he mutters something to the effect of the necessity to first probe if he is welcome at Mulinda's relatives. He denies harbouring any fear for what would happen if he visited the Mulinda's. "I have seen his brother a couple of times as I went to church. I have also seen his sister", he says. "Each time, we exchanged quick greetings and continued our way", he adds. A trip to Mulinda's Then, albeit with a little hesitation, Ahimana accepts an invitation from Hirondelle to go find Mulinda's brother and talk to him a little more than exchanging quick greetings. Once inside FranÃ§ois Munyambabazi's living room, it is difficult to even suspect that anything ever went wrong between them. Both men show respect and calm. "He hasn't asked me for forgiveness", says Munyambabazi. "But I'm ready to forgive him. That is what this country is all about. It is about giving people second chances regardless of what crimes they committed", he calmly adds reclining in a chair. Ahimana quietly listens. After a long positive speech that would impress any reconciliation enthusiast, Munyambazi with an expression of 'its-your-turn-to-speak', looks at Ahimana. "What we did is a shame", Ahimana explains. "When I look back at those days, I can't believe it was me. Worse still, I can't understand how I did this to your family", he adds. Like Munyambabazi's speech, Ahimana's is a near photocopy of the spirit of the policies sung by all authorities in Rwanda day in, day out. But, when quizzed further about his feelings towards the man sitting before him - a man that brutally killed his brother and presided of the killings of his father and his younger brother - Munyambabazi can no longer keep behind the faÃ§ade. With his index finger pointing at Ahimana, Munyambabazi angrily speaks out. "Look, you have no guarantee to life as long as you haven't asked for forgiveness from me and my family", he says shaking his head. "I can shoot you. In fact, get out of my house quickly", he adds. "These people have no truth. Get out of my house", he repeats. Ahimana, with a face of more fear than surprise, mumbles a farewell and quickly walks out of Munyambabazi's house. Other cases Ahimana and Munyambabazi are not an isolated case. Across Rwanda, victims, killers, suspects and their families are struggling to understand the dynamics of being neighbours as they used to about ten years ago albeit in totally changed circumstances. Jean Tuyisenge, 38, returned from jail and resettled on his little property with his wife and three children in the East Rwanda district of Bicumbi last May. He was released after pleading guilty to killing two young men from his neighbourhood. He says he is now a changed man. "I feel terrible about that period. I wish I hadn't been there", the well-built farmer says quietly. Tuyisenge has been working on his small farm since his return. However, he admits he hasn't done any work on asking for forgiveness from relatives of his victims. "They live quite far away; I need to prepare a lot before I go to see them," he explains. Walking away from Tuyisenge's house, his cousin points at a woman walking along a narrow path in a maize plantation. "That is the lady Tuyisenge was talking to you about". The lady is one of the relatives of Tuyisenge's victims whom he said live "quite a distance away". Tansiana Mukarwego's house is 50 metres from the point where she was. "Those people are unrepentant", she says. "I have seen him pass by several times. I can't stop imagining that he is still a beast". "We shall even share water" Whereas most of the released killers and suspects interviewed by Hirondelle hadn't visited families of their victims to ask for pardon, some appear to have started to mend their relationships. The first stop for Theoneste Habimana, 32, on the day he was released from prison last May, was for the family of his victim. "We saw Theo appearing through the front door. He put down a sack containing his belongings", recalls Maria Mukamusoni, the mother of Habimana's victim. "We didn't know what to say to him. He asked for mercy. We didn't know what to do". Today, Habinama and Mukamusoni both admit that even as good neighbours, they need time to return to pre-war friendship. "I'm sure we shall even share water (a domestic practice that symbolises friendship between neighbours) in future", says Habimana. "Personal initiative" Spokesperson for the ministry of justice, Fidele Masengo denies any suggestion that a process normally flaunted as a quick route to reconciliation and co-existence after the genocide may not exactly have worked. "Reconciliation was not the reason for the release of these people. It was purely a judicial process", says Masengo. However, he concedes reconciliation was a major consideration in the drafting of the genocide law that has relatively reduced sentences. A law that Ahimana has benefited from. "Reconciliation will take longer. We can't put a deadline. It will come as people meet more and more in their day-to-day activities". .

News 24 SA 19 Feb 2004 Thousands confess to genocide Kigali - Rwanda is to release a large number of prisoners accused of participating in the country's 1994 genocide who have confessed to their roles in massacres that claimed the lives of up to a million people, the chief prosecutor said on Thursday. Jean de Dieu Mucyo said that "several tens of thousands" of prisoners have made confessions while in preventative detention but declined to say how many of them would be freed. The release plan comes as Rwanda prepares to commemorate of the 10th anniversary in April of the 1994 genocide where members of the country's Tutsi minority and Hutu sympathisers were killed in 100 days of slaughter by Hutu extremists. Some 22 000 genocide suspects were released temporarily from the country's overcrowded jails in May 2003, pending verdicts from the courts. "Since then many prisoners have made confessions, above all in view of the deadline date", said Mucyo, referring to chance given to suspects to confess before March 15 and have their sentences reduced by as much as half. This means that some suspects have served out in preventative detention more time than the sentences that would have been handed out for their crimes, allowing for their release from jail. International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that some 89 000 prisoners are crowded into the jails of the central African country. Mucyo did not give a date for the release of the prisoners, but said it was unlikely that this would take place before or during the official commemoration of the genocide. The release is set to prove controversial after many survivors of the genocide were shocked by the liberation of the 22 000 suspects in May last year. According to Mucyo, it has yet to be decided if prisoners accused of ethnic "divisionism" and damaging state security, such as former president Pasteur Bizimungu, would be affected by the measure. Solidarity camps' After their release, the prisoners are to be sent to so-called "solidarity camps" for one or two months. The camps are aimed at "re-educating" former fighters and genocide suspects and informing them of the changes in Rwanda since 1994. The backlog of prisoners awaiting trial had forced the Rwandan authorities to use mass trials and also to set up so-called "gacaca", or village courts, across the country to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. The suspected masterminds of the genocide are, however, being tried outside Rwanda at a United Nations court, based in Arusha in neighbouring Tanzania and set up in November 1994. Edited by Elmarie Jack

Reuters 20 Feb 2004 Rwanda asks for minute's silence for genocide By Finbarr O'Reilly KIGALI, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Rwandan officials have asked countries around the world to hold a minute's silence at noon on April 7 to mark the 10th anniversary of the 1994 genocide. "We would like the whole world to hold 10 minutes of silence -- one minute for each year since 1994 -- but some say that's too long," said Ildephonse Karengera, Rwanda's director of the genocide memorial. "The most important thing is to have at least a minute of silence because people must remember what happened here," Karengera told Reuters in an interview in Kigali on Friday. The tiny central African country was plunged into a frenzy of ethnic butchery that saw an average of 8,000 people killed each day in the months after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali on April 6, 1994. In all, about 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slain in about 100 days by Hutu extremists and their followers. Scholars concluded that the killers -- mostly civilians armed with machetes, garden hoes and spiked clubs and spurred on by hate propaganda -- did their work five times faster than the gas chambers used by the Nazis in World War Two. The lack of international response to the genocide was seen by many as a failure of the world community. "The international community must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began," America's then-president Bill Clinton said in a speech during a visit to Rwanda in 1998. April 7 has been designated by the United Nations as an "International Day of Reflection" for Rwanda, which will host a conference on the prevention of genocide and a week of memorial services. About 20 heads of state, including U.S. President George W. Bush, are among dignitaries invited for the anniversary. Memorial events on April 7 will include speeches and a march from downtown Kigali to the Gisozi genocide museum, where tens of thousands of skulls and skeletons are on display in glass cases and tombs in a valley below the hilly capital. Karengera would not give the cost of the memorial services until the number of visiting dignitaries was confirmed. He said the three-day conference on genocide would run from April 4 to 6 in Kigali and that various memorial events would continue until a closing ceremony on April 13. The genocide was halted when Tutsi rebels overthrew the Hutu extremists, thousands of whom fled into the lawless jungles of neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels went on to form Rwanda's current government.

Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne) 23 Feb 2004 Rwanda To Hold Large 10th Genocide Anniversary Kigali Plans are underway in Rwanda to hold the biggest genocide commemoration event in the country since the 1994 genocide. April 7th, 2004 will be exactly ten years since the start of 100 days of genocide in which an estimated one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. "It is a big event. It is a time to look back at what has happened since the genocide and to probe whether any lessons have been learnt", James Smith, Executive Director of Aegis Trust, a UK-based organization working with the government on preparations for the event, told Hirondelle News Agency. "There will be questions for the international community on how it would react if another Rwanda happened today", he added. "Many heads of state and other individuals that have been engaged in Rwanda since the genocide have been invited to attend the ceremonies", said Smith. Among the major events scheduled to take place on April 7th will be the opening of the first genocide memorial centre in the country. This event will be followed by a ceremony at the national stadium in the capital city, Kigali. There are also plans to light one of the hills of Kigali making it the brightest spot on earth that night. The light is meant to symbolize a bright future for the country. Many other events are being organized in all provinces. Every event will also include testimonies of genocide survivors.

News 24 SA 24 Feb 2004 Grim tales of genocide unfold 2 Bisesero - Every day in Bisesero, survivors of one of the worst killing fields in Rwanda's 1994 genocide gather on top of a hill where a memorial to the slaughters is nearing completion. When it rains, they huddle in the only available shelter, a hut housing the bones of their dead relatives, relics that will be the centrepiece of the memorial. Aron Gakono, a gaunt man of 51, leaning on a stick, commands respect despite his ragged clothes, which are topped off with a blazer and a felt hat. During the 1994 genocide, when the extremist Hutu government then in power tried to eliminate Rwanda's minority Tutsis, Gakono was one of the leaders of a Tutsi resistance group that held out for almost three months on the Bisesero hills, which lie in the west of the central African country. Once the genocide started on April 7, 1994, Tutsis from the whole region converged on Bisesero, numbering an estimated 50 000 at their height. They held out with spears, stones and the odd gun for just over a month, but their attempt to resist enraged their assailants, led and organized by local dignatories, causing them to redouble their attacks. By the end of June, just over 1 000 Tutsis were left alive in Bisesero. Of the one million people that the Rwandan government estimates died in the genocide, one twentieth of them died in Bisesero. Those who survived, nearly all of them men, are haunted by their memories. Gakono lost his wife and five of his seven children at Bisesero. His wife was crucified and impaled on a bamboo pole while nailed to the cross. "You not only have to live with the pain," he said bitterly. "You have to live with the pain and you go hungry." What he and his fellow survivors find hardest to accept is that the killers pick up the pieces of their lives with relative ease once they come out of prison. "Okay, they were in prison, but they come out, their wives and children are there and their wives and children have cultivated their land all the time they were in prison," Gakono said. Little has been done to help survivors, he said. A few kilometres down the hill, in Mubuga, Karoli Ntagwabira, a peasant farmer of 34, who also sells banana beer in the village bar on market days, locked himself and his visitors into a small room rank with the smell of beer at the back of the bar before telling his story. His eyes bloodshot, beer on his breath, he told how he was freed from prison after six years after admitting to having clubbed four people to death in 1994 and to having taken part in all the massacres in the Bisesero area. Karoli himself has suffered. When he was first arrested in 1997 he spent almost a year in an improvised lockup where conditions were so bad that the prisoners died at the rate of twenty a day. "It's a lot more difficult for a survivor who lost his wife in 1994 than for somebody like me who just has a heavy heart," he said.

NYT 26 Feb 2004 10 Years Later in Rwanda, the Dead Are Ever Present By MARC LACEY MURAMBI, Rwanda — If, for whatever reason, one has the desire to relive the horror of the Rwandan massacre of 10 years ago, Emmanuel Murangira is the man to see. Mr. Murangira, 48, is a survivor of a schoolyard blood bath that killed tens of thousands of people seeking refuge on the hilltop campus of a technical school here that has become one of the country's many memorials to the dead. He walks soberly and silently as he guides visitors down the hallways. He unlocks classroom after classroom and pushes open the doors. "This is genocide," he says. Inside, the rooms are full of the partially preserved remains of hundreds of those who were killed by Hutu extremists. The stench is overpowering. The scene is worse still. Closer inspection of the remains, which have been treated with a traditional substance to slow decomposition, reveals exactly in what manner many of them died. A woman has her arms over her face, as if protecting herself from attack. One of her forearms has been hacked off. Another, a youngster, has a thin crack across his skull, the imprint of a machete. All across Rwanda, there are similar scenes of butchery, preserved by survivors just as they were. But with the 10th anniversary of the mass killing approaching in April, the Rwandan authorities are working to bury the bones while still preserving the memories of the estimated 800,000 Tutsi, who make up a minority in the country, and moderate Hutus who died. "We want the memorials to be centers for the exchange of ideas, not collections of bones," said Ildephonse Karengera, the country's director of memorials. But just what to do with all the remains is the question. Some want the bones displayed for as long as they last as evidence of what happened, just in case doubters emerge. But Rwandans traditionally bury their dead and some people say it is disrespectful to leave so many bones and bodies exposed. A compromise is emerging, one that calls for burying more bodies without sanitizing the horror of what occurred. "For those who say it is undignified to show bones, we're burying them, in a sense, behind dark glass," said Dr. James Smith, who runs Beth Shalom Holocaust Memorial Center in Britain and is working with the Rwandan government to revamp some of its memorials. "For those who say it is necessary to see the death, we're accommodating them, too." The memorials are just one part of Rwanda's attempt to recover from the events of 1994. The Tutsi-led government that now runs Rwanda has eliminated ethnicity from identity cards and made it a crime to say or do anything that can be construed as "divisionist." As for prosecuting those who killed, an international tribunal is slowly working its way through the big fish while Rwandan courts handle the lieutenants. With too many offenders to possibly try, President Paul Kagame recently released tens of thousands of people from jail and ordered them to face community trials, known as gacacas. Those proceedings, which will begin countrywide in the coming months, are already having one unforeseen effect. Defendants are pointing out with more specificity where the killing occurred, and more remains are being found. Some bodies were dumped into latrines. Others have spent the last decade in swamps. Mass graves are being dug up, as well. Rwanda hopes the 10th anniversary will attract worldwide attention to the country, its past but also its attempts to recover. On the morning of April 7, the date the killing began in earnest, the government is planning a somber march through the city, followed by 10 minutes of silence. The main memorial in Kigali will officially open its doors. The federal government intends to focus its attention on a handful of main memorials. Local jurisdictions will maintain other sites. But locals will be encouraged to begin using some properties again, despite the unimaginable things that happened there. "Everybody wants a memorial," Mr. Karengera said. "But the whole country can't be covered with memorials. We're a small country. We can't live with that kind of chaos." Thanks to donations from Rwanda's former colonial power, Belgium, and the foundation run by former President Bill Clinton, work is under way on an education center at the school in Murabi that will tell the story of the killings without offering up so much first-hand evidence. Mr. Murangira narrowly escaped death himself. He was shot in the head during the attack on the school. But somehow, hidden under corpses and bleeding from his head, he managed to live. There were only three other survivors that day and Mr. Murangira, with a deep indentation in his forehead from where the bullet was removed, wants to make sure that the attack is never forgotten. The smell, the sight, he can deal with that. "Those who smell are my relatives," he said. "How can I mind?" All the same, Mr. Murangira is thrilled that a permanent memorial will soon take the place of his ad hoc effort to keep the victims' memories alive. "It's hard for me to be here," he said. "But I cannot leave before they put things in order." A similar overhaul is planned for the church in Ntarama, west of Kigali, where the space between the pews is filled with human remains and bloody clothes. In the back, survivors of the massacre here have lined up skulls, reserving a special row for the children. "I want people to see the bones," said Pacific Rutaganda, 48, who survived the church slaughter but lost his sisters, parents and in-laws inside. "I don't want them buried away. There is no way if you see this that you can say genocide never happened. Genocide happened." He then began pointing at the skulls, indicating the weapon used to kill each person. "This is an ax," he said, noting a huge gash in the temple of one victim. "This is a bullet. Here's an arrow and here's a club." Dancilla Nyirabanzungu said her family was somewhere in the church. She lost her husband, 2 children and 15 other relatives in April 1994. Pregnant at the time, she survived because bodies collapsed on top of her and the killers assumed she was dead, too. Soon afterward, though, she gave birth to a boy, whom she named Hakizimana, or Only God Can Save. He is nearly 10 now, and he knows little about what happened in the year of his birth. He knows that his father died with all the others in the church. And he knows his mother is drawn to the place, sitting on the front step just about every day. But for him, the church yard is a playground, one that attracts many visitors. "People keep coming," he said.

Deutsche Presse Agentur 2 Feb 2004 Fresh fighting in Sudan threatens peace process Khartoum (dpa) - At least 50 people have been killed in renewed fighting between the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and pro-government southern Sudanese militias in the Upper Nile region of Sudan, according to officials on Monday. The clashes are another blow to the increasingly shaky Sudanese peace process, following the unexpected suspension of peace talks between the SPLA and the Sudanese government in Kenya last week. SPLA forces are said to have attacked pro-government militia troops in the government-controlled counties of Ogot, Nakdiar and Panyikango, around the Upper Nile state capital of Malakal. Militia sources said 12 soldiers died in Ogot, while fighting in Panyikango and Nakdiar claimed 18 and 11 lives respectively. No casualty figures were available from the SPLA side. Officials said fighting began when forces loyal to southern leader and former Minister of Transport Lam Akol overran a government garrison in the town of Tonga, killing eight and wounding dozens. Governor of Upper Nile State Dak Dwop Bishok downplayed the significance of the fighting, and told Deutsche Presse-Agenter dpa that the ongoing insurgencies had nothing to do with the government. He warned that the Sudanese army would intervene if the situation continued to deteriorate. Some wounded had been taken by military plane for treatment in Khartoum. Roads leading in and out of Malakal have been closed to civilian traffic. A planned visit to the Upper Nile town of Nasser by officials from Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) was called off due to security concerns. Hundreds of villagers, forced out of their homes by the outbreak of clashes, are taking refuge in the town. The renewed fighting will adversely affect the work of NGOs in the region, an official told dpa on condition of anonymity. Rumours of new offensives are rife in Malakal amid the apparent movement of reinforcements by both sides. Militia Commander James Othow declined to comment on the latest fighting, but advised against travel outside the town on security grounds. The clashes have provoked despair amid citizens of the region and dampened hopes that recent progress in the peace process, including a deal on the sharing of oil wealth, would draw a line under Africa's longest-running civil war. "We are very, very depressed with the renewed fighting'', said 55-year-old Nyakal Akot, questioning the ability of the international community to bring the warring factions to the negotiating table.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL 3 Feb2004 Sudan: Massive abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law in Darfur As fighting and displacement of civilians intensifies in Darfur, western Sudan, Amnesty International is requesting all parties to the conflict to respect international human rights and humanitarian law at all times. Massive abuses of human rights in the region are documented in a new 43-page report entitled: Sudan: Darfur: "Too many people killed for no reason". In an attempt to end the escalating armed conflict in Darfur, Sudanese government forces and government-aligned militia (the "Janjawid") are threatening the lives, liberty and property of hundreds of thousands of civilians through indiscriminate bombings, killings, torture, including rape of women and girls, arrests, abductions and forced displacement. Since the start, in February 2003, of the conflict between the Darfur-based Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the government in Khartoum, hundreds of thousands have either been displaced within the region or sought refuge across the border in Chad. During a visit to the refugees in eastern Chad in November 2003, Amnesty International delegates recorded numerous testimonies from Sudanese refugees. They reported attacks on villages and towns by both government-aligned militia and government soldiers. The nature of the killings committed by government soldiers and by the Janjawid point to a pattern of extrajudicial executions and unlawful killings. "There is clear evidence of cooperation between government forces and government-aligned militia. The Sudanese government should cease all support and supplies to the Janjawid or establish a clear chain of command and control over them, including making them accountable for abuses of international humanitarian law," Amnesty International said. The Sudanese authorities have neither condemned the numerous cases of grave human rights abuses committed in Darfur, nor conducted transparent and impartial investigations into them. "By its silence in the face of abuses, the Sudanese government is condoning or encouraging further abuses. Government forces and its aligned militia must immediately end the targeting of civilians," Amnesty International said. Civilians seeking refuge internally or across the border in Chad have also been attacked. In Darfur, the humanitarian crisis is growing, as access to the displaced and the victims of the conflict remains very limited for humanitarian organizations, due to insecurity and government restrictions. Humanitarian assistance to the refugees in Chad is not only hampered by harsh living conditions and the remoteness of the region, but also by insecurity. On 29 January, bombs were dropped by the Sudanese government in the Chadian town of Tina, killing at least three civilians and wounding twelve others. Amnesty International is also calling on the government-opposed armed political groups the SLM/A and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), and on the government-aligned militia to respect at all times international humanitarian law binding on all parties to internal armed conflicts and to respect and protect the lives and livelihoods of civilians in all areas under their control. Amnesty International repeats its calls for urgent and unrestricted humanitarian access to Darfur, for human rights monitors to investigate attacks on civilians in the region and for an independent and impartial Commission of Inquiry into the complex human rights situation in the region. The organization is calling for the grave human rights abuses committed in the region to be addressed in any future peace negotiations on Darfur. For the full report in English, please go to: http://www.web.amnesty.org/library/index/engafr540082004

Center for the Prevention of Genocide 10 Feb 2004 www.genocideprevention.org The Sudanese government declared victory over the rebel groups that have been fighting against exclusionary policies, applied by state officials in region, for almost a year. President Omar al-Beshir formally declared “the end of all military operations” in the region; all three states within Greater Darfur are now officially “completely in government hands.” Unconfirmed reports of at least 700,000 internally displaced persons, and confirmed reports of more than 110,000 refugees fleeing across the border into Chad, have led to many humanitarian organizations to call for access to this region. Until this week, however, the Sudanese government has refused to grant any person of foreign origin access to the Darfur region, citing instability caused by the ongoing conflict as safety concerns. The Center for the Prevention of Genocide strongly encourages the Sudanese government to grant humanitarian organizations immediate and full access to that region. Many such organizations have repeatedly stated their willingness to assist these internally displaced persons. In addition, transparency in the Darfur region will enable the international community to either confirm or disprove reports of massacres of innocent Darfurians committed by Arab-armed militia known as Janjaweed amid military operations. The health and livelihood of these reported populations depend on the swift mobilization of humanitarian organizations and humanitarian aid.

Center for the Prevention of Genocide 11 Feb 2004 www.genocideprevention.org Suspects Massacres Continue in Darfur, Sudan DARFUR, SUDAN – The attacks continue in Western Sudan despite the Sudanese president Omar al-Beshir’s declaration that the rebels have been ‘crushed’ and that the Sudanese army is now in control of the region. Yesterday afternoon, roughly 80 kilometers West of Nyala, additional villages have been attacked by the Janjaweed, a government-aligned, Arab-militia. Ground sources have reported that the following villages have been destroyed and are currently blocked off by the militia - Shataya, Derlewa, Ai Bo, Ai Bela, Magara, and Romalia. The Sudanese foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, has been quoted reporting that the government has opened 10 corridors in Darfur for relief agencies to move through. However, ground sources report that many of the corridors have not yet been opened.

News 24 SA 14 Feb 2004 Dozens dead in Darfur: rebels Sudan set for bumper harvest Sudan welcomes Chad mediation Sudanese forces bomb town Refugees living in the desert A hotbed of exotic diseases Cairo - Dozens of civilians have been killed in Sudan's western Darfur region in the past 48 hours in a major offensive staged by army troops and their Arab militia allies, a rebel spokesperson said on Saturday. Bahr Ibrahim, speaking for the Sudan Liberation Movement - the largest rebel group active in Darfur - said troops and militia had "killed dozens of civilians and burnt more than 200 villages" in the offensive launched on Thursday. Ibrahim, who spoke to reporters by telephone, said army Antonov aircraft had bombarded the area north and northeast of the village of Kuttum, in the north of the region - an area he said was entirely populated by civilians. The spokesperson accused the Sudanese army and its militia allies of pursuing a policy of "ethnic cleansing", saying the attacks - which were ongoing on Saturday - had targeted villages whose residents belonged to non-Arab ethnic groups. Destroyed every water source "They also destroyed every water source in this arid area," Ibrahim said. "The local population fled to the bushes or the mountains." Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir said on Monday that the army had crushed a year-old rebellion in the Darfur region, declaring an end to hostilities there and offering a general amnesty to rebels who surrender their weapons. But on Thursday, a spokesperson for the rebel Justice and Equality Movement said that the rebels had retaken several towns and road links from government forces in the semi-desert area. About three thousand people have been killed and another 670 000 displaced within Sudan itself by the war pitting government troops and their Arab militia allies against rebels drawn mainly from the region's non-Arab minorities. Another 100 000 Sudanese are estimated to have fled across the border into Chad because of the rebellion that erupted a year ago over the Darfur region's alleged economic neglect by the government. Edited by Tricia Shannon

Center for the Prevention of Genocide 17 Feb 2004 www.genocideprevention.org Massacres Confirmed: 81 Dead in Darfur ARLINGTON, VA - The Center for the Prevention of Genocide has received confirmation of the massacre of 81 innocent civilians in Darfur, Sudan. Janjaweed, an Arab militia aligned with the Sudanese government, killed the victims during a February 10 attack on the town of Shatatya and its surrounding villages. This report verifies suspicions that violence continues in Darfur despite government claims that the Sudanese army maintains control in the region. On-the-ground sources have additionally reported the abduction of 32 teenage girls by popular defense forces. This abduction occurred in Mukjar, a town currently inundated with thousands of internally displaced persons in Wadi Saleh province. The Darfur region of southern Sudan is divided between Arab and indigenous African populations. Increasingly, the Janjaweed militia is looting and burning local villages in an attempt to displace the indigenous African people. UNHCR estimates that about 110,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to neighboring Chad while more than 800,000 IDPs are estimated to be in Darfur itself. These numbers have been growing rapidly in recent months. Despite government attempts to conceal the brutal nature of the recurrent violence, sources in Darfur continue to come forward with reports of abuse. Website: www.genocideprevention.org

Center for the Prevention of Genocide 18 Feb 2004 www.genocideprevention.org TRIBAL LEADERS ARRESTED AFTER USAID MEETING DARFUR, SUDAN – Friday, February 13 – The Center for the Prevention of Genocide has confirmed the arrest of tribal leaders in Darfur by the Sudanese government. In a clear case of minority and political oppression, the leaders were arrested in the town of Nyala following their meeting with representatives from USAID. A Sudanese government official confirmed that the detainees are being held indefinitely. The arrests occurred after Sudanese Fur tribe representatives met with US officials to provide first hand accounts of the genocidal violence and humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Among the detainees is Mr. Salah Eldin Mohamed Fadul, the Acting Sultan of the Fur tribe. The Sudanese military has denied all outside access to the Darfur region. This forced isolation has effectively blocked humanitarian efforts of international organizations, relief agencies, media, and diplomatic envoys for over a year. The ensuing media blackout has allowed numerous attacks on local villages by Government aligned Janjaweed Arab militias to go unreported. In spite of the Sudanese president’s claim that the region is under “government control” 81 civilians were massacred just seven days ago in the village of Shatatya.

IRIN 18 Feb 2004 Pro-government militias massacre 81 in Western Darfur, says rights group This elderly woman suffered burns in an earlier attack on Gosmino, Western Darfur NAIROBI, 18 Feb 2004 (IRIN) - A US-based human rights group has claimed that 81 civilians in the war-affected Western Darfur region Sudan were last week massacred by Arab militia groups aligned with the Sudanese government. The Center for the Prevention of Genocide (CPG) said it had received confirmation that the massacres were perpetrated by the Janjawid militia, during an attack on the town of Shatatya and its surrounding villages on 10 February. Sources also reported the abduction of 32 teenaged girls by government forces, in Mugjar, a town currently inundated by thousands of internally displaced persons in the Wadi Salih area (near the border with Chad), CPG said in a statement. "Despite government attempts to conceal the brutal nature of the recurrent violence, sources in Darfur continue to come forward with reports of abuse," it said. However, the Sudanese ambassador to Uganda has denied any government involvement in the massacres. The ambassador, Siraj al-Din Hamid, told IRIN from the Ugandan capital, Kampala, that sanctioning militia attacks on civilians contradicted his government's overall objective of bringing stability to the region. "The government cannot initiate attacks against people," Siraj al-Din said. "These things are just ignited. It could be about cattle or land, but it has nothing to do with the government or the rebel groups," he added. Violence in Darfur, a region shared by Arab and indigenous African populations, has in recent weeks resulted in the internal displacement of up to 800,000, while about 130,000 people have fled to neighbouring Chad, according to humanitarian agencies. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has begun airlifting food aid to thousand of Sudanese refugees in Chad. It said it planned to send more than 256 t of aid supplies to 110,000 Sudanese refugees currently scattered along the Chadian side of a 600-km strip of the remote border. The airlift, it said, coincided with an ongoing emergency relocation of tens of thousands of refugees on the insecure border to safer camps further inland in Chad before the start of the rainy season in May. Nearly 4,000 refugees had been transported so far to two new camps, UNHCR said in a statement. "Obviously, we’ve still got a long way to go in this race against time and the elements," Ron Redmond, a spokesman for UNHCR, said. The UN World Food Programme (WFP), meanwhile, is airlifting food aid into Darfur to help "alleviate the suffering" of thousands of people displaced by the conflict there. About 500 t of sorghum was airlifted to Al-Fashir, the regional capital of Northern Darfur, as an interim measure to ensure that food reaches people who have been cut off since November. However, WFP expressed concern over insecurity, which, it said, was continuing to prevent it from transporting food overland from its main warehouses to key supply points in Al-Fashir and Nyala, the regional capital of Southern Darfur. "We are not planning a massive airlift to the region, since we hope that road transportation will be re-established very soon," Bradley Guerrant, the WFP’s deputy country director for Sudan, said in a statement. Getachew Diriba, the WFP's senior programme officer for Sudan, who accompanied an EU delegation to Junaynah in Western Darfur, said the situation there was "very, very alarming". "All they have to protect them is the sky of Junaynah. No matter how seriously wounded they are, there is hardly anything to alleviate their suffering," Getachew asserted.

Mathaba.net 21 Feb 2004 Hapless Arabs Seek Foothold in South Sudan, After Supporting Genocide Posted: 02/21 From: Mathaba The Arab League on Friday held its first investment conference on southern Sudan, part of its efforts to make unity more attractive to southern rebels while peace talks are under way. The conference took place in Egypt, safely in an Arab capital far from the war-torn south Sudan region. Earlier, an Arab League official, Samir Hosni, speaking on the sidelines of the conference, said a peace accord being negotiated by the Khartoum Arab-Islamist dictatorship and southern non-Arab south Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) rebels was expected to be signed before March 11. About 200 Arab businessmen participated in the investment and development conference, aimed at luring investment into the region and preventing the partition of Africa's largest country. A Sudanese dictatorship delegation attended the meeting, but there was no representation by the non-Arab south Sudan SPLA. The Arab League "wanted to invite the SPLA to this conference but the Sudanese government vigorously opposed it and stressed it was the legal representative of Sudan at the league," Hosni, the league's point man on Sudan, told reporters. Hosni added that despite the SPLA absence, the Arab League hoped the conference would result in development projects for the marginalized region, "which will render the southerners more enthusiastic about the idea of a unified Sudan". "The hapless Arabs are clearly deluding themselves yet again and have smoked too much hashish", one Sudan analyst said. "To think they can hold a conference in an Arab capital, outside Sudan, and talk of coming in to profit in South Sudan after decades of genocide, supported by Arab regimes, and by chemical weapons supplied to the [Sudanese Arab] dictatorship by Iraq, they not only think Africans are stupid but also sub-human. How could people forget that in the south Sudan alone 2 million people lost there lives, every family has been seperated and traumatised by Arabs?" the analyst said. "We want unity to be an attractive option, but even if ... the southern rebels opt for separation, the Arabs will pursue their interests in the south of Sudan," Hosni said. In a keynote speech, Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa said Arab investment funds "have pledged 1.8 billion dollars for infrastructure projects in the north and the south of Sudan, of which 180 million have already been awarded to the Sudanese government [dictatorship] to launch road construction and purification projects," he said. "The 'Arab interests' are manifestly clear, 2 million dead speak volumes. 'Purification projects' could mean Islamization, or Arabization, or even a return to the genocidal release of germs upon the African population" one south Sudan commentator noted.

BBC 23 Feb 2004 Sudan's Darfur still inaccessible Thousands of displaced people are in need of relief supplies Continued fighting in Sudan's Darfur region, is denying aid agencies access to victims of the conflict, a member of the European parliament has said. Richard Howitt, said only 15% of the victims of the war have access to humanitarian aid in the region. Mr Howitt a British member of the European Union delegation that toured the area in western Sudan told the BBC that the area is still unsafe. More than 600,000 have fled clashes, with some 100,000 crossing into Chad. 'Systematic denial' "There is direct evidence that military confrontation is continuing. The Islamist militia, the Janjaweed, supported by the government are running riot in most of the countryside," Mr Howitt said. "Q&A: Darfur conflict" The government has however denied supporting the Islamist militia who have been fighting against Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) rebels in the area. Mr Howitt said at least 40% of the area is out of bounds for aid agencies, despite the rising number of people being driven out by the fighting. "There has been a systematic pattern of denial of travel to aid agencies and journalists by military intelligence to Darfur in western Sudan." he said. Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir had earlier announced that they had opened up corridors for aid agencies to access victims of the conflict in Darfur. The rebellion began a year ago, when non-Arabs took up arms complaining of neglect by Khartoum. The United Nations has begun supplying emergency aid to some of those affected by the Darfur fighting but many areas are inaccessible by road. The Sudanese government has said it is in full control of the Darfur region, but rebels insist they control much of the countryside and say they have launched a new front.

Reuters 25 Feb 2004 West Sudan rebels say moving towards Khartoum - KHARTOUM, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Rebels from western Sudan said on Wednesday they had opened a new front to show the government the remote area was not alone in its demands for equal treatment and a share in the oil exporter's resources. Two rebel groups launched a revolt in the western Darfur region a year ago, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the arid area and arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages. The United Nations warns of a humanitarian crisis with about a million Sudanese fleeing the fighting. "This means we are fighting a guerrilla war against the government and we can strike them in many places," said rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) leader Abdel Wahed Mohamed Ahmed al-Nur, adding the SLA also had troops in northern Sudan. "Two days ago we attacked government forces in their camp about 100 kms (60 miles) north of El-Obeid," he said, referring to the capital of Northern Kordofan state, which borders Darfur. El-Obeid is less than 400 kms (250 miles) southeast of the capital, Khartoum. "If there's no peace in Darfur there'll not be peace in any part of Sudan," Nur told Reuters from the Darfur region. He added the SLA had signed an agreement to launch joint operations with an eastern rebel group called the Beja Congress. Sudan's armed forces spokesman was unavailable for comment. Army sources have previously said they would not comment on the Darfur conflict to dampen media coverage of the troubles. Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the other rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), said his movement had launched a failed offensive to take Southern Kordofan state 45 days ago. "The government defeated us and arrested 161 of our men," he told Reuters from his Paris base. "We kept this secret to protect the men in prison, but they killed four of them until now so we are announcing it."

BBC 2 Feb 2004 Rwanda tribunal in turmoil By Noel Mwakugu BBC News Online After eight years in slow motion, proceedings at the international court charged with prosecuting the main perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda have picked up pace recently. Hassan Jallow's appointment has quickened proceedings but at what cost? Since the appointment of a new chief prosecutor and the posting of a number of extra judges to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) last year there have been several new convictions. A total of 18 people have now been convicted for their part in the 100 days of killing in which some 800,000 people were slaughtered, including the recent convictions of three key "hate media" executives. This progress has pleased critics concerned that the process could drag on indefinitely. And at a cost of $177m last year, there is a growing realisation that it cannot go on for ever. But this quickening pace has also angered defence lawyers so much that a two-day strike disrupted hearings last week. On average two sittings are now being held daily at the tribunal, which is based in Arusha, in northern Tanzania. 'Defence limited' Defence lawyers say this quicker pace is bad for the pursuit of justice. Under these circumstances we feel that the tribunal cannot portray a fair image required by international law Prof Peter Erlinder Professor Peter Erlinder, a spokesman for the defence, says the tribunal set up actually limits the defence team in preparing for the cases. " We have been saying this for the past seven years but the issues are not being addressed by the registry, " he told BBC News Online. He says the defence is not convinced that the convictions of the those already sentenced by the tribunal were even fair since they were unable to present their cases competently. Unfair Prof Erlinder notes that the defence lawyers are denied an opportunity to investigate their cases adequately unlike the prosecutors. For instance, resources to undertake their research and investigations on the cases before the tribunal have been cut back, he claims. "Under these circumstances we feel that the tribunal cannot portray a fair image required by international law" he said. He said their access to clients at the United Nations Detention Facility (UNDF) in Arusha is restricted and therefore their operations are curtailed. Prof Erlinder says these unresolved issues led 40 detainees to boycott the proceedings and effectively instruct them to stop appearing before the tribunal. The strike is now over, but their grievances have still to be resolved. Crucial case Their arguments are rejected by the ICTR spokesman Roland Amoussouga. He says adequate resources have been provided for the defence teams under the tribunal's legal aid system. Some 800,000 people were killed during the 1994 genocide Mr Amoussouga notes that out of the 81 people indicted, 65 are in custody and have been assigned lawyers to defend them by the tribunal. " We provide for the necessary requirements but our budget is not open ended, excessive claims cannot be met," said Mr Amoussouga. He said the tribunal is concerned that the stoppages by the defence counsel comes when testimony is being given at a crucial case for the tribunal. The lawyers' strike has affected the proceedings of a case involving Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, a former top defence official. " We are open to negotiations over issues raised, but the right procedures should be followed to avoid derailing what has been achieved so far," said Mr Amoussouga. Sensitive issue The BBC's Great Lakes Service reporter Ernest Sagaga says that one group that has been impressed with recent developments is the Rwandan Government Until Carla Del Ponte was replaced last year as the chief prosecutor at the tribunal there was a great deal of tension with the Rwandan administration which accused her of inefficiency. In her defence, she claimed the government was uncomfortable with her plans to investigate the involvement of former Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) soldiers in the genocide. Our reporter says the issue is sensitive - since most of the soldiers are in government or are politically connected to it. If the new chief prosecutor Hassan Jallow opts to revisit the investigations on RPF soldiers then there is bound to be trouble from the government again. Their stance is that the soldiers were preventing the genocide, he says. However this raises questions as to how the tribunal expects to pursue justice impartially when only one side will be investigated. This is a difficult one for the tribunal to sweep under the carpet indefinitely. But any move to broaden out the scope of the tribunal's investigations at the moment would only risk further battles and a reduction in its momentum that it can ill afford.

Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne) 10 Feb 2004 Synthesis: General Romeo Dallaire's Testimony Arusha The trial of four senior officers of the former Rwandan army shifted into high gear when General Romeo Dallaire, former commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR), testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). He was in the witness box from January 19 to 27. Dallaire's former aid-de-camp, Major Peter Beardsley, then testified next in support of the former Canadian general's testimony. Maj. Beardsley finished testifying last week. Dallaire, 58, went to Rwanda for the very first time in August 1993 as a part of an evaluation mission. He arrived at a time when the country was engulfed in political turmoil as well as a civil war that pitted the Hutu-dominated government and the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). Two months later, the United Nations Security Council decided to send a peacekeeping force under the command of Gen. Dallaire. In the meantime, the protagonists had signed peace accords in the Tanzanian town of Arusha. Setback When the massacres started after the killing of president Juvenal Habyarimana on the night of April 6, 1994, Dallaire came to the conclusion that what the Arusha Peace Accords stood for "was lost". According to him, opposition to the accords were rife both within the Habyarimana's "inner circle", and within the RPF. The witness pointed out the former director of cabinet in the Rwandan ministry of defence, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, as spearheading the hardliners within the president's entourage. Bagosora is one of the accused in this trial. The prosecution alleges that Bagosora is the "mastermind" of the genocide that claimed the lives of an estimated one million people within a hundred days. Dallaire did not mince his words. "It was Bagosora who held the real power. He even overshadowed higher-ranked officers", said the general. Dallaire continued that UNAMIR's position was that Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, was the legitimate person to fill the constitutional vacuum left by the death of the president. During the very first meeting of the crisis committee called on the night of April 6, Bagosora rejected the idea of handing over power to the Prime minister arguing that "the population has no confidence in her". According to the Canadian general, such an attitude reflected a total rejection of the Arusha accords, adding that it was more or less a Coup d' Etat. Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was assassinated on the morning of April 7, 1994. All through the turmoil, Bagosora is said to have remained calm and undisturbed. "It was as though everything was going according to plan", or alternatively, "as though he was living on another planet". "The plan aimed at exterminating the opposition" Gen. Dallaire let it out that the "plan" was to eliminate all political opposition recognised by the Arusha accords. He however pointed out that with the extent of the killings, it was difficult to imagine that someone could have been able to plan the death of 800,000 people. It is "impossible that a plan to carry out such a holocaust could have existed". He blames the wide-scale killings to "overspills" that came to add up to what had been planned "on the political side". Dallaire also revealed that there were some moderate elements within both the army and political circles who did not want war. He continued that "maybe between 40 and 70 percent" of the army were tired of war and wanted a ceasefire, while the rest were still in doubt as to the intentions of the RPF following its military and political gains. General Dallaire accuses the UN Information available to UNAMIR from an informer, former militia member Jean-Pierre Turatsinze, revealed that long before the 1994 genocide, the army had trained and distributed weapons to civilians. The informer claimed that the militia had the "capacity to kill one thousand Tutsis in twenty minutes". Going by the information, Gen. Dallaire sent a telegram to his superiors in New York in January 1994 seeking authorisation to mount an operation to seek and recover hidden arms. The witness revealed that the UN turned down his request arguing that an operation of that kind "did not lie within UNAMIR's mandate". In his book, "Shake hands with the devil", in which Major Beardsley also contributed, the former UN forces commander is nevertheless convinced that the operation would have helped fend off or limit the massacres. In his view, the arms proliferation was made worse by the civil wars in both Uganda and Burundi. Both camps were equally guilty Even though Dallaire's principal target is Colonel Theoneste Bagosora and the "inner circle", he did not spare the RPF. "None of the two parties was inclined towards the application of the peace accords", pointed out the General. He added that UNAMIR expected both sides to respect the status quo and not rearm as they waited for installation of the transitional institutions. Instead, as Dallaire explained, the Rwandan government army was rearming and redeploying battalions all over the country. On the other hand the RPF commander Paul Kagame had predicted on April 2, 1994 that "we are on the brink of a catastrophe, and no one would be able to control it once it was triggered off". "It seems they (the government and the RPF) did not understand the full meaning of the accords", lamented Dallaire. Bagosora's defence teams strongly contested the version of events put forth by the Canadian General. According to the lead counsel, Raphael Constant (Franco-Martinique), Dallaire had made up a wrong image of his client. Bagosora is jointly charged with the former head of military operations of the army, Brigadier Gratien Kabiligi, the former army commander of Gisenyi region, Lieutenant Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, and the former commander of the Para-commando battalion in Kanombe (Kigali), Major Aloys Ntabakuze. The trial is taking place in Trial Chamber One of the ICTR composed of Judge Erik MÃ¸se from Norway (presiding), Judge Serguei Aleckseievich Egorov from Russia, and Judge Jai Ram Reddy of Fiji.

AFP 18 feb 2004 UN Rwanda court mulls transfer of cases to Kigali AFP[ WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2004 10:09:02 PM ] ARUSHA: The UN court for Rwanda, set up to try the instigators of the country's 1994 genocide, is considering transferring some of its cases to the authorities in Kigali, the Hirondelle agency reported Wednesday. A spokesman for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) said that its chief clerk, Adama Dieng, had held a meeting on the issue with Rwandan officials on Monday in Kigali. The UN resolution that created the tribunal allows the court to hand cases involving mid-ranking accused to national authorities so it can keep to its timetable of closing all investigations by the end of this year and completing trials by 2008. "The regulations of the court allow us to do this," said the spokesman, Roland Amoussouga during a news conference at the court's seat in the Tanzanian town of Arusha. He said Dieng's talks in Kigali had also looked into the possibility of individuals convicted by the Arusha court of serving out their sentences in jails in Rwanda. So far, no-one found guilty by the court has been sent to a Rwandan prison, although the tribunal's statutes say terms can be served either in Rwanda or in another country designated by the court. Since its creation in November 1994, the court has handed out 17 guilty verdicts and one acquittal. Up to a million people, mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed during 100 days of planned slaughter by Hutu extremists from April to July of 1994.

Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne) 23 Feb 2004 Interhamwe Could Kill Soldiers From The Government, Says Witness Arusha A prosecution witness in the "Military I" involving the former director of cabinet in the Rwandan ministry of defence, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora on Monday told the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) during cross-examination that the Interahamwe could kill soldiers from the government. Bagosora is jointly charged with the former commander of the Kanombe Para-military battalion based in Kigali, Major Aloys Ntabakuze the former head of operations in the former Rwandan army, Brigadier General Gratien Kabiligi, and the former military commander of Gisenyi region, Lieutenant Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva. They are mostly charged with Conspiracy to Commit Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. All have pleaded not guilty. The witness code-named XAQ to conceal his identity was being cross-examined by the lead defense counsel for Ntabakuze, Andre Tremblay (Canada) when he said that the Interahamwe did not need any permission to get into the Kanombe military camp. "The Interahamwe had permission, they had the right to kill soldiers from government if they deserted the front line," he said, The accusation maintains the Interahamwe are the main perpetrators of the genocide, alongside other units of the military and government. XAQ, the 47th prosecution witness, added that the Interahamwe (the MRND youth wing) were given training and weapons by senior military officials. During cross-examination the witness clarified issues he had raised during examination in chief. In particular, he was asked by the lead counsel for Colonel Bagosora, Raphael Constant (Franco-Martinique) about the content of the meetings that he said were organized by Colonel Bagosora. "It was a long time ago - fourteen years - and I cannot remember what he said. All I remember is that the meetings were held at a place called Jolly Bar in shrubs overlooking Kanombe," he answered. Bagosora is considered by the prosecutor to be the "mastermind" of the genocide. XAQ's cross-examination continues on Tuesday. The Military I trial is before trial Chamber One of the ICTR, presided over by Judge Erik MÃ¸se of Norway. Who is assisted by Judge Serguei Aleckseievich Egorov of Russia as well as Judge Jai Ram Reddy of Fiji.

Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne) 23 Feb 2004 Ntabakuze Led Soldiers to Eliminate Former Prime Minister Arusha A prosecution witness in the "Military I" trial on Monday told the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) that the former commander of the Kanombe Paramilitary battalion, Major Aloys Ntabakuze, led soldiers from the death squad to eliminate former prime minister Dismas Nsengiremye. Ntabakuze is jointly charged with the former director of cabinet in the Rwandan ministry of defence, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, the former head of operations in the former Rwandan army, Brigadier General Gratien Kabiligi,and the former military commander of Gisenyi region, Lieutenant Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva. They are mostly charged with conspiracy to commit genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. All have pleaded not guilty. The witness, code-named "XAQ" to conceal his identity, told the court during examination in chief that a corporal named Munyankindi assigned to the unit escorting Major Ntabakuze in the para commando battalion in 1992 to 1993 told him, "Major Ntabakuze led soldiers going to eliminate the then prime minister, Dismas Nsengiremye but the operation failed". Part of the indictment states that the strategy adopted in the early 1990s, which culminated in the widespread massacres of April 1994, comprised several components, which were carefully worked out by the various prominent figures who shared the extremist Hutu ideology, including the members of the Akazu. XAQ who is the 47th prosecution witness added that Munyankindi told him that he was a member of the death squad. "He told me he was assigned to a mission to eliminate people," XAQ, who was himself a member of the paracommando battalion said. "I saw Aloys Ntabakuze every day along with Captain Hakizimana and Bizimungu in the Mugunga and Tingitingi camp(In Zaire, now DRC)," he explained. According to the witness, the death squad was in operation from the beginning of the multi party period up to the time of the death of president Habyarimana in 1994. Similar information about the existence of a death squad was revealed by General Romeo Dallaire, the former UNAMIR commander, when he testified in the same trial at the ICTR, in January this year. Dallaire referred to the death squad as a third force composed of extremists. The witness testified that soon after the death of president Habyarimana, Ntabakuze addressed para commando soldiers on what they had to do saying, "The Inyenzis have just killed him, we have to avenge his death." Inyenzi is the deragatory word meaning coackroaches which was used to refer to Tutsis at the time. "Soon after that, the arms depot was opened and the soldiers took ammunition and started killing people in Kajagari area next to Kanombe camp in Kigali," the witness continued to narrate. XAQ also provided information regarding the Interahamwe. "After the downing of the plane , Interahamwe came to Kanombe camp onboard green ONATROCOM buses to obtain grenades and ammunition," the witness explained, adding that the Interahamwe were also provided with fuel and guns from the camp. The indictment states the Interahamwe (MRND youth wing), were organized into militia groups, which were financed, trained and led by prominent civilians and military figures from the President's entourage. They were issued weapons, with the complicity of certain military and civilian authorities. The militia groups were transported to training sites, including certain military camps, in public administration vehicles or vehicles belonging to companies controlled by the President's circle. XAQ will be cross-examined in the afternoon. The Military I trial is before trial Chamber One of the ICTR, presided over by Judge Erik MÃ¸se of Norway. Who is assisted by Judge Serguei Aleckseievich Egorov of Russia as well as Judge Jai Ram Reddy of Fiji.

BBC 25 Feb 2004 Ex-minister acquitted of genocide Memories of the genocide remain fresh Former Rwandan transport minister Andre Ntagirura has been found not guilty of genocide by an international court. The court also freed former local administrator Emmanuel Bagambiki but a third man, Lieutenant Samuel Imanishimwe, was found guilty. The judge ruled that the charges against the two had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt but the prosecution has appealed. Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed during the 1994 genocide. 'Small fish' This is just the second time the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has acquitted suspects. Rwanda's deputy attorney general Martin Ngoga has criticised the ruling. "I am personally not happy with the judgment because I believe it sets the precedent for convicting the small fish and exonerating those who made the political decisions," said Mr Martin, a former representative of the Rwanda government at the tribunal. ARUSHA TRIBUNAL 21 suspects on trial 22 suspects awaiting trial 18 convictions 3 acquittal Lieutenant Imanishimwe - the then commander of the Karambo military camp was found guilty of authorizing the arrest, detention, mistreatment, and execution of civilians. He is the 18th person to be convicted by the tribunal since it was established in November 1994. Since the appointment of Hassan Jallow as the new prosecutor at the tribunal, based in the Tanzanian town of Arusha, it has quickened the pace at which it processes cases.

Reuters 23 Feb 2004 Uganda Rebels Use Spirit Beliefs to Spread Terror By William Maclean, 1/23/2004 LIRA, Uganda (Reuters) - His voice whispering with awe, Patrick Akat tells of the day God sent a signal of sympathy and support for Uganda's terrifying northern rebellion. ADVERTISEMENT In a guerrilla hide-out in the wilderness of southern Sudan, the teen-ager saw a white dove descend and flutter above the head of rebel leader Joseph Kony as he addressed his child fighters. "As it flew, people started moving away (in wonder)," the former LRA child fighter told Reuters, explaining that the bird's behavior was a sign of divine favor. "Another day, as we trained, a star came out of the sky and flew over him. It was also a sign." Brainwashing and belief in spirits are key to Kony's uncanny power, according to aid workers counseling children who have escaped from his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group. In a continent torn by brutal armies, the Sudan-based LRA is among the most vicious, dismembering and burning alive the Ugandan civilians, including children and babies, it preys upon. Crucially, it is also expert in the psychology of fear, and the skill has proved key to its survival, the aid workers say. The LRA has snatched tens of thousands of children like Akat from their homes in its 17-year-old war against the government and forced them to work as frontline soldiers and sex slaves. Many escape, but the LRA constantly abducts new "troops" from mud and thatch villages dotted among swamps and tall grass. A DEADLY LESSON Within hours of kidnapping a new group LRA commanders will select one child for death -- usually an infant who tries to escape, is sick or fails to walk fast enough. On pain of being killed the rest of the group must beat him or her to death. The abductees, told a similar fate awaits them if they try to escape, are rapidly traumatized into obedience. "The kidnappers began beating me, telling me that they are now registering me to become a real soldier," another former LRA soldier, Kenneth Okorach, 16, told Reuters. "Then I was forced to kill some people ... In our group they told one person to lie down. They got a strong person to beat him. Then the rest of us children had to join in. Immediately I did that I prayed to God to forgive me." Listed by the State Department as a terrorist group, the LRA has displaced more than a million people and shut down the economy of perhaps a fifth of Uganda by a systematic campaign of violence. The group is fighting to topple the government and says it wants to win a better life for the Acholi. But it has never detailed its demands and observers note it avoids fighting the government's army, preferring to attack civilians. Experts on the cult-like movement say Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet and former altar boy, is a deranged personality who believes he must "cleanse" his Acholi tribe of sinners by killing anyone in it who supports the government. Estimated to be in his 40s, he has not been seen by outsiders for years. 'A CULT, PURE AND SIMPLE' "He sees himself as the Acholis' savior. The idea comes from his reading of the Bible and God's treatment of the people of Israel," said Els de Temmerman, an aid worker who has interviewed hundreds of former LRA children at a rehabilitation center she runs for them in this northern town. "He says 'We have to cleanse our people so only the good, faithful ones remain. So we are not killing our people, we are cleansing them'," said de Temmerman, a Belgian. "It is a cult, pure and simple." In Akat's view, and those of many other children who like him have fled LRA ranks, Kony receives continuous messages from God and can read the minds of every one of the 3,000-plus child soldiers who serve at any one time in his rebellion. They believe that he continues to read their minds even after they have escaped and will use his skill to track them down and kill them. "If you ask them why they did not escape earlier they reply because he reads our minds. We could not even think of escape because we could be caught immediately," de Temmerman said. Many of those who escape are killed by LRA hunting parties sent out to punish people they see as traitors. Their success is due to the LRA's habit of keeping a strict record of the home villages and families of those they have abducted. "There is this very strong belief in the spirits in the Acholi community," said de Temmerman. "A lot of children, long after they have come back, tell me that they believe that Kony has the Holy Spirit and has supernatural powers. Aid workers say Kony's brainwashing techniques are so good that many former fighters, especially those who spent years in the bush, see him as a good person, and much misunderstood. "He is nice to children," said Akat. "His only problem is the hard orders he gives to his commanders to kill. It's them who kill and torture children. They do it behind his back." Those with the LRA shorter periods are less generous. "They really like killing people," said Okorach. "I think those people (in the LRA) are wasting their time."

IRIN 30 Jan 2004 Uganda: Peace groups and government officials worried about ICC probe into LRA KAMPALA, 30 January (IRIN) - Peace groups and officials from the government's Amnesty Commission have warned that the impending probe by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into war crimes committed by Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels could make a peaceful settlement of the 18-year conflict impossible. "Certainly, this is going to make it very difficult for the LRA to stop doing what they are doing. They have already been branded 'terrorists', which isn't going [to help] to easily persuade them to come," the Amnesty Commission spokesman, Moses Saku, told IRIN. On Thursday, the ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, announced that there was sufficient evidence to initiate a probe into grave human rights abuses committed the LRA. He was responding to a petition lodged with the ICC by President Yoweri Museveni. Museveni met Ocampo in London on Thursday. Shortly afterwards, the ICC issued a statement requesting maximum cooperation from the international community in the hunt for the LRA's senior commanders. But the ICC acknowledged that many LRA members were themselves victims, having been abducted and brutalised by the LRA leadership, and that "the reintegration of these individuals into Ugandan society is key to the future of northern Uganda". Saku said in this context the "position of the Uganda Amnesty Commission is that all LRA should be granted across-the-board amnesty, including the commanders". However, he went on to concede that "Uganda is a signatory to the ICC, so we acknowledge that they may have obligations not to grant immunity to some of its [the LRA's] members". Members of the Acholi Religious Leaders' Peace Initiative (ARLPI) condemned the probe. "This kind of approach is going to destroy all efforts for peace. People want this war to stop. If we follow the ICC in branding the LRA criminals, it won't stop," the ARLPI vice-president, the Rev McLeod Ochola, told IRIN. Ochola said an ICC probe was something that must come after the war ended. "We're not saying impunity should be encouraged," he said. "We're saying this is poor timing. Let us not forget that UPDF [Uganda People's Defence Forces] have also committed atrocities which will at some stage need to be investigated."

Amnesty International 2 Feb 2004 Press Release Uganda First investigative steps must end impunity Uganda: First steps to investigate crimes must be part of comprehensive plan to end impunity Amnesty International welcomes the announcement last night by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (Court) that he would take steps towards investigating and prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the context of the conflict in northern Uganda. The conflict involves the Government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) armed group. Accompanied by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the Prosecutor , Luis Moreno Ocampo disclosed that the Court had received a referral, made by the Government of Uganda, concerning the LRA. "Any Court investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity in northern Uganda must be part of a comprehensive plan to end impunity for all such crimes, regardless of which side committed them and of the level of the perpetrator", Amnesty International said. The text of the referral is still not yet public, but it appears that Uganda sought to limit the referral to crimes committed by one party to the conflict. Once the Prosecutor receives a referral by a state party of a situation, the Prosecutor, after analyzing the information, can open a formal investigation without judicial approval and has the right to investigate all crimes committed in that situation, regardless who committed them. "A referral by a party to the Rome Statute may not limit the scope of any investigation by the Prosecutor of a situation ", Amnesty International said. "Moreover, the Prosecutor under Article 15 (1) and (3) of the Rome Statute can open an investigation on his own initiative (proprio motu) of crimes outside the scope of that situation, subject to approval by the Pre-Trial Chamber. The organization emphasized that Article 42 (1) of the Rome Statute requires that "the Prosecutor shall act independently" and that no member of his office shall "seek or act on instructions from any external source". Amnesty International urges Uganda to cooperate fully with the Court in connection with any investigation or prosecution. This will require promptly enacting effective implementing legislation for the Rome Statute and ratifying the Agreement on Privileges and Immunities of the International Criminal Court and enacting effective implementation legislation. The organization also calls on Uganda not to ratify or implement the impunity agreement with the United States of America that it has signed. Furthermore, Uganda should review of the Amnesty Act of 1999 which covers crimes committed in the course of the conflict. "Under no circumstances should amnesty laws include crimes under international law," the organization stressed. The ICC Prosecutor has consistently stated that one of his major challenges will be to close the impunity gap between the crimes he will be able to investigate and prosecute and the hundreds of thousands of others that remain the primary responsibility of states. Therefore, Amnesty International urges the Prosecutor to follow the example of the United Nations Secretary-General, who has stated that "amnesty cannot be granted in respect of international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity or other serious violations of international humanitarian law". Article 12 (2) (b) of the Rome Statute gives the Court jurisdiction over crimes committed by the nationals of states parties, such as Uganda, anywhere in the world, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Ugandans and nationals of other countries have been implicated in serious human rights abuses. The Prosecutor is also currently undertaking a preliminary examination of crimes under the Court's jurisdiction committed in the Ituri district of the DRC. Since 1 July 2002, when the Court was established, thousands of civilians have been victims of crimes against humanity or war crimes in Ituri. "The need for investigation of those crimes and prosecution of the perpetrators remains as urgent as ever," Amnesty International said. Last week, the Prosecutor received a letter DRC President Joseph Kabila, which expressed the DRC government's commitment to collaborate with the Court. "The DRC government should take this commitment further by enacting effective implementing legislation for the Rome Statute, by ratifying and implementing the Agreement on Privileges and Immunities of the Criminal Court or by making its own referral to the Court." Background For 18 years, the conflict in northern Uganda has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians and the situation reportedly deteriorated further during 2003. The conflict resulted in the massive displacement of the population, arbitrary killings, maimings, abductions and forced recruitment. In particular the LRA has been accused of abducting children, at times moving them across the border into Sudan and amongst them scores of girls, for use as sex slaves and combatants. The treatment of children returning, voluntarily or as a consequence of military action, from their abductors has also been the subject of much controversy with allegations having been levelled against the Ugandan security forces of retraining some of them for military purposes in the fight against the LRA. Amnesties for crimes under international law, including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, are prohibited under international law, as Amnesty International has documented in numerous studies, including most recently its paper, Sierra Leone: Special Court for Sierra Leone: Denial of right to appeal and prohibition of amnesties for crimes under international law, (AI Index: AFR 51/10/2003, September 2003). Amnesty International opposes amnesties, pardons and similar measures of impunity for crimes under international law in all circumstances where they would prevent a judicial determination of guilt or innocence, the discovery of the truth or full reparations.

AFP 5 Feb 2004 Some 50 killed as rebels attack camp for displaced in northern Uganda KAMPALA, Feb 5 (AFP) - About 50 people were killed when rebels attacked a displaced people's camp in northern Uganda, church sources and a journalist at the scene said on Thursday. About 300 rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) on Wednesday attacked Abia camp, near the northern town of Lira town on Wednesday evening, overpowering a detachment of government soldiers, the sources said. A Roman Catholic priest who visited the camp Thursday, Sebat Ayala, said 44 people were killed during the attack and that eight among 70 injured people taken to hospital had also died. "I have been in the area and I have seen some of the dead, including attending the burial of 17 of them, but I had to leave and help in the evacuation of the wounded so I did not wait to count all the dead," Ayala said. A local radio reporter, Joe Owata, who was also at the camp, told AFP by phone that he had seen some 47 bodies and that more people were believed to have died when 200 huts in the camp were set ablaze. The army confirmed the attack took place but gave a lower death toll. "A sizable number of rebels attacked Abia and after a fierce fight with the army, they started killing civilians and over 20 were killed. Twice that number were wounded," army spokesman Lieutenant Chris Magezi told AFP from Lira, 360 kilometres north of the Kampala. He said three soldiers had been wounded, two of them seriously. The rebels came armed with rifles, machetes and some form of shells or bombs whose fragments caused many of the casualties, according to the spokesman. "Some people were abducted, but our forces are still pursuing the attackers and we hope we shall get hold of them and give the punishment for what they have done to these people," Magezi said. The rebels were reportedly dressed in the same uniforms used by government troops and the army contingent in the camp initially mistook them for their colleagues, until the attackers started firing at people. "All those who tried to run away were shot by the rebels and some of the abducted people were hacked to death by the retreating rebels," Magezi said. A 17-year-old rebel war in northern Uganda has displaced over 1.2 million people, who currently live in congested and squalid conditions in camps set up by the army. The army claims that by housing the displaced in these camps, it is able to guard them against rebel abductions conducted by the LRA to fill its fighting ranks. The LRA has been fighting against President Yoweri Museveni's government since 1988 to replace it with one based on the Bible's Ten Commandments. The group is infamous for its habit of abducting children and forcing them into combat and sexual slavery, among many other human rights abuses. The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced in The Hague last week that its first inquiry would focus on the LRA.

IRIN 5 Feb 2004 Rebels kill 52 in dawn attack on Lira IDPs camp Ugandan army is finding it hard to protect civilians from LRA attacks. KAMPALA, 5 Feb 2004 (IRIN) - In the most devastating assault on northern Uganda’s civilian population for several months, the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) attacked a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Lira District on Thursday morning, killing 52 people and seriously wounding over 70, residents said. Many of the injured were in critical condition. The attack, on Abia camp, 28 km northeast of Lira town, took place at 05:00 GMT. The residents said a 300-strong army of LRA fighters stormed Abia and overwhelmed the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) units guarding it, before opening fire at random on its inhabitants. "The camp is in a state of total confusion. People are terrified and there is no one here to help them – they are crying and burying their dead, helpless and alone," Father Sebhat Ayele, a Roman Catholic priest of Lira municipality, who was evacuating the wounded to Lira hospital, told IRIN. The UPDF spokesman in the region, 2nd Lt Chris Magezi, told IRIN from Lira town that the scale the attack was unusual. "They don’t usually attack in such a large group and they rarely use these big machine guns and mortar bombs," he said. "They must have amassed new supplies from somewhere." But Magezi said that to his knowledge, only about 20 civilians had been killed in the attack. "Some of them [LRA fighters] infiltrated the camp and started beating the civilians," he said, noting that the commander responsible for the attack was a senior LRA leader called Odyambo. "While the others fled to Sudan, we knew he had decided to hang around in Uganda, but he has been hard to track," said Magezi. Two UPDF soldiers had been killed by gunfire in the attack and scores of huts housing the IDPs were set ablaze when the rebels fired mortar bombs into the camp, residents said. It was not immediately clear how many people the rebels abducted for recruitment or to carry loot, but several camp residents were reported missing or unaccounted for by Thursday afternoon. Ayele said 12 of the 44 dead were being buried by their relatives and eight of the 20 injured on the first convoy to Lira hospital, had died before reaching the hospital gates. "Some of the people were killed by bullet wounds, some were burned alive in their homes and others were beaten and hacked to death with pangas. This is terrible," Ayele told IRIN. He added that the evacuations for emergency medical treatment were taking time, because the rebels were still operating the area, making it risky to move to and from the camp. The attack comes barely two weeks after the government claimed to have "nearly defeated" the LRA, saying it had killed many of the group’s most senior commanders. "This latest attack is just a desperate attempt at getting publicity, because they know they are being crushed by our forces on the ground," Magezi asserted. On Wednesday, the Refugee Law Project, a Kampala-based advocacy group, issued a statement claiming that the LRA leader, Joseph Kony, was fighting for survival because he feared being killed if he surrendered or tried to negotiate. But the group noted that Kony still possessed a formidable arsenal, including shoulder-fired rocket launchers, making him "better equipped than many African armies". The statement argued in this context that government plans to scrap the amnesty for the LRA’s stop commanders would obstruct efforts to bring peace to the north. The study was based on interviews with 900 people, including UPDF officers, IDPs, religious leaders and ex-rebels. The LRA says it is fighting to overthrow the government of President Yoweri Museveni and replace it with one based on the Biblical Ten Commandments. But the group’s attacks have mainly targeted civilians from the Acholi tribe. Museveni has sought international help to track down the LRA. Aid agencies estimate that 23,000 people have been killed both by LRA and UPDF in the 18-year-long civil war. Last year, the LRA abducted 8,500 children, whom it forcibly recruited as porters, soldiers or sex-slaves. LRA terror tactics in the north have sent 1.2 million people fleeing into makeshift IDP camps. The international medical aid organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres, said in a statement on Wednesday that among the 33,000 IDPs who had sought refuge in the northeastern Ugandan town of Amuria since June 2003, health needs were serious, with many children suffering from severe malnutrition. People were dying at twice the rate of that considered an emergency threshold, it said. Another 230,000 people had sought refuge in nearly 50 makeshift camps in Lira since November, but only 20 of the camps were accessible. "As fighting between the Ugandan army and the LRA continues, hundreds of thousands of civilians are exposed to brutal attacks. Witnesses have testified to particularly violent, large-scale abuses against civilians, including murder, mutilation, abduction, and rape," MSF said. "In this atmosphere of terror, civilians are forced to choose between staying in insecure villages and towns, thereby risking another attack that could cost them their lives, or fleeing to urban areas that cannot offer them even the minimum conditions necessary to survive."

Deutsche Presse Agentur 6 Feb 2004 War-displaced Ugandans abandon camp after rebel massacre Kampala (dpa) - A camp in northern Uganda where guerillas massacred over 50 people was nearly empty Friday as thousands fled to safer camps, sources from an Italian Catholic Church mission in the area said. According to the Comboni Fathers missionaries, Abia camp which had contained over 10,000 people was attacked Thursday morning by Lords Resistance Army (LRA) rebels who killed 46 people, including 2 soldiers, using machetes and grenades. Eight other people later died in hospital. "Thousands of people have abandoned the camp. There are only a few people and soldiers left. Thousands of people are fleeing the area and are still on the roads. We are sitting in a meeting with relief groups in the area to find how emergency items like blankets and saucepans can reach the people,'' a Comboni Missionary, Father Sebath Ayele, said via telephone Friday. Abia camp is about 280 kilometres north of the capital Kampala and is one of numerous camps sheltering the over one million people displaced by the nearly 17-year civil war waged by the LRA. An army spokesman in the area, Lieutenant Chris Magezi, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa by telephone Friday that "we have deployed heavily in the (Abia) camp. We are hunting down and pursuing the rebels who attacked the camp.''

AFP 9 Feb 2004 At least 10 killed in fresh rebel attack on north Uganda village KAMPALA, Feb 9 (AFP) - Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels attacked another village in northern Uganda at the weekend, abducting at least 10 farmers before clubbing them to death, military and local sources said Monday. "These rebels are becoming crazy. They attacked Ojuru village in Abako sub-county yesterday (Sunday), found people who had returned to the villages to tend to their gardens and abducted all of them, but later decided to club them to death," army spokesman Lieutenant Chris Magezi told AFP by telephone from Lira town in northern Uganda. Magezi said that about 10 people were clubbed to death, but local leaders put the death toll at 15, with about four injured and admitted to Lira Hospital. The latest attack came four days after another deadly attack on a camp housing thousands of displaced people, which left up to 50 people dead. The army said on Sunday that it had killed five members of a group that had attacked the camp on Wednesday. Church sources also confirmed the latest attack, saying that information on casualties was still scanty, but the death toll could be between 10 and 18. The rebel war in northern Uganda, nearly two decades old, has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced over 1.2 million people, many of whom live in congested and squalid camps set up by the army. The army claims that by housing refugees in camps, it is able to protect them against being abducted and forced into LRA ranks. The LRA has been fighting against President Yoweri Museveni's government since 1988. It has gained infamy for its practice of abducting children and forcing them to fight in its ranks or act as sex slaves to rebel commanders, among many other human rights abuses. A top UN official last year said the conflict was the worst forgotten humanitarian crisis in the world. The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced in The Hague last week that it would launch an inquiry into the conflict that would focus on the LRA.

New Vision (Kampala) 14 feb 2004 www.newvision.co.ug Gulu Boss Blasts Religious Leaders By Denis Ocwich Kampala ACHOLI religious leaders have come under fire for insisting on peace talks with Joseph Kony. Kitgum district chairman, Nahaman Ojwe, described the clerics as detractors who are not directly affected by the conflict. He said it was obvious that the rebel leader was not interested in dialogue. "Some of them are talking from safe havens, mosques and churches. Let us hear from the people who are directly affected by the war," Ojwe said. Ojwe, who is opposed to peace talks, last week condemned the rebels for killing innocent people. Meanwhile, a former MP for Erute South, John Akeny who is now a volunteer mobiliser for the Amuka militia in Lango, has also slammed peace talks. "If somebody believes talking to Kony is possible, let him go and surrender his life," Akeny said. He described Kony as a devil and a parasite which survives on the assets of other people. He hailed the International Criminal Court for its decision to probe Kony. [see Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARPI) . www.acholipeace.org]

BBC 22 Feb 2004 Rebels massacre Uganda civilians The government has been fighting the rebels for 18 years A rebel attack in northern Uganda has left 192 people dead and many injured, according to witnesses. Carried out by the Lord's Resistance Army, the killings are thought to be the worst in several years. The rebels armed with assault rifles, artillery and rocket-propelled grenades attacked and then set alight a camp for displaced people north of Lira. For almost two decades the authorities have been fighting the LRA, which is known for its brutality. 'Terrible scene' The attack on Barlonya camp, about 26km (16 miles) north of Lira town, apparently took place on Saturday afternoon. As the insurgents surrounded the camp, many people ran to their grass huts, and were burned as the insurgents torched their houses, said legislator Charles Anjiro. I've never seen in my life such a massacre. Ugandan priest "It's a hopeless situation, we went there this morning with the Lira district police commander and physically counted 192 bodies. The scene is terrible," he said. Fifty-six people were taken to the hospital with burns, shrapnel and gunshot wounds, one of whom died on Sunday, said Dr Jane Aceng, head of Lira hospital. Around 5,000 people, most of whom had fled fighting between the rebels and government troops, were living in the camp. Altogether, the conflict is said to have displaced at least one million people. The camp was being guarded by a local defence who were outnumbered and outgunned, an army spokesman said. Eyewitness: Previous Lira attack "I've never seen in my life such a massacre... I saw in one hut alone a whole family members still burning," a Ugandan priest in Lira told the BBC. The LRA, led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony, are known for kidnapping and brutalising young children, many of whom end up fighting for them. The group is based in lawless areas of neighbouring southern Sudan. The Ugandan army says the rebels attack the camps to divert its attention away from hunting the insurgents down in the bush. The Ugandan army said 25 rebels were killed in a different area on Saturday. However, while the army claims to be weakening the rebels, civilians remain extremely vulnerable, says the BBC's Will Ross, in the capital Kampala. Newly recruited militias have so far been unable to defend the population, he says.

BBC 23 Feb 2004 Uganda rebels 'burnt my family alive' Some were buried in mass graves, others individually More than 190 people were killed in northern Uganda at the weekend when rebels from the notorious Lord's Resistance Army attacked a camp for displaced people near the town of Lira. Some of those who survived have been talking about their ordeal. Samuel Ogwang, a 30-year-old shopkeeper, told AFP news agency that one of his two wives was killed in the attack. Three of his four children were wounded. "My parents were burnt alive in one of the huts. I buried 10 of my relatives yesterday before I brought these children to hospital, he said." "They (rebels) were about 200, dressed in new uniforms and carrying new guns." "They came running, surrounded the camp and started setting huts on fire," said Molly Auma, a 26-year-old mother of three. She was shot and had her right-hand fingers blown off by an exploding grenade. Two of her children were killed and the surviving 10-month-old baby girl was shot in the shoulder. She said the rebels appeared to have overpowered the self-defence militia who were guarding the camp. "When they came I ran inside the hut, then they started shooting. When we tried to run outside the hut, they would shoot you, when you remain inside, they burn you," survivor George Okot told AP news agency, as he winced in pain, lying in Lira hospital with gunshot wounds to his leg. Army accused Local MP Charles Angiro accused the army of trying to play down the scale of the attack by releasing reduced casualty figures. Profile: LRA rebels He told the BBC's Network Africa programme that a local military commander had told him that 84 people had been killed, when he had himself counted 192 bodies. "They went very early in the morning and ordered for the burial of these people without our co-operation," he said. "And the manner in which these people have been buried is horrible." He said he had counted 500 grass-roofed huts which had been burnt down. Mr Angiro also said he had personally warned President Yoweri Museveni that an attack was imminent in the area last year but his request for an army brigade to be deployed had not been acted on. "The government says they have overpowered the LRA but they always say the same thing." "The rebels came with sophisticated guns... and grenades. When they arrived at the camp at 5.30pm, they approached it from three fronts - from the north, east and south and left the western side for their exit," the MP said. "They bombed the camp... and overpowered the local defence forces and then started burning the huts."

BBC 24 Feb 2004 Uganda survivors face grisly aftermath By Orla Ryan BBC, northern Uganda Many victims were burned alive in their grass huts Barlonyo camp in northern Uganda, the scene of rebel attacks at the weekend, is now practically empty. The only people there are people who have come to bury their dead, or look for food. George Okello, 23, has come with his brother, Tom, to bury his father. They are motorbike taxi drivers in Lira town and on Sunday they buried their mother in the trenches surrounding the camp. Now they say they will bury their father under the collapsed walls of the mud hut he lived in. When asked how he feels about the attack, Okello says he cannot feel anything. 'Slaughtered' The camp, which once housed 4,000 people, is now practically deserted. Only the walls remain of the grass thatched huts. At 1700 local time, rebels from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) surrounded the camp, lighting the roofs of the cramped huts and creating a fire which lasted all night. Then they killed about 200 people. Mary Josco Akoli ran from the camp as rebels came with machetes, rocket-propelled grenades and "big guns". Ms Akoli's son, a militiaman defending the camp, was "slaughtered", while three of her grandchildren were burnt to death. She ran to a nearby trading centre, returning only now to search for food. Local militias Smoke still rises in the camp, which is scattered with charred remains. It was too fast - they [had] big guns... there were bullets everywhere Local militiaman Some of the dead have been buried in trenches, others lie hastily buried beneath the fallen walls of mud huts. The dry season has made the ground hard and it is hard to dig deep graves. The remains of a woman lie under a lemon tree covered with grass, while one man's body lies covered by a papyrus mat, buzzing with flies. A lone dog searches the camp. Joseph Kony's LRA has abducted children and adults to use as sex slaves, porters and soldiers in northern Uganda for some 17 years. The attack has highlighted the government's use of hastily-trained and unpaid local militia groups instead of the Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF). At Barlonyo there were 30 Amuka, a local militia named after the white rhino. They had an AK-47 each and six weeks of training. They arrived in the camp on 15 December to replace the local UPDF command. Fleeing flames Kajoka Boniface, 21, one of the militia, spoke to me. Survivors say they have lost everything "It was too fast. They [had] big guns... there were bullets everywhere," he said. In the children's ward of Lira hospital, Ogwang Vincent holds the hand of his five-year-old sister, Akello Dorcus. He found her at the camp on Sunday lying between the dead bodies of his mother and father, her head hacked by a machete. Nekodina Auma, lying on a mat in the floor of the hospital, tells me how she was in her hut when it caught fire. Fleeing the flames, she was shot in the base of her spine and is now paralysed from the waist down. Five of her eight children were burnt to death and her husband lies in another hospital ward, recovering from a gunshot wound. Little consolation The official Ugandan response is to play down the attack, stressing instead the victories the army has achieved in recent weeks. On Tuesday, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni told journalists that the attack was due to lack of co-ordination between the UPDF and militia. The local army commander has since been recalled to headquarters in Kampala. He stresses that the army has killed 146 rebels in the past month, while nearly 50 more have defected. He disputes militia claims that the rebels arrived with big guns. For the people who lost family and friends in the attack, this will offer little consolation. Florence Akello in Lira hospital spoke of her life after the attack. "We have no clothing, no bedding, no food, no cooking utensils," she told me. "As for my feelings [about the attack], I cannot express myself."

BBC 24 Feb 2004 Ugandans seek 'massacre revenge' Acholis are often abducted to fight for the rebels Protesters in Uganda have attacked the homes of Acholi people, the ethnic group they blame for a massacre. At least one man - believed to be an Acholi - has been stoned to death by the mob in the town of Lira. Four other people have died after security forces opened fire on the crowds of protesters. Rebels of the largely Acholi Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) are accused of killing 200 people in a refugee camp north of Lira at the weekend. About 10,000 people took to the streets of Lira on Wednesday to express their anger at the killings and the government's inability to end the rebellion. "The government has shown a lack of concern for the people of Lira and northern Uganda as a whole," said John Bosco Ochieng, a 32-year-old university student. Some marchers demanded United Nations intervention. Ugandan Information Minister Nsaba Buturo rejected the marchers' accusation. The government wants to appeal to our people to have restraint - it's no good venting anger on others because of what has happened Ugandan Information Minister Nsaba Buturo In pictures: Lira protest Speaking to the BBC's Newshour programme, he said the government was doing what it could to protect its people. But he said constraints placed on the poor country by donor nations made it difficult for Uganda to respond as effectively as it would like. "Over the years we have insisted that more expenditure needs to be incurred to increase [the army's] mobility, but our development partners - some of them - have other plans," he said. "They do not think there should be increased expenditure on the armed forces." He appealed to Ugandans to stop rioting. "The government wants to appeal to our people to have restraint. It's no good venting anger on others because of what has happened," he said. Lynch mob The BBC's Andrew Harding, on the march, says a section of the crowd broke away and formed what could only be described as a lynch mob. Q&A: Why haven't the rebels been defeated? In pictures: Barlonya massacre They began burning homes and threatening the lives of Acholis. Our correspondent reports that the group he is with had to intervene on two occasions to prevent women from being murdered by a gang of men armed with clubs. Meanwhile, Uganda's army says that since the massacre it has killed 21 of those responsible. 'Huts torched' Some 4,000 people were living in the Barlonya refugee camp where the massacre took place at the weekend. They had fled their homes because of fighting elsewhere in northern Uganda. The refugee camp near Lira was destroyed Local MP Charles Angiro said that as the camp was surrounded by rebels, many refugees ran to their grass huts and were burned alive when the insurgents torched them. But a rebel spokesman said civilians were caught in the crossfire as rebels defended themselves against a government attack. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has set up camp near Lira, saying he is determined to wipe out the rebels - something he has repeatedly promised to do in the past. Mr Museveni has also issued an apology for what he said were mistakes by the government and army which led to the killings. He has however disputed the eyewitness reports that 200 civilians died in the massacre, putting the figure at 80. Mr Museveni told the BBC that neighbouring Sudan was supporting and equipping the LRA.

New Vision (Kampala) 24 Feb 2004 www.newvision.co.ug MP Blames UPDF for Lira Massacre By Irene Nabusoba And James Oloch Kampala LIRA Woman MP Margaret Ateng has said Saturday's LRA attack, which left over 190 people dead and about 50 injured in a Lira displaced people's camp, was due to negligence of the UPDF. Ateng told The New Vision from parliament yesterday that the rebels had been in the area for several weeks launching similar smaller attacks. "Some individuals in the army must be playing some tricks. Where was the UPDF? How can 30 people (Amuka militia) guard a camp of over 4,000 people? It was agreed that the Amuka boys would work alongside the army but the UPDF is doing nothing," Ateng said. Most of those burnt in their huts were women and children. The men had gone to the market, the MP said. There was reportedly no single UPDF soldier guarding the camp. The Amuka guards fled. The six who tried to fight back were killed. Media reports said the number of dead could be higher, saying the army went to the massacre scene earlier and cleared some bodies. "The fact that the army reached the area earlier and secretly removed some bodies means that they are covering up something," Ateng said. Army spokesman Maj. Shaban Bantariza said the UPDF soldiers were not there to guard the camp because they were in the jungle pursuing the rebels. Meanwhile, Erute North MP Charles Angiro Gutomoi has said the Lango Parliamentary Group has called on the government to probe the massacre and explain what happened.

Reuters 25 Feb 2004 Five Killed as Ugandan Peace March Turns Violent By David Mwangi LIRA, Uganda (Reuters) - Five people were killed in a northern Ugandan town Wednesday when a peace march to protest the massacre of more than 200 people turned into a riot marred by ethnic lynchings and gunfire, witnesses said. Shots crackled as security forces dispersed hundreds of demonstrators who beat three women and a man to death, accusing them of sympathizing with Lord's Resistance Army rebels responsible for the mass killing near the town Saturday. "The latest is that one person was killed by a stray bullet, four were lynched and three injured," said army spokesman Major Shaban Bantariza. "The organizers could not control their demonstration so we moved in stop the chaos." Residents said members of the ethnic Langi community had attacked individuals from Uganda's northern Acholi tribe, accusing them of siding with the rebels who have been waging war in the north of the country for the past 17 years. "We are not happy with the Acholi," said one Langi resident of Lira, a farmer named Goddy Anyima. "We are brothers, we are wondering why they are killing us." A nun placed a reed mat over the body of a man who had been beaten to death and left lying in a grassy field. The body of another man lay sprawled in a makeshift shop in the town center. The army said the four people who were lynched were all suspected by the crowd to have been Acholis. One man was shot and killed when security forces opened fire to disperse protesters who tried to break into the town's police station, smashed car windshields and wrecked offices, angry at what they said was a lack of protection against the LRA. "The police shot with live bullets and one guy was shot dead, it was by accident," said mechanic Bulwadda Hussein, who witnessed the incident. The body was placed in the back of a pick-up truck outside the police station and bore what appeared to be gunshot wounds. ARMY HUNTS REBELS Separately, the army said it had killed 21 of the rebels responsible for the attack on the camp about 18 miles northeast of Lira while pursuing them Wednesday. "We are seriously hunting these thugs that went to the camp and killed innocent civilians," the divisional army commander in Lira district, George Ityang, told Reuters television. Earlier, several thousand marchers waving branches and placards demanded better protection from LRA rebels after the massacre of at least 230 at the camp for people uprooted by fighting, according to a toll given by local officials. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who says 84 people were killed in the attack, has vowed to crush the LRA, led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony. Museveni has blamed the weekend attack on errors made by a local army commander. The LRA says it wants to win a better life for the northern Acholi people, although it has not clearly stated its demands. The movement, which has abducted thousands of children for use as sex slaves and fighters, has defied repeated attempts by the army to crush it, exploiting the long grass, swamps and forests of the north.

IRIN 25 Feb 2004 Uganda: Focus On Lra Attack On Barlonyo IDPs Camp UN Integrated Regional Information Networks ANALYSIS February 25, 2004 Posted to the web February 25, 2004 Barlonyo/Lira All that remained of Barlonyo camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), north of Lira town, were huts burned to ashes. A few contained bodies still smouldering, others the charred remains of what were once granaries, clay pots, bicycles and jerry cans. The few people still there on Monday were burying the dead. The other IDPs had grabbed their remaining possessions and headed out on foot for nearby urban centres. Here they would sleep rough, but face a lower risk of an another attack by rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Victoria Ogwar, 45, did not know quite where to go, but said she could not stay in Barlonyo. Carrying her remaining worldly possessions - an orange plastic basin, a few chunks of firewood and a cloth bag - she trudged along the bush path leading from the ashes of the camp to Ogur trading centre, 16 km away. NO WARNING "They really hit us," says Alfred Komakech, one of the local militiamen guarding the 4,800 IDPs in the camp on the night of the attack. His gaze swept over the black wreckage of the camp, target of the worst attack by the LRA in over 10 years, where at least 200 people were killed on Saturday evening. It was the second attack on an IDP camp in Lira District in a month. On 5 February, the LRA killed about 50 people at Abia camp, about 10 km away. Like the Saturday incident, the Abia attack occurred at about 17:00 GMT. An investigation ordered by the government is under way. Komakech, 20, told IRIN that the first warning of the attack came from a group of IDP children who had gone out to fetch water. They came running back, shouting that rebels were advancing from the adjacent forest. "By then it was too late. They came running at us and started firing straight away - they had all these big guns. They bombed the barracks, and many of us [the militia] fled after we finished our ammunition," he said. REBELS WELL ARMED Komakech told IRIN at Barlonyo that the LRA had vastly superior firepower. "They had all these big RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and recoilless weapons - they were brand new," he said. "We did not stand a chance." The Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) put the death toll at 84, thereby angering local leaders, who insisted they had counted 192 bodies right at the scene of the massacre. More bodies were later discovered in bushes nearby. The army also disputed claims that the LRA had new weapons. Chris Magezi, the UPDF spokesman in Lira, 380 km north of the capital, Kampala, told IRIN: "How could they see whether the LRA guns were new? It was dark." However, the main UPDF spokesman, Maj Shaban Bantariza, had earlier told IRIN in Kampala that "the rebels had superior weapons. The militias have not yet had the training to use similar firepower. They were out-armed." President Yoweri Museveni, who says the rebels are being armed by neighbouring Sudan, flew into Lira on Monday. He blamed the UPDF for letting the massacre happen, but downplayed the significance of the new weapons. "We shouldn't put too much emphasis on big guns. The issue is not guns - it is about confidence and knowledge in fighting," he asserted. "It is possible the Amuka [local militia] were not properly trained about weapons and their capabilities. These RPGs are useless in a bush war, because they only do damage in confined spaces," he told reporters. IDPs BURNED ALIVE Samuel Ogwal, 30, a camp shopkeeper, was resting with his wife and four children when the rebels stormed the camp. "I was just inside, then we heard some commotion and firing in the distance. I saw a group of guys in uniform. They were setting huts on fire, and people were screaming, burning inside the huts," he said. "Then I saw them running towards my shop. I just grabbed my youngest [child] and ran." Ogwal could neither save his wife nor his parents. He returned on Sunday morning, only to find his parents shot dead and his wife brutally hacked with a machete. But his three sons, including an infant who sustained two bullet wounds, survived. "We were lucky," he told IRIN. Poorly defended by a newly trained local militia group, the camp had been a sitting duck, the IDPs said. Ogwal said the rebels did not even bother to fight the militia, just firebombing their barracks, then going straight for the civilians. "Before anyone knew what was going on, they were setting huts ablaze and shooting at people," he said. The cult-like LRA has waged war in northern Uganda for 18 years. Led by a reclusive mystic, Joseph Kony, they say they want topple the Ugandan government. Yet they consistently target defenceless civilians. In 1995, they slaughtered 240 civilians in an attack on a village in Atiak, herding them into a corner and shooting them dead. DEVASTATING IMPACT ON NORTH AND EAST Relief workers say the conflict has had a devastating impact on northern and eastern Uganda, displacing about 1.4 million people - nearly 75 percent of the area's population. The rebels have also abducted about 30,000 children since the mid-1990s. These children have either been forced to fight for the rebels or provide sexual favours. "Fear of abduction and attacks prevent most people in the camps from cultivating the land. Economic activities have largely come to a halt and most displaced persons depend on aid for their survival," said the UN's Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in a statement. Roman Catholic Father Sebhat Ayele, who visited Barlonyo shortly after the attack, told IRIN that the LRA had numbered about 300. Dressed like members of the UPDF and armed with assault rifles and artillery, they stormed Barlonyo at about 17:00 GMT. Using a recoilless gun, they fired into a barracks housing the 35-strong militia guard unit before moving into the camp. Other survivors said at Lira Referral Hospital that most of the IDPs who died were burned alive. The rebels set fire to their thatched huts after ordering them into their houses at gunpoint. Others, who were trying to flee, were shot, bludgeoned or hacked to death by rebels wielding clubs, machetes and AK-47s. ATTACK INTERNATIONALLY CONDEMNED Saturday's attack, which is due to be probed by the International Criminal Court, has drawn a barrage of condemnation. "This senseless atrocity underscores the need for increased security in northern Uganda and protection of vulnerable civilians," UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said in a statement. "There is urgent need for a workable solution to this 18-year tragedy." "Attacks on civilians cannot be justified in any circumstances," Amnesty International (AI) said in another statement. "The LRA should immediately cease all attacks on civilians, end all forcible abductions and release all those held as captives, especially children." AI urged the Ugandan authorities "to show their commitment to the basic principle of protection of civilian populations by taking effective measures to boost security at all existing IDP camps in northern Uganda". "In the 18-year conflict between the LRA and the government of Uganda, civilians remain the prime target of attacks, killings, maimings, abductions, and destruction of property. These attacks should be addressed as a matter of urgency. Over 1.2 million people are living in testing conditions in IDP camps across northern Uganda," AI said. Residents in camps outside Lira town told IRIN that conditions were appalling, made so by lack of adequate food, water, sanitation and medicine. Scores of children had died, they said. "I see children dying of cholera every day, and some have died because there is no water - they are drying up. I have personally buried 17 in the last week," said Joseph Omara, a church leader in Omoro IDP camp. Omoro, 60 km east of Lira, houses about 10,000 people. Omara said many other IDPs had been killed by rebels as they ventured outside the camps. "People leave the camps to collect food, and that's where they [the LRA] strike. On Friday [13 February], they killed a boy called Alio. He was just outside the camp, going to get water," he told IRIN. Relief workers say access to the IDPs has been made difficult by the fluid security situation in the region. "The provision of aid poses several challenges, among which are access to victims and their security in places of residence," said OCHA in a statement. The LRA intensified its operations against Lira District last November with a series of brutal attacks on villages, IDP camps and trading centres. But these attacks led to fewer casualties than the Saturday massacre. Observers say Lira was targeted because the rebels ran out of food after the army forced most of them out of the Teso region. Lira is a corridor between Teso and the country's far north. But observers say the UPDF has not demonstrated enough commitment to mopping up the rebels after they left Teso, leaving the much smaller local militias to pursue them. The mayor of Lira town, Peter Owiny, told IRIN that the IDP population had stretched the town's facilities to the limit. "The population of Lira was officially 90,000, but it is now up to 350,000 people." The local hospital, where at least 60 injured IDPs were writhing in pain, he added, could hardly cope with the situation. Religious leaders in the region have urged the government and the rebel leader, Joseph Kony, to seek a peaceful solution to the conflict. But Museveni has ruled out negotiations, saying the rebels are terrorists who will be defeated militarily. At Lira hospital on Tuesday, Museveni, clad in military uniform and surrounded by UPDF soldiers, repeated his position before driving off to Barlonyo. "We have got a big struggle, but we shall win. We have won previous battles," he told reporters.

The Monitor (Uganda) 25 Feb 2004 www.monitor.co.ug More bodies found in Lira By Patrick Ebong Feb 25, 2004 LIRA – The death toll of the Saturday massacre in Barlonyo camp in Lira has risen to 239. Erute County North MP Charles Angiro told journalists yesterday that the number of the dead had risen from 207 previously to 239 after 32 more bodies were discovered in a garden, 1km away from the Barlonyo displaced people’s camp. “We discovered 32 more bodies of people who were abducted by the rebels to carry their loot but were later murdered in the forest,” Angiro told journalists. “Their bodies were found decomposing on Monday evening 1km away from the massacre scene,” the legislator added. Angiro criticised the army for giving a death toll figure outrageously lower than that given by local leaders and survivors. He also accused a senior army officer in the region for ordering locals to secretly bury some of the victims on Sunday morning. “The army officer ordered for mass burial before the local authorities and the press could count the number of dead people simply to deceive President Museveni that the number of civilians killed were about 80 yet a total of 239 people died,” Angiro said. Mr Angiro told Monitor FM yesterday that the Shs 5 million donated by the president for treatment of the 62 survivors in Lira Hospital was peanuts. Museveni handed over the money to Lira district Chairman Mr Franco Ojur at the hospital yesterday. The President later visited Barlonyo camp before heading to Okwang sub-county where he was expected to pitch camp to oversee the army’s offensive against the rebels. Additional reporting by Edwin Musiime [See also www.lira.go.ug]

The Monitor (Uganda) 26 Feb 2004 www.monitor.co.ug Lira killings shock leaders By Frank Nyakairu Feb 26, 2004 KAMPALA – Political and religious leaders in Acholi have said they are shocked by what they claim were tribal killings in Lira yesterday. Some five people, believed to be Acholi, were killed in Lira yesterday during a demonstration against the Barlonyo camp massacre on Saturday. Barlonyo is in Lira district. “I did not expect this to happen in this modern era,” Gulu district chairman Walter Ochora said by telephone yesterday. “I have been receiving calls from Acholi students in hiding in Lira asking me what they can do.” The chairman of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, Archbishop John Baptist Odama, blamed the escalation of the violence on government. “If government had not involved the population in this conflict, this would have definitely not happened,” Odama said by telephone. “Several youth are now armed with guns. Tell me how you can reverse that situation?” Ochora accused Erute North MP Charles Angiro of incitement. “Angiro is responsible for all this. He incited anti-Acholi sentiments and see what has happened,” he said. Angiro denied the accusations, and in turn counter-accused Ochora. “He is the one who is inciting hatred. I have been injured. My car was smashed,” Angiro said by telephone last evening. Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARPI) . www.acholipeace.org

Telegraph.co.uk, UK 14 Feb 2004 Nazis' Argentine village hide-out pulls in tourists By Seamus Mirodan in Bariloche (Filed: 14/02/2004) The bookshops of Bariloche, an Alpine-style town on the edge of the Argentine Andes, are running out of copies of their new bestseller - a guide to the homes of senior Nazis who found refuge there after the Second World War. The author and publisher of Nazi Bariloche, Abel Basti, said: "It is a serious investigation, presented in non-traditional format, which seeks to demonstrate that Bariloche was a Nazi stronghold." His evidence is compelling. A small yellow-brick building in the town centre houses a delicatessen once owned by an SS captain, Erich Priebke. Priebke is serving a life sentence in Italy for his role in the massacre of 335 Italians, including 75 Jews, but his former neighbour Cecilia Maahs vividly remembers "the sorrowful day" a decade ago when he was arrested. "He was an excellent neighbour who always behaved like a gentleman," said the 79-year-old. She was "always fully aware" of the former Nazi's past "because he never felt the need to hide it here", she said. "It never bothered me in the slightest." Across the road from Priebke's delicatessen is the Club Andino Bariloche, a mountaineering association set up in 1931 by Otto Meiling, the father of Argentine winter sports and a former member of the Hitler Youth. Its membership lists from the late 1940s include Hans Ulrich Rudel, former head of the Luftwaffe and a close confidant of Hitler, and Frederich Lantschner, the former Nazi governor of the Tyrol. Hugo Jung, the club president, remembers Rudel well: "I know he was a Nazi, but it doesn't bother me at all. He was a great man and despite the fact that he had only one leg, he still managed to be an excellent skier." Two blocks further up the hillside is the timber-built house where Priebke lived for 50 years. His son 63-year-old George, still lives there. "We were always very well accepted here," he said. "I went to a local school and, despite the fact that everyone knew who my father was, I never had any problems. "The culture here is different. In Italy people call us assassins and scream at us. Here they greet us and shake our hands." Other sites of interest listed in the guide include Otto Meiling's isolated mountain cabin, preserved as a museum open to the public; the home for many years of Joseph Schwammberger, commander of the Polish ghetto Przemysl; and Primo Capraro, the local German school. Erich Priebke was its president at the time of his arrest and it once proudly flew a swastika flag outside its entrance. At the town hall in the city centre, Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz death camp doctor who was known as the "Angel of Death", took his driving test twice in the 1940s, having failed the first time. Now retired, Francisco Calo, who ran the tests, said: "There were always rumours that Mengele was here, but when I saw his face I was certain it was him." It is no secret that many Nazis fled to Argentina following the Allied victory in 1945. Argentina's then president, Juan Peron, explained: "When the war was over some useful Germans helped us build our factories and make the best use of what we had and in time they were able to help themselves too." For decades most of them lived on undisturbed in the country, and the local population still refuses to condemn them for their actions. A federal police sergeant in Bariloche said: "We have never received a single complaint, charge or denunciation from the civilian population against any of the Nazis." Sergio Perez, a taxi driver, simply did not want to know the truth: "For our community they were great people who did everything they could for us," he said. "We felt impotence when Priebke was arrested because we could not help this man who was like a father to us." At the time of the arrest the pupils of Primo Capraro took to the streets to protest on his behalf. Mr Basti, whose book has prompted a Buenos Aires travel agency to set up tours of the sites he highlights, said he had been "inundated with angry e-mails asking how I can attack these great men". He added: "There remains a strong neo-Nazi sympathy in Bariloche today." Jewish targets were bombed twice in Buenos Aires during the 1990s - first the Israeli embassy and then a Jewish community centre, an attack which left 85 people dead. Daniel Reisfeld, the vice-president of the 150-strong Jewish community in Bariloche, lost a sister in the second bombing and in the same year, after Priebke's arrest, became acutely aware of the pro-Nazi sentiment in his home town. He received several threatening phone calls saying a bomb had been placed in his house or his shop. "I was inundated by phone calls asking why this was happening to poor old Priebke," he said. "There is still a lot of ignorance and, without doubt, anti-Semitism in Argentina. "Nobody wanted to notice the Nazis here and that is why Priebke freely admitted his past without fear of repercussions. "It might be comical if it were not so tragic."

Toronto Star 1 Feb 2004 `I couldn't take my eyes off him' Dallaire tells of being face-to-face with his `Devil' Taking the stand at genocide trial was a test of strength ALLAN THOMPSON In the end, he just couldn't let go. Couldn't take his eyes off the man he once compared to the Devil. "There was this feeling, is this the end? Is this closure? Is this the last time I see him?" Roméo Dallaire recounted in an exclusive interview on the day after he completed seven days of testimony against Theoneste Bagosora, the former army colonel accused of being one of the architects of the Rwanda genocide. Dallaire has made no secret of his hostility toward Bagosora, the de facto military ruler of Rwanda during the 1994 slaughter and the man with whom he was forced to negotiate, even as death squads continued to hunt down Tutsi civilians and hack them to death. Dallaire, the retired Canadian general who commanded the ill-fated United Nations force in Rwanda during the genocide, was left traumatized by the horror and the helplessness. At the landmark genocide tribunal here, Bagosora and three other senior military officers have pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the 100-day killing frenzy that wiped out 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus. For years, Dallaire anticipated his chance to testify against Bagosora but also dreaded the encounter. The ordeal finally over, he says he found himself in the courtroom on Tuesday, rooted to the spot, unable to move, his eyes fixed on Bagosora. "It was very difficult for me to say that it was over. I just didn't want to let him go. It just happened. I couldn't take my eyes off him. I just couldn't." But Dallaire said he also feels that he is leaving Africa feeling stronger — both mentally and physically — than he did when he arrived here, despite fears that reliving the horrors of Rwanda through his testimony might set him back. And he confirmed for the first time that he plans to return to Rwanda in April — for the first time since he left in 1994 — to take part in formal ceremonies to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide. He will be accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth — who has never seen the country that turned their family life upside down — as well as by Maj. Brent Beardsley, the army officer who was his executive assistant in Rwanda and helped write the general's recent memoir. In an hour-long interview over a cup of tea, an omelette, toast and peanut butter, Dallaire spoke in more detail than ever before about his health, his state of mind and his plans for the future. Nearly a decade after Rwanda, after the cycles of depression, the suicide attempts and his long battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Dallaire finally seems to be in a place where he is spending more time looking ahead than back. "I think all this, if I can relate it to the PTSD injury, it is all sort of a maturing of my ability to live with the injury," he said. "Where at times I thought a lot of this stuff would break me down and I'd go back down the tubes, I'm finding that, on the contrary, it's helping me to stabilize and I feel that I'm gaining. "I feel I'm coming out of it." In the fall, Dallaire is to take up a research fellowship at Harvard University's prestigious Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and plans to write a book on conflict resolution. "We can't defuse these conflicts with methodologies that come from pre-1989, Cold War, nation-state concepts. "I feel that so much of the writing is still fiddling with known methods. We need pure, innovative thought, to get ahead of the nature of conflict." Shortly after arrival, one of the burly members of the Canadian military security detail shadowing Dallaire on this trip asked if he would like to join him and the others in the gym. "These guys introduced me to a new way of life," Dallaire said, nodding toward one of the security guards sitting nearby in the hotel restaurant. "So, I've been going to do physical training and yesterday we even started weights and what to eat and not eat. "I hadn't done one inch of physical training since Rwanda, nothing. It's part of the injury — you lose a lot of self-discipline. Just like you can't read, you can't do any of that stuff." Every night, after several hours of preparation with his legal team for the next day's testimony, Dallaire would visit the gym with his bodyguards and work out. "These were really tight when I arrived here," he said, pulling on the belt around his trousers. "So, I'm coming home stronger physically and I think mentally in a sense." But there are still episodes, he says, moments when his mind soars back to Rwanda. "I didn't sleep at all last night. I stayed up all night. I tossed and turned, walked the halls, even though I took the pills. "At the end, in the courtroom, I was quite exceptionally taken aback by all that." While staring at Bagosora, he says, he was once again transported back to Rwanda. "All I saw were bodies and bodies and bodies, so many of the horrific scenes. It was just sort of like fast forward, when you put a million pictures together and try to watch it. "All that stuff was just going at a hyper rate. It created a very tense and difficult moment for me." But the release came when he saw one of the court guards put Bagosora in handcuffs. "I found a certain release in the fact that he left the courtroom handcuffed. When I saw the guy putting the handcuffs and I saw Bagosora sort of jiggling his hands with the handcuffs, there was a certain sense of, well, it was okay." In a departure for Dallaire, who hasn't had much time or patience for leisure since Rwanda, he went on a safari with his delegation last weekend at nearby Arusha National Park. "I'm not into tourism and stuff like that, particularly when I'm here without my wife," Dallaire said. "But the whole gang decided we all needed to get out of this complex and it was a good solution. "We saw water buffalo, giraffes, zebras, wild boar — extraordinary animals — different gazelles, fantastic butterflies. "And monkeys of all types, just beating the living daylights out of each other," he laughed. "And right near, eh." Dallaire spoke by phone with Elizabeth three times during his stay in Africa, "just to keep up and keep her morale. "She suffers from high blood pressure now. These things, you know, they're in the family. And she was quite concerned when we left. "I called her on the Sunday night before starting to testify to say: `I feel ready, prepared, calm and tomorrow it starts.'" Dallaire says he braced himself for questions from the defence lawyers about his medication and state of mind. "It was something that could have been raised and the responses would have been that I felt perfectly capable of handling the situation. "I'm at a stage sort of like a diabetic who takes insulin every day and, as my doctors say, `You're perfectly normal, but you need pills to permit that.' And every now and again, I need a session." He says his medication was increased in the fall, in preparation for his trip to Arusha. "I was having problems, with all this coming. A few years ago, those problems would have been catastrophic. These days, it's more a problem with sleeping and sleep invasion at times, dreams. And sometimes the flashbacks hit me." But maintaining his composure and concentration during seven days on the witness stand was testament for Dallaire that he is making progress. And he says his therapy has taught him how to protect himself against destructive bouts of depression. "Part of the work that has been done over the years is to discern that and work your way out of it. That means getting out of your room, talking to somebody or walking around, not to fall into this spiral. "Before, I had no prosthesis, I would just crash, bumph." He slammed his hand on the table to illustrate the point. "Now, I'm more acutely aware if I'm going that way and I can react." Dallaire still consults a psychiatrist "once in a blue moon — he controls all the medication and stuff like that. "And there's a psychologist who is much more regular, at times when I'm feeling I could use a good punch-up." When he testified here for one day in 1998 — and wept on the witness stand — Dallaire says he was basically operating without a net. "At the time, I was just fiddling with therapy, I'd been told to see a military psychiatrist, but I was a very reticent client." This time, in addition to legal advisers, his security detail and a media handler, Dallaire's team included a defence department psychologist with whom he would often meet at breaks in the proceedings. "At one point, we started to describe some pretty ugly scenes and then I asked for a recess. "It's a therapeutic process, physical and also mental. It's incredible how physical things like massage have an incredible impact on your mental state." With the Bagosora trial behind him, Dallaire is preparing for Harvard and plans to visit Boston to find accommodation. He says his April return to Rwanda will not be the extended, personal pilgrimage he still hopes to eventually make as his final step in coming to terms with the genocide, mourning the dead and "re-establishing contact with the spirits. "This is not particularly appreciated or welcomed in the family, and I know that, but at times I would just like to return to Rwanda and just be a nomad, a pilgrim. "I mean, it's always spring in Rwanda. There is food in the trees. There are always extra beans or some goat milk. And there are a thousand hills and a thousand valleys. "The strongest feeling of being in a whole different dimension is usually in the morning. "On the high roads, you would have clouds or mist below you. And what the mists would do, you would stand there and you would see them creeping in the valleys. "It was like the mist was forming, dissipating, moving down the valleys, like an entity. And then it would disappear." "It is just an extraordinary place to sit and watch paradise."

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 10 Feb 2004 UNHCR condemns murders of two leaders of displaced Colombians GENEVA, Feb. 10 (UNHCR) - The UN refugee agency today condemned the murders of two members of an association of internally displaced persons (IDP) in Colombia and urged Colombian authorities to investigate the killings and prosecute those responsible. Marta Cecilia Aguirre, a 36-year-old mother of four, and Giovanni de Jesús Montoya Molina, 45, were murdered on Sunday in front of their homes in the north-western Colombian city of Aparetado in separate attacks by unidentified armed men in civilian clothes. Aguirre was a founding member of the Apartado Displaced Persons Community Association (ASOCODEA) and currently served as its vice-chairperson. Montoya Molina, from Antioquia Province, was also a member of the association after being displaced five months earlier. He leaves behind a one-year-old daughter. "UNHCR offers its condolences to the families of the victims and calls on Colombian authorities to investigate these crimes and to prosecute those responsible," said UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski at a news briefing. The refugee agency also urged authorities to ensure the protection of IDP leaders who have been threatened in other parts of Colombia as well. "UNHCR will continue working with ASOCODEA and other IDP associations, strengthening them and supporting them in the defense of their rights. This violence must stop," Janowski said. The murders of Aguirre and Montoya Molina are the latest in a string of attacks against individuals and groups involved in human rights work for Colombia's IDPs. UNHCR has publicly condemned these attacks. ASOCODEA was founded by IDP families in Apartado in 2000 and currently counts some 220 displaced families in the city among its members. The majority are IDPs from the northwestern provinces of Córdoba, Antioquia and Chocó. UNHCR has supported the association. UNHCR's work in Colombia is aimed at protecting and promoting the rights of internally displaced people and supporting and strengthening the response of the government and civil society to forced displacement. More than 1 million internally displaced people are registered with the Colombian government, but NGOs estimate there could actually be close to 3 million IDPs in the country. According to official sources, 74 percent of the displaced are women and children. In another development, UNHCR signed an agreement on Feb. 6 with the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in order to carry out joint activities in Colombia. Both agencies decided to coordinate efforts and look for resources, and also for other partners, in order to improve the aid currently given to women of all ages who are suffering the consequences of the conflict in Colombia. Some joint pilot projects between the two UN agencies are expected to be identified soon. UNIFEM has been working in Colombia since 1994 and is consolidating and expanding its operations, giving priority to efforts to strengthen the role of women in the construction of peace, and also to support displaced women.

AP 2 Feb 2004 U.S. says US$15 million in military aid to Ecuador will be cut, QUITO, Ecuador The U.S. government will withhold US$15 million in military aid to Ecuador for failing to guarantee that U.S. military members won't be handed over to an international court, the U.S. ambassador said. "The United States has the democratic right to deny help to nations with which we do not have protection for our military," Ambassador Kristie Kenney told the daily newspaper El Universo in an interview published Monday. Last July, Washington froze military aid to nations which refused to promise not to surrender members of the U.S. military to the new International Criminal Court in The Hague. Despite the loss of military aid, Kenney said the U.S. government has asked the Congress to approve US$70 million for other non-military programs in Ecuador for 2004. "Ecuador is in a fragile zone, but it is an island of peace and the entire region is interested in maintaining it as such," Kenney said, referring to drug trafficking and the leftist insurgency in neighboring Colombia. In September, the U.S. government sent Ecuador US$15.7 million to fight drug trafficking. The United States halted US$48 million in aid to 35 countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, and Central and South America after they failed to meet a July 1 deadline to exempt American troops and other personnel from prosecution before the new court. The United States fears that without the guarantee American soldiers could be subject to false and politically motivated prosecutions before the court. Ninety-two countries have ratified the treaty establishing the court.

Reuters 12 Feb 2004 Ex-Guatemala dictator to testify over reporter death GUATEMALA CITY, Feb 12 (Reuters) - A judge has banned former dictator Efrain Rios Montt from leaving Guatemala and ordered him to testify to a court investigating his possible implication in the death of a reporter last year. Judge Luis Alfredo Morales subpoenaed Rios Montt and members of his family and political party for their alleged role in violent protests in Guatemala City last year in which a radio journalist died while fleeing an armed mob. The reporter's son is accusing Rios Montt -- whom rights groups accuse of genocide during his iron-fisted 1982-83 dictatorship -- of murder, his lawyer said on Thursday. Radio reporter Hector Ramirez died of a heart attack in July as he was being chased by stick-wielding rightists at a demonstration backing a presidential bid by the ex-dictator. Walter Roble, the lawyer representing his son, also called Hector, said he welcomed the judge's ruling, made on Wednesday. "The decision to ban the accused from leaving the country is prudent, in virtue of the fact that in Guatemala those accused often become fugitives of justice," he told Reuters. Rios Montt, 77, was head of Congress at the time of the protests, called in support of his bid to be a candidate for Guatemala's 2003 presidential election. The retired general lost parliamentary immunity from prosecution when he stepped down from Congress in January after losing the election in the first round. Rights groups accuse Rios Montt of ordering the massacre of thousands of Maya Indians during his rule at the height of a 36-year civil war in which 200,000 people died. Judge Morales told local media that a warrant for Rios Montt's arrest would be issued if he did not present himself willingly to the court. Lawyers in the case say they expect Rios Montt to be called to appear next week. The court will then decide, based on his initial testimony, whether to proceed with the case.

Reuters 26 Feb 2004 President apologises for wartime deaths February 26 2004 at 06:00AM Guatemala City - Guatemala's new president asked forgiveness on Wednesday for the state's role in the country's long civil war, but stopped short of calling the widespread wartime killings of Mayan Indians genocide. Oscar Berger, who took office last month, said he was asking forgiveness from "every one of the victims' relatives for the suffering that came from that fratricidal conflict." About 200 000 people were killed in Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which pitted Marxist guerrillas against a series of right-wing governments and ended with peace accords in 1996. Most of the victims were Mayan Indian peasants, many killed in massacres during army or paramilitary sweeps through rural areas.Berger, a conservative businessman, pledged $9-million to compensate civilians who lost relatives and property in the conflict. He said the amount was "important but insufficient" and promised more funds when state finances were more stable. Berger made his comments at a ceremony in the national palace on the fifth anniversary of a UN-backed "truth commission" report that concluded the army targeted Maya Indians in "scorched-earth" tactics to isolate rebel groups. Hundreds of civil war survivors demonstrated in the streets outside the palace on Wednesday to demand the government accept the truth commission's conclusion the civilian deaths amounted to genocide. "It is impossible to relaunch the peace agreements without taking into account the truth commission recommendations, including justice for genocide," said Christina Laur, deputy director of the rights group Caldh. The Caldh group is leading efforts to build criminal cases against senior military officers, including former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, for crimes against humanity. The new government's head of security and defence, Otto Perez Molina, himself a retired general, denied genocide had taken place in Guatemala. "There was no genocide because there was no attempt to exterminate a race. This was a battleground for the United States and Russia, and communism against capitalism. We provided the dead and they provided the ideology," he said. [ www.berger.com.gt guatemala.gob.gt ]

Knight Ridder/Tribune 6 Feb 2004 Opposition movements in Haiti threaten country's stability BY TIM COLLIE FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - (KRT) - The violent takeover of Haiti's fourth largest city by a slum gang offers a frightening glimpse of one possible future for the impoverished nation: Chaos. Many Haiti watchers now fear a prolonged collapse similar to failed states like Somalia or Liberia - especially if the United States and the international community do not take a greater role in resolving Haiti's many problems. Wracked by worsening poverty and political violence, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government may be losing control over key areas of the country. Gonaives has been the scene of periodic violence since September, when a major figure, Amiot "Cubain" Metayer, was murdered. In the Central Plateau, another group known as the Motherless Army, composed of former army members, has carried out assassinations of government officials and sacked villages. Meanwhile, the country's capital has been the scene of frequent large protests by coalitions of students, civic groups, business leaders and other members of the urban elite. They have been pushed together by the continuing economic decay, as well as attacks on their ranks by gangs linked to the government. Though Aristide's government labels them all as one opposition movement, there seem to be few links between these groups, and that's what makes the situation so dangerous, some experts say. There is no figure of Aristide's stature to counter Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected leader. There is no rival who commands anywhere near the following that the former priest still has among the poor. If Aristide was overthrown, the various groupings of gang leaders, politicos, urban elites and intellectuals could easily turn on each other. "That's why this is a very dangerous moment in Haiti, dangerous both for the government and the peaceful opposition," said Robert Fatton, a leading authority on Haiti at the University of Virginia. "If what is happening in Gonaives is the opposition's vision for Haiti, then the future is pretty grim indeed. "I don't think these various groups are linked, but what happens in Gonaives encourages the forces in Port-au-Prince, which then holds marches and rallies and inspires the army in Gonaives to go that much further," said Fatton, author of "Haiti's Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy." "But the only thing that unites these groups is their hatred of Aristide. If he left tomorrow, you'd have all kinds of struggles among the opposition. The whole country could easily fall apart." The resulting fragments would run the gamut from dedicated democratic activists on one end of the political spectrum to a dark force of drug traffickers and armed thugs whose alliances continually shift based on power and money. With only a national police force under his control - the army was disbanded under international supervision in the 1990s - Aristide has maintained power over Haiti's streets with armed gangs known as chimere. These young toughs knock skulls and run drug and kidnap rings in exchange for political patronage - many can be found working as luggage handlers at the international airport. That formula has worked for Aristide, diplomats and other observers say, but it's unclear whether he or his political party still have control over these gangs. Their clout swelled by drug money, many chimere gangs now may be a power unto themselves. A similar situation exists in Jamaica, where political parties lost control of their street wings, which became the notorious drug posses. "If the United States does give more support to the peaceful opposition, the Group of 184 and other groups, then this is what they're going to end up with - groups like the Cannibal Army," James Morrell, a onetime Aristide adviser who now heads the Washington-based Haiti Democracy Project. The Group of 184 is a leading civic opposition group based in Port-au-Prince. Thursday's uprising was led by a group formally known as the Cannibal Army, now renamed the Artibonite Resistance Front. Based in the shanty town of Robateau, they are a hardcore mix of former Aristide supporters and elements of the FRAPH, a paramilitary squad that menaced Haiti during the early 1990s, after Aristide was overthrown during his first administration. "These are not democrats by any means - they don't have a political philosophy other than power and money," said Fatton. When Aristide returned to power, he used them to menace his opponents. Led by Metayer, the group controlled Gonaives as a stronghold for Aristide's Lavalas Family Party for years. In 2002, under international pressure, the government arrested Metayer. But using a bulldozer, his supporters busted Metayer out of prison a month later. The jailbreak also freed a slew of notorious prisoners, including Jean Tatoune, who was serving a life sentence for a massacre of Aristide partisans in 1994, during a period when some 5,000 Aristide partisans were murdered. Metayer and Tatoune joined forces. The militia leader seemed to have reached some arrangement with the government. Despite a warrant for his arrest, he openly held court in Gonaives while the police claimed to be searching for him. But in September, after an alleged meeting with an Aristide emissary, his mutilated corpse was found with both eyes shot out. Gonaives has been in a tense state ever since. A revolt in Gonaives touches a nerve in Haiti, which is enjoying only its first decade of democratic government after 200-year history of instability and 30 military coups. It was there that Haiti's independence was proclaimed January 1, 1804. In 1985, the city also saw the first revolt against Jean-Claude Duvalier, which ultimately led to that dictator's downfall in February, 1986. "Right now I can't tell you where this is all going to go, but it doesn't look good," said Alex Dupuy, a sociologist who has written extensively on Haiti at Wesleyan University. "The opposition, in my view, is not acting in the interests of the Haitian people. But Aristide isn't acting in their interests either."

BBC 8 Feb 2004 Police killed in Haiti city riot The rebels say they are planning to seize more territory At least three police officers have been killed in bloody fighting with militants on the streets of Haiti's fourth largest city. Rebels seized Gonaives two days ago in a challenge to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A column of up to 150 police special forces rolled into the city in a bid to re-establish control on Saturday. Unconfirmed local reports said rebels claim to have killed up to 14 of the officers in street ambushes. The authorities had vowed to restore order after clashes with the gunmen, who set fire to a police station on Thursday and freed about 100 prisoners. The US embassy released a statement condemning the earlier violence in Gonaives, in which at least 10 people died. It said it backed efforts by the Caribbean leaders to mediate the crisis. 'Protecting civilians' Dozens of people have died in anti-government protests over the last few months in Haiti. But correspondents say the latest escalation in tension is the most serious challenge to Mr Aristide yet. He has faced a growing opposition campaign calling for his resignation. Haiti's Secretary of State for Communications Mario Dupuy said the latest police operation was aimed at "protecting the civilian population". "Those who are responsible will be punished," he warned. Opposition fears President Aristide has offered to hold elections but insists he will serve out his second term in office, which ends in 2006. Opposition groups are calling for the president's resignation, saying he stole the 2000 election that returned him to power and are accusing him of corruption and human rights violations. The mainstream opposition is trying to present itself as a viable alternative to Mr Aristide and does not back the uprising in Gonaives. The BBC's Nick Caistor says they are concerned that groups such as those which took over Gonaives are little more than armed gangs without any defined political beliefs. The rebels in the city are former members of the pro-government Cannibal Army militia, who turned against Mr Aristide after one of their leaders was murdered. Many local observers feel that the worst outcome for Haiti would be for President Aristide to be thrown out of office without any credible political force to fill the void.

AFP 10 Feb 2004 Police retake three towns from Haiti rebels by Dominique Levanti PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 10 (AFP) - Haitian police retook three towns from rebels battling Jean Bertrand Aristide as the political opposition on Tuesday distanced themselves from the fighting that has left at least 42 dead in five days. The United Nations warned meanwhile that the impoverished Caribbean nation faces a major humanitarian crisis. Prime Minister Yvon Neptune briefly toured Grand-Goave after police backed by helicopters brought it back under government control late Monday, media reported. A supporter of the ruling Lavalas party was killed on a road outside Grand Goave when police tried to separate rival pro- and anti-government demonstrators, a witness said. That brought the death toll to 42 since Thursday when rebels took over much of the northern city of Gonaives. Neptune also went to St Marc which was taken back by police after a day of armed clashes between rival opposition groups. Armed assailants attacked police in the smaller town of Dondon but police and armed supporters of the government regained control by late Monday after nine houses were torched and at least two people wounded, local radio reported. Armed local insurgents took over about a dozen towns after the the Gonaives attack and took up opposition demands that Aristide stand down. One opposition leader Andre Apaid late Monday blamed elected Aristide for the violence, calling him "a dictator and a despot." Aristide has been ruling by decree since the country was left without a functioning legislature last year because parliamentary elections have not been held. The populist priest turned president has promised polls within six months, but not set a date. He has also vowed to remain in office until the end of his term in 2006. Aristide has accused the opposition political groups of favoring a coup d'etat against him but opposition parties distanced themselves from the armed opposition. "We distinguish the popular movement we support demanding the deprture of Jean Bertrand Aristide from armed rebels with whom we do not identify ourselves," socialist Micha Gaillard, a prominent opposition political figure, told AFP. "We are sticking to our peaceful strategy because the solution can only be peaceful and unnarmed," he added. The United Nations warned Tuesday that a "major humanitarian crisis" is looming in Haiti. "The insecurity and violence make us fear a major humanitarian crisis," said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator in Geneva. Byrs warned that the fighting was holding up hampering food deliveries around Gonaives. "The villages in the north are those that have been most affected by hunger and are the poorest," she said. Power has been cut since Monday in Cap-Haitien in the north, Haiti's second city, and no cars were on the streets Tuesday as there was no gasoline. Several informal lottery stands and a restaurant belonging to presumed anti-government activists were burned by armed men. In Port-au-Prince, two people were wounded in gunfire after a group opened fire seeking revenge for the killing Sunday of a police officer who was close to them. US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on Monday accused the Aristide administration of contributing to the violence. The United States sent 20,000 troops to Haiti in 1994 to bring Aristide back to power after he was ousted in a coup. He stepped down after a five-year term and was reelected in 2000. Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham condemned the violence and supported international efforts by the Organization of American States and the Caribbean Community to mediate between Aristide and the opposition

AFP 13 Feb 2004 Suriname mulls ICC, US immunity deal, PARAMARIBO President Ronald Venetiaan said Thursday Suriname is keen to sign on to the International Criminal Court, but may grant US citizens immunity to prosecution at the ICC. "The government will study the options for Suriname and decide if and how a possible bilateral agreement with the US will be," Venetiaan told reporters. Suriname is mulling a deal to exempt US citizens from prosecution before the ICC in The Hague. The South American country could lose a vital 1.6 million dollars in US military aid this year if it does not sign the so-called Article 98 exemption. Joint US-Suriname military exercises are also planned later this year. Washington has signed pacts with at least 65 other countries, which have guaranteed not to surrender Americans to the ICC to face charges for warcrimes or crimes against humanity. The US has threatened to scrap military aid to countries that refused to sign immunity deals. Suriname foreign minister Marie Levens has said the country will sign up to the ICC in The Hague, even if it meant US aid would be cut off. Leaders of the 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM) agreed in July that member countries would ratify the ICC treaty but are free to enter into bilateral agreements with the United States based on legal advice.

Telegraph UK 24 Feb 2004 Massacre fear as Haiti rebels close in By Marcus Warren in Port au Prince and Robin Gedye Haitian opposition groups attacked a police station on the outskirts of the capital yesterday in what appeared to be the first sign of militants moving on Port-au-Prince after taking the country's second city. Rebel leader Guy Philippe hugs his men after capturing Cap-Haitien The capture of Cap-Haitien on Sunday will have given rebels the confidence to aim for the largest and by far the most difficult prize, a move that prompted America to send 50 marines to protect its embassy in Port-au-Prince. Rifles at the ready and dressed in full combat gear, the marines rushed off their transport plane and adopted firing positions around its perimeter, before moving on to the US embassy, which is already protected by 15-ft walls and roadblocks. It was a far cry from the Pentagon's intervention in the turbulent Caribbean state a decade ago, when more than 20,000 troops launched a huge exercise in nation-building and reinstalled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The former priest still occupies the presidential palace but this time, with the belief that Haiti's chaos is largely the result of his misrule, there is no desire to come to his aid. The United Nations was last night reported to be ordering its staff to leave and America and France have also urged their citizens to do so as soon as possible. The Red Cross warned of an imminent breakdown in public services and said they were struggling to keep pace with the 30 to 50 people being injured each day. The capture of Cap-Haitien by a rebel force of 200, many of them masked, put anti-Aristide forces in control of much of the north. Witnesses said heavy gunfire rattled through the streets of the city and columns of smoke rose from at least two buildings when the rebels took control of the airport and chased poorly trained police from the city. Joking and relaxed, a rebel leader said his comrades would soon take over the rest of the country. "We will liberate Haiti from the slavery of Aristide," said Louis Jodel Chamblain, the former leader of a militia group that terrorised Haitians in the early 1990s. "So far, the only resistance we've encountered has been with machetes," said Chamblain, who was surrounded by about 50 rebel fighters dressed in military fatigues, some of them armed with automatic rifles. The relative ease with which the rebels took Cap-Haitien heightened fears of an imminent attack on Port-au-Prince, where Mr Aristide still has a large reserve of support. Diplomats gave warning that victory on the streets would not automatically translate into political legitimacy. "We will not accept them taking power in Port-au-Prince," one diplomat said. "If they prove successful, they will be unable to substitute military victory for a political solution." The capital was outwardly calm yesterday but presented a very different face from that it normally displays for the Mardi Gras carnival. Instead of revellers filling the city with music and dancing, only sullen groups of youngsters turned out for the festivities, and they only in small numbers..

Seattle Post Intelligencer, WA 1 Feb 2004 seattlepi.nwsource.com OPINION Focus: U.S. sabotages international court at its own peril By DAVID H. SCHEFFER FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR AT LARGE Justice remains elusive for the millions of victims of atrocity crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the worst human catastrophe in recent years still plagues the heart of Africa. Yet if the Bush administration continues to oppose and undermine the work of the newly established International Criminal Court, which is focusing its initial research on the Congo, the task of achieving any accountability in the genocidal regions of the world will be even more unlikely than it is today. The president of the International Criminal Court, Judge Philippe Kirsch of Canada, visited Seattle and other American cities recently to explain why his court merits American support. As the lead American negotiator for the court during the Clinton administration, I hope the court's critics listened to Kirsch. He is a friend of the United States and knows well our angst about the court. But Kirsch also understands how vitally important this new permanent court (with its 92 member states that span our rosters of allies and friends) is for the cause of justice in far distant corners of the world where atrocities rage. The American people can be proud of our contributions to international justice over the past decade, particularly U.S. support for the international criminal tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda and the "hybrid" courts (with international and domestic judges, prosecutors and defense counsel) in Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone and soon in Cambodia. That support has been more problematic under the Bush administration, which greatly fears exposure of high government or military officials to judicial accountability and wants to close down international tribunals as quickly as possible. The war on terror has heightened those concerns as we deploy high-tech military firepower and thousands of soldiers in controversial operations overseas. The White House has reversed America's once cautious support for the permanent International Criminal Court into a policy of destructive disengagement grounded in fear. The Bush team nullified Clinton's authorized signature to the treaty setting up the court. It signed an odious law punishing many nations that support the court and directing the president to use military force to liberate any American detained for trial there. It also launched a worldwide campaign to commit all governments to protect any American (including any mercenaries) from the court's reach and bludgeoned other nations on the United Nations Security Council to immunize American personnel in U.N.-authorized actions from any possible surrender to the court. The foreign perception of American actions to undermine the ICC is that the United States has become an intimidated nation when faced with the prospect of effectively enforcing atrocity law that punishes the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes. In contrast, our unrivaled military power makes us the intimidator nation confronting evil regimes. Our decisive actions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq have ended massive atrocities in those countries. The issue with the ICC is not whether we are justified in taking these actions. Nor does the court restrain us from employing the safeguards offered by the court's treaty. I negotiated them and am gratified to see the administration invoking explicit articles of a treaty it despises as the basis for protecting American personnel. (It is ironic that the new statute of the Iraqi Special Tribunal for Crimes against Humanity, which the United States oversees as the occupying power, replicates many of the provisions in the criminal court treaty.) The real problems are the purpose for which we invoke those safeguards, the strategy we use to obtain them and whether we overreach. In recent years we have fed the impression that ours is a nation wedded to impunity for our military actions in a very dangerous but progressively democratic and atrocity-weary world. As a result, we have lost our leadership role in achieving accountability for atrocities. If any administration in Washington, D.C., were to engage in the kind of governmental planning required to commit genocide or to launch systematic or widespread criminal assaults on civilian populations or to order a large-scale commission of war crimes -- the high thresholds required by the ICC -- then the Constitution and our moral compass would be in peril. To stand intimidated before an international court we helped build to bring the real perpetrators of atrocity crimes to justice because we fear the unthinkable in our own government is the height of folly. To stand intimidated for fear of inevitable but groundless politically motivated charges against the United States mocks the integrity of the court's judges and prosecutor and our successful efforts to build due process and discipline into the court's treaty. To fear for the Constitution in the court's design is a red herring. The Bush administration has negotiated scores of so-called "Article 98 agreements" with other countries (though only a limited number have been ratified in foreign capitals), which would have the effect of preventing any American held by the other country from being surrendered to the ICC. We successfully negotiated Article 98 in the treaty, preserving the core principle of the nearly 100 military status-of-forces agreements the United States has with other countries. The principle is that the nation that sent military forces deployed on foreign soil -- the "sending state" -- retains primary criminal jurisdiction over its soldiers unless it consents to local prosecution. We purposely negotiated the words "sending state" to ensure that Americans sent on official mission overseas -- military, diplomatic, humanitarian -- would retain this important protection. But Article 98 was never intended to protect unofficial actions, such as those taken by mercenaries or others acting without U.S. authority. Other countries agreed and gave us this well-defined protection. What has angered so many overseas is that the Bush administration draws no distinction between official and unofficial actions -- whatever an American does overseas must never reach the international court, regardless of whether he has authority to act. Nor will the administration compromise by pledging in the Article 98 agreements to ensure that any American charged with an atrocity crime indeed would be investigated and, if merited, prosecuted in U.S. courts and under U.S. law. There is also the substantial risk that ICC judges will interpret the American Article 98 agreements as covering only what was originally intended under the treaty, not what Washington wishes such agreements to protect. The Bush administration also has abandoned critical talks still under way to define the crime of aggression and how such a crime might reach the ICC's attention. Although the court's treaty includes aggression as an atrocity crime, the court will not be empowered to investigate and prosecute it until the treaty is amended with a definition that can be used against individual offenders. During the Clinton administration we held the line very effectively to ensure that the drafting of this crime included an acceptable definition and that only the Security Council could trigger it for the court's attention. Aggression is the one crime that other nations may seek to charge our globally deployed military with, regardless of the merits. It is a crime that invites political manipulation to serve the interests of whoever regards any projection of military power to be aggressive. It goes to the heart of why we intervene, not how we intervene. Yet when truly committed, as during World War II and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, its criminal character is undeniable. That is why the weight of our influence in talks over the trigger and definition of aggression is so critical. We do not have to be a ratified party to the court's treaty to participate in those talks. Ironically, however, if the United States were to ratify the ICC treaty by 2009, when the crime of aggression can first be introduced as an amendment to the treaty, it could "opt out" of the application of the crime of aggression to itself. We successfully negotiated that protection in the treaty, and yet the Bush team seems intent on sacrificing it at extreme risk to our military forces. The rebuttal -- that the court must not exercise any jurisdiction over any country's citizens if that country is not party to the treaty (at least under most circumstances) -- has a long history of debate. I believe that debate can be resolved with well-intentioned pragmatic efforts by Washington and the court's supporters around the world. But the Bush administration is at war with this court and has poisoned the well. We now take an enormous risk by arrogantly arguing what so many others dispute, rather than use all the privileges and protections the treaty offers in order to assume leadership of the court's work. There is one important initiative that both supporters and critics of the ICC should agree upon. We spent years drawing from well-established international law to properly define genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes for the court's jurisdiction. Yet U.S. federal and military law remains surprisingly antiquated in reference to such crimes. Since the ICC defers to national courts for investigation and prosecution (a major safeguard we negotiated in the treaty), the United States must be able to prosecute all such crimes or risk being held incapable of doing so. Major parties to the court, such as the United Kingdom, Canada,1 Germany, France and Australia, have amended their criminal codes to enable them to litigate all these crimes. Ironically, they now stand more protected from the court's reach than does the United States. Finally, we should encourage the new Iraqi court that prosecutes Saddam Hussein and his colleagues to invite onto its bench one of the underemployed judges from the ICC, partly to demonstrate the integrity of the judges elected to the international court. Most important, the United States should propose that the Security Council refer the Congo atrocities to the ICC for vigorous investigation, an initiative that would put the full enforcement power of the council behind the court's work. Can we dare deny the millions who have died and suffered in the Congo their right to justice? David H. Scheffer is visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center and the former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues.

www.toledoblade.com 1 Feb 2004 2 Tiger Force vets urge Army inquiry By MICHAEL D. SALLAH and MITCH WEISS BLADE STAFF WRITERS For Rion Causey, it has been 37 years since he watched soldiers herd Vietnamese families against thatched huts before opening fire. Thirty seven years since he saw soldiers lob grenades into a bunker where women and children hid for safety. Thirty seven years since he counted the corpses. After reading The Blade’s series last year of the Tiger Force’s rampage across the Central Highlands, he did something he debated for years: call the Pentagon. But three months after offering his testimony to the Army about the war crimes he saw as a medic in 1967, he’s still waiting to talk to investigators. The 56-year-old nuclear engineer is one of two witnesses to contact the Army since The Blade’s series, "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths," revealed the platoon’s actions - the longest series of atrocities by a fighting unit in the Vietnam War. Now, a leading human rights group and an Ohio congressman are urging the Army to interview the former soldiers. Amnesty International will ask the Defense Department to meet with the witnesses, saying the atrocities are among the worst to emerge from reports about the Vietnam War in years. Last week, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D., Cleveland) wrote acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee, urging the Army to talk to the witnesses and conduct an investigation. "Two veterans, both witnesses to atrocities, simply want to have their stories investigated by the Army and to find out why the Army failed to take action," Mr. Kucinich said. The effort to bring the witnesses forward is the latest development in a case that has gained international attention since the newspaper series was published between Oct. 19 and 22. A Vietnamese provincial official is tracing the movements of Tiger Force through the Central Highlands in 1967 to determine the whereabouts of thousands of civilians missing since the war. The U.S. Army agreed to review the case in late October, but has yet to interview witnesses. The Blade series showed at least 81 unarmed civilians - men, women and children - were killed by platoon members between May and November, in some cases as villagers prayed for their lives. But based on interviews with former soldiers and civilians, the platoon is estimated to have slain hundreds of unarmed villagers. The newspaper found the Army conducted a 41/2 -year investigation beginning in 1971 - the longest war crimes inquiry of the Vietnam conflict - substantiating 20 atrocities involving 18 soldiers. But after reaching the Nixon White House, the case was quietly dropped in 1975 with no one charged. A member of the platoon for six months in Vietnam, Mr. Causey said he watched as the unit broke the rules of war. He contends that commanders who oversaw the unit - part of the 101st Airborne Division - knew of the atrocities, and, in some cases, encouraged the attacks to help boost what was known as "body count," the term used to count dead enemy soldiers. "It was out of control," said Mr. Causey, who now resides in California. "You don’t tolerate things like that. "I still want to see those officers called on the carpet. They have yet to answer to what happened, and that’s wrong." Another witness who has stepped forward since The Blade series said he has written to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command to talk about the executions of civilians by Tiger Force. "I saw it with my own eyes," said Dennis Stout, a former Army journalist, 58, who was assigned to cover Tiger Force in July, 1967, for the military newspaper, The Screaming Eagle. "I’ll never forget what I saw. I’ve lived with this for a long time." He and Mr. Causey describe a platoon that was systematically targeting unarmed villagers in the Quang Ngai and Quang Nam provinces - some of the soldiers severing ears and scalps for souvenirs. Mr. Stout, now a Phoenix contractor, said he watched Tiger Force soldiers round up 35 women and children and execute them in a rice paddy in the Song Ve Valley in July. Mr. Causey said he counted as many as 120 civilians killed during a bloody, 33-day stretch in October and November northwest of Chu Lai. "We would call on the radio to say that we found nine people in a hootch, and we would ask what we were supposed to do with them, and word would come back, ‘Kill them.’ So, we lined them up against the hootch, and shot them.’’ After the war, records show Army agents searched unsuccessfully for Mr. Causey in 1973 during the military investigation of Tiger Force. Mr. Causey said he still struggles with the memories of the massacres 37 years ago - one of the reasons he wants to talk to investigators. "I called them twice after reading the series before I got a call back from a colonel, who told me they were going to send a warrant officer to talk to me. That was three months ago." Mr. Stout said he wrote the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command Jan. 23, but has not yet been interviewed. "I’m here to tell them what went wrong," said Mr. Stout. "I’m here to tell them how things went out of control. I saw it from the ground. "I’ll bet there are hundreds if not thousands of papers written by captains and colonels on how we can avoid military atrocities and what we can do to keep civilians from being killed. But there’s probably very little from enlisted people - privates and sergeants - and, unfortunately, that’s where it all starts." Forty-three former Tiger Force soldiers were interviewed by The Blade as part of the series, with 10 admitting to killing unarmed women and children in what were clear violations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and U.S. military law. Several said they regretted their actions. Curt Goering, senior deputy executive director of Amnesty International, said last week his organization, which monitors human-rights violations, will raise the Tiger Force case with U.S. Defense Department officials later this year. "It’s important that the government take this seriously, and if it doesn’t, it’s a great dereliction of duty," he said. "The last thing you want to do in light of these revelations - and these are serious - is to sweep them under the rug." He said representatives of the human rights organization will ask the military to expand its review of the Tiger Force case by interviewing witnesses. "This is absolutely appropriate." He said the case is one of many issues Amnesty International will bring to the government’s attention at a series of meetings later this year. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command has repeatedly refused to comment on the review, which consists of comparing The Blade’s series with the records of the investigation from three decades ago. In previous interviews, Joe Burlas, an Army spokesman, said some former soldiers could still be charged since there’s no statute of limitations for murder. William Eckhardt, the prosecutor in the My Lai massacre case in which Army soldiers were accused of slaughtering 504 Vietnamese villagers in 1968, said the military should talk to the former soldiers. "We can learn from My Lai and Tiger Force," said Mr. Eckhardt, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. "They serve a purpose. It’s important to examine what happened so the Army doesn’t make the same mistakes - especially with our forces in Iraq. What Tiger Force did was inexcusable. You can’t kill civilians. That’s just wrong." Mr. Kucinich said the Army needs to take the case more seriously and move beyond a "paper review." He said he will press for hearings on the Tiger Force case before the House’s national security, emerging threats, and international relations subcommittee, on which he is the ranking Democrat. "These individuals are in the right, since there is no statute of limitations for the war crimes of torturing and murdering civilians," he said. "The Army’s refusal to speak with them is regrettable. I am hopeful that public attention will help persuade the Army to improve its conduct in this case." Dr. Joseph Nevins, a Vassar College professor who studies international atrocities, said the American military has tried in the past "to bury these kinds of cases," but that there is a "danger in doing so." "What Tiger Force shows is that these atrocities did happen, and it wasn’t just My Lai. What we’ve tried to do is to forget that this happened in Vietnam, and to say My Lai was [the exception]. We need to learn from this. We definitely don’t need to just move on."

NYT 1 Feb 2004 [excerpt] THE PUBLIC EDITOR All the News That's Fit to Print? Or Just Our News? By DANIEL OKRENT THIS week, it's time for some journalism heresy. I'd like to suggest that newspapers with aspirations to greatness - like the one you're holding in your hands - learn to be generous to their rivals, and in the process provide value for their readers. It has long been Times policy to credit other news organizations for their scoops: "Such and so was first reported Monday in 'The Daily Bugle.' '' It has even longer been part of the paper's genetic code never to let someone else's scoop lie unmassaged by Timesian hands. "What can we add?'' goes the editors' refrain. Sometimes - often - that works. Sometimes, though, the effort at addition becomes, for the reader, an act of subtraction. In the last several weeks, three stories launched elsewhere have been either diminished or disregarded by The Times. (Of course, among major news organizations, this not-invented-here attitude is no more exclusive to The Times than are commas.) In each case, the effort to maintain a high level of what people around here call "competitive metabolism'' has not served the readers well. Last October, The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, published a series of articles revealing that "members of a platoon of American soldiers known as Tiger Force slaughtered an untold number of Vietnamese civilians over a seven-month period in 1967.'' The series was the product of 10 months of research conducted on two continents and in seven states. When the Blade series broke, The Associated Press sent out a story summarizing its findings. Many newspapers picked up the A.P. report; some, including the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, put it on the front page. In the Times newsroom, Roger Cohen, who was foreign editor at the time, thought it an important story, but, he recalls, he was "focused on Iraq'' and "did not give it the attention it deserved.'' National editor Jim Roberts tried to get something rolling that the paper could call its own, but reporters who knew their way around the Pentagon were otherwise engaged. Editors felt that running 10 inches of A.P. copy would not represent the story fairly. In The New Yorker of Nov. 10, Seymour Hersh, who as a young reporter broke the story about the massacre at My Lai, praised the Blade series, noting along the way that the four major networks and most major newspapers had all but ignored it. Hersh's article provoked The Times's executive editor, Bill Keller, to order up a lengthy piece on The Blade's discoveries. John Kifner's "Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories,'' which sought to place the Blade series in historical perspective, finally ran on Dec. 28 - a report on a two-month-old story about events that took place 37 years ago. The Blade's publisher and editor in chief, John Robinson Block, felt that The Times's late weigh-in, which included a sizable helping of the skepticism that re-examination will almost inevitably provoke, was an insult to his paper and its reporters. Keller told me that if his own staff had developed the Blade series, he would have put it on the front page. Yet at least partly because it was someone else's, it ended up diminished, delayed and, in some eyes, devalued. . . .The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. The public editor's column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

Richmond Palladium Item, Indiana 1 Feb 2004 www.pal-item.com Students sharpen world view during mock U.N. assembly Earlham College: Matters with Iraq, Middle East take center stage at 2-day event By Bill Engle Staff writer At a glance Students from nine Indiana and Ohio high schools attended the ninth annual Earlham College Model United Nations Friday and Saturday. Students represented various countries during sessions of the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly committees. The event included awards for outstanding delegate/delegation, most favored nation and other committee awards. Young people learned to speak in global voices at Earlham College this weekend. During the ninth annual Earlham College Model United Nations, 140 students from nine Indiana and Ohio high schools conducted mock sessions of the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly committees. However, none of the schools participating were from the area. During the two-day event, students dealt with matters as pressing as the Palestine/Israel crisis, how Iraq can regain its sovereignty, overpopulation and hunger. "It's really been a learning experience,'' said Brinkley Rowe, a freshman from Indian Hill High School in Cincinnati. "They are very specific as to what they want us to talk about and they complement the session with speakers.'' The idea is to encourage the students to explore a more global view by asking them to pair up and represent a specific country. That requires a study of the country and issues facing it today. "We ask the students to try to see the world in another person's eyes, to walk in another's shoes,'' said B. Welling Hall, Earlham professor of politics and international studies and Model U.N. faculty adviser. "And our staff is very international as well.'' Twenty-five Earlham students help with the Model U.N. They are from Egypt, India, Kosovo, Vietnam and Japan. Earlham student Tanyel Cemal, from North Cyprus, is U.N. secretary general. "It's addictive. Once you are involved you just can't get out,'' she said. "Part of it is we are trying to explore the importance of the U.N. to these students.'' "And the U.N. was a part of our lives on a day-to-day basis. That's what we're trying to get across to the students,'' said Ali Mamina, an Earlham student from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was chairman of the Futuristic Security Council. One of Mamina's parents worked for the U.N. and Mamina and fellow family members were evacuated from Rwanda by U.N. troops in 1994 during the genocide that occurred there. Cyprus was under U.N. supervision for years before Cemal was born there. Deepti Chinta and Emily Ehrnschwender from Cincinnati Country Day High School represented North Korea on the committee seeking solutions to terrorism. "It's really enjoyable,'' Chinta said. "At first it's tedious to talk in this format but once you get the hang of it you really feel like you're a part of the U.N.'' "We take it seriously and really go at it, but at the end of the day it's just fun,'' Ehrnschwender said.

ANCA 2 Feb 2004 Gov. Dean Calls for Passage of Genocide Resolution WASHINGTON, DC ? Former Vermont Governor and Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean, in a letter sent today to the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), called on Congress to adopt the Genocide Resolution and criticized President Bush for abandoning his pledge to Armenian Americans that he would properly recognize the Armenian Genocide. "The ANCA joins with Armenian Americans across the country in welcoming Governor Dean's support for the Congressional Genocide Resolution," said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. "We share the Governor's criticism of the Administration, both for blocking this human rights legislation and for abandoning the President's pledge to the Armenian American community that he would properly recognize the Armenian Genocide." In his letter, addressed to ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian, Governor Dean noted his agreement with then Governor Bush?s February 2000 campaign promise that he would "ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people." Citing the broad bi-partisan support for Genocide legislation currently in Congress (H.Res.193 and S.Res.164), Dean observed that the resolutions "would pass tomorrow, except for the fact that President Bush is now pressing Congressional leaders to block this human rights measure for no other reason than that it mentions the Armenian Genocide." He then went on to urge Congress to pass the Genocide Resolution. Click here to read Gov. Dean's statement on the Armenian Genocide http://www.anca.org/anca/pressdocs/Dean_statement.pdf

BBC 2 February, 2004 Unfinished business in Indian country Chris Summers BBC News Online A revolutionary fighting oppression, killed with a bullet in the back of the head by her erstwhile comrades who suspected her of being an informant. Palestine? Northern Ireland? No, this was America's Midwest. Arlo Looking Cloud, accused of killing Anna Mae in 1975 Anna Mae Aquash was an activist with the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was fighting for the rights of the indigenous people of the United States. This week one of her former AIM colleagues goes on trial in Rapid City, South Dakota charged with her murder. The trial of Arlo Looking Cloud, 49, is likely to reopen plenty of old wounds. A second man, John Boy Graham, who allegedly fired the fatal shot, is fighting extradition from Canada. The body of the 30-year-old Micmac Indian was found in a remote corner of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in February 1976. It is claimed she was killed because of rumours she was an FBI informant. 'Exploitation and persecution' In the 1970s a new group was born which was determined to fight proactively for the rights of the Native American people who, it claimed, had been persecuted and exploited for so long by "white" America. AIM took on the mantle of legendary Indian leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Trouble in Indian Country Feb-May 1973: AIM activists besieged at Wounded Knee, South Dakota Jun 1975: Two FBI agents shot dead at Oglala, South Dakota Nov 1975: Anna Mae Aquash goes missing from Denver, Colorado Feb 1976: Anna Mae's body found near Wanblee, South Dakota Apr 1977: Leonard Peltier given two consecutive life sentences for murdering FBI agents. Feb 2004: Arlo Looking Cloud goes on trial accused of killing Anna Mae Who killed Anna Mae? AIM grew rapidly and began to challenge the authority of the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the tame Indian tribal councils who, between them, had run things on the reservations for decades. AIM wanted, among other things, to publicise the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty which ceded a vast swathe of South and North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana to the Lakota (Sioux) people in perpetuity. The treaty was later torn up and Lakotas were given worthless scraps of land to live on. They were also evicted from the sacred Black Hills (Paha Sapa) in South Dakota, when the US Government realised they were a rich source of gold, coal, uranium and molybdenum. Many Lakotas ended up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota which, in the early 1970s, was run as a private fiefdom by a "half-breed" called Dick Wilson. Pine Ridge was the home of the Oglala - one of seven Lakota clans - who descended from Crazy Horse. In an attempt to highlight what they saw as the graft, nepotism and violence of Wilson's regime and to focus attention on the betrayal of the Fort Laramie Treaty, AIM activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee (scene of an infamous massacre of Indians in 1890) in 1973. For 71 days armed AIM supporters were besieged by FBI agents, BIA police and Wilson supporters. Eventually they surrendered after the US Government promised to investigate the corruption. 'Political prisoner' Little was ever done and by the summer of 1975 violence against AIM activists on Pine Ridge was at record levels and the atmosphere was poisonous. The Lakota (Sioux) clans Oglala Brule Hunkpapa Miniconjous Sans Arcs Two Kettles Blackfeet (not to be confused with the Blackfeet tribe from Montana) On 26 June 1975 two FBI agents, Ron Williams and Jack Coler, were killed by AIM gunmen during a shootout near the town of Oglala. Two AIM men, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, were acquitted but another, Leonard Peltier, was given two consecutive life sentences. He continues to protest his innocence from Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas and is considered a political prisoner by AIM. Anna Mae Aquash was suspected of being an FBI informant He has also drawn support from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ann Robinson, the Dalai Lama and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. 'Like the Third world' In September 1975 FBI agents investigating the murder of their colleagues at Oglala raided a property on the nearby Rosebud reservation. Anna Mae was one of several people picked up, although she was later bailed. She jumped bail and headed for California but only got as far as Denver. What happened to her after that remains uncertain. In the quarter of a century since the events on the Pine Ridge reservation life has changed little for the Oglala and the other 4.3 million fellow native Americans. Most reservations are run like Third World countries by tribal elders who act like dictators. Some of them don't even allow freedom of speech Frank King Native Voice Frank King, publisher of the Native Voice newspaper, said: "Most reservations are run like Third World countries by tribal elders who act like dictators. Some of them don't even allow freedom of speech." Mr King, a Lakota who hails from the Rosebud reservation, said many Indians lived in a welfare culture and the Crow Creek reservation in South Dakota had the highest unemployment rate in the US. In December 2000 FBI agents protested against Peltier being pardoned He said alcoholism and obesity were also endemic on most reservations and he blamed it on a "poverty of the mind". "Tribes have come to the point where they have created a business out of being poor and they are just looking for handouts," said Mr King. As for AIM, it has become fractured between different factions and Mr King said: "The main AIM is a federally-funded charity with a board of directors and they're always looking for money. It's just lost the spirit of the thing."

Sacramento Bee, CA 2 Feb 2004 sacbee.com. Tribe seeking jackpot - But hopes for casino hinge on struggle for Plymouth-area land. By Steve Wiegand -- Bee Staff Writer - (Published February 2, 2004) PLYMOUTH -- History students might note some ironic symmetry in American Indians asking the residents of a place called Plymouth to allow the Indians to establish an enterprise in their midst. The locals, however, aren't laughing. Many, if not most, of them see the proposal by the Ione Band of Miwok Indians to build a casino and hotel at the southern edge of town as the precursor to a modern-day version of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: Crime, Traffic Congestion, Pollution and Diminished Lifestyle. "Building an Indian casino in this community would be an absolute tragedy," said Elida Malick, a veterinarian and one of the leading opponents of plans to build a casino and hotel complex on Plymouth's main drag. "An absolute tragedy." Tragic or not, variations of the Plymouth saga are becoming more common around California as Indian tribes without casinos -- and without land to put them on -- seek an economic base for their governments. "We've waited a long time," said Matt Franklin, chairman of the 535-member Ione Band. "I guess you could say we want our piece of the pie." It's a pie of considerable proportions. There are 54 Indian casinos in the state, producing estimated annual revenues of between $4 billion and $6 billion. But that leaves 55 federally recognized California tribes that don't have casinos and at least three dozen Indian groups that are seeking formal federal recognition as tribes -- and potentially, a chance at opening a casino. "Are we reaching a saturation point?" asked Deron Marquez, chairman of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, which operates a successful casino near San Bernardino. "I don't know. I think that's a question only the market will answer." For tribes such as the Ione Band of Miwok, however, there are problems beyond carving out a piece of the casino market, problems such as finding a piece of land on which to put a casino. Like many California tribes, the Ione Band was formed in 1915 when the federal government gathered up Indians who had survived 146 years of genocide and disease and arbitrarily assigned them to tribes based on geography rather than cultural ties. Although a land base was promised each group, some tribes never received any land. Others gave up their land in the 1950s and 1960s when the federal government terminated tribes as sovereign entities in an effort to cut costs and coerce Indians into assimilation. Various court and governmental decisions have restored many of the tribes to recognized status -- the Ione Band was re-recognized in 1994 -- but recognition often came without real estate. That presents no little dilemma for landless tribes that want to open casinos -- there are now about two dozen around the state -- because of provisions in the 1988 federal law that governs tribal gambling. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act requires that a tribe seeking to build a casino on land it didn't own before 1988 must have a federal court ruling in its favor, an act of Congress or approval from both the secretary of the interior and the governor. The Ione Band of Miwok, which wants the federal government to take 215 acres on the southern edge of Plymouth into trust for it, meets none of those requirements. "Being a landless tribe is very difficult," Chairman Franklin said. "We have to go above and beyond to convince all these levels of federal government and then the governor that we are entitled to this land." Nicholas Villa isn't convinced. The leader of a group of about 50 Indians he calls the "traditional" Band of Ione Miwok, Villa contends that Franklin and his supporters belonged to a disbanded tribe from Wilton in south Sacramento County that failed to win re-recognition in the 1990s. According to Villa, the Franklin group colluded with a tribal member who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to "steal" a a tribal election in 1996. "The government didn't have the authority to do what they did (in recognizing Franklin's group)," Villa said. "We are the historical tribe ... and we're opposed to a casino in Plymouth." But Villa also acknowledges that after losing both the election and a subsequent legal challenge, he has little recourse beyond seeking congressional help to reclaim the tribe. "There is no due process for us," he said. "We really don't have anywhere to go." Franklin counters that each member of his tribe can prove his or her legal right to belong, that the tribe's council was democratically elected and that Villa's complaints are so many sour grapes. "Any tribe that is dealing with a casino has to deal with a tribal faction," Franklin said. "That's just a fact of life." Another fact of life is that the state and federal governments put great store in what the locals think about a landless tribe's casino plans. "I've always been, and I know the governor has been, sensitive to the interests of local communities," said Daniel Kolkey, the Schwarzenegger administration's chief negotiator on Indian gambling compacts. "And that requires, at a minimum, consultation and agreements between the tribes and those local communities." That may bode ill for casino prospects in Plymouth, a town that meanders along a stretch of Highway 49 and is home to about 1,000 people. "I like things the way they are around here," said Kevin Cranford, floor manager at the Plymouth True Value Hardware and Feed Supply, "so I don't like the casino." Cranford's place of employment sits opposite the proposed casino site, presently occupied by a modest motel. The tribe's plans call for a 120,000-square-foot complex, half of which would be taken up by the casino. The rest would house a tribal administration center and retail shops. Eventually, the tribe would build a 250-room hotel and conference center. No one questions that the complex would have a major impact on Plymouth, where a hefty chunk of the populace lives in tidy mobile home parks and a "Support Our Troops" banner stretches across Main Street. Dick Moody, who is serving as a consultant to the tribe, said the impact would be positive. "The city's going to get help in getting out from under the water and sewer moratorium they are under now and full-time fire protection, which they don't have now," Moody said, "plus 1,200 to 1,500 jobs, which the tribal government has offered to train the people of Plymouth for." Opponents counter that the casino would exacerbate the town's historic water problems -- it once was named "Drytown" -- and increase crime rates, snarl traffic, enhance air pollution and generally disrupt the area's bucolic atmosphere. "We moved here because it had the safety and the friendly community feeling that we wanted for our children," said veterinarian Malick, who moved to Plymouth two years ago from the Bay Area. "At no time did anyone mention a casino." So pervasive is local opposition that an informal survey conducted by the city found 79 percent opposed and the rest undecided. Moreover, a recall effort has been launched against three members of the town's five-member council, because they supported seeking an agreement with the tribe that would pay the city hundreds of thousands of dollars to mitigate casino impacts. "I voted from my heart and my conscience with the betterment of the city in mind," Councilman Rich Martin said in response to the recall, which is scheduled for a May 4 vote. Even if the council majority is replaced, local opposition remains fierce and the Department of the Interior or the governor refuses to sign off on the Plymouth site, the Ione tribe's efforts for a casino will continue. "This is a long process," Franklin said. "We have waited a long time, and the Plymouth site makes sense for everyone ... but if it doesn't work out for some reason, OK. I guess we would just look somewhere else." And history students who put any stock in names might note the possibilities for irony in Plymouth's original name. Pokerville.

www.palmbeachdailynews.com 2 Feb 2004 Author: Crusades warriors relevant By WILLIAM KELLY, Daily News Staff Writer Monday, Feb. 2, 2004 — The Holy Land is a fiercely contested battlefield between Christians and Muslims who slaughter one other in the name of their respective gods. But this blood-soaked conflict that author James Reston Jr. writes about in his book Warriors of God (Doubleday, $27.50) occurs not in our age but the latter years of the 12th century. Reston's account of the Third Crusade is a biography of two legendary warriors, King Richard I of England, known as the Lionheart, who set out to conquer Jerusalem from the Arabs, and the Sultan Saladin, who successfully defended it. Reston, the author of 12 books, told a Prologue Society audience at the Northern Trust Bank last week that, given the jihad in the Middle East today, he found the topic of the Third Crusade irresistible. "I would have a story that not only entertains, it would have relevance," Reston said. "I knew it would be epic in scope." Reston's book, published in April 2001, took on new life after the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and is now published in paperback and in 10 languages, including Arabic. At the time of the Christian Crusades, the boundaries of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were roughly equivalent to those of modern Israel, Reston said. The kingdom lasted 82 years. Muslims had held Jerusalem since 638 but Christians had been permitted pilgrimages to their Holy Land. That changed in the 11th century when the city was taken over by the Seljuk Turks, who prohibited the pilgrimages. The crusader movement lasted more than 200 years. In the First Crusade led by Pope Urban II, Christians seized Jerusalem in 1099 from a divided Arab world, then established a network of fortresses to defend the territory. "The massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem, and Christian crusaders pounding over the walls is intensely remembered" by Arabs today, Reston said. The Sultan Saladin, hero of the Islamic world, unified the Arabs, whose empire reached from modern Libya to Russia. His forces captured Jerusalem in the battle of Hattin in 1187, which marked the beginning of the Third Crusade. "The battle is considered the greatest victory in Arab history," Reston said. In the Third Crusade, which lasted until 1192, King Richard I, who grew up in the romantic court of Eleanor of Aquitaine in France, resolved to recapture Jerusalem. Both were great warriors, but it was Saladin's iron will that ultimately prevailed. Richard raised an army that battled the Arabs to the outskirts of the city before his sudden failure of nerves stopped him at the gates and turned the tide in favor of the Arabs. The two great leaders respected one another, and Richard the Lionheart is a hero to the Arab people because he made peace with Saladin, Reston said. Today the Arabs view the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as an "unnatural circumstance," Reston said. They are forever waiting for another Saladin to come along and take up their cause, he said. "It is said that Osama bin Laden has a son named Saladin to whom he will someday turn over his struggle," Reston said. But "bin Laden is not a Saladin, but a cult leader and a mass murderer. Saladin recoiled at the death of innocents."

Grand Junction Sentinel, CO 8 Feb 2004 Holocaust survivor to tell story of genocide By DANIE HARRELSON The Daily Sentinel Don’t tell Joseph Kempler one of history’s most horrific genocides never happened. The horrors the Polish Jew experienced during the Holocaust are as real to him today as they were in 1945, when Allied forces liberated him after two years in Nazi concentration camps. “Some people say it never happened, but I was there, and with my own eyes I saw people do unimaginable things to other people,” he said. Kempler will share his story of survival with students in Western Colorado, beginning with Grand Junction High School on Monday. Presentations to students at Central and Palisade high schools are scheduled Tuesday. Kempler’s Western Colorado tour runs through Feb. 20 with stops in Rifle, Aspen, Hotchkiss, Paonia, Carbondale and Basalt. The public is invited to hear his story at 6 p.m. Monday in the Saccomanno Lecture Hall at Mesa State College. Kempler was a teenager when Nazis sent him to Plaszow concentration camp in July 1943. Freedom came two years and four camps later. Kempler, who weighed 60 pounds when Allied forces found him, recalls seeing a small child shortly after his liberation. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “After what I’d been through, I couldn’t imagine there were any children left in the world.” Most of Kempler’s family did not survive the Holocaust. A family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Poland hid his sister, and she lived. The memories of Nazi brutality remain fresh, but Kempler prefers to tell his audiences about the lessons he took from the nightmare rather than describe the nightmare. He hopes his listeners appreciate what he observed in the most inhumane conditions — courage and perseverance. “The most important thing is to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “Each person has a choice and a responsibility to make sure hatred doesn’t win out.” Kempler’s presentation at Mesa State is free. Contact Kip Koski at (970) 963-2098 for information about his speaking schedule.

AP 17 Feb. 2004 Disputed genocide figures in settlement By Greg Risling LOS ANGELES - Martin Marootian displayed a grainy, black-and-white photograph taken in 1905 that shows 10 family members and friends. He pointed out that eight were killed a decade later in what Armenians contend was an act of genocide by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Among them was his uncle, Setrak Cheytanian, and ever since then the family has been trying to collect death benefits from the uncle's policy with New York Life Insurance Co. Their ordeal may finally be over. Last month, Marootian was among 12 plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit who reached a tentative $20 million settlement with New York Life. On Thursday, a federal judge is expected to decide whether to approve the agreement. Marootian, 88, had hoped the agreement -- believed to be the first ever in connection with the often disputed massacre, and open to claims from survivors worldwide -- would bring more recognition to a catastrophe that hasn't been acknowledged by the United States. "If we hadn't done this, many Armenians would have been left out in the cold," he said. "At least this way they are getting some money." However, some Armenian-Americans believe the agreement shortchanges the entire community. "It's a Band-Aid on a bullet wound," said Ardy Kassakhian, executive director of the western region offices of the Armenian National Committee of America. "It's a very emotional subject for many Armenians." "For $20 million, they are buying silence and goodwill," said Harut Sassounian, publisher of the California Courier, a weekly newspaper serving the estimated 100,000 Armenians in Southern California. A full-page ad in the Courier urged readers to call for a jury trial that could lead to a larger monetary judgment. New York Life sold about 8,000 policies in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the 1880s, with less than half of those bought by Armenians. The company stopped selling insurance in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The company said it located about one-third of the policyholders' descendants to pay benefits. The rest of the policies languished because the remaining heirs could not be found, company vice president William Werfelman said. "The parties are confident that this is a fair, reasonable and adequate settlement that the judge should feel comfortable approving," he said. The settlement would set aside about $11 million to pay claims by heirs of some 2,400 policyholders. About $3 million would go to Armenian charitable organizations, with the remainder to be used for legal fees and costs. Marootian would receive about $250,000. He was born in New York in 1915 -- the year that Armenians assert the Turkish regime began executing their ancestors for allegedly helping the invading Russian army during World War I. It is estimated that some 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1923. Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, rejects the genocide claim, insisting that Armenians were killed in civil unrest during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. France and Russia are among 15 countries, along with a United Nations human rights panel, that have recognized the genocide. The United States has not made such a declaration.

VOAnews.com 18 Feb 2004 Survivors of Rwanda Genocide, Nazi Holocaust Find Common Ground Jenny Falcon New York 18 Feb 2004 Their stories of survival are terrifying. But a young survivor of the 1994 Rwanda genocide and a Nazi Holocaust survivor are determined to tell youngsters about their painful past in the hopes of preventing such atrocities from happening again. In the process, the two have forged an unlikely friendship based on a bond of suffering. For years, David Gewiritzman has talked to local students and community groups about his experience as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland. A teenager at the time, Mr. Gewirtzman and his family barely escaped death. They survived after his father paid a Polish farmer to hide eight Jews in a small, filthy hole under a pigsty. They huddled there for close to three years. "We came out of what we called the grave into one large cemetery," recalled Mr. Gewirtzman. "A cemetery in which six million Jews and five million non-Jews were massacred and buried all over Europe. In the town, my town, out of the 8,000 Jewish people who lived in the ghetto, 16 came back alive." Mr. Gewirtzman, 75, often receives letters from students he addresses. But two years ago, the retired New York pharmacist received one that touched him deeply. It was from then-16-year-old Jacqueline Murekatete, who had survived the 1994 massacres of minority Tutsis in Rwanda by the majority Hutus. She lost her parents, six siblings and scores of relatives. Ms. Murekatete wrote: "Maybe I can make a difference in this world, if I try. And maybe I can do my part to make sure that no other human being goes through the same experience I did." Ms. Murekatete thanked Mr. Gewirtzman for sharing his story. "I saw so many similarities, how he was going to school one day - a child, like myself - then he was dehumanized, called an enemy of the country, having to see people killed and losing relatives," she said. "I felt a bond and I felt that he understood me and that is how the friendship started." Mr. Gewirtzman wrote back to Ms. Murekatete and they soon began working together. They approach an auditorium of teenagers who are chewing gum and chatting happily with their friends. But it does not take long for the students to listen quietly. "We would see people with torches and machetes and they would come towards the county [village] and every night our neighbors, our former Hutu neighbors, started following us and every night they came and killed people," she told the youngsters. Ms. Murekatete describes her nightmare in detail. She was nine years old and was staying with her grandmother when machete- and gun-wielding Hutu mobs arrived at her parents' village. Ms. Murekatete eventually found refuge in an orphanage, but her grandmother was murdered. After the killings, which left an estimated 800,000 people dead in 100 days, Ms. Murekatete learned that nearly all of her relatives had been butchered to death and were thrown in the river. "I did not understand, being nine years old," she said, "why they had died, why hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been killed for no reason other than the fact that they were Tutsis." She asked how the international community allows genocides to continue, from Cambodia to Rwanda, despite the post-Holocaust pledge to prevent any more mass killings? "The United Nations and other world leaders always say, 'never again, never again,' but so far it has continued to happen and it is up to each and every one of us to make sure that that phrase 'never again' is not just an empty phrase but a reality," said Ms. Murekatete. Mr. Gewirtzman says selfish motives compel him to keep speaking - he wants to make the world a better place for his six grandchildren. He says if he can influence one person to stick up for someone in need of help, then he has succeeded. "When you see a bully in the corridor of your school beating up on somebody and that somebody is not a friend of yours, is not a relative of yours, instead of going away and saying, 'I do not want to get mixed up with that, you do something about it' because if you do not, neither your children nor my children will ever be safe," said Mr. Gewirtzman. The students, some of them stunned and teary-eyed, ask the survivors questions about their escapes. "Before the genocide," asks one, "did you have friends of other religions or ethnic groups and if so how did the genocide impact those relationships?" While most of the students go on to their next class, several stay behind to talk to Jacqueline Murekatete. Another student says, "It's upsetting that the world has let something like this occur and it helps you to think about what you can do about it." During her talk, Ms. Murekatete begins to cry when describing the day she found out that her parents had been murdered. David Gewirtzman says from the beginning, the two survivors understood each others' tears. "It did not matter whether she was from Africa, Asia, Europe, Jewish, Christian, it did not matter," he said. "All of a sudden, there was a blood bond between us. It was our pain that united us. I felt, my God, is that what it takes in order for her and me to unite. Can we not do it without going through the horror that we went through? She really is my sister. As close as other people are to me, as close as neighbors and friends are, they do not understand me the way she does." Ms. Murekatete was adopted by an uncle in the United States, but Mr. Gewirtzman and his wife have taken on a role of grandparents. They invite her to their home for dinner and call to see how she is doing in school. Now a college student in New York, Ms. Murekatete is writing a book about her experience.

Zap2it.com 18 Feb 2004 Production Begins on HBO Genocide Pic (Wednesday, February 18 09:17 AM) LOS ANGELES Director Raoul Peck ("Lumumba") and HBO Films have begun production on "...Sometimes in April," an original project that is described as the first major film to tackle the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The film, which stars Idris Elba (HBO's "The Wire"), Oris Erhuero ("Highlander: Endgame") and Debra Winger ("Terms of Endearment"), is shooting on location. Set in the present day with flashbacks to 1994, "...Sometimes in April" focuses on Rwandan Army officer turned teacher Augustin Muganza (Elba), a man forced to relive the genocide in his mind after receiving a letter from his brother Honori (Erhuero), a former broadcaster on trial at the International Tribunal in Arusha. Winger plays Prudence Bushnell, U.S. State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. HBO produced the English-language version of Peck's acclaimed "Lumumba," which premiered on the network in 2002. "It is a pleasure to be working again with Raoul Peck, whom we feel will accomplish a highly authentic visualization of the events surrounding the Rwandan genocide, shot on location in many of the very locations where the events took place," says HBO Films President Colin Callender. "It is a powerful piece, and the fact that many of the young Rwandans on the production team are survivors is extraordinary." In addition to the location filming in Rwanda, Peck and his crew will also shoot in Paris in March. Currently there are no plans in place for a theatrical run for "...Sometimes in April." Joel Stillerman (HBO's "A Lesson Before Dying") is co-executive producing with Sam Martin as the HBO executive in charge of production.

AP 18 Feb 2004 Today in History - Feb. 19 Today is Thursday, Feb. 19, the 50th day of 2004. There are 316 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History . . . In 1986, the U.S. Senate approved a treaty outlawing genocide, 37 years after the pact had first been submitted for ratification.

AFP 1 Feb 2004 Afghan official and family killed by landmine believed planted for him KABUL, Feb 1 (AFP) - An Afghan official was killed along with his wife and three children when his vehicle ran over a landmine believed to have been planted deliberately for him in south central Uruzgan province, its governor said Sunday. Eight people were killed in all and five injured in the incident on Saturday afternoon, Uruzgan governor Jan Mohammad Khan said. "Yesterday in the late afternoon when the newly-appointed Deh Rawood district chief Khalifa Sadat was on his way back home from bazaar with his family, his vehicle ran over a landmine planted for him near his house," Khan said. "Among the eight killed are his three sons, his two brothers and his wife." Khan said the family had gone shopping for Eid-al-Adha, the three-day Muslim festival of sacrifice which began Sunday, and were returning home when the vehicle hit the explosive device. An investigation had began into the deaths but it was too early to say whether Sadat was targeted by remnants of the ousted Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime or local warlords, or whether the attack was related to a personal dispute, Khan said. Sadat was from an area close to Deh Rawood, he added.

The Age, Australia 2 Feb 2004 Aborigines tell of child sex abuse February 2, 2004 - 10:07AM Horrific rates of child sexual abuse have blighted the Aboriginal community at Cherbourg in south-east Queensland for years, but a group of women spoke out in a desperate appeal for help. Until now, the subject of abuse has been largely ignored for fear of retribution, but the women - many of them grandmothers - put an end to their silence. In a deeply emotional plea, the women appealed to Australia's politicians - both federal and state - to help them deal with a crisis they believe touches more than 80 per cent of children in the 2,000-strong community. In one case, a two-year old girl had contracted syphilis, while other girls had been so severely raped they would never be able to have children. In a written statement released during a meeting with Queensland Opposition leader Lawrence Springborg, the women called for help in dealing with several areas, including in the courts, police, witnesses, pathology and the state's Families Department. "If we cannot grow up our kids better, as is the present situation, our communities will continue to implode and biological genocide will be complete," the statement said. The women said there were currently 27 children involved in sexual abuse legal proceedings, including seven victims and 20 witnesses. Another case, involving 12 victims from a historical charge, was also tied up in the courts. "Some of the crimes are so severe, the children have to be repaired and rebuilt," one woman told the meeting. "We're bringing children into this world to be destroyed." Another woman said: "We want justice as grandmothers because we've buried a lot of our mothers and daughters who went to the grave." Concerned grandmother Esme Fewquandie said without urgently-needed services, people would take the law into their own hands. "Our people are not going to be tolerant for too much longer," Ms Fewquandie said. "Our people are angry about what is happening to the children." Lorian Hayes, who helped establish a task force several months ago to deal with the issue, said she believed at least four out of five children would be sexually abused sometime during their childhood in the community. This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au

BBC 16 Feb 2004 Sydney riots over Aborigine death A number of people have been arrested More than 40 police officers have been injured in Sydney in a riot sparked by the death of an Aboriginal teenager. Angry youths torched a railway station and pelted police with petrol bombs and lumps of concrete in the mainly Aborigine district of Redfern. Thomas Hickey, 17, died after he was impaled on a metal fence when he fell off his bike. Police deny claims he was being chased by officers at the time. There are to be three inquiries into the boy's death and the riot. Four people have been arrested and charged over the riot, which last for nine hours. Police say they expect more arrests to follow. The BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney says this was the worst night of violence in Sydney for years, and will be a setback for race relations. New South Wales State Premier Bob Carr said his government would launch inquiries into the incident to establish how the teenager died and whether there was any police involvement. The three inquiries will be carried out by the state coroner, the police service and a public affairs watchdog. Local anger The riot broke out on Sunday night and continued into the early hours of Monday. Police reinforcements wearing riot gear were drafted in from across Sydney to quell the violence. Eight of the injured officers had to go to hospital. "At this stage one officer was knocked out by a brick that was thrown through the air and a number of others have got broken limbs, legs," Assistant Commissioner Bob Waites told reporters. At the height of the riots, some 100 people were said to have taken to the streets. "They burnt out one vehicle and they in fact were throwing Molotov cocktails both at police and at Redfern railway station during the course of the riot," said Mr Waites. Thomas Hickey's mother said her son was being pursued by police when he fell of his bike and became impaled on a metal fence. The allegation is strongly denied by the police. A local resident, identified only as Donna, told ABC radio that people were angry because they believed the police were responsible for the teenager's death. "He was murdered. We've been down to look at the spot and everything and there's no sign, they cleaned it up that quick," she said. One local community leader accused the police of harassing people who live in a rundown area of housing known as The Block. "You could interview every Aboriginal kid down there that comes from The Block, and the majority will tell you to your face... that they've all been bashed by the police," said Lyle Munro. The area is notorious for drug dealing, with heroin being sold openly in a local park.

Courier Mail AU 19 Feb 2004 'Persecuted' Aussies flee to US By Mark Dunn MORE than 30 Australians have sought asylum in the US. At least two Australians have been granted asylum in America after complaining they faced religious, racial or political persecution in Australia. Four other Australians await the outcome of US asylum applications. Privacy reasons prevent authorities detailing specific arguments used by Australians for asylum, but it is known Aborigines have made official complaints to US diplomatic staff claiming racial persecution in Australia and allegations of genocide. Human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, QC, said the Australian applications came as a shock, but Aboriginal claims of persecution could well be entertained by US immigration courts considering asylum. "I can understand how some Aborigines might complain of a fear of persecution," he said. Between 1997 and 2002, 31 Australian nationals applied for asylum, US Department of Justice figures show. And UK Home Office documents also show Australians have sought asylum, but the Asian region statistics are not broken down to show precisely how many Australians have applied for refuge. While several Australians apply for asylum in the US every year, it is extremely rare for them to succeed. Two Australians were granted asylum in 1999 and 1997. Mr Burnside said Aboriginal issues including land rights and the so-called Stolen Generation might be considered as background in support of a persecution case. "If you see that, the history, it helps explain more recent treatment," Mr Burnside said. "What they have to show is that they genuinely fear persecution." The persecution did not have to be actual, but had to be shown to be genuinely perceived. "These cases come as a bit of a shock to us, because we are inclined to believe we are a very tolerant society," he said. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission said it was unaware of indigenous claims for asylum. High-profile refugee lawyer Eric Vadarlis was also surprised Australians had sought asylum overseas, and said he was "gob-smacked" at least two were successful in the US. "I am extremely surprised. Whatever we say about this country, there is a lot of tolerance generally," Mr Vadarlis said. Most applicants make their claim for asylum once they reach the US or after they have been in the country some time. Under the US system, applicants must persuade immigration officials they are unable to return to Australia "because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion". Australian Civil Liberties Union president John Bennett said real or perceived persecution by police may also lead to asylum applications. "Although Australia is a reasonably fair society, I could see why some people don't feel treated fairly." Falun Gong spokesman Katerina Vereshaka said she was not aware of Australian asylum seekers from her group, but she said some members had been harassed by Chinese officials in Australia. The Foreign Affairs and Immigration departments and the Attorney-General's office said they had no knowledge of the asylum cases.

IPS 7 Feb 2004 (Inter Press Service) UN's Cambodian 'success' in question By Marwaan Macan-Markar BANGKOK - More than a decade after the United Nations claimed as a success story the restoration of democracy in war-ravaged Cambodia, the Southeast Asian country is showing this achievement to be much less than it has been vaunted to be. Democratic processes such as elections are meant to create societies that work for a country's citizens. But more than six months after the third general elections it has had since a 1991 accord brought peace to the country, Cambodia does not have a functioning government. In fact, a key contributor to the deadlock between the three main political parties - the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), the royalist Funcinpec (Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Independent, Neutre, Pacifique, et Cooperatif, or National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia) and the Sam Rainsy Party - is a condition enshrined in the country's democratic constitution. It states that a political party needs a two-thirds majority of seats in the Cambodia's 123-member National Assembly to form a government after a national poll. Because of this high demand - in contrast to the universal practice of political parties needing only a simple majority to rule - the governments formed after the 1993 and 1998 polls were coalitions. Fence-mending among the rival parties would lead to a way out, but the prospect of a political alliance emerging after last year's poll has been shot down by the bitter rivalry between the CPP, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, and the other two main parties. The CPP won 73 seats at the July polls. This week Cambodia's former finance minister, Sam Rainsy, who leads the party that bears his name, revealed during a visit to Bangkok that there had been a slight thaw in the frosty relations. He was quoted by Thursday's Nation newspaper as saying he had dropped his refusal to join Hun Sen in forming a government. Yet he stressed that it would not be easy, since his party and Funcinpec, which have just united under a new political banner called the Alliance of Democrats, have set preconditions for the CPP to meet as part of any political deal. They include changes to the justice system, the electoral process and anti-corruption measures. The two previous elections also gave rise to similar factionalism and signs of incompatibility between the main political parties. The country's 1993 constitution, which was adopted by the parliament shortly after that year's poll, had received the blessing of the United Nations. At that time, the UN had a special mission running the affairs of Cambodia for 18 months as the country embarked on a journey from decades of war to peace. "The two-thirds clause had some validity at that time, because Cambodia was in a process of national reconciliation," said Kao Kim Hourn, executive director of the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, a Phnom Penh-based independent think-tank. "The need then was for consensus-building and bringing Cambodia's many political factions together." But now, Kao asserts, this provision has proved to be more bane than boon. "The clause is no more an asset, but has become a political liability. It has become a problem given the difficulty it poses in us getting a new government after an election." Continuing political violence has also not helped the picture painted by the UN when its special mission left Cambodia in December 1993 - that it had spurred a nation traumatized by genocide, war and occupation to take the path to stability. In a report released this week, the independent Cambodia Human Rights and Development Association (known by its French acronym ADHOC) declared that 2003 was the country's most violent year since the 1998 elections. Thirty-three activists were murdered last year, including 12 from the Sam Rainsy Party, 10 from Funcinpec and 11 from the CPP, the Phnom Penh-based ADHOC revealed in its annual report. Last year also saw anti-Thai riots in January, and the murder of high-ranking officials, a Buddhist monk and a judge, the report added. In addition, Cambodia witnessed attacks on a radio journalist and a popular female singer and, most recently, the murder of its most prominent trade-union leader (see Unionist's killing stirs up hornets' nest, January 27). Today, critics of the world body argue that the United Nations must shoulder some responsibility for Cambodia's troubled times. "The UN has to bear the responsibility for failing to create a viable political environment in Cambodia in the early 1990s," said Sunai Phasuk, analyst at Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human-rights lobby. "The chaos there today is the result of how the UN approached the problem of restoring democracy." The only emphasis was on bringing together the disparate political forces in the country to create stability, said Sunai. "The elections of 1993 and the country's constitution that was adopted soon after were the ways through which the UN sought to achieve that goal." But the United Nations did not "create an enabling environment for the newly imposed democratic culture to grow", added Sunai. "We have been deeply skeptical of the UN's ability when it comes to elections and the political process being introduced to war-ravaged countries." The United Nations will also find it hard to ignore Cambodia's political climate, since the turmoil has created yet another stumbling block to a still unfulfilled mission - the setting up of the UN-backed war-crimes tribunal to prosecute the former leaders of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime (see Cambodia on trial over genocide trial, January 10). Between 1975 and 1979, when the Khmer Rouge ruled the country, more than 1.7 million people died from torture, starvation and illness. After close to five years of at times testy negotiations, UN officials had been hoping that the law to create the special tribunal would be passed soon after last July's election. But as Mu Soc Hua, Cambodia's minister for women's and veteran's affairs, said, "Because of the deadlock, no laws have been passed in the National Assembly." Likewise, she said that because of the absence of a government, the legislative body has not approved the budget for 2004. This reality should give supporters of the United Nations a reason to pause, said Sunai, the human-rights activist. "The timing is appropriate, because of the present calls to get the UN involved in the electoral and democratic process in postwar Iraq." Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC) www.bigpond.com.kh/users/adhoc/

Scotsman UK 22 Feb 2004 scotsman.com Torture museum crumbles into dust ALISON WINWARD IN PHNOM PENH ON THE wall is a grainy photograph of a metal bed frame to which is chained a crumpled heap of bones. Beneath the picture is the bed itself. Nearby are three rooms containing row upon row of black and white photographs of people who all have the same defeated look in their eyes, as if they knew when the camera flashed that they were already dead. The exhibits in Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum are so compelling that their surroundings often go unnoticed. But any visitors who look up at the ceiling will see cracks and holes, and those who look down will see the floor is sinking and the tiles are crumbling to dust. The museum is the most tangible testament Cambodia has to the two million victims of the Khmer Rouge’s murderous regime, masterminded by their leader, Pol Pot. But it is falling apart, taking with it memories that historians and older generations warn must be preserved to avoid such horror ever happening again. The holes in the roofs mean the torrential rains of the Cambodian wet season are washing away the brickwork, riddling the walls with damp and causing irreparable damage to the museum archives. "Parts of the complex are in imminent danger of collapse, and many others will reach that state if they are not renovated promptly," said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DCC), which collects and catalogues evidence on the regime’s atrocities. There were torture centres all over Cambodia, but Tuol Sleng - which means "poisonous hill" - is the best preserved, the country’s most visible reminder of its bloody recent past. The camp was built in 1958 as a high school. But when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the school was converted into the infamous S21 prison and interrogation centre. Between May 1976 and January 1979, an estimated 15,000 adults and 2,000 children were detained in S21 and tortured into confessing ‘crimes’ against the state before being taken to the killing fields for execution. Only seven survived. On arrival, a prisoner - whose ‘crime’ could be that he wore glasses or spoke a second language, which branded him an ‘intellectual’ and therefore a dissident - would be photographed and made to write their life story. Some were held in brick cells, just 80cm wide and two metres long, others were crammed in mass cells on the two upper floors. Prisoners were forbidden to talk to each other, while regulations for people under torture included: "While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all." The Vietnamese soldiers who liberated S21 opened the former prison as a museum and funded it until they withdrew from Cambodia in 1989. The museum was supported by subsequent administrations until the United Nations-supervised elections in 1993. Since then the government has paid the museum’s wages and utility bills, but now says it cannot afford repair and maintenance costs. Museum director Sopheara Chey says he needs less than £200,000 to repair the buildings. "This is our story," said Chey. "And it is for the next generation, for the children who don’t know the Pol Pot regime killed the people like that, that we want this museum to be here for a long time."

BBC 11 Feb 2004 N Korean defector 'held by China' A North Korean man who fled with evidence that prisoners are used to test chemical weapons has been detained by China, a human rights worker said. Kang Byong-sop, 58, was stopped last month in Yunnan province while trying to cross into Laos, Kim Sang-hun said. Mr Kim called on the UK to stop China handing Mr Kang to North Korea, where he faced possible torture or death. Pyongyang has described claims it used political prisoners to test gases for chemical weapons as "US propaganda". Mr Kang was the source of a North Korean document, or letter of transfer, which appeared to authorise chemical weapons testing on political prisoners. China is becoming an accomplice to North Korean crimes Kim Sang-hun Within prison walls The document featured in a BBC documentary broadcast this month which also interviewed a man who claimed to have been head of security at North Korea's notorious prison camp 22. While there, he claimed to have seen chemical weapons testing carried out on political prisoners. Mr Kim, a Christian activist who has helped dozens of North Koreans escape to the South, had contacted Mr Kang and encouraged him to flee North Korea with documentary proof of the testing. "We knew he had strong feelings that someone had to do something to stop this practise," Mr Kim told BBC News Online. Mr Kang was an engineer at a chemical factory where the testing allegedly took place. On one occasion, according to Mr Kim, Mr Kang inadvertently witnessed what appeared to be tests being conducted behind a large glass window. "He saw human hands, scratching the window from the inside," Mr Kim said. Mr Kang was helped to leave North Korea and arrived in China in July 2003, before travelling across the country in secret. Mr Kang was detained, with his wife and son and two South Korean helpers, on 4 January, Mr Kim said. "It appears the North Koreans have found out papers are missing. They offered a lot of bounty money to the Chinese authorities, who were waiting for him," he said. "This is a clear case where China is becoming an accomplice to North Korean crimes," he said. Mr Kim said he had kept Mr Kang's identity secret, but that it was now clear North Korea and China knew who he was. "We don't know what has happened to him, of if he has already been repatriated," he said. "I fear it could already be too late."

NDTV.com (India) CBI locates bodies of Gujarat riot victims Veeraghav Monday, February 2, 2004 (Ahmedabad): The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has now got some fresh leads into one of the most horrific cases in the post-Godhra violence in Gujarat. The skeletal remains of at least three persons have been unearthed from the forests of Dahod in Gujarat which the CBI suspect could be remains of the members of the family of Bilkis Banu. On March 3, 2003, 14 members of Banu's family were killed by an armed mob. The Gujarat police had, however, registered seven of them as missing persons. Brutal act Two years back, during the Gujarat riots Bilkis Yakoob was raped by a mob and then left to die. Even though she survived, 14 of her family members including her three-year-old daughter also caught in the attack were killed and their bodies buried. Only 6 of the bodies could be found till now and that had weakened Bilkis's case. But the CBI seems to have discovered at least four of the remaining eight bodies. The first skeleton was dug out on Saturday by a CBI team and the next day bulldozers were called in to dig deeper and three more human skeletons were found. This is one more example of the CBI's quick work after the Supreme Court asked the investigating agency to take over the case in December 2003. Two weeks back, it arrested 12 of the main accused, the first arrests made in the case in almost two years. The CBI will now get DNA tests done on the four skeletons to confirm their identity.

BBC 12 Feb 2004 Police submit Gujarat riot report - The riots left at least 1,000 dead - mostly Muslims India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has submitted a report to the Supreme Court on an alleged gang rape and murder of Muslims during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Fourteen Muslims are alleged to have been killed and three women raped in the incident. The CBI was asked to take over the investigations by the Supreme Court after local police closed the case. More than a thousand people died during the Gujarat riots, India's worst religious violence in decades. During its investigation, the CBI unearthed the skeletal remains of four people including that of a child in Gujarat's Dahod district. The bones have been sent for DNA testing. The CBI was asked to follow up the case after India's National Human Rights Commission came in support of a key eyewitness, Bilkis Bano. Bilkis Bano, who was pregnant at the time, is reported to have seen three women being raped in the incident in which 14 Muslims were also killed. Ms Bano herself managed to survive because the attackers assumed her to be dead. She says she had named the accused to the Gujarat police but they allegedly took no action. Arrests Thirteen people have been arrested by the CBI in this case including a policeman for allegedly tampering with evidence. The case is expected to shortly come up before the Supreme Court. More than 10 Gujarat riot cases are currently before the court. The Gujarat authorities have been criticised for their poor handling of riot cases. Last October, the Supreme Court ordered the government to appoint new public prosecutors to handle the cases following the acquittal of 21 Hindus charged with burning 12 Muslims in a bakery in Baroda city. The Gujarat riots started after 59 Hindus were killed in an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims in February 2002. That attack was blamed on a Muslim mob. Bibliography on 20002 Anti-Muslim Violence in Gujarat (ths website)

www.paknews.com 19 Feb 2004 Kashmiris Genocide Preplanned - Gilani Kashmir Media Service SRINAGAR, IHK : Feb 19 (PNS) - In occupied Kashmir, the Chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, Syed Ali Gilani has said that the Indian troops are carrying on genocide of Kashmiris under a preplanned strategy. He was addressing a gathering of the agitated people at Narbal in Budgam. It may be recalled that a murderous attack by Indian troops was made on the APHC Chairman and other Hurriyat leaders while they were leading a demonstration in the area yesterday, against the custodial killing of a civilian who was father of seven children. Syed Ali Gilani strongly denounced the occupation authorities for not allowing mourners even to bewail killings of martyrs of liberation. Referring to use of brute force on demonstration yesterday he pointed out that the Indian government, he emphasized was resorting to brute methods to maintain its illegal subjugation of occupied Kashmir. He led the funeral prayers of the martyred woman who was injured in yesterday's military firing and succumbed to her injuries in a hospital. Meanwhile, the Chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Muhammad Yasin Malik, addressing a gathering at Badharwa in Doda district, and the Chairperson of Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Khawateen Markaz, Yasmin Raja, in a statement in Srinagar today expressed grave concern over the stepped up state-terrorism.

BBC 25 Feb 2004 Vajpayee reaches out to Muslims Mr Vajpayee made a direct appeal for Muslim votes India's prime minister has appealed to Muslims not to be afraid and vote for his Hindu nationalist party in this year's general election. "We are creating a new India - we need your help," Atal Behari Vajpayee said. He also told the thousands of Muslims who had gathered for a rare convention in Delhi that India should "walk and live together" with Pakistan. His ruling BJP hopes peace moves and a strong economy will help it return to power in elections expected in April. Delhi and Islamabad began peace talks this month, after two years of tension. The prime minister told his Muslim audience in the capital that India's policy was to have peace with its neighbours while keeping the country's interests in mind. "There is no conflict between the two," he said. "If we have to fight, we have to fight against poverty and unemployment but not with each other." Wooing Muslims Urging Muslims to put aside their mistrust of the BJP, Mr Vajpayee asked them to seriously consider voting for the party. Vajpayee: "Our policy is to have peace with all our neighbours" "We have always sought votes from all sections, but we didn't get them," he said. "I have come to appeal to you... stop being afraid, give it serious thought." The BJP has been attempting to reach out to India's 130 million-strong Muslim minority, which has often been suspicious of the party's strong Hindu nationalist agenda. On Tuesday, a key Muslim politician joined the BJP and said he would work to "bridge the gap" between the party and the Muslim community. Arif Mohammad Khan, a former member of the main opposition Congress Party, is seen by many as a prize catch for the governing party. The BJP has already announced that it is dropping the contentious Ayodhya issue from its campaign. The Ayodhya dispute, in which hardline Hindus pushed to build a grand temple on the ruins of a destroyed 16th century mosque, was once the BJP's key campaign issue. The hardliners believe the mosque, destroyed by Hindus in 1992, was built over a site marking the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram. Gujarat scar But many Muslims say the BJP is unlikely to win much support among the community. Mehmood Madani of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, a Muslim religious body, says that they have not changed their impression of the BJP. "Why are they suddenly thinking of reaching us to out now, just days before the election? Why didn't they think of it earlier, during their five years in power?" he asked. He added that religious violence in Gujarat two years ago had left a lasting scar on the community. Sarosh, a civil engineer working in Saudi Arabia who was attending the rally, agreed with this view. "They can only gain our trust if they bring the perpetrators of the violence to justice, something they have still to do," he told the BBC. More than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, died in Gujarat in 2002 in some of the worst religious violence in India in decades. The BJP-ruled state administration was accused of turning a blind eye to the rioting.

Laksamana.Net 2 Feb 2004 Review - Regions: No More Mediation The International Red Cross said Wednesday (28/1/04) it had suspended efforts to mediate the release of hostages held by the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). "As of today the Indonesian Red Cross and the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) have suspended our involvement until both sides in the conflict reach an agreement," ICRC spokesman Fortuna Alvariza told Agence France-Presse. "Our job was to facilitate the exchange of messages but we saw that both sides could not reach common ground," she said. GAM rebels had said they would release a batch of some 80 captives they are holding in East Aceh if the military granted a two-day cease-fire, but any release must be arranged with Red Cross representatives rather than military (TNI) or government negotiators. The government rejected the cease-fire proposal and accused GAM of holding 277 people hostage but TNI commander Endriartono Sutarto said Monday (26/1/04) he would order a two-day cease-fire provided GAM promised not to take any more civilian hostages in the future. The military later in the week successfully freed two officers' wives who had been held hostage since June in a military operation. The military claimed to have killed 22 rebels in a number of clashes last week, while another 17 suspected rebels had surrendered. The government said Thursday (29/1/04) it would channel Rp500 billion in cash this year to build infrastructure, including roads and bridges. Of this, Rp210 billion will go on irrigation systems, and Rp60 billion for housing and resettlement sites, Resettlement and Regional Infrastructure Minister Sunarno said at the opening of a bridge in West Aceh. Priority would be given to the people's basic necessities, Sunarno said.
Maluku Separatists Jailed Judges in the provincial capital Ambon sentenced on Thursday (29/1/04) three Christian separatists from the outlawed Republic of South Maluku (RMS) group to between 13 and 15 years in prison for treason. John Latuhihin and Johanis Abraham went down for 15 years and Markus Siwabessy was jailed for 13 years for hoisting separatist flags in April last year. Earlier this month the same court sentenced nine RMS activists to between 30 months and 15 years in jail for treason. RMS leader Alex Manuputty and his deputy Sammy Waileruni were sentenced to three years in prison in January last year for subversion and an appeal court in May increased their terms to four years. They were released pending an appeal to the Supreme Court after their detention period expired in early November. Manuputty later fled the country and is now in the US.
Papua Emergency Ruled Out Amid fears that Jakarta would crack down in Papua and launch another 'integrated military operation', the government said it would not impose a state of emergency there. The National Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), the Elsham Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy and the National Solidarity for Papua (SNUP) have protested strongly against plans said to have been made in a closed meeting held between People's Representatives Council (DPR) Commission I and the armed forces commander. According to the three NGOs, the idea was mooted by a member of the Military/Police faction and was a deliberate attempt to hamper investigations into alleged human rights violation cases in Papua. Some legislators had also called for a state of civil emergency in Papua to ensure elections this year run smoothly. "There are not enough reasons to impose a state of civil emergency in Papua," Home Affairs Minister Hari Sabarno announced on Wednesday (28/1/04). Under a state of civil emergency the governor would have special powers that include command of the police and military and the right to ban meetings and censor the media.
Military Bars E. Timor Opposition TNI commander in Indonesian West Timor, Col. M. Musanip, said Thursday (29/1/04) the military would not allow members of the "Kolimau 2000" opposition group in neighboring East Timor to enter West Timor where many former East Timorese refugees still live. "If members of Kolimau 2000 opposition group enter our territory and then ask ex-Timorese residents living in camps to carry out a rebellious movement in East Timor, we will take stern action against them," Musanip said. "There will be no leniency for them."East Timorese officials say Kolimau 2000 is led by disgruntled former resistance fighters, disillusioned by a lack of jobs. Earlier reports said the leader of Kolimau 2000, Bruno, had entered West Timor to ask former East Timorese militiamen to help them create chaos in East Timor after the withdrawal of United Nations troops this May. West Timor is still home to thousands of militiamen who fled the arrival of foreign peacekeeping troops in September 1999. Tens of thousands of other East Timorese who were forcibly moved across the border by militias at the time have now returned home. Meanwhile in East Timor, prosecutors for the Serious Crimes Unit (SCU) court said in a press statement on Wednesday (28/1/04) that they had petitioned for a public hearing on the pending application for an arrest warrant against Gen. (Ret.) Wiranto, former Indonesian military commander and a candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections. A UN-supported SCU indictment against Wiranto was filed in February last year, for his alleged role in gross human rights violations perpetrated in the former Indonesian territory in 1999.The indictment was accompanied by an application for an arrest warrant for Wiranto, who was Armed Forces commander and Defense Minister in 1999 when the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence form Indonesia in a UN-backed referendum. The SCU indictment alleges that under international law Wiranto was responsible for crimes against humanity, including murder and persecution, for failing to punish or prevent crimes committed by his subordinates or those acting under his effective control in the period before and after the 1999 referendum in East Timor. Wiranto did not attend the subsequent trial at the SCU, which was set up to investigate and try those held responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 East Timorese during the 1999 mayhem. A human rights tribunal in Jakarta last year found Wiranto innocent of committing crimes against humanity in East Timor but international observers have criticized the tribunal's procedures and verdicts for not being impartial. Wiranto, along with six other ex-generals, is also on a visa watch list in the United States, because of the SCU indictment
E. Kalimantan: PDI-P Barred from Polls The East Kalimantan General Elections Commission (KPUD) ruled on Wednesday (28/1/04) that the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) could not run for seats in the provincial council during the upcoming elections. The decision was made after executives from PDI-P's East Kalimantan chapter failed to beat a midnight Tuesday deadline to file a final and valid list of the party's legislative candidates. The deadline was also imposed on other political parties. "The deadline passed and it cannot be extended. The party is not allowed to run for seats in the upcoming elections," said Noersyamsu Agung, the chairman of the KPUD. Noersyamsu said the KPUD gave the party the deadline to allow it to resolve its internal differences, but none of the party leaders turned up. "The KPUD has no right to interfere in the internal matters of a party. The internal conflicts of a party must be settled by themselves," he said. The KPUD invited the PDI-P executives to a meeting on Wednesday, but only one turned up. A PDI-P official said the party had yet to formulate a response to the KPUD decision but would hold a meeting that would be attended by all of the party chapter executives to discuss it. KPUD also announced that 759 legislative candidates from 23 political parties, excluding PDI-P, had passed the verification process.
Golkar Wins in Kupang Ibrahim A. Medah and Ruben Funay were elected as the new regent and deputy regent of the East Nusa Tenggara provincial capital of Kupang for the 2004-2009 term on Monday (26/1/04). The election took place under heavy security following an anonymous bomb threat a few days before. The tight security prompted thousands of supporters of rival candidates to cancel their plans for major rallies on the evening of the election. The pair, who were nominated by the Golkar Party, won 31 of the 40 votes in the Kupang legislative council, defeating their rivals from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan), Libert S. Foenay and Paul Nyoko. The PDI-P nominees received only four votes. Medah has been questioned as a witness in at least three graft cases involving billions of rupiah in Kupang, which remained unsolved to date.

Sydney Morning Herald, Australia 3 Feb 2004 www.smh.com.au Ambassador vowed closer ties: Wiranto By John Garnaut February 3, 2004 Wiranto - the former Indonesian military chief accused of crimes against humanity over the 1999 carnage in East Timor - says Australia's ambassador to Jakarta had discussed "increasing co-operation" if he defeats President Megawati Soekarnoputri in July's presidential elections. Wiranto told the Herald that Indonesia's bloody occupation of East Timor had been a "catastrophe", but his role in the pre-independence violence had been misunderstood. Australia and East Timor would be the first countries he would visit as president, he said. Wiranto has recently emerged as a leading presidential candidate, despite allegations he helped orchestrate violence in East Timor, Maluku province, Jakarta and elsewhere. He denies the allegations. A Washington-based campaign adviser, who did not want to be named, said ordinary voters were more concerned with security, stability and jobs than human rights. Wiranto has been accused of orchestrating militia violence that led to an estimated 1400 deaths and the displacement of almost a third of East Timor's population in 1999. This led to the decision by the Prime Minister, John Howard, to send Australian troops to lead an international peacekeeping force. United Nations prosecutors in East Timor this week stepped up efforts to obtain an Interpol warrant to arrest for the one-time protege of former president Soeharto, following his indictment by a UN tribunal last year. It also emerged that his name is on a US State Department watch list, which prevents him from entering the US without special permission. A Wiranto presidency would create serious diplomatic headaches in Canberra. "I think the most important thing is not to look backward, but to look forward and rebuild the friendship with Australia and the US," the retired general said. An Australian embassy spokesman said the ambassador, David Ritchie, had recently met Wiranto but had "certainly not" made any commitments. Many Jakarta-based analysts say Wiranto has the best campaign funding and election prospects of any challenger. He deflected questions about the source of his campaign funding, saying only that "I don't have a lot of money but I have a lot of friends". He said he would not accept donations from his former patron, Mr Soeharto. But an Indonesian member of his campaign team was confident Wiranto would remain Mr Soeharto's "strategic" choice.

www.yaledailynews.com. 3 Feb 2004 Report discloses abuse in W. Papua BY STEPHEN BUTLER Staff Reporter Yale Law students in the school's Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic released a report on Dec. 10 detailing human rights abuses in West Papua, Indonesia, the western half of the island of New Guinea. The report, which was prepared over the course of several years at the behest of the Indonesia Human Rights Network, found considerable but inconclusive evidence that the Indonesian government acted with the intent to commit genocide against indigenous West Papuans at various times during the past 30 years. "Although no single act or set of acts can be said to have constituted genocide, per se -- there can be little doubt that the Indonesian government has engaged in a systematic pattern of acts that has resulted in harm to -- and indeed the destruction of -- a substantial part of the indigenous population of West Papua," the report says in its conclusion. Elizabeth Brundige '98 LAW '03, one of the lead authors of the report, said there was clear evidence of "horrible" human rights abuses in West Papua. But it was not easy to definitively label these acts as genocide, she said. "The part that is more difficult to prove is if there was the requisite intent to commit genocide," Brundige said. Brundige, who has worked on the report since its inception, said there is a difference between the current situation in West Papua and previous situations in Rwanda and Nazi Germany, where governments publicly expressed their intent to wipe out an entire group of people. Law School professor and Lowenstein Clinic Director James Silk said the issue of human rights abuses in West Papua was new to many of the students in the Lowenstein Clinic. But he said many of them had heard of problems in parts of Indonesia, such as now independent East Timor. "[The students] weren't aware that in some of the other territories that are part of Indonesia, there are serious human rights abuses," Silk said. Silk said the Lowenstein Clinic had hoped from the start to use the West Papua report to draw international attention to the situation. "We wanted to bring this paper to the attention of organizations concerned with human rights but also to the attention of governments and the United Nations," Silk said. "We were hoping to use the report to generate discussion, particularly with officials in the United States government who have connections to the Indonesian government." Indonesia first gained control of West Papua in 1969, when the United Nations-sponsored "Act of Free Choice" transferred sovereignty over the area from the Netherlands to Indonesia. Silk said the students he supervised had to prepare their report using incomplete documentation of abuses in West Papua. "For the early period of Indonesian control, [the students in the clinic] relied on a fairly limited number of secondary sources," Silk said. "In the more recent period, there have been good efforts by West Papuan human rights activists to document abuses." Brundige said that since the report's authors did not go to West Papua to do fact-finding research, their final analysis was based primarily on secondary sources and primary sources that had been collected by other people. "We certainly had access to enough information for a very comprehensive report, but our report highlighted the need for further documentation," Brundige said. Silk said he was involved in supervising the report's preparation, but that the students in the clinic did all of the research and writing. He said the students also organized a round table discussion with experts on West Papua and experts on genocide about the issues at stake there as part of their research. [ 12 December 2003 Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control December 10, 2003, Yale Law School's Human Rights Clinic has released a report on human rights conditions in West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled western half of the island of New Guinea. The report by Elizabeth Brundige, Winter King, Priyneha Vahila, Stephen Vladeck and Xiang Yuan was writeen for the US-based Indonesia Human Rights Network (IHRN www.indonesianetwork.org ). Quote from the text: "Although no single act or set of acts can be said to have constituted genocide, per se, and although the required intent cannot be as readily inferred as it was in the cases of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, there can be little doubt that the Indonesian government has engaged in a systematic pattern of acts that has resulted in harm to--and indeed the destruction of--a substantial part of the indigenous population of West Papua." Summary (html) or 77 page report (PDF file) ]

ICG 3 Feb 2004 Asia Report N°74 : Indonesia Indonesia Backgrounder: Jihad in Central Sulawesi Recent violence in Central Sulawesi suggests the nature and gravity of the terrorist threat in Indonesia must be reassessed. While the shorter-term prospects are somewhat encouraging, there is an under-appreciated, longer-term security risk In October 2003, attacks in Poso and Morowali killed thirteen, mostly Christian villagers. Most of those responsible were local recruits from a militia spawned by, though institutionally distinct from, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), South East Asia?s largest terrorist group. Close examination reveals important rifts within JI: a more radical element pushes for attacks on Western targets but a majority views such attacks as undermining the longer-term strategy for an Islamic state in Indonesia. If those in the more radical faction can be captured, the immediate threat of another Bali-style attack by JI in Indonesia could substantially ease, though the longer-term th reat from local groups would remain. ------------------------------------- ICG reports and briefing papers are available on our website: www.crisisweb.org

International Herald Tribune 19 Feb 2004 Justice Still Eludes Indonesia Washington's Double Standards Toward Mass Murderers by Joseph Nevins President George W. Bush's promise, when Saddam Hussein was captured, that the former Iraqi dictator would "face the justice he denied to millions" took on a special meaning for me. I had just completed a friend's book manuscript on the events preceding the bloody seizure of power in Indonesia by General Suharto, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But unlike in the case of Saddam, Washington has no desire that Suharto and his accomplices be held accountable for their crimes. The reasons why, and the fact that the United States is in position to realize its desires, painfully illustrate the poverty of international justice. Beginning in October 1965, Suharto and his army organized and carried out what the CIA described "as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." Over the course of several months, they slaughtered members of the Indonesian Communist Party along with members of loosely affiliated organizations such as women's groups and labor unions. Amnesty International estimated "many more than one million" were killed. The head of the Indonesia state security system approximated the toll at half a million, with another 750,000 jailed or sent to concentration camps. Marshal Green, American ambassador to Indonesia at the time, wrote that the embassy had "made clear" to the army that Washington was "generally sympathetic with and admiring" of its actions. Indeed, the United States had helped lay the groundwork for the coup through its support for the military, and through intelligence operations aimed at weakening the Communists and drawing the Communist Party into conflict with the army. Accordingly, Washington supplied weaponry, telecommunications equipment, as well as food and other aid to the army in the early weeks of the killings. The United States Embassy also provided the names of thousands of Communist Party cadre who were subsequently executed. This same military mounted a full-scale invasion of neighboring East Timor on Dec. 7, 1975. While meeting with Suharto the previous day in Indonesia's capital, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger approved of the invasion plans and the use of American weaponry, but asked Suharto to wait until they returned to the United States. About 14 hours after their departure, Indonesian forces attacked. What followed was a war and occupation that cost more than 200,000 East Timorese lives - about one-third of the pre-invasion population - and 24 years of American complicity in the slaughter. From the Ford administration to that of President Bill Clinton, the United States provided billions of dollars in military weaponry and training and economic assistance, as well as diplomatic cover to Jakarta. Today, Suharto resides comfortably in Jakarta, and the brutal military he helped to build remains intact, free to commit atrocities throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Similarly, officials from the United States complicit with the 1965-66 slaughter and Indonesia reign of terror in East Timor continue their lives unhindered. Not surprisingly, the United States and its allies - many of whom also actively supported Jakarta's crimes - have made it clear that they have no desire to see an international tribunal for Indonesia and East Timor established. Comparing laws to spider webs, Anarchasis observed in the 6th century B.C. that laws catch the weak and poor, while the rich and powerful tear them to pieces. Although not always the case, Anarchasis has generally shown himself to be prescient in the area of international affairs, a profoundly undemocratic arena in which the powerful demand accountability of their weaker enemies, while insulating themselves and their allies from prosecution. Whatever we may call this, it is not justice. The writer is an assistant professor of geography at Vassar College and author of "A Not-So Distant Horror: Making and Accounting for Mass Violence in East Timor," to be published next year by Cornell University Press.

Chicago Tribune 1 Feb 2004 Prosperous Kurds complicate Iraq's handover - Island of peace, stability seeks to keep its status of near independence By Tom Hundley
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq - A dozen winters ago, during the last great repression by Saddam Hussein's regime, Kurds in this mountainous region of northern Iraq stayed alive by eating grass. These days they shop in sleek new supermarkets for Pringles potato chips and Belgian chocolates. It would be difficult to overstate the economic and political progress that has exploded across the swath of Iraq known as Kurdistan. While the rest of the country withered under Hussein's rule, Kurdistan, protected by a coalition-enforced no-fly zone, flourished. Today, as insurgents in Baghdad and the region known as the Sunni Triangle fight a persistent guerrilla war against the American-led occupation and Shiite clerics in the southern areas flex long-dormant political muscle, Kurdistan remains a relative island of Western-oriented stability. In Sulaymaniyah, the provincial capital, merchants along Salim Street fill shops with widescreen televisions, computers and the latest in cell phones. At night, a carnival display of Christmas lights illuminates the downtown area - and this well into the new year. Christmas is not usually observed in Muslim lands, but Kurds can't seem to get enough of the West and its commercial ways. Proud parents line up children for photos with shopping-mall Santas, known here as Baba Noels, and then take them for an ice cream sundae at "MaDonals." The U.S. has long held up Kurdistan as an example of what can be achieved under Western-style democracy. And while the U.S. encouraged the autonomous Kurdish region during Hussein's rule, it now worries that an Iraq divided into ethnic cantons would seed instability throughout the Middle East. But a quasi-independent Kurdistan appears to be the likely outcome of a process that threatens to slip from the Bush administration's control. Scrambling to meet its self-imposed June 30 deadline for the handover of power in Iraq, Washington faces increasing pressure to yield to the Kurds' key demands. For once, the gods of geopolitics seem to be smiling on the Kurds.
'Almost independent' The large measure of autonomy and the self-governing institutions already established in Kurdistan likely will be left in place during the transition period. After that, it will be hard to change the status quo, U.S. officials concede. More problematic are Kurdish demands for a referendum that almost certainly would give them control of the oil-rich region around the city of Kirkuk, and for a security policy that would allow the main Kurdish political factions to maintain their traditional militias while barring the Iraqi army from entering the Kurdish territory. Earlier this month, Paul L. Bremer III, head of the U.S. occupation authority, curtly rejected those demands, but he has since taken a softer approach. The turnabout would appear to reflect second thoughts about alienating the only piece of Iraq that seems to be functioning well, and a recognition that the Kurds, the only Iraqis who actively and enthusiastically supported the U.S. in the war against Hussein, are owed. "Right now, we are almost independent," said Barham Salih, a prominent Kurdish politician. "By seeking reintegration into Iraq, we are giving up things; we are not asking for more." Given Iraq's grim history of persecution and genocide against the Kurds, during Hussein's regime and before, it is remarkable that the Kurds would want anything to do with Iraq. But the general feeling among the Kurdish population seems to be that while separation and independence would be nice, that will never happen. Some of Iraq's neighbors - Turkey, Iran and Syria, with Kurdish minorities of their own - would create too many problems. There also is a feeling that despite the troubled history with Iraq, there are certain advantages to being part of an important Arab country. "Iraq belongs to Arabs, Christians, Jews and Kurds," said Sabah Muhammed, 40, a currency dealer in the Sulaymaniyah money trader's bazaar. "I was born in Baghdad, and I have many Arab friends. If the Arabs respect my rights, I see them as my brother."
Shaky democracy Most of the economic progress in the Kurdish north has occurred in the past five years, after the two main political factions, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, fought a brief civil war that led to a wary political settlement. U.S. officials talk about Kurdistan's "democracy." It does have an elected parliament and elected local administrations, but it is effectively ruled by two tribal mafias, each jealously protective of its turf. The KDP is headed by Massoud Barzani, a tribal chieftain who dresses and governs in the traditional, patriarchal manner. His father, Mustafa, founded the KDP and led a failed uprising against the Arabs during World War II. The rival PUK is headed by Jalal Talabani, who affects a more modern style. The two leaders loathe each other but, for the sake of political peace and profit, have learned the art of accommodation. All the major economic projects in Kurdistan - the shopping malls and hotel complexes - have direct links to Barzani or Talabani. It would be a serious mistake to invest in a mall in KDP-controlled Dohuk, for example, without taking one of Barzani's nephews as a partner. For the U.S. occupation authority and for Iraq's neighbors, the underlying fear is that autonomy for the Kurds will only whet their appetite for full independence. They worry that Kurdish politicians are playing a shrewd game, taking autonomy for now, keeping all options open for the future.
Dreams of nationhood Not far from Sulaymaniyah's main market, an inconspicuous doorway opens into a cavernous cafe. Beneath chandeliers and slowly turning ceiling fans, men's chatter mingles with the clatter of backgammon games and the soft clinking of their tea glasses. Here, in the thin afternoon light filtered through a fog of cigarette smoke, long-frustrated dreams are sometimes given voice. "I feel like I have lived my whole life for these last 10 years," said Muhammed Nergiz, 60, a renowned Kurdish folk singer. He wears the traditional checkered headscarf and baggy trousers of a Kurdish peasant. "The other 50 years of my Kurdish life, either we are in prison, or in the mountains, or fighting or in sadness," he said. "In these last 10 years, we have our freedom. ... We felt for the first time that we are human." He noted, as Kurds often do when they speak with foreigners, that Kurds are the largest ethnic group on the planet who do not have a country to call their own. "People know what's behind the curtain," he said. "If they give it to us, I would dance."

BBC 2 Feb 2004 Iraqi Kurds count cost of attacks People had been celebrating Eid al-Adha when the offices were hit Kurds in northern Iraq are in mourning after a double suicide bombing at the offices of their main political parties, that killed at least 56 people. Senior political figures were among the dead, and some 200 people were wounded, in the blasts on Sunday in Irbil. US chief administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer condemned the "cowardly attack on innocent human beings". He said it was also an attack on the principle of democratic pluralism in Iraq. Communities across the region reportedly flew black flags in place of those for their two main parties - Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Kurdish television turned to sombre music. The northern region is in shock and mourning, said the BBC's World Affairs Correspondent Mike Wooldridge in Iraq. In virtually simultaneous attacks, the bombers hit the KDP and PUK offices packed with guests for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Crucial time Kurdish officials blamed al-Qaeda and its allies and said they feared the death toll could rise above 100. The KDP and PUK between them largely run northern Iraq and are strong allies of the US-led coalition which ousted Saddam Hussein. Irbil hosts the Kurdish parliament. On the first day of Eid we receive people and well-wishers and that's why security wasn't as tight as during the rest of the days Mohammed Ihsan Minister for human rights for Kurdish regional government The bombings have dealt a severe blow to the two parties and their leadership as critical negotiation is taking place ahead of the installation of a new interim Iraqi government. Our correspondent says there is speculation that the attacks may be intended to drive a wedge between Kurdish north and the rest of Iraq. "I want to express my outrage at today's terrorist bombings which constituted a cowardly attack at both innocent human beings as well as on the very principle of democratic pluralism in Iraq," said Mr Bremer in a statement. Senior officials killed Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari - a Kurd - blamed the Muslim militant group Ansar al-Islam for the attacks. The Kurds and the United States say the group is allied with Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. MAJOR ATTACKS SINCE 1 MAY 1 February 2004: At least 56 killed by twin suicide bombings during celebrations in Kurdish city of Irbil 18 January 2004: 18 reported killed outside coalition HQ, Baghdad 14 December: Car bomb at police station kills 17 in Khalidiya, west of Baghdad 12 November: 26 die in suicide attack on Italian base in Nasiriya 2 November: 16 US soldiers die as Chinook helicopter downed 27 Oct: Red Cross and other buildings in Baghdad bombed, more than 30 killed 29 Aug: Mosque near Najaf bombed, at least 80 dead including top Shia cleric 19 Aug: UN headquarters in Baghdad bombed, 23 killed including head of mission List covers attacks since US declared war effectively over An overview of Iraq's Kurds Ansar al-Islam was expelled from northern Iraq by Kurdish and coalition forces during last year's war. But PUK spokesman Sabah Sabir told the BBC that Ansar had recently re-emerged because of the increasing volatility in Iraq. Mohammed Ihsan, minister for human rights for the Kurdish regional government, said the dead included senior figures in the provincial government . Among them were the Irbil Governor Akram Mintik, Deputy Prime Minister Sami Abdul Rahman, Minister of Council of Ministers Affairs Shawkat Sheik Yazdin and Agriculture Minister Saad Abdullah. The bombers, witnesses said, made their way through checkpoints outside both venues and detonated their bomb belts once inside. "On the first day of Eid we receive people and well-wishers and that's why security wasn't as tight as during the rest of the days," said Mohammed Ihsan. "They [the attackers] took advantage of this."

DEBKAfile, Israel 2 Feb 2004 www.debka.com Talabani Accuses Turkish Intelligence of Massacre DEBKAfile Exclusive Report February 2, 2004, 12:21 AM (GMT+02:00) Two huge bombs were detonated Sunday, February 1, at the very moment that Iraq’s Kurds joined their leaders for a mass celebration at the headquarters of their two parties in the north Iraqi town of Arbil. The crowds had gathered to mark the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice and the passing of their archenemy Saddam Hussein. The carnage was unimaginable, the worst terrorist assault ever seen in post-war Iraq. The death toll rose fast towards 70 with more than 200 injured. Hospitals recalled staff from their holidays and US helicopters rushed in medical assistance. The extent of the bloodshed and damage indicated strongly that vehicles packed with explosives outside the buildings must have backed up the suicide killers within. According to DEBKAfile’s sources in Kurdistan and Washington, PUK leader Talal Jalabani talking later to senior US officials - believed to include visiting US Pentagon second-in-command Paul Wolfowitz - bluntly accused Turkish intelligence of orchestrating the massacre with the aim of wiping out the entire Iraqi Kurdish leadership at a single stroke. Kurdish PM Baram Salah repeated the allegation during a visit to White House that day. Kurdish sources declared the Qaeda-linked Ansar al Islam lacked the resources and capabilities for mounting an operation of such magnitude and precision. It was clearly the work of a professional intelligence agency, who knew the two Kurdish heads Masoud Barzani, leader of the KDP and Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK, were to greet their followers at their respective headquarters in Arbil, along with the entire Iraqi Kurdish political and military leadership. Talabani smelled a rat at the last minute and went into hiding. Barzani is in deep shock. Among the dead are Sami Abdul Rahman, Dep. PM of the Kurdish region and his two sons, and Medhi Khoshnau, Dep. Governor of Arbil Province. Turkish prime minister Tayyep Erdogan and foreign minister Abdullah Gul have just ended four days of talks in Washington at which they voiced concern over the generous measure of autonomy Iraq’s Kurds had been promised as America’s primary allies in the new Iraq. DEBKAfile’s sources report that they were not satisfied with the replies they received from President George W. Bush. Neither were they happy when secretary of state Colin Powell told them that the Kurdistan problem would be resolved in negotiations between the future sovereign government in Baghdad and Kurdish leaders. The American responses were seen by Turkish leaders as leading inevitably to near-Kurdish independence, creating a model in Iraq that threatened to inflame Turkey’s own Kurdish minority.

NYT 2 Feb 2004 Death Toll Rises to 67 in Sunday's Attacks in Iraq By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and EDWARD WONG RBIL, Iraq, Feb. 2 — The death toll from an attack by two suicide bombers in northern Iraq has risen to 67 people, a coalition official in Baghdad said today. At least 247 people were wounded in the blast on Sunday during Muslim holiday celebrations at the separate headquarters of Iraq's two leading Kurdish parties. All of those killed in the blast were Iraqis, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The attack shattered the calm of the north, a part of the country that had been relatively stable under the American occupation. The bombers killed several top Kurdish leaders and wounded other senior officials in the explosions, which came 10 minutes apart and constituted the worst attack in Iraq since late August, when a car bomb killed more than 80 people outside a Shiite shrine in the southern city of Najaf. The bombings here came at a time when the two rival Kurdish parties have been trying to unite the divided administrations of the northern region to strengthen their demands to retain autonomy in that area. The two parties had been using their Erbil headquarters reception areas for the first day of a festival celebrating the end of the hajj, when devout Muslims travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. American military officials have said they expected an increase of violence during the four-day holiday, but there was little preparation for the possibility that suicide bombers strapped with explosives would walk virtually unnoticed into celebrations here. Some officials said the attacks bore the signatures of foreign fighters or Ansar al-Islam, a mostly Kurdish terrorist group that American officials suspect has ties to Al Qaeda. The group was based near the mountainous Iranian border until American forces routed it last year with the help of Kurdish fighters. At the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, a blast blew out every ceiling panel, curled the blades of ceiling fans, peeled off wallpaper and left charred and bloody remains across the floor. At the time of the explosion, around 11 a.m., more than 200 people, including children, were packed into the reception hall, according to guards who had been there. They were exchanging greetings, eating chocolates and paying respects to Kurdish leaders. That was when a lean man in his 20's walked into the reception hall wearing a bulging photographer's vest, said Aziz Ali Achmad, chief of security for the headquarters. "He came up, reached for a minister's hand, and then all of a sudden there was a horrible noise and fire everywhere," Mr. Achmad said. Mr. Achmad said nobody was searched before entering the hall, despite his urging. "I kept telling the sheiks, `Please let us search people,' and they said, `No, we will not bother them, not today,"' Mr. Achmad said. A witness provided a similar account of an explosion at the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. It was unclear to what degree the attacks were a result of rising ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq. Except in the hotly contested oil-rich city of Kirkuk, the Kurds have generally not been involved in sectarian violence, and the Kurdish region has been considered one of the safest parts of Iraq. Relatively free of assassinations, roadside explosions and suicide bombings, the region is one where American soldiers can be seen occasionally walking around unarmed and eating in restaurants. L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, said in a statement that the bombings "constituted a cowardly attack on human beings as well as on the very principle of democratic pluralism in Iraq." The Kurdish region has existed as a virtually independent state since 1991, when the American and British governments declared it a no-flight zone and protected Kurds from Saddam Hussein's forces. The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan each govern half the region. "Certainly this was an attack against the stability and security in the Kurdish region," said Bakhtiyar Amin, a spokesman for Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of the Iraqi Governing Council, who was on his way to one of the buildings at the time of the attacks. "They are forces of darkness and they want to bring Iraq back to an age of tyranny." Mr. Amin predicted that the attacks on Sunday would draw the two main Kurdish parties which went to war against each other in the mid-1990's closer together and strengthen their resolve for autonomy. Party leaders say they want a unified regional government that will retain much of the independence the Kurds have enjoyed, though the parties are willing to cede matters of monetary, foreign and national defense policy to a central Iraqi government. "These attacks could be better prevented by unity, by joining forces," Mr. Amin said. "I hope this will expedite the process." The two parties have been in talks since the summer to unite their regional administrations. Those talks have accelerated in the past couple of months, and Kurdish leaders say they expect to reach an agreement well before the Bush administration transfers sovereignty to an Iraqi government, which is supposed to happen on June 30. Mr. Amin said the parties had agreed in principle several weeks ago that the prime minister of a united region would come from the Kurdistan Democratic Party and his deputy from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, while the top two officers of the parliament would come from the two parties in reverse order. The ministries of the rival administrations would be combined, he said. Several Governing Council officials say autonomy for the Kurds, who make up a fifth of Iraq's population, is one of the most sensitive issues confronting them as they try to complete an interim constitution by Feb. 28. The committee writing the document opened debate over a first draft on Saturday. That draft calls for a three-person joint presidency shared by one Shiite Arab, one Sunni Arab and one Kurd. Some Kurdish officials insist that the two Kurdish parties should be able to keep their militias, called pesh merga, in some form, a demand that has become a delicate issue with the Governing Council because American officials are trying to disband militias. The attack on Sunday could bolster the Kurds' argument that they need to retain the pesh merga which means "those who face death" for security. On Sunday night, pesh merga essentially shut down Erbil, a city of around one million people. Sentries established roadblocks at all major intersections and searched cars. At the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a guard's description of the morning attack mirrored the accounts of the bombing in the reception hall of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. "A man walked up to Shakhawan Abbas," a member of the patriotic union's leadership council, "and while he was shaking his hand, he exploded himself," said the guard, who gave his name as Mahmoud. The guard said investigators were checking a videotape taken right before the bombing to identify the bomber. Many people here blamed Ansar al-Islam. They also cited as suspects insurgents from the restive Sunni Arab areas to the south. American military officials have said there is "a rat line" of insurgents flowing north. As a cold drizzle fell Sunday night, crowds huddled around the gates of Erbil's hospitals. "My son, my son," one man moaned as he collapsed against a friend outside Erbil Emergency Hospital. Achmad Umer, a farmer in traditional baggy Kurdish dress, with pants pulled up high, waited nearby to hear about his cousin. "They tried to erase our leaders," Mr. Umer said. "And they took many innocents along the way." Among the leaders killed were Sami Abdul Rahman, the deputy head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Saad Abdullah, a high-ranking official in the same party. Kurdish officials declared a state of emergency and appealed for donations of blood. The Erbil bombings overshadowed violence elsewhere in Iraq on Sunday. In the southwest, at least 20 looters were killed when they accidentally set off a munitions bunker guarded by Polish soldiers, Polish military officials said, according to The Associated Press. The looters were apparently trying to steal rockets, artillery shells and other weapons stored by Mr. Hussein's army. Near Balad, in central Iraq, one American soldier was killed and 12 others were wounded in a rocket attack on a support base. Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Erbil for this article and Edward Wong from Baghdad. ]

AFP 2 Feb 2004 Iraqis to try Saddam for genocide SADDAM Hussein will be handed over to a special court being set up by the US-appointed Governing Council to face charges of genocide and invasion of neighbouring countries. The ousted dictator remains in Iraq, US administrator Paul Bremer said yesterday. "Saddam is in Iraq now, and yes he will be tried publicly by a special Iraqi court when the prerequisites for setting up such a court are completed," Mr Bremer said. "The Governing Council has started setting up the special court and we have spent some funds on that and he will be tried publicly after bringing charges of mass killing and invading neighbouring countries against him. "Saddam will be handed over to the Governing Council after it finishes setting up the court." Asked if Saddam was co-operating with investigators, Mr Bremer replied: "He is not co-operating, but he is not a troublemaker either. "He has not given us any important or useful information up to now and has not confessed to the whereabouts of his offshore funds, but we know for sure that he has a lot of money outside Iraq." He said Saddam was in good health, but no new photographs of him will be released before trial. The Red Cross has insisted on its right to interview Saddam, who was captured by the US military on December 13 and confirmed an enemy prisoner of war on January 10. Red Cross spokeswoman Nada Doumani said last week that Saddam could not be tried in Iraq until the country regained its sovereignty because of Geneva Convention restrictions. But the US has insisted that Saddam's status does not preclude him from being tried in Iraq or elsewhere. Under a deal signed in November, the US-ledcoalition occupying the country has promised to cede power to a transitional Iraqi leadership by June 30.

Reuters 10 Feb 2004 US unveils Al Qaeda Iraq 'plan' BAGHDAD: A militant Islamist who the United States has described as an associate of Osama bin Laden has plotted a series of attacks in Iraq aimed at provoking a civil war, the US-led occupation authority says. Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt said US forces had seized a computer disc that contained a letter outlining the plan written by Abu Musab Zarqawi, who Washington suspects of links to Ansar al-Islam – a Muslim militant group operating in Iraq. "There is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come into this country and spark civil war, breed sectarian violence and try to expose fissures in the society," Kimmitt, the top US military spokesman in Iraq, told a news conference today. "We are persuaded that Zarqawi was the author of the letter ... We believe the document is credible and we take the threat seriously," he added. In October, Washington offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Zarqawi, who featured prominently in a presentation of US intelligence by US Secretary of State Colin Powell before the war in Iraq. "Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants," Powell said at the time. He said Zarqawi oversaw a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan that specialised in poisons. He is also suspected of orchestrating the murder of US diplomat Laurence Foley in the Jordanian capital in 2002. Zarqawi was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court last year for plotting attacks against US and Israeli targets. PROVOKING VIOLENCE In Washington today, Powell said the letter added credence to his presentation to the United Nations last year. "With respect to the letter itself, it's very revealing. They describe the weaknesses they have in their efforts to undercut the coalition's effort. "But at the same time, it shows they haven't given up. They're trying to get more terrorists into Iraq ... But they will not succeed," Powell added. Iraq's US occupiers have long said they suspect al Qaeda has played a role in the insurgency against US troops and particularly in attacks on civilian targets in Iraq. US officials say last month's arrest by US troops in Iraq of Hassan Ghul, who they say reported to the operative responsible for the September 11 attacks – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, shows al Qaeda is trying to get a foothold in Iraq. Dan Senor, chief spokesman for Iraq's US governor Paul Bremer, said the 17-page letter proposed attacks on the shrines and leadership of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority, whom Arab Sunnis and Kurds fear could dominate a future government. "The document ... talks about a strategy of provoking violence targeted at the Shia, the Shia leaders in the hope that it would provoke reprisals against other ethnic groups in the country," he said. The document's author alludes to having conducted some 25 attacks in Iraq, Kimmitt said. Senior US officials in Baghdad said the letter was contained on a CD obtained in Ghul's capture, which also led to the identification of Zarqawi as its author. Another official said the letter spoke of the possibility of kidnapping US soldiers and expressed frustration at the participation of Sunnis in Iraqi security forces. "Before, we had a strong suspicion that al Qaeda was trying to operate in the country, kill coalition soldiers and create sectarian violence," that official said. "This confirms it." Asked how questions about the document's authenticity might be addressed, one senior US official said: "We couldn't make this up if we tried."

Reuters 15 Feb 2004 Saddam Trial Unlikely for Two Years - Newspaper LONDON- Saddam Hussein is unlikely to stand trial for at least another two years, a British newspaper quoted a top Iraqi lawyer as saying on Monday. Salem Chalabi, who is coordinating the toppled dictator's trial, told the Guardian ``there are frustrations'' over establishing a war crimes tribunal to try him on charges that could include genocide and crimes against humanity. The paper said delays have been caused by the need to select and screen judges, prepare courts and establish well-guarded jails to hold suspects. ``I think it will take two years to get to Saddam being tried,'' said Chalabi, a U.S.-educated Iraqi lawyer and nephew of Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi. The United States last month declared Saddam a prisoner of war, meaning he has certain specific rights under the Geneva Convention on treatment of POWs. That provoked demonstrations in Baghdad by Iraqis opposed to the move, who also demanded that Saddam face the death penalty. Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said in Kuwait on Sunday the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council would ask Washington to hand over Saddam and to remove his status as a POW when Iraqis take over power on June 30. Saddam has been held by U.S. forces since his December 13 capture near Tikrit. U.S. officials have said they do not rule out the possibility the United States might re-evaluate Saddam's POW status in the future. Earlier this month Chalabi told Reuters the tribunal would try low-ranking Iraqi officials first, and he hoped to get the first trial going before year's end.

NYT 21 Feb 2004 Iraqi Kurdish Leaders Resist as the U.S. Presses Them to Moderate Their Demands By DEXTER FILKINS BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 20 — The alliance between the United States government and Kurdish political parties in Iraq has come under intense strain in recent days, with Kurdish leaders accusing the Americans of trying to block their long stifled hopes for autonomy in the new Iraqi state. Kurdish leaders say American officials are putting pressure on them to drop some of their main demands for autonomy in negotiations with the other major Iraqi groups, the Shiites and Sunni Arabs, over a temporary constitution to guide the country until the end of next year. Iraqi leaders on both sides of the negotiations say the talks on the constitution are deadlocked over three main issues: the fate of the 60,000-member Kurdish militia, which Kurdish leaders want to keep; the boundaries of the autonomous Kurdish region, which Kurdish leaders want to expand; and the amount of oil revenue to be set aside for the Kurdish region. Kurdish leaders also say they want years of Arab migration into Kurdish lands reversed before nationwide elections for a permanent government are held next year. They say they are especially embittered by American leaders, who they say have forgotten the special relationship that grew up between the Kurds and the United States in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when they were united against Saddam Hussein. "Have the Americans forgotten that the Kurds are their best friends in the Middle East?" said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "After all the Kurdish people have been through, the killings, the genocide, I cannot go to my people and tell them to accept the things the Americans are trying to force on us. The Kurdish people will not accept them." According to Kurdish and other Iraqi officials, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator here, has told Kurdish leaders that he will not yield on the three major issues holding up the negotiations. Mr. Bremer, the Iraqis say, has flatly rejected the Kurds' demand that they keep their militia intact, that they be guaranteed a percentage of oil revenue proportional to their population and that their region be expanded to include heavily Kurdish areas once held by Mr. Hussein's forces. The deadlock cuts to the heart of the future of the Iraqi nation, a patchwork of ethnic and religious groups cobbled together from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. It poses a test for Mr. Bremer, who is faced with the task of reconciling the demands of the three Iraqi groups while putting in place a framework that will hold the country together after the Americans leave. Kurdish officials said Mr. Bremer, trying to break the deadlock, flew by helicopter earlier this week to the home of Massoud Barzani, the longtime Kurdish guerrilla chieftain and political leader. He stayed overnight, Kurdish officials said, but left empty-handed. Kurdish leaders say they can only compromise on autonomy so much, because an overwhelming majority of their people want independence from Iraq. That desire is shaped by the historic depredations suffered by the Kurds at the hands of the central government in Baghdad. "These are our rights — we fought hard for them," said Rowsch Shaways, a senior leader of Mr. Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party. "The experiment of Iraqi statehood failed once before. We do not want to repeat the same mistakes." American officials declined to comment on the negotiations. At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Bremer was asked about oil, militia forces and disputed territories. While he declined to address in depth the subjects of oil and territory, Mr. Bremer said he expected the Kurdish militias, some of whom have been fighting for decades, to disarm or be integrated into an army under the command of the central authority in Baghdad. "We have made clear in discussions with the Kurdish leaders and other political leaders that we believe there's no place in an independent, stable Iraq for armed forces that are not under the control of the command structure of the central government," Mr. Bremer said. The issue of Kurdish autonomy has loomed over the fledgling Iraqi government here since the fall of Mr. Hussein, whose military brutally put down a Kurdish revolt after the 1991 war when the United States and its allies declined to intervene. Since American and allied forces returned to the area later in 1991 and a no-flight zone was established to exclude Mr. Hussein's air force, Iraq's Kurdish region has largely governed itself. Its flourishing unnerves Turkey, Iran and Syria, which have their own Kurdish populations whose pleas for autonomy they have sought to suppress. The draft of the constitution that is serving as a basis for the negotiations recognizes the regional government of the Kurdish lands that were held by the Kurds when the latest war started in March 2003. The document sidesteps an array of contentious issues. It leaves for later, for instance, the settlement of conflicting claims to Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city that was subjected to a government-encouraged immigration of Arabs during Mr. Hussein's time. Kirkuk is the center for oil production in northern Iraq. Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, said he hoped that many of the Kurdish demands could be left for the permanent constitution next year. But the council has already made some compromises to placate the Kurds, he said. In the draft now circulating before the council, Mr. Pachachi said, the temporary constitution enshrines Kurdish as one of Iraq's two official languages. The council did that, Mr. Pachachi said, even though Kurds make up only about 20 percent of Iraq's population. But Mr. Pachachi said he opposed the Kurds' demands that they retain their militia and receive oil revenues roughly proportionate to their population. "This is the national wealth," Mr. Pachachi said of the oil revenue. "In the end, they can't have everything." Kurdish leaders have been especially adamant on keeping their militia, the force that fought alongside the Americans during the campaign to unseat Mr. Hussein. Political parties across the country have their own militias, which has raised the prospect of internal conflict. But Kurdish officials say their history of persecution in Iraq has been too traumatic for them to consider surrendering their armed forces yet. Similarly, Kurdish officials say they will insist that Arab migration into Kurdish lands be reversed before elections next year for a national assembly. Otherwise, they say, a census would enshrine Arab dominance in many areas rightfully Kurdish, and then, with the elections that are sure to follow, any incentive to reverse those policies would fade. Mr. Othman, the Kurdish member of the Governing Council, said he was so frustrated by the current deadlock and by American policy that he was inclined to let Mr. Bremer be the one to explain the situation to the Kurdish people. "If I try to go back to my people and sell these things to them, they will choke me," Mr. Othman said. "Let Mr. Bremer tell them."

BBC 25 Feb 2004 Kurds demand vote on independence By Barbara Plett BBC correspondent in Baghdad Kurds want to decide their own future in Iraq Kurdish activists have collected 1.7 million signatures on a petition demanding a referendum on the future of northern Iraq's Kurdish region. For the past decade, Kurds have ruled their own affairs, out of the reach of former strongman Saddam Hussein. Their status in the new Iraq has been one of the most contentious issues for negotiators as they try to finalise an interim constitution. The petition was handed to Iraqi and American officials. The referendum campaign has been gaining momentum over the past month. Memories of repression Organisers are demanding a vote on whether the Kurdish zone in northern Iraq should become part of the country in a federal structure or declare independence. Referendum advocates said Kurds had strong memories of repression under Arab-majority governments in Baghdad and did not want to give up the freedoms gained during more than a decade of autonomy under Western protection. Few of us feel Iraqi any more - a younger generation has grown up in freedom, learning Kurdish, not Arabic. For the older generation, Iraq is mostly a bad nightmare Extract from petition Organisers said they have presented the petition to officials in the Iraqi Governing Council and the occupation authorities, and are waiting for a response. Their grass-roots campaign has complicated an issue that has bedevilled negotiations on an interim Iraqi constitution. Kurdish leaders have been pressing for self-government in a federal system but they have met opposition from Arabs, who fear this would be the first step to the break-up of Iraq. Organisers of the referendum campaign say the movement is asking only for the right to be consulted - but popular sentiment is clearly in support of independence.

NYT 29 Feb 2004 Hussein's Regime Skimmed Billions From Aid Program By SUSAN SACHS AGHDAD, Iraq — In its final years in power, Saddam Hussein's government systematically extracted billions of dollars in kickbacks from companies doing business with Iraq, funneling most of the illicit funds through a network of foreign bank accounts in violation of United Nations sanctions. Millions of Iraqis were struggling to survive on rations of food and medicine. Yet the government's hidden slush funds were being fed by suppliers and oil traders from around the world who sometimes lugged suitcases full of cash to ministry offices, said Iraqi officials who supervised the skimming operation. The officials' accounts were enhanced by a trove of internal Iraqi government documents and financial records provided to The New York Times by members of the Iraqi Governing Council. Among the papers was secret correspondence from Mr. Hussein's top lieutenants setting up a formal mechanism to siphon cash from Iraq's business deals, an arrangement that went unnoticed by United Nations monitors. Under a United Nations program begun in 1997, Iraq was permitted to sell its oil only to buy food and other relief goods. The kickback order went out from Mr. Hussein's inner circle three years later, when limits on the amount of oil sales were lifted and Iraq's oil revenues reached $10 billion a year. In an Aug. 3, 2000, letter marked "urgent and confidential," the Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, informed government ministers that a high-command committee wanted "extra revenues" from the oil-for-food program. To that end, he wrote, all suppliers must be told to inflate their contracts "by the biggest percentage possible" and secretly transfer those amounts to Iraq's bank accounts in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. "Please acknowledge and certify that this is executed in an accurate and clear way, and under supervision of the specified minister," Mr. Ramadan wrote. Iraq's sanctions-busting has long been an open secret. Two years ago, the General Accounting Office estimated that oil smuggling had generated nearly $900 million a year for Iraq. Oil companies had complained that Iraq was squeezing them for illegal surcharges, and Mr. Hussein's lavish spending on palaces and monuments provided more evidence of his access to unrestricted cash. But the dimensions of the corruption have only lately become clear, from the newly available documents and from disclosures by government officials who say they were too fearful to speak out before. They show the magnitude and organization of the payoff system, the complicity of the companies involved and the way Mr. Hussein bestowed contracts and gifts on those who praised him. Yet his policy of awarding contracts to gain political support often meant that Iraq received shoddy, even useless, goods in return. Perhaps the best measure of the corruption comes from a review of the $8.7 billion in outstanding oil-for-food contracts by the provisional Iraqi government with United Nations help. It found that 70 percent of the suppliers had inflated their prices and agreed to pay a 10 percent kickback, in cash or by transfer to accounts in Jordanian, Lebanese and Syrian banks. At that rate, Iraq would have collected as much as $2.3 billion of the $32.6 billion worth of contracts it signed since mid-2000, when the kickback system began. And some companies were willing to pay even more than the standard 10 percent, according to Trade and Oil Ministry employees. Iraq's suppliers included Russian factories, Arab trade brokers, European manufacturers and state-owned companies from China and the Middle East. Iraq generally refused to buy directly from American companies, which in any case needed special licenses to trade legally with Iraq. In one instance, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led administrators in Iraq, found that Syria was prepared to kick back nearly 15 percent on its $57.5 million contract to sell wheat to Iraq. Syria has agreed to increase the amount of wheat to compensate for the inflated price, said an occupation official involved in the talks. Iraq also created a variety of other, less lucrative, methods of extorting money from its oil customers. It raised more than $228 million from illegal surcharges it imposed on companies that shipped Iraqi crude oil by sea after September 2000, according to an accounting prepared by the Iraqi Oil Ministry late last year. An additional $540 million was collected in under-the-table surcharges on oil shipped across Iraq's land borders, the documents show. "A lot of it came in cash," recalled Shamkhi H. Faraj, who managed the Oil Ministry's finance department under the old government and is now general manager of the ministry's oil-marketing arm. "I used to see people carrying it in briefcases and bringing it to the ministry." United Nations overseers say they were unaware of the systematic skimming of oil-for-food revenues. They were focused on running aid programs and assuring food deliveries, they add. The director of the Office of Iraq Programs, Benon V. Sevan, declined to be interviewed about the oil-for-food program. In written responses to questions sent by e-mail, his office said he learned of the 10 percent kickback scheme from the occupation authority only after the end of major combat operations. In the few instances when Mr. Sevan's office suspected an irregularity, the statement said, it notified the sanctions committee, "which then requested member states concerned to investigate." As the details of the corruption have recently emerged, law enforcement authorities in several countries said they had opened criminal and civil investigations into whether companies violated laws against transferring money to Iraq. Treasury Department investigators have also been helping the Iraqi authorities recover an estimated $2 billion believed to be left in foreign accounts. So far, more than $750 million has been found in foreign accounts and transferred back to Iraq, said Juan C. Zarate, a deputy assistant treasury secretary. To some officials of Iraq's provisional government, what is perhaps most insulting is how little their country got for its oil money. Taking stock of what was bought before the American-led invasion toppled Mr. Hussein last spring, they have found piles of nonessential drugs, mismatched equipment and defective hospital machines. "You had cartels that were willing to pay kickbacks but would also bid up the price of goods," said Ali Allawi, a former World Bank official who is now interim Iraqi trade minister. "You had rings involved in supplying shoddy goods. You had a system of payoffs to the bourgeoisie and royalty of nearby countries. "Everybody was feeding off the carcass of what was Iraq." Trade Embargo Imposed The United Nations Security Council first imposed a trade embargo on Iraq on Aug. 9, 1990, one week after Mr. Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. It was kept in place after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, with the provision that sanctions would be lifted once Iraq destroyed its unconventional weapons and ended its weapons program. But as living conditions deteriorated, the Council made several offers to let Iraq export limited quantities of oil to buy food and medicine. The two sides agreed on a mechanism only in 1996. Late in 1999, after further tinkering, Iraq was permitted to sell as much oil as it wanted, with the proceeds going into an escrow account at Banque Nationale de Paris, supervised by the United Nations. The new rules also allowed Iraq to sign its own contracts for billions of dollars in imported goods. As ministry officials and government documents portrayed it, the oil-for-food program quickly evolved into an open bazaar of payoffs, favoritism and kickbacks. The kickback scheme worked, they said, because the payoffs could be included in otherwise legitimate supply contracts negotiated directly by the former government and then transferred to Iraq once the United Nations released funds to pay the suppliers. "We'd accept the low bid and say to the supplier, `Give us another 10 percent,' " said Faleh Khawaji, an Oil Ministry official who used to supervise the contracting for spare parts and maintenance equipment. "So that was added to the contract. If the bid was for $1 million, for example, we would tell the supplier to make it $1.1 million." The contract would then be sent to the United Nations sanctions committee, which was supposed to review contracts with an eye only to preventing Iraq from acquiring items that might have military uses. Mr. Khawaji said he always assumed that United Nations officials simply chalked up the higher costs after 2000 to inflation. "If it was possible, Saddam would have made it 50 percent," he added. "But 10 percent could be hidden." Some companies balked, he said, but most accepted the suggestion that they find a willing trading company to act as their intermediary. The trading companies, most of them Russian or Arab and some no more than shells, would then sell the product to Iraq and make the required kickback, Mr. Khawaji said. "The Western company would say, `I can't do it, I've got a board, how do I get around the auditors?' " he said. "And someone would tell them there are companies in Jordan willing to do this for you. You sign with this trader and authorize them to sign a contract on your behalf." The kickbacks were paid into Iraq's accounts, and designated ministry employees withdrew the cash and brought it to Baghdad on a regular basis, according to Mr. Khawaji and Iraqi financial records. American and European investigators said they were trying to determine whether the banks knew they were being used for illegal financial dealings with Iraq. Mr. Zarate, the Treasury official, said it was possible that banks did not see the whole picture because Mr. Hussein's government sometimes used agents and front companies to help move money. "But the reality was that banks were used," he said. The chairman of Jordan National Bank in Amman, for one, said his bank was unaware that Iraq was collecting kickbacks, although Iraqi records show that tens of millions of dollars flowed into accounts at the bank in the name of government agencies and high-ranking Iraqi officials. "If there is something like this, this 10 percent, to be honest, it wouldn't appear in the bank transactions," said the bank's chairman, Rajai Muasher. "It would be between the Iraqi government and the supplier." The old government, however, required companies to provide separate bank letters of credit for the kickbacks, "to guarantee that they will pay them later to Iraq," as the country's irrigation minister noted in a Sept. 9, 2000, letter to Mr. Ramadan. Businessmen who paid the kickbacks said they had no choice but to follow instructions. "If you wanted to do business in Iraq, these were the conditions you had to abide by, not only my company but thousands of companies from all over the world that dealt in the oil-for-food program," said Emad Geldah, a member of the Egyptian Parliament who had three trading companies that sold commodities to Iraq. "Once they told us it is for transportation inside Iraq because everything is very expensive," he said. "Or they would tell us it is for the maintenance of the trucks or they would call it after-sales service. We didn't know what they did with it." Margin for Corruption Under normal circumstances, Iraq would have been expected to seek the highest price for its oil, its only legal source of cash. Instead, said officials who worked with the oil-for-food program, Mr. Hussein's government fought to keep the price as low as possible to leave a margin for oil traders to pay illegal surcharges. "We were instructed by the government to get the lowest price," said Ali Mubdir, director of crude oil sales in the State Oil Marketing Organization, or SOMO. Under the oil-for-food program rules, the United Nations' oil overseers had to certify that Iraq was selling its crude oil at fair value. Until the overseers changed the pricing formula in late 2001, Iraq's oil sold at a discount compared with similar oil from other producers. The margin allowed Iraq to impose an illegal surcharge on each barrel of oil it sold, with purchasers required to pay in cash or by transferring money into foreign bank accounts, Oil Ministry officials said. At the same time, the Oil Ministry officials said, purchasers of Iraqi oil were required to pay a surcharge, either in cash or by transferring money into Iraqi accounts in foreign banks. "It started in September 2000 and stopped in October 2002," said Mr. Faraj, the SOMO general manager. "It was 10 cents a barrel for three months. Then some people suggested 50 cents, then it was 30, then 25, then 15 cents." According to SOMO balance sheets, one in four oil purchasers, mostly Russian companies, paid cash. The ministry's records showed that the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow, as well as embassies in Turkey, Switzerland and Vietnam, received $61 million in cash from the companies that bought oil. Among the companies listed by SOMO as having paid the surcharges are some of the world's biggest oil trading companies and refineries. Although the balance sheet lists payments down to the penny, companies contacted about the surcharges denied they were the ones that paid. Iraqi records, for example, show that Glencore, a Swiss-based trading company that was one of the most active purchasers of Iraqi crude, paid $3,222,780.70 in surcharges. But the company said in a written statement that "it has at no time made any inappropriate payments to the Iraqi government" and "had no dealings with the Iraqi government outside the U.N. approved oil-for-food program." Determining who paid the surcharge in each oil transaction will take time, according to American and Iraqi investigators. Iraqi oil shipments passed through more than one set of hands before reaching the major Western oil companies and refineries that were the ultimate customers. Those that directly bought the oil and resold it were a scattered collection of politically connected businessmen rewarded with contracts by the government, small oil dealers and companies with no experience in the business, among them a Thai rice company and a Belarussian drug company. When oil companies complained to the United Nations about the per-barrel surcharges, Iraq levied higher charges on ships loading at its port. "Before the war, when a lot of companies refused to pay them under the table, they started pushing up the port charges because that was also money that came to them directly," said Ahmed Ashfaq, managing director of B.C. International, an Indian oil trading company that bought Iraqi oil during the oil-for-food program. The port charges, up to $60,000 for large tankers, were collected by two Jordan-based shipping companies and transferred to Iraqi bank accounts in Jordan, according to SOMO officials. The companies, Al Huda International Trading Company and Alia for Transportation and General Trade Company, are owned by the Khawam family, leaders of one of Iraq's biggest tribes. "We had a contract with Iraq to provide services at the port," said Hatem al-Khawam, chairman of the board of the family business in Amman. Collecting and passing on the charges, he added, was simply business. "It wasn't my job to say if it was right or wrong." Vouchers for Favors In the high-flying days after Iraq was allowed to sell its oil after 10 years of United Nations sanctions, the lobby of the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad was the place to be to get a piece of the action. That was where the oil traders would gather whenever a journalist, actor or political figure would arrive in Iraq and openly praise Mr. Hussein. Experience taught them that the visitor usually returned to the hotel with a gift voucher, courtesy of the Iraqi president or one of his aides, representing the right to buy one million barrels or more of Iraqi crude. The vouchers had considerable value. With the major oil companies monopolizing most Persian Gulf oil, there was fierce competition among smaller traders for the chance to buy Iraqi oil. And as long as Iraq kept its oil prices low enough, traders could make a tidy profit, even after buying the voucher and paying the surcharge. "We used to joke that if you get one million barrels, you could make $200,000," Mr. Faraj, of SOMO, added, referring to a period when the vouchers sold for about 20 cents per barrel. "And yet the ones who got it were those people who used to come here and praise Saddam for his stand against imperialism." Tarek Abdullah, an Iraqi-born trader living in Jordan, formed a company, DAT Oil, in Cyprus to take advantage of the Iraqi government's low oil prices. "We all bought from those people who got the allocations," he said. "Sometimes they'd register the quantity under my name, but often the Iraqis wouldn't give us an allocation directly." Late last year, SOMO prepared a list showing 267 companies and individuals that it said received allocations during the oil-for-food program. "The list is factual," Mr. Faraj said. "There's nothing made up regarding the person and the quantities." Laith Shbeilat and Toujan Faisal, two Jordanian politicians who supported the former Iraqi government, said they received oil allocations but gave them to friends who wanted to get into the business. So did Bernard Guillet, a French diplomat and an adviser to the former French interior minister, Charles Pasqua. He said he asked Tariq Aziz, one of Mr. Hussein's top aides, for gift vouchers and then gave them to people from Mr. Pasqua's European parliamentary district who were looking to deal in Iraqi oil. "Some people were trying to do some business," Mr. Guillet said. "My role was only to say to Tariq Aziz or others, `Look, there are some companies that are willing to work and they're having difficulties.' That's it." Last month, a Baghdad newspaper published the list of companies that got allocations, prompting a chorus of denials. The Russian Foreign Ministry, for example, blames politics for releasing the list, which contained 46 Russian companies and individuals, including the former Russian ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Titorenko, and Nikolai Ryzhkov, a Parliament member. In a statement, the ministry denied any wrongdoing by Russians. "It is hard not to notice," the statement also said, that publication of the list "coincided with the strengthening of efforts to return Russian companies to the Iraqi market in order to cooperate in the reconstruction of war-destroyed Iraq." Others on the list said the Iraqis tried to ply them with vouchers, but they refused. The Rev. Jean-Marie Benjamin, a Catholic priest who campaigned for years to lift the sanctions on Iraq, said his Iraqi contacts once told him they could offer him "help" in the form of valuable oil vouchers. He said he refused outright. In a telephone interview from his office in Assisi, Italy, Father Benjamin also said he went so far as to write to Mr. Aziz in early 2002 to repeat his refusal, and underlined it again when he met Mr. Aziz that year in Baghdad. As he recalled the conversation, Father Benjamin said, "Aziz told me, `But we won't give you anything. Only the traders will take something.' And I said, `I don't know how it works, but I can't, morally.' " Contracts Canceled When Dr. Khidr Abbas became Iraq's interim minister of health six months ago, he discovered some of the effects of Mr. Hussein's political manipulation of the oil-for-food program. After a review of the ministry's spending, he said, he canceled $250 million worth of contracts with companies he believes were fronts for the former government or got contracts only because they were from countries friendly to Mr. Hussein. They were paid millions of dollars, said Dr. Abbas, for drugs they did not deliver, medical equipment that did not work and maintenance agreements that were never honored. Iraq, he added, was left with defective ultrasound machines from Algeria, overpriced dental chairs from China and a warehouse filled with hundreds of wheelchairs that the old government did not bother to distribute. "There is an octopus of companies run by Arabs connected with the old regime or personalities like Uday," he said, referring to one of Mr. Hussein's sons who was killed by American troops last July. "Some paid up to 30 percent kickbacks." Other Iraqi officials said the ministries were forced to order goods from companies and countries according to political expediency instead of quality. "There would be an order that out of $2 billion for the Trade Ministry and Health Ministry, $1 million would have be given to Russian companies and $500 million to Egyptians," said Nidhal R. Mardood, a 30-year veteran employee of the Iraqi Ministry of Trade, where he is now the director-general for finance. "It depended on what was going on in New York at the U.N. and which country was on the Security Council," he added. "They apportioned the amounts according to politics." One result, for Iraqis, was a mishmash of equipment: fire trucks from Russia, earth-moving machines from Jordan, station wagons from India, trucks from Belarus and garbage trucks from China. "We got the best of the worst," Mr. Mardood said. Yasmine Gailani, a medical technician who worked at a lab specializing in blood disorders, said the political manipulation resulted in deliveries of drugs that varied in quality and dosage every six months. At one point, she said, the lab was instructed to only buy its equipment from Russian companies, adding, "So we would have to find what we called a Russian `cover' in order to buy from the manufacturer we wanted." Her husband, Kemal Gailani, is minister of finance in the interim Iraqi government. Last fall, he said, he confronted a United Nations official over the quality of goods that Iraqis received in their monthly rations during the sanctions. "We were looking at the contracts already approved and the U.N. lady said, `Do you mind if we continue with these?' " he recalled. "She was talking as if it was a gift or a favor, with our money of course. I said, `Is it the same contracts to Egypt and China? Is it the same cooking oil we used to use in our drive shafts, the same matches that burned our houses down, the same soap that didn't clean?' She was shocked." Dr. Abbas, a surgeon who left his practice in London to return home to Iraq, said he was preparing lawsuits against some of the drug and medical supply companies he said were allowed to cheat Iraqis. He would also like to stop dealing with any company that paid kickbacks, but he said he realized that might not be practical. But he would like to give them a message. "I would say to them, it was very cruel to aid a dictator and his regime when all of you knew what the money was and where it was going," he said. "Instead of letting his resources dry up, you let the dictatorship last longer." Abeer Allam in Cairo, Erin Arvedlund in Moscow and Jason Horowitz in Rome contributed reporting for this article. .

B'Tselem 27 Jan 2004 www.btselem.org Forbidden Families New report by B'Tselem and HaMoked: Following enactment of the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law on 31 July 2003, thousands of couples will be forced to live apart. Children will be separated from their parents at the age of 12 or will become lawbreakers through no fault of their own. Many families will remain in Israel with no legal status in order to live together. Today, B'Tselem and HaMoked released a report describing the implications for residents of East Jerusalem of the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) 5763-2003. The report demonstrates that Israel deliberately misstated the purpose of the law, claiming it was necessary for security reasons, in order to conceal the real basis for the legislation – demographic concerns. Yet, even the security claims are refuted: According to Interior Ministry's figures, 23 of the 100,000-140,000 Palestinians who came to Israel through the family unification process – only some 0.02 percent – ostensibly took some part in attacks against Israelis. As such, the law constitutes severe collective punishment, a form of discrimination with no legitimate basis. B'Tselem and HaMoked urge the government of Israel to change its policy and treat its citizens and residents equally, and call on the Knesset to repeal the new law. The Interior Ministry must reinstate the procedures for family unification and the registration of children, and process these requests efficiently and fairly. These procedures must recognize the right of residents of East Jerusalem to marry whomever they choose and to live with their spouse and children wherever they wish. Background: On 31 March 2002, then-Minister of Interior, Eli Yishai, froze the handling of all applications for family unification for Palestinians – the process through which an alien spouse received legal status in Israel. Some two months later, on 12 May, the government of Israel decided to maintain the freeze "until a new policy was formulated." On 31 July 2003, the Knesset enacted the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order), 5763-2003. The law prohibits Israeli residents who married, or who in the future marry residents of the Occupied Territories to live with them in Israel. The law also makes it impossible to register children born in the Occupied Territories to parents who are Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Except for this sweeping prohibition, no "new policy" has been drafted. A number of petitions have been filed with the High Court of Justice challenging the government's decision and the new law. These petitions are currently pending.

AFP 1 Feb 2004 33 countries object to ICJ ruling on West Bank barrier JERUSALEM (AFP) - Thirty-three countries believe the International Court of Justice (ICJ) does not have the jurisdiction to rule on the legality of the controversial separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank, a foreign ministry official said Sunday. According to Ron Prosor, chief political adviser to Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, a total of 33 nations formally expressed their objections to the ICJ's authority to rule on the issue at a hearing scheduled for February 23. The court's deadline for written arguments was Friday. Among the countries submitting an objection were the United States, the majority of EU member states including France, Germany and Britain, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Senegal, Cameroon, Poland and Hungary. "These countries believe the issue of the security fence is a political issue which the court in The Hague is not supposed to debate," Prosor told army radio. Israel on Friday formally submitted a written challenge to the court's right to rule on the barrier, which is currently under construction. The Jewish state is hoping the court will decline to debate the legality of the barrier on grounds that it is not the appropriate forum in which to discuss what is an essentially political issue. The matter was referred to the ICJ by the UN General Assembly, which asked the court to pronounced on the issue following an Arab resolution. The opinion is non-binding and only advisory but could cause great embarrassment to Israel. Seventeen countries, most of them Arab or Muslim, believe the world court does have the right to rule on the issue. Palestinians says the route of the barrier, which at points juts deep into their territory, proves it is little more than a bid to pre-empt the borders of their promised state and grab some of its most fertile land. But Israel insists it is merely designed to prevent attacks on its soil, such as the suicide bombing of a bus in Jerusalem on Thursday which left 12 people dead as well as the Palestinian bomber. Palestinian officials on Saturday reacted angrily to US and EU opposition to the world court ruling on the barrier. "The United States, Britain and Germany ask the Palestinians not to have recourse to violence, but when the Palestinians have recourse to diplomacy they slam the door on us," said Palestinian negotiations minister Saeb Erakat.

AP 2 Feb 2004 Israeli defense minister says Islamic leaders are assassination targets By Josef Federman The Associated Press JERUSALEM -- The leaders of violent Islamic groups are targets for assassination, Israel's defense minister said Sunday, raising the possibility of a further escalation in the three years of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed. Shaul Mofaz issued the threat in response to a declaration by the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, that the group plans an all-out effort to kidnap Israeli soldiers. "The statements of Yassin just emphasize the need to strike the heads of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad," Mofaz told the weekly meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, according to an Israeli official who attended the meeting. The statements by Mofaz and Yassin threaten to inflame an already violent confrontation that has led to the deaths of more than 3,500 people on both sides during three years of fighting. Last week, Israel killed eight Palestinians in a shootout in Gaza City, while a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 11 people in Jerusalem. Hamas took responsibility for the bombing, a day after a claim from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, loosely linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Sunday was a Muslim holiday, and Hamas officials were not available to react to Mofaz's comments. During more than three years of violence, Israel has carried out many pinpoint attacks aimed at leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- often prompting a violent response. In September, Yassin narrowly escaped an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip. But Israel has greatly reduced the number of targeted killings in recent months. Last month, Mofaz's deputy, Zeev Boim, retracted comments calling for Yassin's assassination, saying later that no decision had been made.

WP 2 Feb 2004 Israel Exposes Horror of Bus Bombing Gruesome Video Aired On Official Web Site; Need for Barrier Cited By Molly Moore Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, February 2, 2004; Page A12 JERUSALEM, Feb. 1 -- The camera jostled past the crush of rescue workers, entered the bombed bus and paused on bloody pieces of flesh and a withered gray lung hanging from a twisted window frame. It moved to a severed right foot flung against a curb, then halted on an arm lying in the middle of the street. For the first time in more than three years and after scores of suicide bombings, the Israeli government has taken the horror of a bus bombing directly to the public via a video on the Internet, bypassing what one senior Israeli official called the "distorted" coverage of the international news media. "We decided this was the only way for us to bring our message to the world," said Gideon Meir, a senior Foreign Ministry officer. "It took us 31/2 years to show these pictures." The decision to put the graphic five-minute, 38-second video on the Israeli Foreign Ministry Web site just hours after the Thursday morning explosion, which killed 11 people and the bomber, has unleashed an emotional public debate. Many Israelis are weary of a conflict that has turned buses, cafes and streets into targets and are increasingly frustrated with political leadership on both sides that has not stopped the violence. Meir said the Web site had received 600,000 hits on the video as of Sunday night. On the day of the bombing, the site temporarily collapsed under the volume of attempts to view the footage, which carried the understated warning -- "Caution: Video contains very graphic footage." According to Meir, the government decided to air the footage because of a pending case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague over the legal aspects of the massive complex of walls, fences and trenches that Israel is building around and through the West Bank. The Israeli government describes the project as a security fence that is needed to prevent suicide attacks. Palestinians and some international human rights organizations argue that it is an attempt to unilaterally establish a new border deep inside the West Bank and expropriate Palestinian land. Meir said the government decision to put the footage on the Internet "was based on the fact that Israel is being taken to the International Court of Justice while Palestinians are perpetrating this barbaric terrorism." That rationale outraged some opponents of the barrier project. "Showing bodies or body parts . . . lying on the ground and using it for political ends is disgusting," said Jeff Halper, who heads the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, an organization that monitors Israeli military actions against Palestinians. He accused the Israeli government of "trying to sell a certain political program, the wall, and to recruit the dead for this mission." But some Israelis defended the government's decision. "Unfortunately this display was not introduced at an earlier stage," said Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "The media presents these things in a sterile manner and it does not show you what happens in reality. I believe you should show the horror, put the truth on the table." The video footage on the government Web site, www.mfa.gov.il, was taken by Ilan Sztulman, 45, who heads visual productions for the Foreign Ministry. He said he arrived at the scene of the Thursday attack only minutes after the blast. "I get to the zone much faster than any other photographers because I have special permission to go in," Sztulman said. "Most of the journalists cannot go in until the bomb officers declare the area is bomb-free." At Thursday's bombing, most journalists were kept more than 30 yards from the bus in the first minutes after the explosion. Many of the body parts videotaped by Sztulman had been collected by rescue workers by the time journalists were allowed to move closer. The 11th victim's body was so mutilated that the passenger, an Ethiopian woman, was not identified until this weekend using DNA tests. "We've been documenting the terrorist attacks for a long time," Sztulman said, adding, "We classified this stuff as almost secret." Last summer, the Foreign Ministry's public affairs office showed one of its graphic videos to international journalists for the first time, but did not make the footage public. Some of the most gruesome images from Thursday's bombing were edited out of the version now on the Foreign Ministry Web site, Sztulman said. Even so, the footage remains jarring: Bodies, their appendages bruised and bloodied, lie at unnatural angles on the pavement; a pile of brains is partially covered by a piece of fabric; blood drips from flesh hanging on the bus window. Sztulman also captured the intimate details that illustrate how the explosion shattered what began as an ordinary ride for dozens of passengers on Egged Bus No. 19. His camera recorded a black holy book still atop a sheaf of folders on one seat, a navy blue knapsack and silver mobile telephone tossed on the nearby pavement and a woman's leg in a black running shoe protruding into the bus aisle as though she were preparing to get up from her seat. On Sunday, the Israeli military conducted a rare incursion into the West Bank city of Jericho, which has been largely immune from Israeli military operations during the current uprising, and imposed a curfew on the city, according to local residents and military officials. Israeli soldiers killed a man whom Palestinian security officials identified as a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Israeli military officials said troops shot the man after he opened fire when soldiers tried to arrest him. Researchers Samuel Sockol and Hillary Claussen contributed to this article. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs www.mfa.gov.il

The Nation 2 Feb 2004 Pursuing the Millennium Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by David Hirst In the minds of many Westerners, Muslim fundamentalism has replaced communism as perhaps the greatest single "threat" to the existing world order. From this perspective the Palestinian intifada becomes just another episode in a "clash of civilizations." For them, there is an intrinsic link between Palestinian "terrorism" and, say, the al-Qaeda bombing of an American warship off Yemen. Almost totally absent from such arguments is any inclination to examine Jewish fundamentalism, or so much as to ask whether it, too, might be a factor in the conflict over Palestine, one of the reasons why it seems so insoluble. There is, in fact, a great ignorance of, or indifference to, this whole subject in the outside world, and not least in the United States. This is due at least in part to that general reluctance of the mainstream American media to subject Israel to the same searching scrutiny to which it would other states and societies, and especially when the issue in question is as sensitive, as emotionally charged, as this one is. But, in the view of the late Israel Shahak, it reflects particularly badly on an American Jewry which, with its ingrained, institutionalized aversion to finding fault with Israel, turns a blind eye to what Israelis like himself viewed with disgust and alarm, and unceasingly said so. American Jews, especially Orthodox ones, are generous financiers of the shock troops of fundamentalism, the religious settlers; indeed a good 10 percent of these, and among the most extreme, violent and sometimes patently deranged, are actually immigrants from America. They are, says Shahak, one of the "absolutely worst phenomena" in Israeli society, and "it is not by chance that they have their roots in the American-Jewish community." It was from his headquarters in New York that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Menachem Schneerson, seer of possibly the most rabid of Hasidic sects, the Chabad, gave guidance to his many followers in both Israel and the United States. The ignorance or indifference is all the more remiss in that Jewish fundamentalism is not, and cannot be, just a domestic Israeli question. Israel was always a highly ideological society; it is also a vastly outsized military power, both nuclear and conventional. That is a combination which, when the ideology in question is Zionism in its most extreme, theocratic form, is fraught with possible consequences for the region and the world, and, of course, for the world's only, Israeli-supporting superpower. Like its Islamic counterpart, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel has grown enormously in political importance over the past quarter-century. Its committed, hard-core adherents, as distinct from a larger body of the more traditionally religious, are thought to account for some 20 to 25 percent of the population. They, and more particularly the settlers among them, have acquired an influence, disproportionate to their numbers, over the whole Israeli political process, and especially in relation to the ultra-nationalist right, which, beneath its secular exterior, actually shares much of their febrile, exalted outlook on the world. It is fundamentalism of a very special, ethnocentric and fiercely xenophobic kind, with beliefs and practices that are "even more extremist," says Shahak, "than those attributed to the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism," if not "the most totalitarian system ever invented." Like fundamentalism everywhere, the Jewish variety seeks to restore an ideal, imagined past. If it ever managed to do so, the Israel celebrated by the American "friends of Israel" as a "bastion of democracy in the Middle East" would, most assuredly, be no more. For, in its full and perfect form, the Jewish Kingdom that arose in its place would elevate a stern and wrathful God's sovereignty over any new-fangled, heathen concepts such as the people's will, civil liberties or human rights. It would be governed by the Halacha, or Jewish religious law, of which the rabbis would be the sole interpreters, and whose observance clerical commissars, installed in every public and private institution, would rigorously enforce, with the help of citizens legally obligated to report any offense to the authorities. A monarch, chosen by the rabbis, would rule and the Knesset would be replaced by a Sanhedrin, or supreme judicial, ecclesiastic and administrative council. Men and women would be segregated in public, and "modesty" in female dress and conduct would be enforced by law. Adultery would be a capital offense, and anyone who drove on the Sabbath, or desecrated it in other ways, would be liable to death by stoning. As for non-Jews, the Halacha would be an edifice of systematic discrimination against them, in which every possible crime or sin committed by a Gentile against a Jew, from murder or adultery to robbery or fraud, would be far more heavily punished than the same crime or sin committed by a Jew against a Gentile--if, indeed, the latter were considered to be a felony at all, which it often would not be. All forms of "idolatry or idol-worship," but especially Christian ones (for traditionally Muslims, who are not considered to be idolaters, are held in less contempt than Christians), would be "obliterated," in the words of Shas party leader Rabbi Ovadia Yossef. According to conditions laid down by Maimonides, whose Halacha rulings are holy write to the fundamentalists, those Gentiles, or so-called "Sons of Noah," permitted to remain in the Kingdom could only do so as "resident aliens," obliged under law to accept the "inferiority" in perpetuity which that status entails, to "suffer the humiliation of servitude," and to be "kept down and not raise their heads to the Jews." At weekday prayers, the faithful would intone the special curse: "And may the apostates have no hope, and all the Christians perish instantly." One wonders what the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons think of all this; for it is strange, this new adoration by America's evangelicals of an Israel whose Jewish fundamentalists continue to harbor a doctrinal contempt for Christianity only rivaled by the contempt which the Christian fundamentalists reserve for the Jews themselves. Fundamentalists come in a multitude of sects, often fiercely disputatious with one another on the finest and most esoteric points of doctrine, but all are agreed on this basic eschatological truth: It is upon the coming of the Messiah that the Jewish Kingdom will arise, and the twice-destroyed Temple will be reconstructed on the site where the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques now stand. One school of fundamentalists, the Hanedim, believes that the Messiah will appear in His own good time, that the millennium, the End of Days, will come by the grace of God alone. The Shas party is their largest single political component. Their position has in it something of the traditional religious quietism, which, historically, opposed the whole idea of Zionism, immigration to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. The other school, less extreme in outward religious observances, is more so, indeed breathtakingly revolutionary, on one crucial point of dogma: the belief that the coming of the Messiah can be accomplished, or hastened, by human agency. In fact, the "messianic era" has already arrived. This messianic fundamentalism is represented by the National Religious Party, and its progeny, the settlers of the Gush Emunim, or Bloc of the Faithful, who eventually came to dominate it. Its adherents are ready to involve themselves in the world, sinful though it is, and, by so doing, they sanctify it. Except for the symbolic skullcap, they have adopted conventional modern dress; they include secular subjects in the curricula of their seminaries. According to the teachings of their spiritual mentor, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, the Gush, or at least the rabbis who lead it, are themselves the collective incarnation of the Messiah. Since, in biblical prophecy, the Messiah was to appear riding on an ass, he identified the ass as those errant, secular Jews who remain in stubborn ignorance of the exalted purpose of its divinely guided rider. In the shape of those early Zionists they had, it is true, performed the necessary task of carrying the Jews back to the Holy Land, settling it and founding a state there. But now they had served their historic purpose; now they had become obsolete in their failure to renounce their beastly, ass-like ways--and to perceive that Zionism has a divine, not merely a national, purpose. The mainstream secular Zionist leadership had wanted the Jewish people to achieve "normality," to be as other peoples with a nation-state of their own. The messianics--and indeed, though for emotional more than doctrinal reasons, much of the nationalist right--hold that that is impossible; the Jews' "eternal uniqueness" stems from the covenant God made with them on Mount Sinai. So, as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a Gush leader and head of a yeshiva that studies the ancient priestly rites that would be revived if and when the Temple were rebuilt, put it, "while God requires other, normal nations to abide by abstract codes of 'justice and righteousness,' such laws do not apply to Jews." Since Zionism began, but especially since the 1967 war and Israel's conquest of the remainder of historic Palestine, the Jews have been living in a "transcendental political reality," or a state of "metaphysical transformation," one in which, through war and conquest, Israel liberates itself not only from its physical enemies, but from the "satanic" power which these enemies incarnate. The command to conquer the Land, says Aviner, is "above the moral, human considerations about the national rights of the Gentiles in our country." What he calls "messianic realism" dictates that Israel has been instructed to "be holy, not moral, and the general principles of morality, customary for all mankind, do not bind the people of Israel, because it has been chosen to be above them." It is not simply because the Arabs deem the land to be theirs that they resist this process--though, in truth, it is not theirs and they are simply "thieves" who took what always belonged to the Jews--it is because, as Gentiles, they are inherently bound to do so. "Arab hostility," says another Gush luminary, Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, director of the Kiryat Arba settlement's main yeshiva, "springs, like all anti-Semitism, from the world's recalcitrance" in the face of an Israel pursuing "its divine mission to serve as the heart of the world." So force is the only way to deal with the Palestinians. So long as they stay in the Land of Israel, they can only do so as "resident aliens" without "equality of human and civil rights," those being "a foreign democratic principle" that does not apply to them. But, in the end, they must leave. There are two ways in which that can happen. One is "enforced emigration." The other way is based on the biblical injunction to "annihilate the memory of Amalek." In an article on "The Command of Genocide in the Bible," Rabbi Israel Hess opined--without incurring any criticism from a state Rabbinate whose official duty it is to correct error wherever it finds it--that "the day will come when we shall all be called upon to wage this war for the annihilation of Amalek." He advanced two reasons for this. One was the need to ensure "racial purity." The other lay in "the antagonism between Israel and Amalek as an expression of the antagonism between light and darkness, the pure and the unclean." For the Gush, there is a dimension to the settlements beyond the merely strategic --the defending of the state--or the territorial--the expansion of the "Land of Israel" till it reaches its full, biblically foretold borders. Settlements are the citadels of their messianic ideology, the nucleus and inspiration of their theocratic state-in-the-making, the power base from which to conduct an internal struggle that is inseparable from the external one--the intra-Jewish struggle against that other Israel, the secular-modernist one of original, mainstream Zionism, which stands in their path. The Gush must make good what Rabbi Kook taught: that the existing State of Israel carries within itself "the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth; consequently, total Holiness embraces every Jewish person, every deed, every phenomenon, including Jewish secularism, which will be one day swallowed by Holiness, by Redemption." It goes without saying that the Gush consider any American-sponsored Arab-Israeli peaceful settlement to be a virtual impossibility; but furthermore, any attempt to achieve that impossibility should be actively sabotaged. For them, the Oslo Accords, and the prospect of the "re-division" of the "Land of Israel," was a profound, existential shock. It was, said Rabbi Yair Dreyfus, an "apostasy" which, the day it came into effect, would mark "the end of the Jewish-Zionist era [from 1948 to 1993] in the sacred history of the Land of Israel." The Gush and their allies declared a "Jewish intifada" against it. The grisly climax came when, in the Ramadan of February 1994, a doctor, Baruch Goldstein, Israeli but Brooklyn-born-and-bred, machine-gunned Muslim worshippers in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 of them before he was killed himself. This was no mere isolated act of a madman. Goldstein was a follower of New York's Lubavitcher Rebbe. But what he did reflected and exemplified the whole milieu from which he sprang, the religious settlers, and the National Religious Party behind them. There was no more eloquent demonstration of that than the immediate, spontaneous responses to the mass murder; these yielded nothing, in breadth or intensity, to the Palestinians' responses to their fundamentalist suicide bombings, when these first got going in the wake of it. Many were the rabbis who praised this "act," "event" or "occurrence," as they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of Jerusalem's religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling Goldstein's virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond the religious camp in general; polls said that 50 percent of the Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less approved of it. The "Jewish intifada" also turned on other Jews. Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, was no less a product than Goldstein of the milieu from which the latter sprang. As in other religious traditions, the hatred Jewish fundamentalists nurtured for Jewish "traitors" and "apostates" was perhaps even greater than it was for non-Jews. Rabin, and the "left," were indeed traitors in their eyes; they were "worshippers of the Golden Calf of a delusory peace." And in a clear example of their deep emotional kinship with the fundamentalists, Sharon and several other Likud and far-right secular nationalist leaders joined the hue and cry against Rabin and his government of "criminals," "Nazis" and "Quislings." Declaring that "there are tyrants at the gate," Sharon likened Oslo to the collaboration between France's Marshall Pétain and Hitler and said that Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were both "crazed" in their indifference to the slaughter of Jews. The struggle between the religious--in its fundamentalist form--and the secular, between ancient and modern, ethnocentric and universal, is a struggle for Israel's very soul. The Gush settlements are at the heart of it. The struggle is intensifying and is wholly unresolved. The fundamentalists can never win it; they are simply too backward and benighted for that. But, appeased, surreptitiously connived with, or unashamedly supported down the years by Labor as much as by Likud, they have now acquired such an ascendancy over the whole political process, such a penetration of the apparatus of the state, military and administrative, executive and legislative branches, that no elected government can win it either. Meanwhile, they grow increasingly defiant, lawless and hysterical in pursuit of the millennium. The Zionist-colonial enterprise has always had a built-in propensity to gravitate towards its most extreme expression. And what, with the rise of the Begins and Shamirs, the Sharons and now a new breed of super-Sharons, has been true of the whole is bound to be even more true of its fanatical, fundamentalist particular. Its latest manifestation is the so-called "hilltop youth"; these sons and daughters of the original, post-1967 settlers, born and reared in the closed, homogenous, hothouse world of their West Bank and Gazan strongholds, surpass even their elders in militancy. In keeping with time-honored, Sharon-approved Zionist tradition, they have taken to seizing and staking out hilltops as the sites of settlements to come, and, in every neighborhood they claim as their own, they forcibly prevent the Palestinians from harvesting the fruit of their ancestral olive groves. There is surely worse--much worse--to come. This essay is excerpted from David Hirst's The Gun and the Olive Branch, recently re-released by Nation Books. Click here for info on this myth-breaking history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jerusalem Post 2 Feb 2004 jpost.com Guilty -of advocating mass murder NITSANA DARSHAN-LEITNER While many around the world seem focused on the upcoming legal confrontation in the International Court of Justice involving the legitimacy of the security fence, another important decision in a different international forum seems to have passed by unnoticed. In early December 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda (ICTR) found three African media executives guilty of genocide, incitement to commit genocide and crimes against humanity for the hateful reports and editorials they had published and broadcast nine years before. With its ruling that could impact on our own regional warfare, the ICTR handed down long prison sentences for the trio, establishing that their racist diatribes against a Rwandan minority – mere words – were enough to make them criminally liable for the subsequent murderous attacks of the actual militants. Throughout the early 1990s, when this African conflict was unfolding, the newspapers and electronic media of the Hutu majority incited hatred and urged violence against members of the Tutsi minority. The editorials and broadcasts urged the private militias to kill Tutsi civilians and even targeted specific leaders for death. The Rwandan media played no small role in formulating extreme public opinions of the Hutu community, glorifying violence and fanning the flames of the civil-war. In 1994, during a 100-day period, Hutu militias unleashed deadly assaults on the Tutsis resulting in mass murder. According to estimates, more than 800,000 were killed during those three months. Only then did UN officials and international forces arrive in Rwanda to investigate the reports of genocide. In time, order was restored and arrests were carried out for the killings. A special criminal tribunal was established and indictments were brought against ruling the Hutu political figures and militia leaders. IN ADDITION, three media executives were also singled out for responsibility in the genocidal attacks on the Tutus. Hassan Ngeze, publisher of the mass-circulated Kangura newspaper, and Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, executives of the Rwandan RTLM radio station, were charged with conspiring to perpetrate the violence. Last month, the trio were found guilty of using the media to incite the 100-day genocidal campaign against the Tutsis. The sentences handed down by the ICTR ranged from 35 years to life. Amazingly, the defendants were not convicted of any specific act of violence or victims. Instead they were found guilty, through their radio broadcasts and articles, of whipping up anti-Tutsi passions that resulted in mass murder by others. The ICTR's remarkable 350-page decision noted that under international law states have the powers and right to limit speech to protect their own national security and safeguard their citizens. However, governments additionally have an obligation to restrict and impede speech that advocates: "national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence." In its decision the ICTR compared the Rwandan defendants to the infamous Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, who published the anti-Semitic Der Stuermer. Decades earlier, the Nuremberg Tribunal adjudicating the war crimes of the Third Reich found that Streicher's racist writings acted as a "poison injected into the minds of thousands of Germans which caused them to follow the National Socialist Party's policy of Jewish persecution and extermination." The Nuremberg judges gave Streicher the death penalty for his journalistic incitement. THROUGHOUT THE more than 40 months of this current intifada, Israel and its Jewish citizens have also been at the center of an escalating campaign of racial incitement and hate speech. Barely an evening passes without Israeli television viewers being treated to video samples of the latest racist and anti-Semitic incitement on Palestinian Authority, Syrian, Saudi Arabian, Egyptian and Hizbullah television. The menacing and deranged broadcasts of the local Arab media seem to be united and unrelenting in their message: We Jewish infidels are less than human, and killing us is a meritorious act. Whether it's the masked Palestinian gunmen in Ramallah or the speeches of the turbaned Iranian-backed terrorists in the Bekaa Valley, or the videotaped final testaments of Hamas suicide bombers in their Gaza homes, the words all sound surprisingly the same. The viciousness of their imagery and the dangerous anti-Semitic stereotyping they employ all seem designed to glorify the terrorists and encourage the killing of Jewish civilians. The hate speech of our Arab enemies would not, indeed, have sounded much out of place on the pages of Der Stuermer or the Rwandan Kangura. The international community has finally been handed a clear and unequivocal legal precedent that the racist speech inflicted on Israel's citizens by the Palestinians encourages their violence against us. The reasoning of the ICTR's decision mandates that broadcasters and publishers have an obligation to restrict hate speech or face the penal consequences. Those who provide a media forum to encourage racist violence are guilty of crimes against humanity. The ICTR's long sentences for criminal incitement that led to murder constitute a powerful example of how seriously hate speech is now viewed under international law. IT IS long past time for Israel to go after the conspirators who pump out hate and incitement in the local Arab media. We have allowed our Palestinian neighbors carte blanche to vilify and slander us with words that no free and self-respecting Jewish community would ever allow to continue. We have contented ourselves with targeting the lowly killers without any punishment for those Palestinians who motivate and incite them. Criminal indictments for crimes against humanity should be issued by our Justice Ministry to the key Palestinian broadcasters and journalists engaging in daily anti-Semitic diatribes. Those who operate Palestinian television and radio stations and the printing presses engaged in hate speech should be arrested along with the other suspected killers. In public trial a direct evidentiary connection can be made between increasing Palestinian media incitement and the perpetration of terrorist acts by its viewers and readers. The defendants will be offered the opportunity to explain the legitimacy of their dangerous lies and libels. Moreover, in handing down long sentences to these Palestinian media figures an Israeli tribunal can provide a powerful deterrent to others. Every nation has not only the right but the obligation under international law to prosecute crimes against humanity and racist incitement to murder. Mere words, the ICTR has established, could lead to mass murder in Rwanda. Mere words, we will show, have led to mass murder in Israel too. The author, an Israeli attorney, is the Director of Shurat Hadin – Israel law Center.

AFP 3 Feb 2004 Uprising casts new light on Mideast conflict for historian JERUSALEM Tuesday, Feb 03, 2004,Page 6 An audience with Benny Morris, the historian whose exposure of Israeli atrocities during the war of independence marked him out as a bete-noire of the nationalist right, provides a startling illustration of the corrosive impact of the intifada on Israeli opinion and the peace process. Fifteen years after the publication of his landmark tome The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Morris has now produced a new version with conclusions that have overturned the reputation of a man who still considers himself a leftist. "There are circumstances in history in which ethnic cleansing actually turns things out for the better, makes things better," the 55-year-old history professor said in an interview here, in reference to the first Arab-Israeli conflict. Some 700,000 Palestinians left their homeland, either forcibly or voluntarily, during the conflict which culminated with the proclamation of the Jewish state in May 1948. Now numbering some 3.7 million, these refugees and their descendants constitute one of the principal obstacles to peace in the Middle East conflict. Born several months after the creation of Israel, Morris, a former journalist who is now a professor of history at Ben Gurion university in the southern town of Beersheba, forged his reputation with his searing expose of the atrocities committed against the civilian Palestinian population during the first conflict. In the eyes of the Israeli right, only a militant anti-Zionist could have penned such a book and delivered such ammunition to the enemy. Since then the label of new historian has stuck. It's a description Morris is happy with as it implies "looking afresh at Israel's past and revising that history on the basis of documentation." "And if the revised history means Israel looks worse or reveals things which were not particularly favorable about Israel's behavior, so be it." Morris' publishers have also just published a Hebrew version of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, a comprehensive history of the conflict which was first written in English at a time when the Oslo peace accords appeared to promise a brighter future. "In the 1990s, I was cautiously optimistic that the Palestinians were really willing, they were sincere and they were really willing to accept a two-state solution," he said. But his optimism has taken a pounding both from a deep immersion in the history archives and the launch of the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, at the end of September 2000. "In the year 2000, it dawned on me that the Jews really were bigger victims," he said. "The people here who are in danger of actual annihilation and genocide are the Jews. The Arabs do not face that. The worst they face is expulsion." Morris has also become increasingly convinced that the Palestinians are not prepared to compromise. "They want the whole of Palestine. They want the destruction of the Jewish state." Morris speaks without embarrassment of "a partial ethnic cleansing" which took place at the birth of the state of Israel. "No Jewish state would have been established in 1948 without the displacement of 700,000 Arabs," he said. He even appears to regret that the founders of the state did not expel all the Arabs. "Had the war ended with the Jews in possession of and living west of the Jordan river in Palestine and Arabs of Palestine going across the Jordan ... the Middle East would have been a quieter place and the two peoples, in my view, would have been much happier." Morris concedes that expelling Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip "today would be immoral and impractical." But he adds that he does not rule out the possibility that such a scenario may one day become necessary if the Arab-Israelis join forces with neighboring countries in a concerted attack on the Jewish state.

ICG 5 Feb 2004 Middle East Report N°22 : Arab/Israeli Conflict Palestinian Refugees and the Politics of Peacemaking The Palestinian refugee question has formed a core of the Middle East conflict since 1948. For Israelis, talk of the right of return raises a spectre of Israel's destruction through demography. For Palestinians, the dispossession experience and the call for return are at the root of the national movement. To reach a viable two-state peace, the refugee question must be taken seriously - by Palestinian leaders who must prepare their people for a pragmatic solution; Israel, which must understand Palestinian insistence on an acknowledgment of responsibility; and the international community, which must start now to work on a detailed resolution. Should the disconnect between conditions on the ground and abstract discussions of possible settlement options go on too long, and unravelling of their national leadership persist, Palestinians will become more radical while the credibility of those who con tinue to advocate a negotiated compromise on the refugee question will be dramatically reduced. ICG reports and briefing papers are available on our website: www.crisisweb.org

AFP 8 Feb 2004 Israeli minister wants Muslims converted Muslim and Christian Arabs have lived together for 1400 years An Israeli minister has called on missionaries to solve the Middle East's problems by converting Muslims to Christianity and so "combat terrorism". Speaking on public radio this Sunday, the National Union party's Benny Elon also called on fundamentalist Christian groups to bolster Israel by pushing the nation's "biblical" rights to land. "It would be better that these people are converted to Christianity which is based on the Bible and recognises our rights" to the holy land. Just one condition The tourism minister added that Israel would welcome evangelists in their effort to "spread the good word" in Israel - on condition that they do not seek to convert Jews. Elon, who is also a rabbi, said he supported conversion attempts as a way of dealing with "extremist Muslims such as terrorists who cry Allahu Akbar (God is greater) as they kill". "In the past I believed that Islam was much closer to Judaism than Christianity but I have changed my opinion." Elon stressed that he was expressing his own point of view and was not speaking on behalf of the government. Many fundamentalist Christians have formed a theological alliance with Jewish Zionists - whom they accuse of murdering Jesus - in the belief that the ingathering of Jews into Palestine will hasten the second coming of Christ.

Ha'aretz 25 Feb 2004 Boim apologizes for saying Arabs have 'genetic flaw' By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent The Likud's Deputy Defense Minister MK Ze'ev Boim apologized Wednesday night for saying that perhaps Arabs have a "genetic defect" that makes them tend to participate in acts of terrorism. On Tuesday, Boim created a firestorm of outrage by rhetorically asking: "What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness." Boim's office issued a statement later in the day saying his comments, made at a memorial service for the victims of the 1978 coastal road massacre, were taken out of context. But the excuse fell largely on deaf ears as voices rose in the Knesset calling on him to retract and apologize at the very least, while others called for his resignation. Wednesday night he told Haaretz, "I'm sorry for the term I used. I was referring to terror that has no comparison in the history of humanity but felt the usual words to express the horror and disgust of those who conduct the terror attacks had been eroded and lost their meaning, and as a result I chose to use a term that I regret because it involved a generalization. I have never been a racist." He said that he originally prepared a written speech to the families of the victims of the 1978 coastal road massacre, but decided to forgo it and speak from the heart. He said that immediately after his speech at the annual memorial service, one of the relatives of the dead approached him and berated him for his racist statement. "'You shouldn't have said that,' he told me," Boim said. Twenty-four hours earlier, his comments set off a storm of controversy. Balad MK Jamal Zahalka said, "Boim gives racism a bad name and is returning to the same primitive, sickening and dangerous racism from which the Jews themselves suffered for many generations." Meretz MK Avshalom Vilan asked rhetorically, "What is this, Mein Kampf?" MK Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor) called for Boim's resignation if he did not apologize, while MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said he'd prefer that Boim not resign, "because he's an asset to proving the Palestinian case that the Israeli government is embracing fascists."

AFP 31 Jan 2004 Myanmar junta, Karen rebels to meet again next week: official YANGON, Jan 31 (AFP) - Myanmar's military rulers and ethnic Karen rebels will hold a new round of peace talks in the coming week after calling a halt to five decades of fighting, a junta official said Saturday. Brigadier General Kyaw Thein, who has been closely involved in peace talks with the Karen National Union (KNU), confirmed the upcoming meeting but declined to provide its exact date or location. "Things are coming along fine and we will be meeting again next week for the next round of talks," Kyaw Thein, from the Office of the Chief of Military Intelligence, told AFP. The junta announced on January 23 that it had reached a ceasefire agreement with the KNU to halt more than five decades of conflict with the ethnic insurgent group. A broader peace arrangement is being sought to conclusively end one of the world's longest-running insurgencies and bring the KNU an element of political legitimacy. A delegation led by the commander of the rebel group's military wing, General Bo Mya, made a historic trip to Yangon this month and held a two-hour meeting with the reclusive country's leader, Senior General Than Shwe. Although the informal ceasefire fell short of a written settlement sought by the Karen at the six-day talks in Yangon, the red-carpet treatment extended to the delegation was proof of a warming relationship. The KNU is the largest of the handful of rebel groups still fighting against Yangon's rule. The junta estimates there are 7,000 rebels in the insurgent group which took up arms 53 years ago. Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt has been courting the insurgents as he works to have all rebel ethnic groups attend a national convention for this year to draft a new constitution. The inclusion of the ethnic groups is key to the credibility of the convention, which is the first step in a seven-point "roadmap" for democracy announced last year which the junta hopes will mute international criticism over its failure to embark on reforms. The premier said meanwhile that preparations for the implementation of the roadmap were coming along apace, but warned against internal or international efforts to disrupt the political process. "Any attempts to hinder the working process will make the national goal (of) the emergence of a peaceful, modern, developed and discipline-flourishing democracy ... a distant reality," Khin Nyunt was quoted as saying in the official New Light of Myanmar.

Irrawaddy Online 2 Feb 2004 www.irrawaddy.org News Alert More NLD Members Arrested February 02, 2004—Burma’s military junta continues to jail members of the main opposition group while preparing to head down the path to national reconciliation, say National League for Democracy (NLD) members in Rangoon. Meanwhile, a political prisoner died after serving 10 years in prison, according to an exiled political group and a prisoners’ rights association. Last weekend, military intelligence officers arrested two NLD members, said a senior NLD youth member in Kyee Myin Daing Township, Rangoon. Myint Aye, chairman of the township’s NLD office, and Tin Maung Kyi, a senior member, were arrested, he said. Nobody, including the men’s family members, knows the motive behind the arrests or where they are being held, the NLD youth member said. According to the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) (AAPP), 15 NLD members were arrested throughout Burma in December and January. On Jan 16, the junta released 26 NLD members who were arrested after the May 30 attack on NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi;s convoy in Upper Burma. Meanwhile, a political prisoner, Shein Tin, died last Wednesday, according to a press release from the exiled National Coalition Government of Union of Burma. He was being held at Taungoo prison in Pegu Division. The press release states that the 65-year-old prisoner died of lung cancer. He was arrested in March 1994 and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, so he was scheduled to freed next month. Shein Tin was executive member of the People’s Progressive Party, which was founded during the 1988 pro-democracy movement and later disbanded by the junta. He was accused of being connected to the banned Communist Party of Burma. The AAPP confirmed the death of Shein Tin. Secretary of the AAPP, Tate Naing, said sources inside Burma told him that prison authorities only told Shien Tin that he suffered from lung cancer a week before he died. Shein Tin passed away at a hospital in Taungoo, said Tate Naing. Tate Naing added that Shein Tin’s son-in-law was arrested with him in 1994 and is detained at Thayet Prison in Magwe Division. Shein Tin is the 85th political prisoner to die in a Burmese prison since the military staged a coup in 1988, according to the AAPP.

AFP 1 Feb 2004 Maoists kidnap 192 students and teachers in western Nepal: claim KATHMANDU, Feb 1 (AFP) - Nepal's Maoists have abducted a total of 192 school students in western Nepal in recent days and are forcing them to undergo military training, witnesses and officials said Sunday. Ramesh Pokharel, a teacher at Bajura district, 340 kilometres (212 miles) west of Kathmandu, said 104 school students and some teachers were taken by the rebels last Thursday from a school in Rameswori village to an unknown location. Another 88 students were abducted from a school in Pujyatala village in Achham district, 360 kilometres (225 miles) west of Kathmandu on Friday, a village official said. Home Ministry spokesman Gopendra Bahadur Pandey confirmed that a number of students had been kidnapped but was not immediately able to provide details. The security forces had been sent to rescue the abducted students, Pandey said. Following the abductions, some 45 lower secondary schools in western Nepal have been closed to prevent further such incidents, he said. Village officials claim the boys and girls are rounded up by the rebels and taken to camps for military training and "communist orientation". "The Maoist force is dwindling sharply and is needing to recruit more (people) to reinforce their fighting groups," a former Maoist brigade commander said recently. The rebels have been fighting for a communist republic in Nepal since 1996 and the uprising has so far claimed more than 9,000 lives.

ICG 17 Feb 2004 Nepal: Dangerous Plans for Village Militias New civilian militias threaten to exacerbate the war in Nepal, which has already claimed nearly 9,000 lives. The government's program to arm villagers is deeply flawed for many reasons. First, it is not backed by effective training and oversight, raising the spectre of further abuses by undisciplined combatants. Second, disarming and demobilising militias after conflicts is notoriously difficult, as shown by other post-conflict situations around the world, where militias remain active as criminal groups. Third, their creation will force many villagers to take sides in the conflict - something most wish to avoid since it makes them targets for violence from both sides and tears the already worn social fabric, leaving lasting damage. At a time when Nepal is mired in a three-way conflict, the arming of civilians just creates another group with the potential to destabilise society. - ICG reports and briefing papers are available on our website: www.crisisweb.org

BBC 29 Jan 2004 Access to Evil North Korea remains isolated and in fear of an Iraq-style invasion from the United States. International crisis talks continue over the regime's nuclear weapons programme. President Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung, and head of the only dynasty in the history of communism But This World has uncovered evidence of another more chilling evil: that North Korea is testing new chemical weapons on women and children. Hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned without charge. It's not because they have committed a crime. It is because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime and so they are punished. According to President Kim Jong Il, the bad blood and seed of any dissident must be rooted out down to three generations. Forced labour and starvation rations ensure that prisoners do not escape. Those who try to are publicly executed. But this is not the North Korea the government wants the world to see. The authorities go to great lengths to equip all foreign intruders with "minders" and monitor their every move. Former workers' party official, Sun-ok Lee, was accused of falsifying accounts and tortured in prison The This World team were scrupulously guarded. The answers could only be found outside North Korea itself. Reporter, Olenka Frenkiel, hears testimonies from victims of the secret camps who have since fled to South Korea or the United States. And most shocking of all, she tracks down one of the perpetrators. Kwon Hyok, a former North Korean army intelligence officer, was also chief guard at "Prison Camp no. 22". For the first time on camera, he describes specially-made glass gas chambers used for human experimentation. This World asks: if a deal is reached with North Korea about its nuclear weapons, should it be allowed to keep their gas chambers? Access to Evil was broadcast in the UK on Sunday, 1 February, 2004 at 2100 on BBC Two.

GlobalSecurity.org reported on Camp 22 in July 2003, with satellite photographs , see http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/dprk/dprk-hoeryong-camp.htm

BBC 30 Jan 2004 Within prison walls By Olenka Frenkiel Reporter, This World Kwon Hyok is one of about 4,000 North Korean defectors living in Seoul, South Korea. Locations of secret prison camps, or Gulag, are marked in black Most escaped because of hunger, fear, torture, imprisonment or a simple hatred of the regime. But Kwon Hyok is not one of those. In 1999 he was a North Korean intelligence agent stationed in Beijing when he was persuaded by the South Koreans to defect. Six years before, in 1993, Kwon Hyok says he was Head of Security at prison camp 22 in Haengyong, an isolated area near the border with Russia. Camp 22 is one of a network of prisons in North Korea modelled on the Soviet Gulag where hundreds of thousands of prisoners are held. Most of them have been charged with no crime. They are there because of the "Heredity Rule". Prisoners were like pigs or dogs. You could kill them without caring whether they lived or died Kwon Hyok "In North Korea, " Kwon Hyok explains, "political prisoners are those who say or do something against the dead President Kim Il-sung, or his son Kim Jong-il. But it also includes a wide network of next of kin. It's designed to root out the seeds of those classed as disloyal to North Korea." In prison, says Kwon Hyok, "there is a watchdog system in place between members of five different families. So if I were caught trying to escape, then my family and the four neighbouring families are shot to death out of collective responsibility." Torture, he says, was routine. "Prisoners were like pigs or dogs. You could kill them without caring whether they lived or died.." "For the first three years" he explained " you enjoy torturing people but then it wears off and someone else takes over. But most of the time you do it because you enjoy it." Human experimentation But Kwon Hyok had something else he wanted to tell. I had no sympathy at all...I felt they deserved to die Kwon Hyok He says he witnessed chemical experiments being carried out on political prisoners in specially constructed gas chambers. "How did you feel when you saw the children die?", I asked. His answer shocked me. "I had no sympathy at all because I was taught to think that they were all enemies of our country and that all our country's problems were their fault. So I felt they deserved to die." Verification There have been many rumours of human experimentation on political prisoners in North Korea. But never has anyone offered documentary proof. Until now. In Seoul I met Kim Sang-hun, a distinguished human rights activist. He showed me documents given to him by someone else completely unrelated to Kwon Hyok. He told me the man had recently snatched them illicitly from Camp 22 before escaping. Kim Sang Hun is convinced the documents are not forgeries They are headed Letter Of Transfer, marked Top Secret and dated February 2002 . They each bear the name of a male victim, his date and place of birth. The text reads: "The above person is transferred from Camp 22 for the purpose of human experimentation with liquid gas for chemical weapons." I took one of the documents to a Korean expert in London who examined it and confirmed that there was nothing to suggest it was not genuine. But I wanted to run a check of my own with Kwon Hyok. Without showing him the Letter of Transfer, I asked him very specifically, without prompting him in any way. "How were the victims selected when they went for human experimentation? Was there some bureaucracy, some paperwork?" "When we escorted them to the site we would receive a Letter of Transfer," he said. Sadly, as long as these reports continue from defectors, and as long as the North Korean government continues to deny all allegations of human rights abuse, while refusing to allow access to its prisons, such allegations cannot be dismissed or ignored. Access to Evil was broadcast in the UK on Sunday, 1 February, 2004 at 2100 on BBC Two.

Observer UK 1 Feb 2004 guardian.co.uk Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag A series of shocking personal testimonies is now shedding light on Camp 22 - one of the country's most horrific secrets Antony Barnett Sunday February 1, 2004 The Observer In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held. Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them. Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings. Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime. Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening. 'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.' Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.' He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. 'At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country. 'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.' His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. 'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.' Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped 'top secret' and 'transfer letter' is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: 'The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.' Kim Sang-hun, a North Korean human rights worker, says the document is genuine. He said: 'It carries a North Korean format, the quality of paper is North Korean and it has an official stamp of agencies involved with this human experimentation. A stamp they cannot deny. And it carries names of the victim and where and why and how these people were experimented [on].' The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000. Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent. With North Korea trying to win concessions in return for axing its nuclear programme, campaigners want human rights to be a part of any deal. Richard Spring, Tory foreign affairs spokesman, is pushing for a House of Commons debate on human rights in North Korea. 'The situation is absolutely horrific,' Spring said. 'It is totally unacceptable by any norms of civilised society. It makes it even more urgent to convince the North Koreans that procuring weapons of mass destruction must end, not only for the security of the region but for the good of their own population.' Mervyn Thomas, chief executive of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said: 'For too long the horrendous suffering of the people of North Korea, especially those imprisoned in unspeakably barbaric prison camps, has been met with silence ... It is imperative that the international community does not continue to turn a blind eye to these atrocities which should weigh heavily on the world's conscience."

www.wiesenthal.com 2 Feb 2004 WIESENTHAL CENTER: REPORTED HORRORS OF NORTH KOREA'S CAMP 22 DEMAND INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL TO INVESTIGATE CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY The Simon Wiesenthal Center is urging the establishment of an international tribunal by the United Nations to investigate allegations that North Korean scientists have operated a gas chamber for horrible experiments on political prisoners. "The latest allegations reported in Sunday's Observer, and in a BBC ‘ This World’ documentary, assert that North Korean scientists at Camp 22 operated a gas chamber and experimented on prisoners, recall the imagery of the Nazi gas chambers and the horrific experiments at Auschwitz and Imperial Japan's Unit 731 during World War II," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights agency named in honor of the famed Nazi hunter. The Observer article reported that eyewitnesses who defected from North Korea detailed execution and torture, and gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings. Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass walled chambers, gassed and left to an agonizing death while scientists take notes. “I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,” one eyewitness claimed, “The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.” According to the report, estimates of the number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag could be as many as 200,000 in 12 or more centers. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000 internees including those critical of the regime and religious Christians. “If even a portion of these allegations are true, the world is no longer facing an axis of evil, but the very root of evil,” Rabbi Cooper charged, adding, “The crimes of the Nazi era are a stark reminder that silence is admittance and such state-sanctioned barbarities demand action. Even without regime change or cooperation from the North Korean authorities, the civilized community must put the perpetrators of such crimes against humanity on notice that they will be held accountable. We hope that all international NGOs will join us in urging UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to act now,” he concluded.

www.yad-vashem.org.il 3 Feb 2004 Yad Vashem Reacts to Gas Chambers in North Korea In Letter to UN Secretary-General, Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev Calls for Investigation of Political Genocide (February 3, 2004) Yad Vashem is appalled by reports of North Korea’s use of gas chambers to murder and perform medical experiments on political dissidents and their families. Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev has sent an urgent letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in which he calls for a full investigation of this insidious abuse of human rights. The issue is all the more severe due to North Korea’s status as a member of the UN. The internment, torture, and murder of North Korean political dissenters and their families was recently reported by the BBC. In his letter, Shalev states with alarm that only six decades after the utilization of gas chambers to exterminate European Jewry, North Korea has apparently employed them against thousands of its own citizens. “The lives of untold thousands of North Koreans are in danger because their totalitarian government perceives them as a threat”, Shalev writes. “Although the rationale, scale, and context are vastly different, the chilling image of the murderers coolly watching their victims’ death agonies is all too reminiscent of Nazi barbarism.” Shalev’s letter also reminds Annan of his speech on January 26 at the Stockholm International Forum, in which Annan said the world must do more to prevent genocide from ever taking place again, and raised the possibility of having Genocide Convention states set up a Committee to Prevent Genocide. Annan also said that genocide has happened in our time, while states even refused to call it by its name, to avoid fulfilling their obligations. Shalev continues, “recent reports that a scientist passed nuclear weapons technology to several rogue states, including North Korea, keenly underscores the dangers posed by such regimes. We must remain aware that there is an unmistakable link between rogue states and international terrorists. This confederation of evil is honing its weapons and aiming them at diverse targets. The United Nations must put a stop to their use immediately, and work to disarm the linked forces of evil that threaten the enlightened nations of the world.” Shalev concludes, “Now is the time to implement the vision you set forth in Stockholm. You must act in North Korea."

AP 3 Feb 2004 Group Seeks U.N. Probe on North Korea HANS GREIMEL Associated Press SEOUL, South Korea - A U.S.-based Jewish human rights group has urged the United Nations to investigate claims that North Korea conducted gas chamber experiments on political prisoners, comparing the alleged acts to those in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The Simon Wiesenthal Center made the appeal Tuesday after the British Broadcasting Corp. aired a TV documentary in which a man, claiming to be a former North Korean agent, described seeing prisoners gassed to death. There was no way to verify the claim. "This brings to mind the imagery of Nazi gas chambers and the horrific experiments at Auschwitz and Imperial Japan's Unit 731," the center's associate dean, Abraham Cooper, said in a statement. Unit 731, the Japanese Imperial Army's germ warfare division, is believed to have killed as many as 250,000 people in their experiments during the 1930s and '40s, when Japanese troops occupied much of China. "The crimes of the Nazi era are a stark reminder that silence is admittance and such state-sanctioned barbarities demand action," Cooper said. "The civilized community must put the perpetrators of such crimes against humanity on notice that they will be held accountable." The BBC report said the North Korean man, identified as Kwon Hyok, was a former army intelligence officer who defected to South Korea in 1999. It also said that he was formerly chief guard at a North Korean prison camp, reportedly known as "Prison Camp No. 22." Kwon Hyok said the camp had a gas chamber made of glass so scientists could observe inmates as they were gassed. "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber," he told the BBC. "The parents, son and a daughter." The Simon Wiesenthal Center urged the United Nations to establish an international tribunal to investigate the allegations. It is virtually certain that totalitarian North Korea, which keeps out most foreigners and views outside criticism as an infringement on its sovereignty, would not agree to any investigation on its soil. U.S. officials believe North Korea has chemical and biological weapons programs. But South Korean Foreign Ministry and Unification Ministry officials said they could not independently confirm the BBC report. Defector groups in Seoul could also not confirm such claims. The United States and its allies are trying to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear development, and most contacts with the North have focused on the nuclear issue rather than human rights. As many as 200,000 people are held in North Korean prison camps, from petty criminals to political dissidents and religious activists, according to a 2003 report by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Prisoners are subjected to starvation and torture, it said. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, based in Los Angeles, is an international organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust by fostering tolerance and understanding. english.chosun.co The Chosen Ilbo (South Korea) NK Document on Human Experimentation on Political Prisoners Released by Kang Cheol-hwan (nkch@chosun.com) A local human rights group released a North Korean document Monday that supports claims that North Korean authorities are using political prisoners kept at prison camps in the country as subjects for the testing of liquid gas for use in chemical weapons. The North Korean document released by the group called Kidnap Victims and Defectors Human Rights Solidarity was a Letter of Transfer written by the Security Section of a political prison known as Camp 22. In the letter, it is written, ¡°The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.¡± Moreover, at the top of the document, it is marked ¡°Top Secret,¡± and the test subject¡¯s name, sex, date of birth, place of birth, and place of residence is written at the bottom along with the date -- Feb. 13, 91 Juche (2002) -- and the signature of the document¡¯s framer. The official stamp of the Security Section, which issued the document, is also affixed to it. Ahn Myeong-cheol, 35, a former guard at Camp 22 who defected in 1994, said that he was positive that the document is, in fact, an official document used when political prisoners are escorted to the camp. Meanwhile, in regards to the red stamp bearing the inscription, ¡°Camp 22 of the National Security Section of the Democratic People¡¯s Republic of Korea,¡± some members of the South Korean intelligence community have raised doubts as to the document¡¯s authenticity because the official name of North Korea¡¯s intelligence body is the State Safety & Security Agency, the Korean title of which differs from that found on the stamp. www.freenorthkorea.net Promoting Nonviolent Action for Human Rights in North Korea and Safe Haven for North Korean Refugees: A Non-Partisan Forum for North Korean Human Rights and Freedom.

WP 4 Feb 2004 Auschwitz Under Our Noses By Anne Applebaum Page A23 Nearly 60 years ago last week, Auschwitz was liberated. On Jan. 27, 1945, four Russian soldiers rode into the camp. They seemed "wonderfully concrete and real," remembered Primo Levi, one of the prisoners, "perched on their enormous horses, between the gray of the snow and the gray of the sky." But they did not smile, nor did they greet the starving men and women. Levi thought he knew why: They felt "the shame that a just man experiences at another man's crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist." Nowadays, it seems impossible to understand why so few people, at the time of the Auschwitz liberation, even knew that the camp existed. It seems even harder to explain why those who did know did nothing. In recent years a plethora of respectable institutions -- the Vatican, the U.S. government, the international Jewish community, the Allied commanders -- have all been accused of "allowing" the Holocaust to occur, through ignorance or ill will or fear, or simply because there were other priorities, such as fighting the war. We shake our heads self-righteously, certain that if we'd been there, liberation would have come earlier -- all the while failing to see that the present is no different. Quite a lot has changed in 60 years, but the ways in which information about crimes against humanity can simultaneously be "known" and not known hasn't changed at all. Nor have other interests and other priorities ceased to distract people from the feelings of shame and guilt they would certainly feel, if only they focused on them. Look, for example, at the international reaction to a documentary, aired last Sunday night on the BBC. It described atrocities committed in the concentration camps of contemporary North Korea, where, it was alleged, chemical weapons are tested on prisoners. Central to the film was the testimony of Kwon Hyuk, a former administrator at a North Korean camp. "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber," he said. "The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing." The documentary also included testimony from a former prisoner, who says she saw 50 women die after being deliberately fed poison. And it included documents smuggled out of the country that seemed to sentence a prisoner to a camp "for the purpose of human experimentation." But the documentary was only a piece of journalism. Do we really know that it is true? We don't. It was aired on the BBC, after all, an organization whose journalistic standards have recently been questioned. It was based on witness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. All kinds of people might have had an interest in making the film more sensational, including journalists (good for their careers) or North Korean defectors (good for their cause). The veracity of the information has been further undermined by the absence of official confirmation. The South Korean government, which believes that appeasement of the North will lead to reunification, has already voiced skepticism about th e claims: "We will need to investigate," a spokesman said. The U.S. government has other business on the Korean Peninsula too. On Monday Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told a group of Post journalists that he feels optimistic about the prospect of a new round of nuclear talks between North Korea and its neighbors. He didn't mention the gas chambers, even whether he's heard about them. In the days since the documentary aired, few other news organizations have picked up the story either. There are other priorities: the president's budget, ricin in the Senate office building, David Kay's testimony, a murder of a high school student, Super Tuesday, Janet Jackson. With the possible exception of the last, these are all genuinely important subjects. They are issues people care deeply about. North Korea is far away and, quite frankly, it doesn't seem there's a lot we can do about it. Later -- in 10 years, or in 60 -- it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied. Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act.

CNSNews.com 4 Feb 2004 Pacific Rim Bureau Chief Activists Demand Talks on North Korean Human Rights Abuses By Patrick Goodenough Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - The U.S. and its partners should ensure that human rights abuses in North Korea -- including startling new allegations of gas chamber experiments -- are on the agenda at six-party nuclear talks scheduled for later this month, campaigners say. While not optimistic that this will happen, groups campaigning for North Korean rights believe it is crucial that the Stalinist regime's treatment of its citizens not be overlooked. A man claiming to be a former North Korean prison camp "chief of management" said in a BBC documentary this week that he had seen prisoners gassed to death in experiments believed to be testing agents for non-conventional weapons. The man, a former army intelligence officer who defected to South Korea in 1999, said scientists at a facility called "camp No. 22" had observed inmates through glass windows from above, as they were gassed inside a chamber. He described watching a couple trying to save their two children by giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, even as they themselves were "vomiting and dying." Another source, a former prisoner at another of the camps, described how about 50 women were ordered to eat soaked cabbage leaves, and were soon screaming and vomiting blood. Within 20 minutes they were all dead, she said. The claims follow numerous others about maltreatment, torture, infanticide and killings at notorious forced labor prison camps in remote parts of North Korea, where campaigners estimate hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and criminals are held. Drawing parallels with Nazi gas chambers, Jewish groups are urging the United Nations to investigate the allegations. "The crimes of the Nazi era are a stark reminder that silence is admittance and such state-sanctioned barbarities demand action," Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international human rights group, said Tuesday. "Even without regime change or cooperation from the North Korean authorities, the civilized community must put the perpetrators of such crimes against humanity on notice that they will be held accountable," he said. Israel's national Holocaust memorial authority, Yad Vashem, also called for an urgent international inquiry. In a letter to U.N. secretary-general Kofi Anan, Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said the lives of thousands of North Koreans were at risk because their government perceived them as a threat. "Although the rationale, scale, and context are vastly different, the chilling image of the murderers coolly watching their victims' death agonies is all too reminiscent of Nazi barbarism," he wrote. 'Put rights on the talks agenda' On Tuesday, North Korea announced it was ready to hold a round of talks on its nuclear programs with the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China and Russia on Feb. 25. The U.S. and its partners want Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons programs, and it appears unlikely that issues not immediately linked to the nuclear question will be allowed to complicate the already complex negotiations, to be held in Beijing. When Japan last year sought to include in previous talks the subject of the abduction of its citizens by the North Koreans, Pyongyang responded furiously, saying the move would "throw the discussion into confusion and divert its focus." Nonetheless, Debra Liang-Fenton, executive director of a non-governmental organization called the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), voiced hope Tuesday that the rights issue would not be sidelined. Liang-Fenton said she hoped U.S. officials "will be encouraged to include the issue of human rights as they enter into their six-party talks. It is extremely important that human rights is on the agenda." A representative of the Seoul-based Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, said Wednesday it had long pressed for human rights to be included in meetings with the North Koreans. She was skeptical, however, that this would happen, noting that the South Korean government, in particular, had been reluctant to bring up issues that would unsettle the North. "You should look at the record of the South Korean government - they will not. They have never been cooperative in that area." Asked about the gassing claims, the Korean campaigner, who did not provide her name, said she did not find them especially difficult to believe. She recalled that when allegations of infanticide and forced abortions in North Korean prison camps were first made by defectors, many campaigners were skeptical. "Eventually, however, after so many [reports of infanticide] came out, and they were so consistent, it was hard to deny," she said. "This [gassing claim] is horrific. I don't know how reliable he [the former prison guard] is, but I do believe these stories. They are going to come out. The good thing to come out of this is that we'll have other, independent groups [like the U.N.] investigating this now." Beatings, malnutrition at camp 22 Last October, the HRNK released a comprehensive report on North Korea's prison camp system, including satellite photographs and eyewitness accounts by defectors. The report deals, among others, with "camp No. 22," located at Haengyong in North Korea's northeast, near the border with China and Russia. A former guard at camp No. 22, Ahn Myong Chol, told HRNK some 1,000 guards and 600 administrative agents oversaw about 50,000 inmates, who worked in coal mines and in agricultural plantations. Up to 2,000 prisoners - mostly children - died each year from malnutrition, according to the guard, who worked there in the early 1990s. Ahn recounted that so many prisoners died from beatings, "at one point the guards were warned to be less violent." The HRNK report also included accounts from a defector who served a six-month sentence at camp No. 22 in 1995 for "unauthorized buying and selling" and other petty offenses. He described being hung upside down and beaten by prisoners who were forced to march past him and hit him for three hours. Another former prisoner reported that he entered camp No. 22 in a group of nine inmates in 1996. "Within the year, he was the only one of the nine who had not died from malnutrition, forced labor, and beatings." The HRNK report does not include claims of gassing. Liang-Fenton said Tuesday some defectors had made such allegations of "experimentation on human beings" but as the HRNK could not corroborate the claims, it had chosen to omit them. She said she was not surprised by the new claims, however. "The level of brutality and torture that occurs within the prison camp system, you can infer from that that they would take things a step further and do chemical and other experimenting on prisoners," she said. "So the BBC report isn't hugely shocking - again, we did hear from some defectors that this was happening." Liang-Fenton said one of the reasons the HRNK had been set up two-and-a-half years ago was to raise public awareness in the U.S., and so to encourage decision-makers to ensure that human rights is on the agenda when talking with North Korea. Meanwhile, a Seoul-based human rights group called Kidnap Victims and Defectors Human Rights Solidarity has released a document which it says supports defectors' claims of human experimentation in North Korean prison camps. The paper, purportedly an official North Korean document marked "top secret" and entitled "Letter of Transfer," refers to the transfer of a prisoner to camp No. 22 "for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons." The document includes the name, sex, date and place of birth and place of residence of the prisoner, and is dated February 13, 2002.

BBC 5 Feb 2004 N Korea denies chemical tests North Korea has denied allegations it tests chemical and biological weapons on political prisoners. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said the allegations were part of a United States-inspired "lie". On Sunday, the BBC aired a documentary in which a former North Korean army intelligence officer said he had seen prisoners gassed to death. US officials believe North Korea has chemical and biological weapons programmes. Prisoners were like pigs or dogs. You could kill them without caring whether they lived or died Kwon Hyok, North Korean defector Within prison walls North Korea's official KCNA news agency targeted the US for the claim regarding chemical weapons testing. "It is spreading a lie about the 'test of chemical weapons on prisoners'. This shows what a base anti-DPRK (North Korea) smear campaign the Bush group is engaged in," it said. "It is a trite method of the present US administration to use those defectors for inventing lies and justifying a war of aggression under that pretext," the statement continued. The BBC's documentary, shown on the series This World, interviewed defector Kwon Hyok, who said he was chief guard at North Korea's "Prison Camp 22", in Haengyong near the border with Russia. Kwan Hyok told the programme that entire families had poisonous gases tested on them in glass chambers. He said scientists would observe the process through the glass. The BBC reporter, Olenka Frenkiel, said she had independent confirmation that the defector was genuine, and documentation referring to the transfer of a prisoner for human experimentation.

Korean Central News Agency (North Korea) 5 Feb 2004 www.kcna.co.jp Spokesman for DPRK FM Lambastes U.S. Smear Campaign against DPRK Pyongyang, February 5 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea today gave the following answer to the question put by KCNA as regards the U.S. ridiculous smear campaign against the DPRK. These days the United States is busy holding a Congressional hearing from "north Korean defectors," spreading a sheer lie that north Korea tested a chemical weapon on prisoners, the spokesman said, and went on: The U.S. let loose a string of balderdash against the DPRK over "the issue of drug", "the issue of counterfeit money" and "the issue of north Korean defectors". Not content with this, it is spreading a lie about the "test of chemical weapons on prisoners". This shows what a base anti-DPRK smear campaign the Bush group is engaged in. The U.S. seems to have no more material for conducting such a campaign. It is a trite method of the present U.S. administration to use those defectors for inventing lies and justifying a war of aggression under that pretext. This was clearly evidenced by the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq. We do not feel any need to argue about this cheap U.S. propaganda, but we can hardly overlook an ulterior aim sought by it. Now the Bush administration finds itself in a tight corner as it provoked a war against Iraq after deceiving Americans and the world. The Bush group, dismayed at the election campaign turning unfavorable for it, is working hard to get rid of the difficult situation by leading the situation on the Korean peninsula to an extreme pitch of tension under the pretext of the nuclear issue. Its dirty smear campaign is aimed to invent plausible pretexts for starting another Korean war, raising a hue and cry over the "human rights issue" in addition to the "issue of weapons of mass destruction," and thus not to repeat its setbacks in Iraq. We are watching every movement of the Bush administration with vigilance. Some media acting tools for the U.S. smear campaign for cheap publicity are well advised to come to themselves, though belatedly.

Korean Central News Agency 31 Jan 2004 www.kcna.co.jp At least 190 Cases of U.S. Aerial Espionage Committed in January Pyongyang, January 31 (KCNA) -- The U.S. imperialist warmongers have committed more than 190 cases of round-the-clock aerial espionage against the DPRK in January, according to military sources. Involved in them were strategic and tactical reconnaissance planes with various missions based in south Korea and overseas. On Jan. 30 "U-2" flew over forefront areas to spy on the depth of the DPRK. And "RC-135", "E-3" and "P-3" also committed espionage against the whole area of the DPRK, its targets in areas along the Military Demarcation Line, its seas and their bottom. The cases of espionage committed by those planes totalled more than 40 in January. Meanwhile, ten tactical reconnaissance planes including "RC-7B", "RC-12" and "RF-4C" made shuttle flights over the areas from Tokjok Islet to Phochon and from Phochon to Sokcho Islet to spy on the front and the coastal areas of the DPRK on Jan. 20, nine from Jan. 13 to 15 on a daily average, eight on Jan. 6, 26 and 27 every day. Such aerial espionage clearly shows the U.S. imperialists' black-hearted design to mount a sudden preemptive attack on the DPRK anytime as they did to seize Iraq and Afghanistan.

Korean Central News Agency 30 Jan 2004 www.kcna.co.jp KCNA Warns against Japan's Moves for Overseas Aggression Pyongyang, January 30 (KCNA) -- The Japanese reactionaries are now getting into full stride in their moves for overseas aggression, oblivious of the lesson of history. No sooner had the Japanese chief executive expressed his willingness on January 26 to dispatch a main unit of the "Self-defence Forces" to Iraq following an advance unit than Defense Agency Chief Ishiba ordered the main unit to Iraq. This gave the green light to military operations of a large unit of the SDF equipped with such heavy weapons as armored vehicles, recoilless artillery pieces and portable anti-tank bombs in combat areas overseas as a shock brigade of the U.S. forces. This means that the Japanese reactionaries have shaken off the veil of the "UN peace-keeping operations" they had been wearing and opened up a prelude to overseas aggression. The Japanese reactionaries' dispatch of the SDF combat troops to Iraq was prompted by their shrewd intention to give a helping hand to the U.S. in its awkward position and earn profits in the division of interests including oil. Another important aim sought by them in the troop dispatch is to build a framework for turning Japan into a military giant and militarizing it and secure a justification for overseas aggression. The Japanese authorities are now driving the Japanese society to the Right with all speed by whitewashing Japan's past history of aggression, paying visits to the "Yasukuni Shrine" and spreading ultra-nationalism while establishing the Missile Defense System, launching spy satellites and trying to have access to nuclear weapons in a bid to emerge a military power at an early date. Very disturbing developments brought to Japan today by the Japanese right-wing forces remind one of the eve of Japan's aggression of Korea and Asian continent in the past century and this indicates that the Japanese reactionaries' ambitious moves to militarize the country and turn it into a military power for reinvasion have been adopted as a state policy. What remains to be done by them now is to work out a war constitution whereby to mobilize all human and material resources as the final step to the completion of their preparations for a war of overseas aggression. In last November the Japanese chief executive openly called for revising the constitution and elevating the status of the SDF to Defense Ministry. And Secretary General of the Liberal Democratic Party Abe in his Fuji TV appearance on Jan. 8 cried for exercising right to collective self-defence and revising the constitution. All these were part of the attempts to remove the last roadblock in the way of reinvasion. It is a well-known fact that Japan has so far gnawed away little by little at Article 9 of the present constitution which bans the possession of a regular army and war by adopting "law on emergency," "law related to Japan-U.S. defence cooperation guidelines" and "law on anti-terrorism." But it is the first time for the chief executive and heavyweights of the ruling party to openly call for the exercise of right to collective self-defence and the revision of the constitution. It is as clear as noonday that once the Japanese society got militarized and turned into a military power such fascist elements as Tojo would appear on the scene and launch reinvasion, holding sway over the Japanese politicaldom Korea and other Asian countries are not what they were in the past when they were trampled underfoot and plundered by the Japanese imperialists. The Japanese reactionaries will never be able to evade a miserable lot if they keep pushing for militarization to become a military power. .

Korean Central News Agency 4 Feb 2004 www.kcna.co.jp Anti-Imperialist and Anti-War Struggle Called for Pyongyang, February 4 (KCNA) -- It is a common task and strategic commitment of humankind to intensify the anti-imperialist and anti-war struggle for peace in order to check and frustrate the imperialists' moves for aggression and war, says Rodong Sinmun today in a signed article. It goes on: The dominationist moves of the imperialist aggression forces at present have reached their height. Under this situation the people can never realize their desire and demand for independence nor achieve the peaceful development of the world in the new century unless their blatant aggression and interference are checked. The anti-war struggle is the main form of the struggle for world peace at present and its principal target is the United States. The U.S. imperialists are the chieftain of aggression and war and the principal disturber of peace in the 21st century. It is impossible to avert a war and achieve the world peace without a struggle against the U.S. imperialists. The world remains so disturbed and peace and order are harassed due to the U.S. imperialists' moves for aggression and war. Few countries desirous of independence are free from the U.S. threat of military intervention and aggression. Only when all the anti-imperialist, independent peace-loving forces of the world fight against the U.S. imperialists' moves for aggression and war is it possible to avert a war and ensure world peace. The people of all countries of the world should lift their anti-war, anti-U.S. voices and bind Yankees hands and foot to keep them from starting a war. Wrong is the logic that one may exert little effort and others should make greater efforts in the struggle for peace. Remaining indifferent to others shedding blood is little short of inviting the danger of aggression to oneself. If any country ceases to struggle for peace or vacillates in the struggle or budges from it, this will result in weakening the struggle for peace against war and causing its setback. There will be lasting peace when the moves of the U.S. imperialists for aggression and war are checked and they are dismembered in all parts of the world.

Reuters 9 Feb 2004 Food crisis looms in North Korea Out of grain to feed 6.4 million undernourished North Koreans, the UN food agency on Monday warned of potentially appalling suffering and appealed to foreign donors for help. The UN World Food Programme will feed fewer than 100,000 of 6.5 million needy dependants in the sheltered communist state until shipments from the United States, Russia and others begin to arrive at the end of March, the WFP coordinator in Pyongyang, Masud Haydar, told a news conference. Orphanages had already cut back from three meals a day to two, he said. Underweight pregnant mothers were more likely to give birth to poorly developed babies and elderly people on small pensions would be unable to buy food on fledgling markets where prices had skyrocketed, he added. "If you're going to give, please give early," Haydar urged foreign countries. Hopes He held out hopes a second round of six-nation talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis later this month in Beijing could produce a turnabout. But without new pledges, the WFP food pipeline would dry up again in June. "I'm afraid with this increasingly erratic pattern, the painstaking gains that the humanitarian community, including the WFP, have made in pushing back, improving the nutritional situation ... will be lost," he said. "People are not really expected to die because of short-term deprivations," he said, but added: "People in fragile and recovering health ... would then again suffer a setback." "If you're going to give, please give early" Masud Haydar, coordinator, WFP He said the food crisis came at the wrong time - in the dead of winter, when stocks from the October harvest were already depleted and at a point when embryonic economic reforms had driven food prices up on farmers' markets. In 2003, breaks in the pipeline forced the WFP to stop feeding as many as half of its dependants who constitute more than a quarter of the North's 23 million people. Frustration "Now we're talking of a total cutback," Hyder said. "It's graver, with deeper consequences." Haydar has acknowledged the lack of funds is symptomatic of international frustration with restrictions Pyongyang puts on the WFP, which lacks access to about 40 of 206 counties. He appealed to the North to lift the constraints, but stressed gradual progress had been made on that front. WFP is seeking 485,000 tonnes of commodities in 2004, but has been pledged only 140,000 tonnes - a small fraction of which has arrived. Haydar said it remained to be seen whether the North's neighbour and ally China, which sends food estimated at about 200,000 tonnes across the border each year, might consider channelling aid through the WFP. The WFP will phase out aid to China by the end of 2005 and has said it wants China to become one of its major donors. Food shortages have plagued North Korea since at least 1995, when it first appealed for aid after floods compounded years of economic mismanagement and the disintegration of its main patron, the Soviet Union.

www.paktribune.com Muslims urged to adopt moderation 2 million perform Hajj PLAIN OF ARAFAT, February 01 (Online): Up to two million Muslims ignored security concerns and packed Plain of Arafat at the climax of the Hajj pilgrimage on Saturday. Many of them headed at dawn to Mount Rahma (Mercy) where the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) gave his farewell sermon 14 centuries ago. Airborne helicopters were a reminder this year’s pilgrimage takes place amid heightened security as Saudi Arabia battles militants. The kingdom’s highest religious authority, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh, stressed in a sermon the need for unity and solidarity among the Ummah. He said that their success in this world and hereafter was in pursuing the teachings of Holy Qur’aan and following the Sunnah. He asked the Muslims to overcome their differences and firmly hold on to the path of Allah for their success. The Grand Mufti pointed out that Islam is the religion of peace and welfare and it strongly opposes violence. He said Islam gives the message of justice, fairplay and protection of rights of the people. He urged the Muslims to acquaint themselves with the true teachings of Islam and adopt moderation for emancipation in the world herein and hereafter. He said despite the fact that there is no room in Islam for terrorism, violence and crimes against humanity, today terrorism is being attributed to the good name of Islam. The Grand Mufti emphasised that the philosophy of Jihad is to wipe out injustice from the world. Jihad doesn’t mean that lives, properties and honour of Muslims are not protected in their own societies. He appealed to the youth not to play in the hands of those who have their own nefarious designs to promote. He also urged Ulema not to misinterpret Islam and cause split in the Ummah. He said the Ummah has to blame itself for its miseries, as it is divided in groups and sects. He called for upholding of the principles of Adl, tolerance and mutual understanding. A true Muslim obeyed his rulers and protected his country, he said. "Does one serve his religion by seeking to destabilise national security...or by accusing scholars and rulers of being traitors? No, this is not serving religion, this is affliction." Prayers were offered for the glory of Islam and the emancipation of the occupied Muslim lands. The pilgrims offered Zohr and Asr prayers together at Masjid-e-Nimrah. During the Waqoof-e-Arafat, the pilgrims prayed for their forgiveness. At sunset the Hujjaj left for Muzdelfa where they offered Maqhrib and Isha prayers together and spent the night praying under the open sky. On Sunday morning, the Hujjaj will proceed to Mina where they will throw stones at the Satan, sacrifice the animals and perform other rituals of Hajj. They later will go to Makkah to perform Tawaf-e-Ziara. Some 5,000 security forces have been deployed in and around Makkah to maintain security and control the mass of pilgrims.

Tamil.Net 1. Feb 2004 Thampalakamam massacre victims rememberedThe sixth death anniversary of the killing of eight Tamil civilians including two students by Sri Lankan police on 1st February, 1998, was observed Sunday at Potkerney and Puthukuddiruppu, suburbs of Thampalakamam village in Trincomalee district, sources said. Thampalakamam is located twenty four km off south west of Trincomalee town on Trincomalee-Colombo highway. The case against the police personnel and several homeguards alleged to have been responsible for the killing is still pending in Kantalai Magistrates Court. The case has made little progress in the last six years, legal sources said. On 1 February 1998 around six in the morning a group of police personnel of the Thampalakamam police with several home guards entered the suburbs Potkerney and Puthukuddiruppu in the village and took eight civilians into custody when they were staying in a house after watching video show. The Police did not allow their relatives and parents to see them in the police station. After some hours, residents heard gunshots from the police station and thereafter police informed their higher authorities that they had shot dead eight LTTE cadres while in ambush. However civil groups brought the matter to the notice of the court that all the eight killed were farmers and students and not LTTE cadres. At the magisterial inquest the dead were identified as A.Surendran (13), A.Gajendran (17), N.Pavalanathan (29), S.Thiyagarajah (23), M.Janagan (18), K.Sivarajan (23), A.Sekar (32) and P.Kanagasabai. Surendran and Gajendran were brothers and students. Five of the killed were residents of Puthukuddiruppu and the rest were from Potkerney. Later on representation made to the higher authorities, several police personnel were arrested in connection with these killings and were indicted with the murder. During the non-summary proceedings several witnesses identified the police personnel and home guards who committed the crime.

Timor Leste UNDP Date: 9 Feb 2004 Timor-Leste builds public administration as UN Mission prepares to leave With the UN Mission that has aided Timor-Leste's recovery from its pre-independence crisis departing in June, UNDP is helping Timorese strengthen and run their public administration effectively. At its independence in May 2002, the country froze most civil service recruitment and many posts remained vacant. Indonesians had held most technical, middle and senior-level management positions during Indonesia's 25 year rule, and Timorese civil servants lacked many of the skills. To cope with the situation, the Government placed 300 international advisors in important positions to help run public administration, and UNDP has helped rebuild the bureaucracy. Timorese now hold most civil service posts, and more than 200 international advisors are transferring their skills to national counterparts through one-on-one mentoring. UNDP recommended last year that the Government place more emphasis on strengthening the civil service. It helped start pilot projects to build skills in common ministry functions, such as interpretation and translation, information technology, accounting, and human resource management. UNDP Resident Representative Sukehiro Hasegawa said an efficient public administration is imperative. "The UNDP initiative to enhance the capacity of the public administration will improve the skills and knowledge of Timorese civil servants so that they can serve their fellow citizens effectively," he said. UNDP has helped develop a public administration strategy for implementation after the UN Mission leaves and has formed a task force with the Government and the UN Mission to design programmes for individual ministries and cross-ministerial programmes. These focus on three pillars for a viable civil service: skills and knowledge, management systems and processes, and culture and attitude. Some of the programmes began last year, including one to strengthen the justice sector and another for interpreters and translators. The others will begin this year, and all state institutions are to develop action plans for civil service development for the next three years. Other UN agencies will help implement the initiatives, with development partners providing support. New international advisors and other types of assistance will work within these programmes.

BBC 25 Feb 2004 Early violence in Sri Lanka poll - Poll watchdogs fear more violence in the six-week campaign At least 40 people have been hurt in a series of violent incidents on the closing day for nominations in Sri Lanka's general election. The party activists were hurt on Tuesday as a record 6,024 candidates were registered to contest 225 seats. Tamil Tiger rebels marked the opening of the campaign by warning of "serious consequences" if their supporters were obstructed from voting. The poll was ordered for 2 April after the president dissolved parliament. Police said there were 27 violent incidents on Tuesday in southern and north-central regions in which the 40 activists were injured. Twelve arrests were reported. A senior police official said there had been 82 incidents so far of violations of the election law, ranging from removing rivals' posters to intimidation and outright violence. Balance of power The BBC's Frances Harrison in Colombo says the violence has prompted poll watchers to express fears about the next six weeks of campaigning. The consequences will be serious if the rights and wishes of our people are denied SP Thamilselvan, Tamil Tigers One such group, the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence, issued a statement expressing concern about the geographic spread of the incidents and the fact that they all involved the two main political parties, the People's Alliance and the United National Party (UNP). The statement noted that in previous elections, these two parties were responsible for three quarters of the violence. President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who heads the People's Alliance, has called the election almost four years ahead of schedule. She has been locked in a feud with Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe, head of the UNP, whom she accuses of yielding too much ground to the Tamil Tigers during a fragile two-year peace process. Mrs Kumaratunga is hoping to gain control of the legislature as well as the executive, while Mr Wickramasinghe is trying to show he alone can lead the country to a peace deal with Tamil rebels. Prime minister (left) and president have been locked in a long feud The rebels are backing proxy candidates in the moderate Tamil grouping, the Tamil National Alliance. The Tamils may end up holding the balance of power as the vote of the majority Sinhalese will be split between the parties of the prime minister and president. SP Thamilselvan, the head of the Tigers' political wing, warned on the pro-rebel TamilNet web site that the polls had to be "free, fair and peaceful". "The consequences will be serious if the rights and wishes of our people are denied," he said. A military blockade stopped many Tamils voting in the general election in 2001. A total of 24 recognised political parties and 192 independent groups had put their names forward for the election as nominations closed on Tuesday. The number of candidates is the highest since Sri Lanka won independence from Britain in 1948. Leading political parties have scheduled big rallies for Thursday to start their campaigns.

Baku Today 20 Feb 2004 Khojali genocide will be put before an interantional court Azerbaijan will bring Khojali genocide case before the International Criminal Court, said deputy chairman of Azerbaijani Parliament Ziyafet Asgarov at a session of the parliamentary commission for security and defense affairs yesterday, according to Assa Irada News Agency. Asgarov said, Armenian chauvinists bear responsibility for killing and torturing Khojali civilians in February 1992, although he added Azerbaijani authorities might have helped the civilians leave the Khojali town before massive killings by Armenians took place. Khojali was a town in Nagorno Karabakh located between Agdam and Barda until 1992 when the city was plundered and burnt by Armenian armed forces following killing and capturing about 7,000 Azerbaijanis who lived there. Official reports on the massacre hold information about 613 dead and 200 disabled by Armenians people. According to the reports seven families were completely eradicated in Khojali and 27 families lost at least one person.

AzerNews 26 Feb 2004 www.azernews.net 26/02/2004 12:59 President makes nationwide address on Khojaly genocide On Tuesday, President Ilham Aliyev made a nationwide address on the 12th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide. "The Khojaly tragedy was a continuation of Armenian nationalists' policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide perpetrated against the Azerbaijani people for 200 years. This hateful policy brought our people endless misfortune and suffering. New territorial claims made by the aggressive Armenian nationalists against our people in the second half of 1980s led to forcibly mass ousting of Azerbaijanis from their homelands and to large scale merciless war accompanied by numerous terrorist acts. As a result, tens of thousands of our citizens were killed, while hundreds of thousands of our countrymen became refugees and IDPs. The most terrible of these tragedies was the unprecedented cruelty which took place February 26, 1992. Armenian military units annihilated the ancient city of Khojaly, leaving a bloody carnage of its defenders and peaceful inhabitants. A hundred people - women, children and the elderly - were tortured and outrageously killed. The Khojaly tragedy, for its cruelty, mass killing and terrible nature of the crimes committed, numbers among the gravest crimes against humanity," the address reads. In his address, President Aliyev further noted that measures are currently being taken in cooperation with Azerbaijanis abroad to bring the Khojaly tragedy to the notice of the global community, and gain recognition of the incident as an act of true genocide. He also stressed the necessity of holding such measures annually on a higher and professional level.

AzerNews 26 Feb 2004 www.azernews.net Exhibitions mark Khojaly genocide A number of exhibitions dedicated to the 12th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide were held in Baku last days. An art exhibition opened at the State Arts Museum on February 25 featured approximately fifty paintings and sculptural works. An exhibition of works by photographer Ali Kazimov was held at the International Press Center on Tuesday. The show included photos of the atrocities perpetrated by Armenian military units in cooperation with Russia's shooting regiment #366 against the peaceful people of Khojaly city in Upper Garabagh on February 26, 1992. Another art exhibition opened at the Gala picture gallery on February 23. Approximately fifty works were included in the exhibition. The show featured works by more than thirty students for the Baku Arts Gymnasium.

Armenia Foreign Ministry 26 Feb 2004 ArmenianForeignMinistry.com OSCE Amb. Tabibian on Murder of Armenian Soldier in Budapest PRESS RELEASE Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia Contact: Information Desk Tel: (374-1) 52-35-31 Email: info@armeniaForeignMinistry.com Web: http://www.ArmeniaForeignMinistry.am OSCE AMBASSADOR TABIBIAN SPEAKS OUT ON MURDER OF ARMENIAN SOLDIER IN BUDAPEST A week ago today, Ambassador Jivan Tabibian, Armenia's representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and also to the countries of Austria, Hungary, Czech and Slovakia, received a phone call about the murder of an Armenian Lieutenant at a NATO Partnership for Peace Language Training program in Budapest, Hungary. For the last week, Ambassador Tabibian and his staff have been working with the Hungarian authorities to ascertain the facts and to appropriately deal with the logistical and legal processes that have ensued. Today, Ambassador Tabibian addressed the Permanent Council of the OSCE, which meets every Thursday. His remarks addressed the murder, as well as the reaction of other states to that act. He began by referring to the statement by Azerbaijan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. `Unfortunately, a careful and close reading of the statement is both instructive and very disappointing. Instead of an unequivocal condemnation of the act, the official statement provides explanations as a justification. Besides the fact that in the very first paragraph it mentions that an Armenian serviceman was killed, there is no link between the murder victim and the murderer referred to in the second paragraph. This entire paragraph is an exercise in blaming the victim, an old and vicious practice, used throughout history to justify persecution and genocide of the "impure other.' We find it particularly offensive and bothersome that the Azerbaijani leadership by its own words thinks the defense of the offended "honor and dignity" of an officer can be redressed by the gruesome action of the supposedly offended officer by decapitating another officer in his sleep, defenseless and unarmed. A very starange idea of honor! Suffice it to add, that nowhere in the police reports, or the statements of the witnesses and fellow students of the course, there is any reference to any supposed hostile exchange or an altercation between murderer and victim,' the ambassador said. `We find it discouraging that the perpetrator of a cowardly act is, right before our eyes being transformed into a hero, entrusted with defending memory and righting wrongs in this reprehensible manner. It is symptomatic that such brutality is being referred to as an "incident" throughout the Azerbaijani's statement. Or suggesting to the millions of refugees around the world, including to those of Armenia, that they should encourage self-appointed avengers operating outside the law and state structures, even as they wear the uniform of a state's armed forces. Actually, perhaps the Azerbaijani officer detained for murder did not think he was acting outside his government's and his superiors' wishes, designs and ideology, since his leaders encourage people to act vengefully,' he continued. The Ambassador also spoke about the prevailing anti-Armenian attitude in Azerbaijan. `Let me conclude by saying that Azerbaijan uses the prevailing Armenophobia in its population as an obstacle to peaceful resolution of the NK conflict, where compromises may have to be made on both sides. But no one is telling Azerbaijan that the prevailing level of murderous hostility and hyster ia is the result of the authorities' own actions, encouragements, distortions, exaggerations, in short their effective hate propaganda. `A few weeks ago, here at a Permanent Council meeting I expressed my Government's indignation at Azerbaijan's refusal to issue visas and allow Armenians to attend a preparatory Conference in Baku for forthcoming NATO/PfP "Co-operative Best Effort" exercises. Flaunting blatantly and unapologetically its engagements even within multilateral arrangements such as PfP, where its obligations are clear, it has received no public rebuke. There was none here. When we fail to explicitly condemn so-called little things, we eventually face the dilemma of what to say about monstrous acts. `At every step Armenia has stated and demonstrated its willingness to co-operate wherever possible, to create and implement confidence building measures. My Government continues to do so. Without building such confidence, neither side can convince its own population to accept peace. At each step and every opportunity Azerbaijan has refused to demonstrate any flexibility or willingness to start a process of unfreezing the conflict in the minds of its own population. The Azerbaijani statement has it all backwards: it is the reduction of tension, hostility and pumped up hatred that will lead to resolution and peace, not the other way around. `It is the responsibility of all of us to see this sequence in its proper order: Security and co-operation as well as through co-operation,' he concluded.

ANCA CALIFORNIA DEMOCRAT AND CONGRESSIONAL ARMENIAN CAUCUS CO-CHAIRS CONDEMN VICIOUS MURDER OF ARMENIAN SOLDIER BY HIS AZERBAIJANI COLLEAGUE AT NATO SPONSORED EDUCATION PROGRAM WASHINGTON, DC, FEBRURY 25. ARMINFO. California Democrat Adam Schiff and Congressional Armenian Caucus Co- chairs Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Frank Pallone (D-NJ) condemned the vicious murder of an Armenian soldier by his Azerbaijani colleague at a NATO sponsored education program in Hungary last week, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA). "I was shocked and saddened to hear of the Armenian soldier's horrific murder in Hungary," stated Rep. Schiff, in a statement submitted to the ANCA yesterday. "While we do not yet know all of the circumstances of the soldier's tragic death, this incident reinforces the need for Azerbaijan to end its propaganda regarding Nagorno Karabagh and reach a negotiated settlement of the Karabagh issue. Regrettably, the Administration has requested 4 times more military assistance for Azerbaijan than Armenia. I hope Congress will step in and correct this funding injustice against Armenia, one of America's strongest allies in the region." Rep. Pallone echoed similar concerns, stating that, "this unfortunate tragedy shows how dangerous Azerbaijan's war propaganda can be not only in Azerbaijan but around the region. It's time the Azerbaijani government reject shocking propaganda that does nothing more than reignite xenophobia and extremism." Rep. Knollenberg noted that, "I am deeply saddened by the horrific murder of Lt. Gurgen Markarian. It is a tragedy that the Partnership for Peace program has been marred by this murder. I expect nothing less than a full investigation and complete justice for those responsible." "The brutal murder of the Lt. Gurgen Markarian by his Azerbaijani counterpart has drawn the attention of the international community to the growing anti-Armenian sentiment being fostered by the Azerbaijani government, as well as its ongoing obstruction of the Nagorno Karabagh peace process and efforts to exclude Armenia from NATO exercises," explained ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. "The Azerbaijani government's violent rhetoric, its destabilizing actions, and the very real human costs of their decisions need to be addressed immediately and decisively by the U.S. government and the international community before this tragedy is repeated on a larger scale." Lt. Gurgen Markarian was brutally axed and stabbed to death last Thursday by Azerbaijani Lt. Ramil Safarov during a NATO language- training seminar in Hungary. Hungarian officials have arrested Safarov and are continuing their investigation in the matter. Following the slaying, the Armenian Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying the killing in Hungary was "the logical consequence of anti- Armenian hysteria that has been left unreined by the Azeri authorities over the years and of (Azerbaijan's) war- mongering, militarist propaganda." NATO officials characterized the incident as a clear criminal act on Friday and, according to the RFE/RL report on the topic, expressed it hopes the tragic incident will not affect Armenia's "strong participation" in NATO's Partnership for Peace program.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty 27 Feb 2004 European Parliament calls for stronger EU engagement in South Caucasus The European Parliament adopted on 26 February a report drafted by its rapporteur, Swedish parliamentarian Per Gahrton, calling for closer ties between the EU and the three South Caucasus states, RFE/RL's Brussels correspondent reported (see "RFE/RL Caucasus Report," 30 January 2004). The Gahrton report specifically advocates an increase in EU aid to the South Caucasus and calls on the EU to solicit the cooperation of Russia and Turkey in resolving regional conflicts. Parliamentarians insisted, however, on removing from Gahrton's draft report a demand that Armenian forces be withdrawn from five Azerbaijani districts adjacent to the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in exchange for the resumption of rail traffic from Azerbaijan to Armenia (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 30 January and 3 February 2004). The Armenian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on 26 February noting that "the EU has refused once again to make a one-sided decision on Nagorno-Karabakh," RFE/RL's Yerevan bureau reported. LF

Baku Sun, Azerbaijan 4 Mar 2004 www.bakusun.az:8101 Alleged killings in Sumgait marked Avet Demourian YEREVAN — Thousands of Armenians laid flowers at a monument in the capital on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the 1988 deaths of ethnic Armenians in rioting in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait. The violence that tore through Sumgait 16 years ago came as tensions between Armenians and Azerbaijanis soared over the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that was agitating to become part of Armenia. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan were Soviet republics at the time. Nagorno-Karabakh later plunged into war, with ethnic Armenian forces driving out Azeri troops; thousands of ethnic Azeris fled to the mountainous region. Nagorno-Karabakh is now under control of an unrecognized ethnic Armenian government, whose forces face off warily with Azerbaijani troops across a heavily fortified “line of control.” Official reports at the time of the Sumgait rioting said that 32 people were killed — 26 of them Armenian — although later reports claimed that more than 50 died. “The events of that day, by their cruelty, shook international society,” President Robert Kocharian said in a statement Saturday. The statement came as Armenians streamed to place flowers at the vast monument marking widespread deaths in what Armenians say was a 1915–23 genocide in eastern Turkey. Armenians say some 1.5 million people died in a campaign to force them out of eastern Turkey. Turkey objects to the use of the word “genocide”, and says the figures are inflated and that the deaths were the result of civil unrest and not a planned campaign. Talks to work out a final settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh’s status have become bogged down, and have shown little progress in recent years, while tensions simmer on both sides. The tensions were aggravated by the killing of an Armenian soldier studying in Hungary, allegedly by an Azerbaijani soldier. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev Saturday accused Armenian officials of trying to use the killing “for their own goals.” “There is reason to say that this occurrence was a personal matter and to add a political coloring to it is incorrect,” he said.

BBC 4 Feb 2004 Top Bosnian Serb denies genocide Momcilo Krajisnik may face life imprisonment if found guilty One of the top Serbian leaders of wartime Bosnia has pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges at a UN tribunal. Momcilo Krajisnik is charged with genocide and masterminding a campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs during the war between 1992 and 1995. "The indictment is probably addressed to the wrong person," he said in court. Mr Krajisnik, 58, the former speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament, is a very close ally of wartime leader Radovan Karadzic. His trial is expected to take at least two years and if convicted he could face a life sentence. I believe in God and in justice and I believe that truth will triumph. After all these years in prison, I will be a free man again Momcilo Krajisnik Mr Krajisnik was detained three years ago in Pale, when French Nato troops blasted off the door to his home with explosives. He told the UN court on Wednesday, the second day of his trial, he was confident he would be acquitted. "I believe in God and in justice and I believe that truth will triumph," he said. "After all these years in prison, I will be a free man again." Mr Krajisnik co-founded the Serb nationalist party in Bosnia with Mr Karadzic. He was the speaker in the Bosnian parliament before the Serbs walked out and war began. He led the Bosnian Serb parliament during the war, in which more than 200,000 people died. Peace negotiator He was later one of the negotiators of the Dayton peace accords and the Serb representative in Bosnia's first post-war joint presidency, along with a Croat and a Muslim. He is now facing charges including organising detention camps, inciting ethnic hatred and shared responsibility for killing thousands. "Along with Radovan Karadzic, it was his hand which held firmly the levers of power and authority," prosecutor Mark Harmon said in his opening remarks on Tuesday. Mr Karadzic, the tribunal's most wanted fugitive, is still on the run. Mr Krajisnik is one of the most senior Bosnian Serb leaders to be tried at the UN court so far. Former Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic made a surprise guilty plea to charges of crimes against humanity two years ago and was sentenced to 11 years in prison last February.

BBC 5 Feb 2004 Sarajevo massacre remembered By Jim Fish BBC World Affairs Correspondent It was one of the single most bloody events of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and one of the most mysterious. The single shell blast in Sarajevo's Markale market on 5 February 1994 killed 68 people and wounded more than 100. The Muslim-led government blamed the besieging Serb forces. The blast in the crowded market place killed 68 people They, in turn, accused the government of shelling its own people, to win international sympathy. A report by United Nations peacekeepers at the time was inconclusive, although there have been persistent rumours that a secret UN report later pointed the finger of blame at the government. A mortar shell landed in the crowded market place just after noon, scything down the mainly civilian shoppers and traders between the tightly packed stalls. Rescue workers and UN personnel who rushed to help described a hellish scene spattered with blood and body parts. What aroused suspicion in some quarters was that the market was surrounded by high buildings and would normally have been considered safe from all but the most precisely targeted shell. Other reports noted that television crews were on the scene, filming within seconds of the blast. Shocking footage Indeed foreign broadcasters at the time, including at the BBC in London, were surprised at the speed and shocking detail with which they received the raw television pictures from Sarajevo. General Michael Rose, the British head of the Sarajevo-based United Nations Protection Force (Unprofor), said at the time that he could not be sure who was responsible. But in his memoir, Fighting for Peace, General Rose relates how three days after the atrocity he told the Deputy Commander of the Bosnian government forces, General Divjak, that the mortar shell had indeed been fired from their own side, according to UN experts. That proved to be a telling intervention from the British general. Within days the government and the Serbs had agreed to a ceasefire which resulted, under Nato pressure, in the removal of most of the Bosnian Serbs' heavy weapons from the Sarajevo area, and the first loosening of the nearly two-year siege. Although the UN never publicly accused the Bosnian Government of shelling its own people, Unprofor did accuse government forces of firing to provoke the Serbs, and of using hospitals and public buildings as cover for such fire. Under General Rose, Unprofor was firmly focused on preserving or extending ceasefires, and opposed to any escalation of the fighting which might drag Nato or the Western powers into conflict. Suspicion The Bosnian Government, on the other hand, was deeply frustrated by the arms embargo and Western diplomacy, which it felt tied its hands and those of its hard-pressed troops. In such an atmosphere of mutual mistrust, the Markale massacre 10 years ago and a similar attack in August 1995 became the focuses of outrage, recrimination, and ultimately successful military action by Nato forces to lift the siege of Sarajevo and bring the two sides to the negotiating table. Galic was jailed for 20 years for his role in the siege of Sarajevo What angered many Sarajevans was that even if their government had shelled its own civilians in order to drag the Western powers into war against the Serbs, it was the Serbs who were responsible for the protracted shelling of the city and for the deaths of at least 10,000 people, including almost 1,800 children. Perhaps the final verdict on the Markale incident lies with the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Last month the court sentenced Bosnian Serb General Stanislav Galic to 20 years in prison for his part in the attacks on civilians, including the Markale massacre. General Galic was in command of the 18,000-strong Bosnian Serb Army from September 1992 to August 1994. However, there will almost certainly be those who continue to blame the Bosnian Government for the atrocity. The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia noted that while the verdict on Markale against General Galic was widely reported in the international media, it was ignored in Serbia itself.

AP 7 Feb 2004 Karadzic's wife wants NATO to pay for property damage caused during search of her house SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The wife of Bosnia's most-wanted war crimes fugitive, Radovan Karadzic, has filed charges against NATO troops for damaging her house while searching for her husband, Bosnian Serb police said Thursday. NATO troops in early January searched the Karadzic home in Pale, near Sarajevo. The troops raided the town on a tip the wartime Bosnian Serb leader would be seeking medical assistance there. They failed to find him. Karadzic has been in hiding since 1996, when a U.N. war crimes tribunal charged him with genocide. His wife, Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic, filed charges Wednesday with Bosnian Serb police claiming troops caused $19,000 in damages during the raid, said Miroslav Popara, a police spokesman in Sarajevo. NATO usually compensates Bosnians whose property was damaged by troops during operations such as raids, and the peacekeeping force would respect the legal process in the Karadzic case, spokesman Capt. Dave Sullivan said.

BBC 9 Feb 2004 US crackdown on 'Karadzic aides' By Nick Hawton BBC, Sarajevo The US has taken action against 10 people it says are protecting the former Bosnian Serb leader and indicted war criminal, Radovan Karadzic. The individuals' financial assets have been frozen and they have been banned from travelling to the US. Three serving Bosnian police officers and a former Bosnian Serb President have also been sacked from their jobs for allegedly helping Mr Karadzic. Mr Karadzic, who has been charged with genocide, is still on the run. Nato has repeatedly failed to capture Mr Karadzic The US ambassador to Bosnia, Clifford Bond, said there was credible information that 10 people had been providing financial and logistical support, protection and communications for indicted war criminals, including Radovan Karadzic. He said the aim of the visa ban and the freezing of assets was to disrupt the financial networks which enable war criminals to avoid arrest. At the same time the chief international envoy to Bosnia, Lord Ashdown, announced that three Bosnian Serb police officers would be sacked from their jobs. He said a former Bosnian Serb President, Mirko Sarovic, would also be removed from his position as Vice-President of the SDS political party, a party originally founded by Radovan Karadzic. Lord Ashdown said some of the individuals were guilty of bribing and intimidating the police and the courts to drop investigations against them. Radovan Karadzic, who has been charged with genocide for his part in the Bosnian war, remains free eight years after the war ended. The international community has been embarrassed by repeated failures to arrest him. It now seems to be adopting new tactics, getting at their prey via his friends and associates.

The European Roma Rights Center 16 Feb 2004 www.errc.org The Non-Constituents: Rights Deprivation of Roma in Post-Genocide Bosnia and Herzegovina February 16, 2004, Budapest. The European Roma Rights Center announced today release of the Country Report Series publication "The Non-Constituents: Rights Deprivation of Roma in Post-Genocide Bosnia and Herzegovina", a comprehensive report on the human rights situation of Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Roma are barred by law in Bosnia and Herzegovina from enjoying a number of fundamental political rights. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the only country in Europe in which Roma are ineligible for high political offices, including the Presidency. As members of a second class "non-constituent" people, Romani children in Bosnia and Herzegovina today can only aspire in vain to one day becoming president of their country. The European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) has undertaken first-hand documentation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as among Romani refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina displaced abroad, since 1996. . . . EXECUTIVE SUMMARY There are few countries in which human rights are as richly guaranteed by law as they are in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina states, "Bosnia and Herzegovina and both Entities shall ensure the highest level of internationally recognised human rights and fundamental freedoms." The Constitution further gives priority to European human rights law over all other law, includes non-discrimination provisions and enshrines in the constitutional order a range of other international human rights agreements, including some not ratified by any other European state. These facts notwithstanding, certain provisions of both the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Constitutions of the two Entities prima facie discriminate against Roma and other "non-constituent peoples", violating both themselves and international human rights law. The constitutional law of Bosnia and Herzegovina prevents Roma from enjoying a number of fundamental political rights. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the only country in Europe in which Roma are barred by law from holding crucial high political offices, including the Presidency. As members of a second class "non-constituent" people, Romani children in Bosnia and Herzegovina today can only aspire in vain to one day becoming president of their country. European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) monitoring of the situation of Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina has established that Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina are regularly exposed to abuses of their civil, political, economic and social rights as a result of their official second-class status in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and also because entrenched anti-Romani sentiment in Bosnia and Herzegovina gives rise to endemic racial discrimination and other human rights violations against Roma. In addition to being legally barred from holding high political office, many Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina are denied basic franchise and cannot vote because they lack one or more personal documents and/or may even be stateless. Lack of personal documents also results in the denial of a number of services crucial for the realisation of a range of fundamental rights, including schooling, public housing, health care and social support services. Many Roma have not been able to repossess their pre-war properties, and, as such, live in very precarious situations, often in informal settlements with substandard conditions in various parts of the country. In addition, instances of violence against Roma by state agents, as well as by non-state actors (i.e., their non-Romani neighbours) have been reported. Incidents of violence against Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina appeared to be on the rise as this report went to press. The break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the wars that ensued had a devastating effect on Romani individuals and communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Roma were brutally treated by all parties to the conflict, and it is feared that as many as 30,000 Roma were subjected to ethnic cleansing. Many Roma were also detained and severely ill-treated in concentration camps, particularly Serb-run concentration camps. Roma and Romani communities were reportedly particularly targeted in Prijedor and the surrounding villages of Kozarac, Hambarine, Tukovi and Rizvanovici. Horrific atrocities were also committed against Roma from Vlasenica, Rogatica and in Zvornik and surrounding villages. At least seventy Roma were killed in the infamous massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Romani men were also forcibly conscripted and made to perform slave labour in the armies of all sides to the conflict. Many Romani women were raped and/or forced to perform sex labour. The 1992-1995 war saw the wholesale destruction of a number of Romani communities. To date, justice has yet to be provided to Romani victims of actions during the 1992-1995 war. In addition, although the majority of Bosnian Roma lived before the war in eastern Bosnia -- in areas of the country today located in the entity known as Republika Srpska -- today most Roma live in the area of Bosnia and Herzegovina known as the Federation, primarily in north-eastern Bosnia, the Tuzla Canton, or central Bosnia (Sarajevo, Zenica). Many thousands of Roma from Bosnia and Herzegovina have not returned to the country. The genocidal civil war fought in Bosnia and Herzegovina fundamentally altered the demography of Romani settlement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Perhaps more importantly for individuals concerned, vast numbers of Roma have been to date unable to claim pre-war property and have remained without adequate compensation for property confiscated or destroyed during the war. This report is based on extensive field documentation undertaken by the ERRC, independently as well as in partnership with the Bijeljina-based non-governmental organisation Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Republika Srpska (HCHRRS), as well as with other non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Monitoring of the human rights situation of Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the ERRC and the HCHRRS, has revealed a number of serious human rights concerns, including the following: 1. Exclusion of Roma from the Highest Levels of Political Participation The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina bars Roma from the offices of the Presidency and the House of Peoples. Only members of the three constituent peoples - Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs - are eligible to participate in the Presidency and the House of Peoples. Therefore, solely on the basis of their ethnicity, Roma are prohibited from even participating as candidates in elections for such offices. Roma are further barred from voting in the election of the representatives to the House of Peoples of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (an Entity-level institution with a very similar name to the national-level "House of Peoples), as only Bosniak and Croat delegates of the House of Peoples of the Federation are empowered to vote for representatives to the House of Peoples. Exclusion from political offices at the highest levels serves to reinforce the vulnerability of the Romani community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2. Difficulties in Accessing Personal Documents and Citizenship Many Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina lack personal documents and, in extreme cases, citizenship. Instances of statelessness have been reported among Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Roma have encountered difficulties in accessing documents including but not limited to birth certificates, personal identification cards, documents related to the provision of health insurance and social aid, and passports. Barriers arising from a lack of documents can be daunting, and the lack of one document can lead to the inability of a person to access further documents. The lack of access to personal documents and citizenship threatens the ability of Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina to gain access to services crucial to the realisation of a number of fundamental rights and freedoms, such as the right to vote, the right to adequate housing, the right to social assistance, the right to education and the right to the highest attainable standards of health. 3. Violence against Roma In the context of persistent ethnic tensions and mistrust in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, Roma have found themselves at the mercy of law enforcement agencies in which they have almost no representation. Police officers in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been the perpetrators of violent attacks on Roma; have specifically targeted Roma through ethnic profiling practices; have conducted abusive raids on Romani settlements; have accused Roma of crimes on the basis of little or no evidence; and have failed to adequately investigate crimes committed against Roma. Racially motivated attacks against Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina have also been documented during and since the end of the 1992-1995 war. Roma have in a number of incidents fallen victim to violent attack by non-Roma, resulting in very serious injuries in some cases. Verbal abuse and threats of violence against Roma are common in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 4. Violations of Housing and Property Rights Many Roma have experienced difficulties in exercising their property rights and accessing the right to adequate housing in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Indeed, many Roma are still internally displaced within the country for a myriad of reasons. In some cases, Roma have been unable to return to their pre-war homes due to fear and/or impediments to return. The repossession of personal property by Roma has been left to the discretion of local (generally non-Romani) authorities slow to remove temporary occupants from their property. In many of the cases of repossession of personal property by Roma of which the ERRC is aware, temporary occupants have vandalised or looted property before leaving. Many of the informal settlements in which Roma lived prior to the war have been destroyed and no adequate alternative accommodation has been made available to former inhabitants. Roma who have been able to return to informal settlements often find themselves at the mercy of local authorities eager to allocate their land for industrial or other economic development projects, while at the same time making no plans for the provision of alternative accommodation for Roma displaced through forced evictions. Roma living in informal settlements or who lived in social housing before the war are frequently excluded from the benefits of new property laws and are in many cases ineligible for the aid money that has poured into the country under reconstruction schemes. In such settlements, an adequate standard of living is not available. In extreme cases, very substandard conditions in such settlements have led to the death of vulnerable inhabitants. Further, Roma are frequently unable to rent private accommodation due to racial discrimination or poverty or both. 5. Obstacles to Accessing Other Fundamental Rights Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina encounter obstacles to the exercise of their fundamental rights to employment, social aid, the highest attainable standard of health, and education. Roma are frequently blocked on arbitrary grounds from having access to the public services crucial for the realisation of a range of social and economic rights. In a number of cases documented by the ERRC and partner organisations, Romani individuals died apparently at least in part as a result of the failure of Bosnian authorities to provide basic services such as rudimentary health care. A very large number of Roma today face serious existential threats because of the extremely poor conditions in which they are forced to live. . . . The European Roma Rights Center is an international public interest law organisation which monitors the rights of Roma and provides legal defence in cases of human rights abuse. For more information about the European Roma Rights Center, visit the ERRC on the web at http://www.errc.org

Kathimerini 9 Feb 2004 www.ekathimerini.com Church out of politics (just) Archbishop Christodoulos, who has placed himself squarely in the center of political developments since his election as primate of the Church of Greece nearly six years ago, said yesterday that the Church had ordered clerics to keep away from all pre-election gatherings in order to avoid influencing their congregants in any way. Christodoulos, speaking at a meeting with Greek members of the European Parliament, went on to argue that members of the Church had every right to an opinion. He accused journalists of picking on him for expressing political views while allowing “other pressure groups” to get away without a mention, the Athens News Agency reported. In 2001, when he led a crusade against the government’s decision to scrap the mention of religion on identity cards, Christodoulos had warned that the Church would take this into consideration in the next elections. Christodoulos was pessimistic over the resumption of talks on the Cyprus issue, saying the next three months would be the Cypriot people’s most difficult period.

Kathimerini 28 Feb 2004 www.ekathimerini.com SCANDINAVIAN ‘WIMPS’ Archbishop’s spokesman loses cool over issue of religion on ID cards The spokesman for Archbishop Christodoulos, Epiphanios Economou, reacted angrily yesterday during a debate with political party and government representatives on whether state identity cards should carry a religious faith slot. “We are Greeks and not Danes or Swedes to be acting like wimps,” Economou retorted in reaction to comments by the Education Ministry’s religious affairs spokesman Yiannis Konidaris, who argued that the reference — or not — to religion on ID cards was not a matter of relations between the Church and the State but of respect for human rights. Economou later apologized for his comments.

www.errc.org Budapest, 12 February 2004 Young Hungarian Romani woman sterilised without any prior explanation from doctors: ERRC and NEKI initiate international legal action. On 2 January 2001, a Hungarian Romani woman was sterilised by doctors at Fehergyarmat hospital. While on the operating table she was asked to sign forms giving her consent to this and other operations, without a full explanation about sterilisation. No information was provided to her as to the nature of the intervention, or what the consequences of being sterilised would be. Nor did doctors tell her what the risks involved in the operation were. The right to be fully informed before an operation is a cornerstone of modern medical practice and is anchored at the core of international human rights law. Nevertheless, despite suing the hospital in Hungarian Courts, she has yet to obtain justice. After the operation, when she learnt that she had been sterilised, the victim (Ms.S.) said "We wanted a big family. I wanted to give birth again. But I simply cannot." ERRC and NEKI are therefore helping the victim, Ms. S., take her case to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. ERRC Legal Director, Branimir Plese, said "This is a sadly typical example of women's and patients' rights violations in the health care systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Many men and women are treated as passive objects by an authoritarian caste of professionals uninterested in facilitating the individual's right to decide in matters related to her own medical care. Due to high levels of anti-Romani sentiment in the region, Romani women are particularly exposed. We hope that by bringing this case to the United Nations, we can change the practices of some doctors, and that Governments will take note and tighten relevant laws and regulations, so that cases of this kind may not happen again. Most importantly of course, we seek, finally, justice for the victim, after her long ordeal." Note to editors: On 12 February 2004, the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) and the Legal Defence Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities (NEKI) jointly filed a complaint against Hungary with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) relating to an illegal sterilisation of a young Hungarian woman of Romani origin (Ms. S.). The complaint asserts that Hungary, as a State Party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, is in violation of Article 10.h. (no adequate information on contraceptive measures and family planning), Article 12 (the lack of informed consent on the part of the victim as a violation of her right to appropriate health care services), and Article 16.1.e. (the states interference with the victims ability have children in the future). The facts of the case On 2 January 2001, Ms. S' birth pains started. She was taken by ambulance to the public hospital in Fehergyarmat, in pain, having lost her amniotic fluid and bleeding heavily. During an examination the attending physician informed Ms. S. that her unborn baby had died in her womb and that a caesarean section needed to be immediately performed to remove the dead embryo. While on the operating table the doctor asked her to sign a statement of consent to the caesarean section. At the bottom of this form the doctor had added in a hand-written, barely readable script - - a consent to sterilisation. He wrote the Latin equivalent of the Hungarian word for sterilisation on the consent form, a word unknown to Ms. S. She signed the consent forms. The hospital records show that only 17 minutes passed from the ambulance arriving at the hospital until the completion of both operations. Before leaving the hospital, Ms. S. sought out the doctor to ask him for information on her state of health and when she could try to have another child. It was only then that she learnt the meaning of the word sterilisation and that she could not become pregnant again. This information had a profound effect on Ms. S. as she has strict religious beliefs that prohibit any form of contraception, including sterilisation. At no point prior to the operation did Ms. S. receive full information about the nature of sterilisation, its risks and consequences, or about other forms of contraception. This lack of informed consent before a medical intervention, and the resulting inability to reproduce, amounts to a clear and compelling violation of numerous international legal standards. Relevant international law provisions The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, in its General Recommendation 24, explained that "Women have the right to be fully informed, by properly trained personnel, of their options in agreeing to treatment or research, including likely benefits and potential adverse effects of proposed procedures and available information." The Recommendation further states that "Acceptable [health care] services are those that are delivered in a way that ensures that a woman gives her fully informed consent, respects her dignity, guarantees her needs and perspectives. States parties should not permit forms of coercion, such as non-consensual sterilisation." The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine states that "An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person has given free and informed consent to it. This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks." The World Health Organisation's Declaration on Patients Rights states that "patients have the right to be fully informed about their health status, including the medical facts about their condition; about the proposed medical procedures, together with the potential risks and benefits of each procedure; about alternatives to the proposed procedures, including the effect of non-treatment, and about the diagnosis, prognosis and progress of treatment." It further states that "Information must be communicated to the patient in a way appropriate to the latter's capacity for understanding, minimising the use of unfamiliar technical terminology. If the patient does not speak the common language, some form of interpreting should be available." The UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women states that "[women] have the right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children." The Committee that oversees the Convention emphasised, in their General Recommendation 21, that "Decisions to have children or not ... must not be limited by Government. The means to reproduction were taken away from Ms.S. by Hungarian State actors, the doctors at the hospital, in violation of the Convention. Legal action in Hungary On 15 October 2001, Ms. S and her attorney filed a civil claim for damages against the hospital. They requested that the Town Court of Fehergyarmat find the hospital in violation of the plaintiff's civil rights and that it had acted negligently in its professional duty of care with regard to the sterilisation of Ms. S in the absence of her full and informed consent. The Town Court turned down the claim in its decision of 22 November 2002. On appeal, the Szabolcs-Szatmar-Bereg County Court held that the hospital doctors had indeed acted negligently in failing to provide Ms. S with the relevant information about the sterilisation and stressed that "the information given to the plaintiff concerning her sterilisation was not detailed ... [and that she] ... was not informed of the exact method of the operation, of the risks of its performance, and of the possible alternative procedures and methods". Nevertheless, and contrary to international jurisprudence as well as medical practice, the same Court then went on to conclude that sterilisations as such are fully reversible operations and that as Ms. S. had provided no proof that she had suffered a lasting detriment, she was not entitled to compensation. Having obtained no redress in Hungary, with the assistance of the ERRC and NEKI, Ms. S. has now decided to turn to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and request that international justice be served. For further details on this case, please contact Alan Anstead at ERRC Alan.Anstead@errc.org or Dr Bea Bodrogi at NEKI bbodrogi@yahoo.com Further information on the human rights situation of Roma in Hungary is available on the ERRC website www.errc.org and the NEKI website www.neki.hu

www.radicalparty.org (Italy) 6 Feb 2004 | CHECHNYA/ATTACK IN MOSCOW: STATEMENT BY OLIVIER DUPUIS, ON THE 19TH DAY OF HIS HUNGER STRIKE Turin, 6 February 2004 - On 18 January the Radical MEP Olivier Dupuis began a hunger strike to urge the authorities of the European Union and of the Member States finally to address the question of the Chechen genocide with determination, from a political and humanitarian point of view. In Turin, where he is taking part in the presentation of the book Chechnya nella morsa dell’impero (published by Guerini e Associati), he issued the following statement on the attack in the Moscow underground: “This appalling terrorist attack in the Moscow underground is yet another result of the alliance between those in Moscow who continue to push for a violent, military resolution of the Chechen question and those in Chechnya who are now irresponsibly trapped in a heroic, romantic vision of their own destiny and that of their own faction, without any concern for the future of their country. Like President Maskhadov and his government, like the vast majority of Chechens, and like over 60% of Russians, I am hoping and working - together with my friends in the Transnational Radical Party - for a political solution to the Russo-Chechen tragedy, founded on justice, dialogue and non-violence. I am convinced that if the international community continues to abandon the moderate, pro-European and pro-Western Maskhadov government and to ignore its Peace Plan, the only alternative to the Russian terrorism in Chechnya risks becoming Chechen “counter-terrorism”. In this context, to speak - as the European Union and the United States have done so far - about war on terrorism or unity against terrorism is no more than an exercise of cynical hypocrisy. The recourse to terrorist actions or war against Russian civilians can only be stopped by supporting an alternative that can stop the war and the genocide of the Chechen people. Even the extremist factions of the Chechen cause are well aware of this: recently, for example, they have attacked me because I support the Akhmadov-Maskhadov Plan for the establishment of an interim UN administration in Chechnya, rather than attacking other European politicians who, by declaring their unity of purpose with Putin, merely reinforce the status quo of death and violence in Chechnya and, increasingly, in Russia”.

ICG 25 Feb 2005 Pan-Albanianism: How Big a Threat to Balkan Stability? Fears of a "Greater Albanian" agenda driving a new round of Balkan conflict are unwarranted. The idea of a single state unifying ethnic Albanians currently spread out over six countries and entities simply does not interest most Albanians. Despite some Balkans observers' fears, the desire to territorially unify all the Albanian people has long held far more power as myth than as a practical political agenda. The uncertainty over Kosovo's final status will continue to make neighbouring states uncomfortable, but the idea of separate Albanian entities in the Balkans is broadly accepted. Decentralising power in Macedonia and giving Kosovo conditional independence in return for an assurance from all the Albanian entities in the Balkans that the present borders of south-eastern Europe will remain unchanged, would help stabilise the situation. So would the relaxation of business, cultural and travel restrictions. ICG reports and briefing papers are available on our website: www.crisisweb.org

B92 (Serbia) 2 Feb 2004 www.b92.net Genocide charge in doubt, says del Ponte | 13:09 | SENSE THE HAGUE -- Monday – The UN’s chief prosecutor has warned that Belgrade’s refusal to hand over documents is jeopardising the case against Slobodan Milosevic for genocide in Bosnia. Carla del Ponte has said several times in recent months that it will be very difficult to prove the genocide charge against the former Yugoslav president. Del Ponte denied trying to justify the prosecution’s possible failure to prove the charge, saying she had merely wished to warn those in possession of the necessary documents that their refusal to cooperate was jeopardising the case. The chief prosecutor claimed to know exactly which documents were missing and where they are.

NYT 2 Feb 2004 HAGUE JOURNAL Another Serb Defendant Stays on His Best Bad Behavior By MARLISE SIMONS THE HAGUE — Slobodan Milosevic is being upstaged. For the past two years, the former Yugoslav president has noisily challenged the international tribunal that is trying him for war crimes, by pontificating, denigrating his judges and dismissing his trial as a mere anti-Serb farce. But a fellow Serb, the ultranationalist politician and warlord Vojislav Seselj, is now outdoing the former strongman in insolence. Taken together, their behavior illustrates some of the difficulties this court faces in doing its work. Frustratingly slow at times, it deals with Croat, Muslim and Serbian defendants accused of atrocities in the 1990's wars that broke up Yugoslavia. Mr. Seselj (pronounced SHESH-el), who turned himself in a year ago, has sneered that the United Nations court is just an "American tool against Serbs," which he "will blast to pieces." Known in Serbia for his rabble-rousing speeches and foul language, he has now brought those habits to The Hague. He has equated one judge with the Nazis and requested that all three of his judges be disqualified. He has accused the tribunal registrar of financial crimes, fired off motions that amount to insulting diatribes, and managed to outwit his prison guards — and his trial has not even begun. Some court officials wonder how a proper and fair trial can be held of such an obstructionist defendant. "Other accused have their ways of being difficult," said Jim Landale, the tribunal spokesman, "but we have not seen such extreme verbal assaults before." Like Mr. Milosevic, Mr. Seselj, 49, is conducting his own defense, which allows him to hold the floor in court, even now at preparatory hearings for the trial that may begin later this year. Mr. Seselj, a former Sarajevo University lecturer who founded an ultranationalist political party and his own armed militia, faces charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990's. His indictment says that he ordered persecutions, plunder and killings, and that he is accountable for the atrocities perpetrated by his gang, known as Seselj's Men. Prosecutors and witnesses contend that he often directed the fighters as they terrorized, robbed and killed non-Serbian civilians. Mr. Seselj's latest move that aggravated court officials came in December, when he managed to use the jail telephone to campaign for his Radical Party in the parliamentary elections of Serbia. Mr. Milosevic did the same for his Socialist Party. When the tribunal discovered they were broadcasting on Belgrade radio, it imposed a temporary ban on all calls except to family and lawyers. Mr. Milosevic reportedly respected the ban, a court official said, but Mr. Seselj gave another interview on Dec. 25 from a public phone near his cell. He told his listeners in Belgrade that he was able to trick his guards because "the fools are all busy celebrating Christmas." Mr. Seselj's party won almost 28 percent of the vote, making it the largest political force in the country. He tried to deliver a victory speech by telephone until his guards cut him off. The telephone episode points up the challenge of trying to stop these two seasoned politicians from exercising their influence from their cells. Court officials are even more concerned about the plans of the two to use their trials as political platforms. Mr. Milosevic, for example, is entitled to hold the floor for many months once his defense begins in May. Proceedings are regularly broadcast to the Balkans, and while Mr. Milosevic's influence at home has waned, his past defiance and now Mr. Seselj's courtroom histrionics draw applause or amusement in Serbia. One such story involves a computer, which the court gave Mr. Seselj to try to stop him from filing his lengthy motions scribbled by hand. He announced to his judges that he would not touch this laptop because, he said with evident sarcasm, he did not want to get electric shocks. During one session, he requested that the judges change their red-and-black courtroom robes because they caused him deep psychological problems. He said they reminded him of the Roman Catholic Inquisition. In court, the judges have shrugged off or played down most of his antics, calling them "frivolous." But behind the scenes, Mr. Seselj has sometimes provoked outrage, particularly with his motion demanding that his three judges be disqualified. Wolfgang Schomburg, the presiding judge, he said, had to step down because he was from Germany, a country hostile to Serbs. "Whenever I see Wolfgang Schomburg, I remember Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Jasenovac," Mr. Seselj wrote, referring to Nazi concentration camps. "The smell of crematoriums and gas chambers comes into the Hague courtroom with him." As for the two other judges, he wrote, they were "ardent and zealous Catholics," which meant they belonged to "one of the most dangerous international criminal organizations," whose priests, he claimed, had taken part in mass killings of Serbs. The court dismissed his written outburst as ill-founded and frivolous, but warned that it might decide to restrict his motions in the future. "Unspeakable," said one judge who is not part of this case. But, he said, to hold Mr. Seselj in contempt of court would probably be counterproductive. Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch who follows the tribunal, said the repugnant language served to illustrate the kind of racism and hatred with which Serb politicians incited their public for years and which "are at the core of much of the violence" in the former Yugoslavia. In a highly unusual move, the court has now imposed a standby counsel on Mr. Seselj to avoid being held hostage by his temper. It ruled that if his conduct becomes too disruptive, he will be removed from the courtroom and the standby counsel will take over. Mr. Seselj retorted that he would have nothing to do with the "alleged standby counsel." Further, he announced, he would sue the court for violating his rights.

Guardian UK 4 Feb 2004 Serb chief stands trial for genocide Ian Traynor in the Hague One of Bosnia's most important war crimes trials opened yesterday, when Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik went on trial in the Hague accused of helping to mastermind the ethnic cleansing and persecution that left 250,000 people dead and forced two million more from their homes. Four years after his arrest in Bosnia, the former speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament faced the war crimes tribunal charged with eight counts of genocide, complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in 1991 and 1992. The 59-year-old economist sat inscrutably as the prosecutor, Mark Harmon, alleged how the Bosnian Serb leadership, taking its cue from the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, planned and implemented a ruthless and systematic campaign to drive out non-Serbs. Mr Krajisnik, an intimate associate of Radovan Karadzic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb leader, has pleaded not guilty to the charges and, according to the prosecution, has invoked one procedural wrangle after another to delay appearing in court. He was originally to be tried as a member of the leading Bosnian Serb troika with Mr Karadzic and Biljana Plavsic. But Mr Karadzic remains at large. A year ago Plavsic pleaded guilty on reduced charges in a plea bargain and is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence in Sweden. Mr Harmon said Krajisnik was responsible for deploying "the blunt instrument of force" to terrorise and expel non- Serbs. "He is responsible for massive crimes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Krajisnik was fully aware of the horrific consequences ... and indifferent to them." The lengthy opening statement from the prosecution concentrated on the political and organisational preparations for the war in Bosnia and failed to present much new evidence. Most of the planning evidence has already been aired at the ongoing trial of Milosevic and other cases. Mr Krajisnik was the number two or three in the Bosnian Serb political leadership under Mr Karadzic and gained notoriety for his hardline intransigence throughout the various rounds of diplomacy and negotiations to end the war. He took part in the Dayton negotiations in the US that ended the war in November 1995, but remained bitterly opposed to the settlement. Mr Harmon described the defendant as an "unrepentant Serb nationalist leader" who was "shrewd and calculating". Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor, told the Guardian that Mr Karadzic should have been sitting alongside him in the dock, but she was confident his eight years on the run were coming to an end. The prosecution's case against Mr Krajisnik would have been made easier if Plavsic had agreed to testify against her former fellow leader. But despite striking a plea bargain with the prosecution more than a year ago Plavsic refuses to testify. Ms del Ponte admitted she had made "an error" in not insisting on an agreement to testify as part of the Plavsic plea deal. Mr Krajisnik was at the apex of power among the Bosnian Serbs and enjoyed a good relationship with Mr Milosevic in Belgrade, Mr Harmon argued. The "paramount leaders of the Bosnian Serbs were guided by Slobodan Milosevic on whose counsel they relied". The prosecution replayed previously aired tapes of intercepted telephone conversations between Mr Milosevic and Mr Karadzic, who was coordinating policy in Bosnia.

BBC 12 Feb 2004 UN general at Milosevic trial - General Philippe Morillon promised not to abandon Muslims The former commander of UN troops in Bosnia-Hercegovina, General Philippe Morillon, has started giving evidence at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. General Morillon commanded the UN Protection Force (Unprofor) from September 1992 until July 1993 during intense fighting in Bosnia's war. Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands were expelled from their homes in "ethnic cleansing". Mr Milosevic is accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The prosecution at The Hague tribunal is attempting to prove that Mr Milosevic had control over Serb forces in Bosnia and was therefore responsible. General Morillon promised Muslims under siege by Serb forces in the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia in March 1993, that he would never abandon them. Two years after the French commander had left his post as head of the Unprofor, Serb forces overran the enclave in July 1995 and massacred about 7,000 Muslim men and boys. General Morillon's testimony is being heard in open court in the presence of two French government officials. This contrasts with the procedure when former Nato commander Wesley Clark gave evidence at the trial, which was behind closed doors under a deal which allowed the US government to vet a transcript of the hearing.

Guardian UK 15 Feb 2004 How a UN chief was broken by horror of Rwanda Tribunal hears how a general finally came face to face with a devil, reports David Beresford in Arusha, Tanzania Sunday February 15, 2004 The Observer General Romeo Dallaire is a haunted man. After 100 days in hell, including a meeting with 'the devil', he has been reduced to a suicidal, pill-popping civilian. The last time he was a witness in court in this small safari town he was in uniform and in tears. This time he has found his composure in a pinstriped suit, behind bulletproof glass and guarded by Canadian commandos. The three-star general's appearance before the United Nations criminal tribunal in Arusha has been a long time in the making. It was 10 years ago that Dallaire last met the most senior of the four officers in the dock - a short stocky man in dark glasses. Then, says Dallaire, Theoneste Bagosora - allegedly the chief architect of the Rwandan genocide - promised to kill him the next time he saw him. Bagosora had previously set up a meeting between Dallaire and the 'devil' in the form of Robert Kajuga, president of the Interahamwe, the movement widely held to be the main killers of the genocide. Kajuga's white shirt had been spattered with dried blood. 'There were small flecks on his right arm as we shook hands,' Dallaire recalled. 'I felt that I had shaken hands with the devil.' Shake Hands with the Devil is the title of Dallaire's recent book telling of his experiences as military head of the UN Assistance Mission (Unamir) in Rwanda. It is a reminder that as the tenth anniversary of the slaughter approaches, the genocide remains unfinished business for the world. 'Unfinished, because a decade has gone by without a proper investigation into what happened, without even a formal board of inquiry into the causes of the air crash which killed two heads of state and which is popularly credited with starting the awful slaughter,' he writes. Dallaire graphically describes the murder of 800,000 people and the mental breakdown of the rising star in the Canadian defence force, who later made several suicide attempts as he battled to come to terms with what he had seen. 'We saw many faces of death during the genocide, from the innocence of babies to the bewilderment of the elderly, from the defiance of fighters, to the resigned stares of nuns,' he observes. 'For many years after I came home I banished the memories of those faces from my mind, but they have come back, all too clearly.' Four years ago Dallaire was found unconscious under a park bench in Canada. In hospital it was found that the alcohol with which he was consoling himself had not mixed well with drugs he was taking for depression. His depression was understandable, but it is questionable whether what he had seen in Rwanda was the only cause of his breakdown. There were also the 10 Belgian soldiers. Dallaire had problems with the Belgians under his command: they drank on patrol, trashed hotels, ignored orders from black officers, roughed up local politicians and on one occasion 'buzzed' the Rwandan parliament in a plane. Dallaire accuses some of cowardice for abandoning a convoy. Immediately after the air crash that killed Rwanda's Hutu President, Juvenal Habyarimana, Dallaire attempted to persuade the Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a 'moderate' Hutu, to broadcast on government radio station to calm the population. Instead she was killed, along with her bodyguard of Belgian soldiers. In one extraordinary section of the book Dallaire describes how he was being driven into the main military camp in the capital, Kigali, when 'I got a glimpse of what looked like two Belgian soldiers lying on the ground at the far end of the compound.' He told his driver to stop, but the man ignored him, and Dallaire did nothing until hours later when he asked where the 10 Belgian bodyguards were. Told they were in the camp hospital, he insisted on going there and was shown to the mortuary. 'At first, I saw what seemed to be sacks of potatoes to the right of the morgue door. It slowly resolved in my vision into a heap of mangled and bloodied white flesh in tattered Belgian para-commando uniforms,' he wrote. 'Commanders spend their careers preparing for the moment when they will have to choose between lose-lose propositions in the use of their troops,' he observes. 'Regardless of the decision they make, some of their men will die. My decision took sons from their parents, husbands from their wives, fathers from their children. I knew the cost of my decision.' Dallaire believed the killings were part of a plot to force Belgian withdrawal and precipitate carnage. The 'plot' had been described to him months previously by a secret informant codenamed 'Jean Pierre'. But he could not decide whether Jean Pierre was the senior figure in the government forces Dallaire believed him to be, or or no more than a lowly driver, fired for petty theft, as has been claimed. Was President Habyarimana's plane brought down by a missile, as suspected, and was that part of a plot? Was it all genocide? The genocide question goes to the heart of Rwanda's tragedy. Many have claimed to answer it, some pointing to lists of names used to hunt down victims, the distribution of machetes, the reference to Tutsis on government radio as 'cockroaches' to be exterminated. The lists existed, but the selection of victims seems have been based more on hysteria. Defence lawyers staged a strike at the end of Dallaire's evidence, bringing the Bagosora trial to a standstill. They complained their clients were being tried for a crime which has never been proved to have taken place.

AP 23 Feb 2004 Milosevic trial judge submits his resignation AP AP Monday, February 23, 2004 Effect of move, due to illness, is unclear THE HAGUE The presiding judge in the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic will resign due to health problems, the United Nations tribunal said Sunday. Judge Richard May, 65, of Britain will step down from the high-profile bench in three months, just as Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, begins presenting his defense case at the UN war crimes tribunal. "Judge May's letter of resignation states that his recent illness will make it increasingly difficult for him to continue the performance of his duties and that he believes, however reluctantly, that his resignation is in the best interests of the tribunal," said the tribunal's president, Theodor Meron. May was absent for the last three sessions. Under the court's rules, a presiding judge can miss only five consecutive sessions before he is replaced. A spokeswoman for the chief prosecutor, Carla Del Pont, declined to say whether May's sickness would have implication for the proceedings. "We don't know if there will be any affect on the trial," said Florence Hartmann, the spokeswoman. "The issue is in the hands of the trial chamber. We will discuss it and consider possible implications at the next hearing on Tuesday." One of Milosevic's legal associates, Zdenko Tomanovic, said the defense was not going to comment on possible implications of May's resignation. Milosevic, who faces 66 counts of war crimes including genocide, is to start his defense case after a three-month break to prepare. Under the court's statute, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, will appoint a successor. The two other judges who served with May in the Milosevic case, Patrick Robinson of Jamaica and O Gon Kwon from South Korea, will continue. The tribunal has no jury. "I am confident that Judge May's resignation will not have an unduly disruptive effect on any proceedings before the tribunal," Meron said in a statement. There were no immediate details about May's illness. Marlise Simons of The New York Times reported earlier from The Hague: The 65-year-old judge, who has a reputation for keeping tight control over his courtroom, has headed the three-judge panel trying Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, since the trial began in February 2002. Naming a new judge, lawyers at the court said, at the very least would add further delays to a trial that has been regularly slowed or halted by the frequent bouts of illness of Milosevic, who suffers from high blood pressure and heart disease. A new judge would require time to plow through the transcripts of almost 300 court days, including the testimony of as many witnesses. The complex war crimes trial, the first of its kind for a modern head of state, is just now reaching its halfway point as the prosecution prepares to rest its case in the coming days. Prosecutors had hoped to close their case last Thursday, but the final hearings have been postponed several times on the orders of Milosevic's doctors, who reported that his blood pressure was too high for him to attend court. Since the start, the trial has been postponed more than a dozen times because the defendant had the flu, exhaustion or heart problems, causing him to miss 65 days in court. Even now, Milosevic's trial is the longest before an international court. He faces multiple charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to three wars - in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo in the 1990s. He is facing separate charges of genocide, the gravest of all crimes, for the war in Bosnia. If the trial has been a "scheduling nightmare" for the prosecution, as one official called it, it has also been a management problem for the judges, dealing with an unruly defendant. May, who has long experience in Britain, is one of the least perturbable and most experienced trial judges at the tribunal. "I think anybody running that trial would have to lose his temper, taking that abuse day after day," said a former judge, referring to the disdainful tone with which Milosevic regularly addresses the judge as "Mister May." The two final days devoted to the prosecution may continue without May. After the prosecution rests its case, Milosevic will have three months to prepare his defense. Although no lawyer assists him in court, he does have a large legal team, some of whom were present in The Hague last week and said they were preparing his case. Several of the lawyers have visited Milosevic at the UN detention center in recent days. Among them was Zdenko Tomanovic, who heads the Milosevic team. Tomanovic suggested a likely strategy for Milosevic. "If a judge is ill, we can wait till his health is better," Tomanovic said. "But if a judge has to leave, then the accused has the right to ask for the proceedings to start all over again."

NYT 26 2004 Surprise Move in Prosecution of Milosevic By MARLISE SIMONS THE HAGUE, Feb. 25 — Prosecutors unexpectedly rested their case on Wednesday against Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, relinquishing their final two days in the war crimes trial that opened two years ago. Lawyers said that the prosecution's decision came after Mr. Milosevic's latest bout with high blood pressure had forced cancellations of the hearings and was further precipitated by the sudden resignation of the leading judge in the case. Prosecutors had planned to hear four more witnesses in the time allotted to them. Mr. Milosevic will now have three months to prepare his defense in the enormous trial at the United Nations tribunal where he stands accused of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the three wars of the 1990's that tore up Yugoslavia. The British judge in charge of the trial, Richard May, has been forced to resign because of a sudden, severe illness. Judge May will be replaced, most likely by another British judge, to be named by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general. On Wednesday both prosecutors and judges moved uncommonly swiftly. Only hours after the prosecution said it was closing its case, judges announced that the trial will resume on June 8. They gave Mr. Milosevic, who is acting as his own defense counsel, 150 days to present his arguments and his witnesses. Lawyers said that amounts to the same time, or slightly more, than the prosecution used. Although the trial began in February 2002, it has been suspended 65 days because of Mr. Milosevic's illness, and during court recesses. In the minute calculations of the court, Mr. Milosevic has held the floor for about 60 percent of the time during the 300 days of hearings, as he cross-examined witnesses and often strayed into political arguments. A member of Mr. Milosevic's defense team said that they have not yet decided on their strategy, now that they are faced with having one of the three judges replaced in mid-stream. At this juncture, Mr. Milosevic can go along with the court's intended continuation of the case or claim a mistrial. He could also appeal for more time to prepare his case.

ICRC News 4 Feb 2004 04/09 Russian Federation: ICRC vice-president addresses ICC conference in Moscow A two-day conference entitled "The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: implementation at the national level" began here today. The conference will be assessing the legislative amendments required to establish effective cooperation between States and the ICC, along with the main obstacles to ratification of the Rome Statute. The event was opened by ICRC vice-president Jacques Forster; the President of the International Court (ICC), Philippe Kirsch and the President of the Russian Association of International Law, Anatoly l. Kolodkin. Participants include representatives of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, the Council of Federation, the State Duma, the Constitutional Court, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Federal Security Service, and the Supreme Court, together with leading Russian and foreign scholars and experts in international law. The ICRC supports the ICC as part of its efforts to promote respect for international humanitarian law, urging States to adhere to the relevant treaties and enforce them at national level. As Jacques Forster noted in addressing the opening session, "A significant step forward in our common endeavour to promote greater respect for international humanitarian law, the Rome Statute reflects the international community’s longstanding wish to ensure that the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes do not go unpunished."

BBC 6 Feb 2004 Many dead in Moscow metro blast Scores of people were injured in the blast At least 39 people died and more than 100 were injured in a suspected bomb attack on a packed Moscow subway train. The blast happened at the height of rush hour in the second carriage of the train as it approached Paveletskaya station from the south. Hundreds of passengers were evacuated from the station. President Vladimir Putin blamed the blast on Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov and called for greater efforts to fight terrorism. "We do not need any indirect confirmation. We know for certain that Maskhadov and his bandits are linked to this terrorism," the Russian Interfax news agency quoted the president as saying. The Chechen rebel leadership has issued a statement condemning the explosion, although it said it fears Chechen separatists will be blamed. My hands are shaking and I can't work Lyudmila, Russia Send us your comments Russian police and security officials said the blast could have been caused by a suicide bomb attack. However, Moscow's deputy mayor told the Associated Press news agency that investigators had not found metal shrapnel, which usually fills suicide bombers' explosives. Click here to see a graphic showing where the blast happened He said that the bomb was probably hidden in a suitcase or rucksack on the floor of the subway car. 'Carnage' Up to 120 people were injured in the incident, Interfax reported, many of them suffering from broken bones, smoke inhalation and burns. In pictures: Moscow blast The world's busiest metro Speaking at the Kremlin following talks with Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin described terrorism as "the plague of the 21st Century" which the world must unite to defeat. There were scenes of panic and confusion as people fled the powerful explosion, which occurred at about 0840 (0540 GMT). Helicopters from the Russian Emergencies Ministry hovered over the Paveletskaya station as police with loudspeakers told the gathered crowd that the metro was closed. Scores of dazed commuters, many with faces bloodied by injuries and blackened with smoke, poured into the city streets to escape the flames. One woman who works in a shop near the site described horrific scenes as emergency workers struggled to cope with the scores of victims. "We saw them carrying bodies and injured covered in blood," she told French news agency AFP. "A man came into the shop, he was shaking uncontrollably and covered in blood. "He told us that he saw arms, legs scattered around the carriage. He said it was bloody carnage." Large fire The train had left Avtozavodskaya station, on the metro system's green line, and was travelling north towards the city centre to Paveletskaya station when the blast occurred. Moscow's deadliest attacks Dec 2003 - female suicide bomber kills five near Red Square July 2003 - aborted suicide attack kills bomb disposal expert July 2003 - suicide bombers kill 14 at Moscow rock concert Oct 2002 - suicide attackers seize Moscow theatre, 130 hostages die in rescue Aug 2000 - bomb in underpass kills 11 Sept 1999 - two blasts in blocks of flats kill more than 200 Wounded passengers were guided to safety through the tunnel by emergency services, while fire officials attempted to put out a large fire caused by the explosion. More than 50 ambulances arrived at the scene and police sealed off the surrounding streets. The train was severely damaged in the blast, which occurred as many commuters were travelling to local offices and factories. BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg in Moscow says that more than nine million people use the metro system every day and the blast is likely to spread fear across the city. Chechen militants have previously targeted the Russian capital with suicide missions and the city has been on alert for attacks as the country prepares for presidential elections in March.

BBC 6 Feb 2004 Moscow on edge after bomb horror By Sarah Rainsford BBC correspondent in Moscow The bomb attack on the Moscow metro brought panic and chaos to the Russian capital. As the first of the walking-wounded emerged into daylight from Paveletskaya station, many struggled to absorb the enormity of what had happened. The public is blaming Chechen separatists for the attack Moscow has been hit by suicide-bombers before. But the target this time has shocked everyone. The train exploded on a packed commuter line at the height of rush hour. Dozens of people were killed in their seats. Irina works outside Paveletskaya station and she watched as the dead and injured were evacuated in front of her. Sobbing quietly, she could barely believe the scale of horror she had witnessed. "I used to trust in God for protection," she said. "Now I'm terrified. I can't believe that you can just go out to work one day, and never return." It's like we're at war on our own doorstep Alexei Metro passenger The Moscow Metro system is one of the busiest in the world carrying close to nine million passengers every day. For many in the city it is a transport lifeline. Now, it has proven a soft target for terror. By Friday evening, a full Metro service had been restored and life in the capital was returning to normal. Left with little alternative, crowds of resigned Russians were heading back underground. Public anger Russians are famously fatalistic. But many passengers admitted to feeling nervous. "It's like living on a battlefield," Alexei said as he made for the escalators. "It's like we're at war on our own doorstep." The underground system was soon running as normal "The Metro is my only way of getting around," another passenger added. "But now I'm terrified something will explode." Underground, investigators worked their way through the twisted wreckage of the train in a hunt for clues. With the rescue operation at an end, the next task is to identify whoever was behind this attack. But up at street level, many people have already drawn their own conclusions. Taking their cue from the Russian president, they are pointing the finger of blame towards separatist fighters from Chechnya. Spokesmen for the rebels deny any involvement - but support for the Kremlin's tough tactics in the war-torn southern republic is increasing regardless. Hearts here, are clearly hardening. "We should never have listened to those liberals," one man said. "We have to crush the terrorists. To be very, very tough with them. It's the only way." "This just shows we need to crack-down on all people from the Caucasus" another man told me. "We need to do more document checks, to see exactly who they are." Security has been stepped-up now across the capital. Outside metro stations, police officers have been warning passengers, through megaphones, to be on their guard for any form of suspicious activity. But there is a clear sense here that it is far too little - and too late. Initial public shock at the blast quickly turned to anger and a conviction that the attack should never have happened. There is scepticism too, at talk of increased security measures on the Metro. "What good will it do?" one woman said. "They can't possibly stop and search everyone. The only thing we can rely on, is our luck." So as Russia comes to terms with terror yet again, many people here are feeling extremely vulnerable; left only to wonder when and where the next bomb will strike. "

Institute for War & Peace Reporting 5 Feb 2004 Chechnya: New methods, same old abuses A night-time campaign of kidnappings and murders continues to terrorise Chechnya. By Murad Magomadov in Grozny (CRS No. 217, 05-Feb-04) Thirty-two-year-old Umar Mantsigov recently got a job with Chechnya's police force. He was tasked with guarding a four-storey temporary settlement centre in the Zavodskoi district of Grozny, which was home to several hundred refugees recently returned from neighbouring Ingushetia. It is hard to find a job in the shattered Chechen capital, so his friends and relatives thought him a lucky man. But at dawn on January 29, a minibus with no number-plates drew up outside the centre, and a group of armed men wearing masks and camouflage fatigues burst in and took Mantsigov away. Since then, his police colleagues and relatives have searched for the missing man -- with no success. Mantsigov's family believe he was snatched because after the first Chechen conflict of 1994-96, he had several pictures taken of himself in the company of rebel fighters. Photographs such as this and even old newspapers from the period between 1991 and 1994 when Jokhar Dudayev was president, have reportedly been used to identify and target people in abductions and disappearances. Arbitrary arrests and abductions, torture and killing are continuing in Chechnya, say witnesses and human rights monitors, although both the perpetrators and the methods they used have changed. The abuses are often more covert, but are still being recorded every day -- challenging the Russian federal government's assertion that Chechnya is undergoing a "normalisation process" and daily life is improving. On January 21, Moscow abolished the post of Russian presidential special representative for human rights in Chechnya, and sacked the incumbent Abdul-Khakim Sultygov. Alexander Cherkasov, a leading expert on Chechnya with the Russian human rights group Memorial, said that Sultygov had been an official appointee who had done nothing to defend human rights. "The abolition of this post is just a confirmation of the existing reality," he told IWPR by telephone from Moscow. "Nonetheless, a disgraceful situation is continuing there and there is a need for particular and heightened attention to Chechnya, which is not forthcoming from the Russian state. "The situation remains very alarming. People are still being abducted, they continue to disappear." Memorial's office in Ingushetia says that the numbers of abductions and killings it recorded in Chechnya in 2003 was less than the year before, but the change was not a significant one. In 2002 they recorded 729 killings of civilians and 537 people who were abducted and disappeared without trace. Last year the figures were around 500 killed and more than 470 disappeared. These figures are incomplete, stresses Memorial's Shakhman Akbulatov, and the real numbers could be much higher. "Our organisation is able to cover only about 25 to 30 per cent of the territory of Chechnya," he said. "The remaining regions, including the mountains, are inaccessible to our researchers. "Even in the regions covered by our monitoring, Memorial cannot draw up an exhaustive report. Our rough estimates suggest that the total number of crimes committed against civilians in the Chechen Republic could be two or three times higher than the information we have at Memorial." The manner of the abuses has changed. The "mass cleansing operations" experienced by Chechen villagers two or three years ago, when the Russian military would arrive in force at a village and close it off for several days, are now a rarity. More common are now are what are described as "targeted cleansing operations", when a group of armed men snatch one person at night -- as happened with Mantsigov. In the majority of cases the abducted men are never seen alive again. The infamous "filtration camps" at Chernokozova, PAP-1 (a former bus garage in Grozny) and the Khankala military base, where large numbers of Chechen men were detained and tortured, have virtually ceased to operate. They have been replaced, however, by a series of underground pits, known as "zindans" (prisons), located at almost all military bases in the republic, including Khankala. These appear to be the destination of most of the abducted men - but few get out alive, and those relatives who do manage to extract their loved ones from a "zindan" are reluctant to speak about it. The pro-Moscow government of Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov also now runs a series of small "private prisons" across the republic. One of them is in Tsentoroi, Kadyrov's home village of Kadyrov, and is under the charge of his son, Ramzan. Two others have been set up in Pobedinskoe and Krasnaya Turbina outside Grozny, run respectively by Kadyrov's security chief Movladi Baisarov and Russian special forces commander Said-Magomed Kakiev, who is a Chechen. Another special forces officer, Sulim Yamadayev, runs a "private prison" in the town of Gudermes. The prominent role now being played by Kadyrov, who was elected president of Chechnya in October, has contributed to another major change in the republic. Many ordinary Chechens say that as well as special Russian military units -- dubbed "death squads" by locals - they fear operations carried out by Kadyrov's commanders. Detachments of "Kadyrovtsy", as these units are known, operate throughout Chechnya. On January 28-29, a joint force of"Kadyrovtsy" and police carried out a rare "mass cleansing operation" in Alleroi, the native village of rebel president Aslan Maskhadov. Two days later Sultan Dadayev, who led the operation, and four of his men were shot dead in Alleroi by pro-Maskhadov fighters. The Kadyrov administration insists that the human rights situation in Chechnya is improving. A senior official in the interior ministry, who asked not to be named, said that, "the situation in the Chechen Republic is constantly improving. We can see a radical change for the better in comparison with 2000 and 2001." However, Kadyrov himself told a government meeting on January 23 that he was "concerned about the continuing abductions and disappearances". Both he and the Russian military blame Chechen pro-independence and Islamist fighters for the abductions. Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, a senior Russian commander in charge of the "anti-terrorist operation" in Chechnya, said that the rebels were dressing up in military uniforms to carry out abductions and killings. "They are doing this primarily to sow distrust of federal and local officials among the population, and to discredit the process of political settlement in Chechnya," Shabalkin said. "Often they use fake documents from members of the security forces. There is plenty of proof of this." Shabalkin cited a case from mid-January when he said Russian troops had found "high-quality" fake identity documents for the Chechen police force and Kadyrov's security service in a house near the village of Tangi-Chu. While there is plenty of evidence that Chechen rebels have killed civilians in suicide bombings and raids, human rights monitors challenge the assertion that they are behind the abductions. They say that these raids are almost always carried out at night, during curfew hours, when large numbers of fighters could be easily spotted. The attackers are usually heavily armed and have special equipment, such as helmets with radio links and automatic weapons with silencers, which the rebel fighters do not have. "Practically all the abductions, murders, robberies and looting happen at night and are carried out by men in masks and military uniforms," said Alkhazur Suleimanov, a former Chechen policeman. "In most cases the bandits arrive in armoured vehicles or several cars. And only soldiers or employees of the security services can travel freely in Chechnya by night, when there are checkpoints at every step of the way. It's obvious they wouldn't clash with their own people." Another worrying phenomenon is the increased targeting of Chechens living in Ingushetia. On January 12, Khamzat Osmayev, a 50-year-old doctor who had lived in the neighbouring republic since the conflict began, was abducted from his office in the village of Plievo. Two weeks later, Osmayev was dumped in wasteland near Ingushetia's Magas airport. He told Memorial that he had been beaten and tortured by a group of men demanding information about Chechen fighters. The only explanation he could give about why he was targeted was that in a wedding photograph taken in 1999, he had shared the frame with Chechen warrior Shamil Basayev. Osmayev believes he was held either in the Russian military base at Khankala or in Grozny. Anna Neistat, who researches Chechnya for Human Rights Watch in Moscow, says she will remain pessimistic unless and until the Russian justice system changes its attitude on Chechnya. "We can only begin to say that the problem is being solved when all the cases of abductions and disappearances are investigated and brought to an end, and not as now, when the prosecutor's office opens criminal charges on an abduction and then closes it a couple of months later," she said. "Serious changes for the better will only begin when the disappearances become very rare, they are all investigated and those responsible end up in court." Murad Magomadov is a journalist with the Chechenskoe Obshchestvo newspaper in Chechnya.

AFP 9 Feb 2004Nearly 500 Chechens kidnapped in 2003: rights group MOSCOW, Feb 9 (AFP) - More than 470 Chechens were kidnapped in the war-torn republic during 2003, mostly by Russian troops or forces of the pro-Moscow President Akhmad Kadyrov, Russia's leading human rights organization said Monday. Out of the 477 people kidnapped, "155 were released, 49 have been found dead and 273 are listed as missing," Alexander Cherkassov, of the respected Memorial organization, told AFP. "We monitor kidnapping cases on only 30 percent of Chechnya's territory, where there is only half of the population, so the real scale of the problem might be larger," he said. "The majority of the kidnappings were committed by the Russian troops and security services, as well as the forces of Akhmad Kadyrov," Memorial said. Russian troops have been fighting separatists in the Caucasus republic for more than four years, reinforced by Kadyrov's forces since his controversial election in October last year. Shortly after Russian troops poured into the southern republic in October 1999, reports from rights groups charged them with massive abuses, including summary executions, kidnappings and looting. "There exist in Chechnya today non-official prisons where people are tortured and killed. Sometimes their bodies are destroyed," Cherkassov said. During January 2004, 33 Chechens have been kidnapped, 14 of whom were released and 18 of whom have disappeared, Cherkassov said. President Vladimir Putin launched the war as prime minister in October 1999 as a lightning anti-terrorist strike, but it has since bogged down into guerrilla warfare that claims lives on nearly a daily basis. "The fight against terrorism with terror methods is inefficient because the relatives of the disappeared Chechens constitute a reserve for terrorism," as they want to avenge the deaths of their loved ones, Cherkassov said. Chechen rebels have been blamed for an increasing number of bombings outside the Caucasus republic during the past year. The latest attack killed at least 40 people when a bomb blew apart a packed subway train during morning rush hour in Moscow on Friday. Kadyrov, a former mufti, fought Russian troops during the first Russo-Chechen war in 1994-96, but switched sides at the beginning of the latest conflict. The Kremlin appointed him the republic's administrator in 2000 and last October he was overwhelmingly elected president of the republic in a Kremlin-organized election that was boycotted by international observers and denounced by rights groups and journalists for irregularities. www.memo.ru

Kavkaz Center, Turkey 8 Feb 2004 kavkazcenter.com K.G.B. continues its dirty business Chechen rebels have denied involvement in the yesterday’s bomb attack on a commuter train in Moscow. The bomb was detonated at the rush hour as the train entered a tunnel. At least 45 people were killed. Russian authorities had immediately accused Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov of being behind the incident. A spokesman for Mr. Maskhadov denied that Chechen rebels are involved in the explosion. It is amazing that the explosion happened just few weeks before the Russian presidential election and the only one person would gain from the bombing is Mr. Putin. Whole world was shocked when after independent investigation French journalists exposed the FSB (former KGB) involvement in the 1999 bombings of apartment’s blocks in Russia. FSB was behind the attacks then and it organized the explosions to accuse the Chechens in it. At that time, in 1999, Putin strongly needed justification for war in Chechnya, he promised to finish with 'Chechen terrorism' once and forever. He used the explosions to start genocide against Chechen innocent population, he used the Chechen war to win the election in 2000. For four years, Putin could not crash Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and Russians become unhappy with his failed promises. But KGB took over the situation, KGB is always KGB, even if it is called FSB now, the face, structure and 'values' are still the same, only masks are changing. At the mean time, colonel of KGB Putin should do something to take control of the situation in Russia which is getting every day out of his hands. To do so he require to accuse Chechens once again that they are the threat to Russian 'democratic' state and the best way to do it – KGB way – to set Chechens up, like in 1999. It is obvious that Mr. Putin would go far further by killing anybody, ordinary Russians and Moscovits, to justify his bloody business in Chechnya, to continue the massacre of the Chechen children, elderly and women, and, of course, to save his presidential chair. Somebody might ask: will the trick work? It worked once on Russians in 1999, why should it not work now? By Tariq Mohammad, editor The Friday Times -«Muslim Voice in Ireland»

Moscow Times 9 Feb 2004. Page 8 Responding in Kind? By Matt Bivens "Moscow does not negotiate with terrorists -- it destroys them." -- President Vladimir Putin responding to Friday's terror attack About this time last year, a group of 15 armed and masked men -- from their accents, Russian soldiers -- arrived at the home of a Chechen family and seized two brothers, Kharon and Aslanbek. At a detention center in Grozny, Aslanbek was interrogated and beaten. His nose was broken with a heavy metal flashlight, his back and face beaten with rifle butts. The next day he was loaded into a car -- with the corpse of his brother, Kharon -- and driven to an abandoned chemical plant. His tormentors tied him and his dead brother to timed explosives, shot him in the head and left. However, the head wound had been a near-miss -- merely superficial. Aslanbek worked free of his bonds and brought his brother's body home. That case, as recounted by New York-based Human Rights Watch, is just one of many atrocities by Russian forces documented last year. For last February, the Russian human rights group Memorial documented 41 "disappearances" -- cases in which people were taken into custody and never heard from again. All told, Memorial documented 269 disappearances in 2003, of which several dozen have turned up as corpses. Put aside guerrillas being gunned down in fire fights, or women and children caught in the regrettable crossfire; put aside those who stepped on mines, or succumbed to war-zone diseases; put aside kidnappings or arrests where the victims were ransomed, or freed, or at least formally accounted for. Consider only the disappearances (people last seen alive being led away by men with guns and never heard from again) and these alone have been averaging about 22 victims every month. And that's a conservative undercount. Memorial is only able to document a fraction of atrocities in Chechnya -- a patch of mud and mountains in the Caucasus still too dangerous for a United Nations mission. Memorial guesses that for every documented atrocity, two or three go unrecorded. That works out to an average of 66 to 88 disappearances each month. (That jibes with figures from the Kremlin-approved Chechen administration, which last August was already reporting 400 disappearances, plus dozens of mass graves containing the remains of about 3,000 civilians.) So on top of the landmines and diseases and such, there have been 22 or 44 or 66 or maybe 88 disappearances every month, for more than a year now, with no end in sight. In terms of tragedy and death, that's in the ballpark of one Moscow metro bombing every month. But the metro bombing was carried out, presumably, by a group of criminals -- people we really have no control over. It was immediately and loudly denounced by the entire world. Even the London representative of Chechen president-in-exile Aslan Maskhadov condemned it. The Kremlin declared a national day of mourning and accepted condolences from governments on every continent. The Chechen disappearances, by contrast, were ultimately carried out not by unaccountable criminals, but by a democratically elected government -- Vladimir Putin's. They occurred with little comment or complaint, even as they were exhaustively documented in reports to the UN and other bodies. And no doubt this all fed the determination of crazed extremists who, upon seeing the callous murder of their own by outsiders, said things like, "We don't negotiate with Russians -- we destroy them." Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, covered the first war in Chechnya for the Los Angeles Times.

BBC 10 Feb 2004 Girl killed by Russia 'racists' A skinhead attack on a Moscow market had left three dead in 2001 A nine-year old Tajik girl has been stabbed to death in the Russian city of St Petersburg by suspected skinheads. Police said a group of youths armed with knives and bats attacked the girl on Monday night, stabbing her 11 times. Her father and an 11-year old boy were also hospitalized with head wounds. The attack was being widely seen in Russia as racist in origin. St Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, who described the attack as "bestial", said they must combat any manifestations of nationalism in the city. "This crime is comparable to the terrorist act in the Moscow underground railway," she said. "It is different in scale but these events are of the same order." At least 39 people died last week in Moscow when a suspected suicide bomber detonated a bomb on an underground train. 'Skinhead gangs' St Petersburg police named the man injured in Monday's attack as Yusuf Sultanov, 34, from Tajikistan. He was with his daughter, Hurshida, and an 11-year old boy, Alabir, when they were attacked in a courtyard. A report by Russia TV said investigators were confident that St Petersburg-based skinheads were behind the incident. There were several small but well-organised neo-Nazi groups in the city, the report said. There have been several racist attacks in Moscow and other large Russian cities in the past, targeting foreign students, diplomats or immigrants from former Soviet Republics. An estimated 300 skinheads attacked market places in Moscow two years ago, killing three people. Chanting racist slogans, they smashed up market stalls and attacked anyone who appeared to be from the Caucasus region.

WP 15 Feb 2004 Bombing Sustains Backlash Against Chechens By Susan B. Glasser Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A18 MOSCOW -- The police came for Akhmed Arsanakov within hours of the deadly explosion in Moscow's subway. Never mind that the 52-year-old refugee from Chechnya, a former boss in the Soviet Construction Ministry, had already answered their queries many times before. Never mind that they had already hauled him down to the station four times in the past to take his fingerprints. "We have to do it," he said they told him when he demanded to know why a fifth set of his fingerprints was necessary. "To show we are working after the terrorist attack." In hiding now, he refuses to answer the door or the telephone; three times since he went to the police station last Sunday they have come back for him. "Why would they think I had anything to do with this terrorist act? I'm a refugee, but for them it's not important. They just need to find a Chechen." For Arsanakov and other Chechens living in Moscow, the Feb. 6 rush-hour blast attributed to Chechen rebels quickly reverberated on them, a backlash they say has become a drearily familiar ritual after nearly a decade of on-again, off-again war in the southern republic and a series of Chechen-linked attacks here in the capital. "It's a new wave, a new campaign that's been started," said Yelena Burtina of Civic Assistance, a human rights group that aids refugees. But this time the backlash has been accompanied not only by alleged police harassment of ordinary Chechens, widespread document checks and racist taunts but also by unusually harsh rhetoric from several politicians suggesting that Chechens as a group should be punished. Dmitri Rogozin, a leader of the new, nationalist Motherland bloc in parliament, demanded a state of emergency be implemented in Moscow hours after the explosion that killed at least 41 commuters and wounded more than 200 others. Chechens, he said, are the "enemy" within, "an ethnic criminal community that evidently supports the terrorists coming to Moscow, owns property in Moscow and imposes its will on the authorities." Although he was not so blunt, Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, quickly announced a new, punitive policy designed to crack down on "illegal migrants" living in Moscow without registration documents -- a Soviet holdover that is technically unconstitutional but is still enforced by the city authorities. Such residency permits remain extremely difficult to obtain for many Chechens and other ethnic minorities from the Northern Caucasus. "It's obvious that there is a tendency of Chechenophobia now that is developing very rapidly among Muscovites," said Shamil Beno, a Chechen political activist here. "People are very worried that pogroms, massacres are possible now, much more so than before." Every day since the attack on the subway, Beno has fielded reports of backlash -- a friend who witnessed a young Chechen man being beaten on the outskirts of Moscow by a group that included two uniformed police officers, his own son stopped hours after the explosion by the police and forced to take off his shoes and stand barefoot in the snow. He blames statements by politicians such as Rogozin for inflaming the situation. "Such politicians are committing a crime and that's a crime against the Russian public -- they are creating a situation of intolerance," said Beno, who runs a Chechen aid foundation. No matter how old they are, how prominent their work or how long they have lived in Moscow, several Chechens said in interviews this week that they knew that the fallout from the terrorist attack would somehow reach them. After the explosion the police even knocked on the door of Abdullah Khamzayev, a 66-year-old lawyer who is one of Russia's best-known Chechen figures. Khamzayev was hospitalized for pneumonia when it occurred. He obtained permission to go home the next day for a brief visit with his wife and found a police officer at his door soon after. The officer, Khamzayev said by telephone this week from the hospital, produced a detailed questionnaire that he asked Khamzayev to fill out. "He said he felt really confused and embarrassed but there was an order to visit all Chechens living in Moscow," Khamzayev recalled the officer telling him. The questionnaire demanded extensive information about all members of Khamzayev's family, in Moscow and in Chechnya -- everything from where they lived and worked to how often they visited him. Outraged, Khamzayev proceeded to cite chapter and verse on the illegalities of such a questionnaire under Russian law. He refused to cooperate. "I am a famous and respected person and they even came to me," he said, "so you can imagine what's going on with just ordinary people. They catch us in accordance with our nationality." Other ethnic groups also complain that they are subject to retribution from Russians who do not distinguish among darker-skinned people from the Caucasus and Central Asia. In St. Petersburg, a 9-year-old Tajik girl was murdered Monday by a gang of teenagers who stabbed her 11 times in the courtyard of an apartment building. The attack had no known link to the Moscow explosion but came just days later and fueled fears of ethnic hate crimes. "This hatred is felt everywhere in Moscow," said an Armenian resident of the city, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The man said he was chased and beaten by four young men as he switched subway lines last weekend -- an attack he said he immediately linked to the subway explosion of the day before. "Right after the Metro explosion, the police said to everyone they were looking for a person of Caucasian nationality. That was like a sign, a signal to everyone. To them, it doesn't matter that I'm not Chechen, that I'm not Muslim," he said. It was the third time in recent years he has been assaulted, including once when he and his 10-year-old daughter were set upon in a suburban train by a group of young men. Ever since the war in Chechnya broke out in 1994, human rights groups have documented allegations of police misconduct and a rising tide of street violence targeted at Moscow's large population of ethnic Chechens and other Caucasians. The October 2002 theater siege in Moscow, which resulted in the deaths of 129 hostages, set off an especially "intense police crackdown and widespread discrimination," according to Human Rights Watch. Hundreds were subjected to arbitrary detention in mass roundups, the group found, and many Chechens living here complained of police efforts to plant drugs or other incriminating evidence on them. Others found it impossible to renew their Moscow registration permits or had their jobs threatened. "This has become the standard now that most people from the North Caucasus have to go through after every terrorist act in Moscow," said Burtina of Civic Assistance. She saw it happen herself with Arsanakov, the Chechen refugee taken in for his fifth fingerprinting after the subway attack. He is a friend, and she allowed him to register in her apartment so he could live and work legally in the city. Over the weekend, she was there when the police came for him. But a spokesman for the Moscow office of the pro-Russian administration in Chechnya said that widespread police abuses did not occur after last week's subway attack, unlike the mass roundups and deportations following the theater siege. "This time, the terrorist act did not cause condemning of the entire Chechen people in Moscow," said the spokesman, Eddy Isayev. "The militia handled the situation much better than certain politicians like Rogozin, for example. . . . It's high time they understand you cannot blame Chechen people for all terrorist acts." .

Washington Times 15 Feb 2004 Chechnya's agony By Jeffrey T. Kuhner As the media remains fixated on Iraq and the next outlandish comment to come out of the mouth of Howard Dean, there is a major news story receiving very little attention: the slow, creeping genocide in Chechnya. Russian President Vladimir Putin insists his troops are conducting a military campaign aimed at wiping out "Islamic international terrorism" from the war-torn southern province. Using the global war on terrorism as a pretext to consolidate Moscow's iron grip over the breakaway republic, the Russian army has been waging a war of extermination against the Chechen people. Yet the West has been silent in the face of Russia's genocidal campaign. Instead of demanding the Kremlin withdraw its forces and negotiate a peace settlement with Chechen leaders, the Bush administration continues its shameful policy of neglect. President Bush is convinced that, after looking into "the soul" of Mr. Putin, the former KGB apparatchik is an important ally in the war on terrorism. Washington has accepted Moscow's line that the issue of Chechnya is a Russian "internal matter." Mr. Bush would be better served if he looked at Mr. Putin's actions. Before the conflict began nearly a decade ago, there were approximately 1 million Chechens in the small mountainous republic in the Caucusus. Since then, human-rights activists estimate hundreds of thousands have been displaced, thousands more have simply "disappeared" and more than one-fourth of the population is believed to have died. A report last year by the Council of Europe documented extensive human-rights violations by Russian forces, including widespread torture of Chechens. Also, the Russian army has launched a scorched-earth campaign, seeking not only to cripple the Chechen nation, but its economy and physical environment as well. Its capital, Grozny, is in ruins. Most of Chechnya's land has been devastated by defoliants. The remainder of the population is slowly dying through a combination of war, disease and sky-rocketing suicide. Sadly, Chechnya's plight is not new. In terms of proportionate losses and victims of genocide, three peoples suffered the most during the 20th century: Jews, Gypsies and Chechens. In 1944, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported most of the Chechen nation to the icy far east to punish them for their staunch opposition to communism. More than half of all Chechens died during the murderous operation, many of them freezing to death or simply butchered by Red Army troops. Following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the surviving Chechens returned to their native land. From 1994 until 1996, they fought a courageous war for independence against Russian imperial rule. An intense guerrilla campaign by Chechen tribal clans forced Russian troops to retreat. But in 1999 Moscow sought to reassert its authority in another invasion. The conflict continues to this day, with Chechen civilians the primary victims (about 5,000 Russian soldiers also have died). Moscow's brutal occupation has convinced most Chechens to abandon their dreams of national sovereignty; many now would gladly accept some form of autonomy. Yet Mr. Putin refuses to even consider the idea. He demands world leaders accept the notion every Chechen leader is a terrorist. Therefore, Russia's hawks argue peaceful compromise is impossible, and the only viable solution is all-out military victory — regardless of the humanitarian consequences. The Kremlin's line is not completely without merit. During the past several years, Chechnya has attracted international Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and other Arab states. The goal of the militants is to forge a fundamentalist Muslim republic. However, most of the Chechen rebels are not Islamic extremists, but romantic nationalists seeking to defend Chechen rights against an increasingly authoritarian Russia. The savage war in Chechnya is simply one component in Russia's evolution from a fledgling democracy into a repressive corporate state. Rather than a pro-European Westernizer, Mr. Putin has shown himself to be a Russian Francisco Franco or Augusto Pinochet: a right-wing strongman who champions social order and market-driven economic growth. Under his leadership, Moscow has begun flexing its muscles against neighboring countries, leading dissidents such as tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky have been arrested on trumped-up charges and basic press freedoms and civil rights have come under assault. The West's appeasement of Russia risks emboldening the Kremlin to continue its anti-democratic and expansionist policies. Moreover, failure to condemn Mr. Putin's genocidal rampage in Chechnya threatens to open Western governments to charges of hypocrisy. Although it took decisive action to stop the Serbs' ethnic cleansing campaigns in Kosovo and Bosnia, the West refuses to lift a finger to help prevent the tragedy unfolding in the Russian province. Yet unlike the discovery of the Nazi death camps after the Second World War, this time the civilized world cannot claim the excuse of lacking knowledge of the horrors occurring in Chechnya. We know. We just don't care. Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a historian and contributing writer for The Washington Times.

Pravda 20 Feb 2004 pravda.ru Moscow Businesses Controlled by Ethnic Groups - 02/20/2004 17:02 The breakup of the Soviet Union did not split the nationalities living on its vast territory It is an open secret that national minorities hold many businesses in Moscow. This does not mean at all that the businesses are connected with crime groups. When we come to Moscow markets we see that Caucasus people or Vietnamese prevail among tradesmen there. Let us leave markets aside. When we go shopping to large super markets or fashionable mega molls, fill up cars, have dinners at restaurants or buy domestic technique on credit very often money we pay goes to the pockets of some national diasporas. As we see, the breakup of the Soviet Union did not split the nationalities living on its vast territory. People of almost all nationalities live and make money in Moscow. What is more, many business fields are already distributed between diasporas and clans. Chechens and Ossetins hold the most paying spheres: gambling (Moscow casinos) and filling stations network. Chechens are also key figures in the car business: the Audi bureau in Moscow is headed by Oskar Akhmedov. Chechen Umar Dzhabrailov is the owner of the Plaza group where the Rossia hotel and other 2-3-star hotels belong. Chechen Ruslan Baisarov is the vice-president of the Moscow Fuel Company keeping over 100 filling stations in Moscow and the Moscow Region. Even though the company is part of the TsRK holding and majority of the holding shares are held by the Moscow Government, businessmen say that Ruslan Baisarov "costs" $200 million (however it is not clear how the sum got formed). Saidullayev is Moscow-s richest Chechen whose fortune makes up $500 million. He is the owner of the Milan concern (the Russian Lotto group of companies). The Saidullayev Empire also includes restaurants, beauty salons, research companies and centers for construction technologies. Chechens have to share all profitable fields with Ossetins who also own casinos and filling stations. The Ossetia diaspora also has control over brewery: an Ossetin group headed by Teimuraz Bolloyev is at head of the Baltika brewery. The Stepan Razin brewery is held by the Georgian family of Gvichia; Georgian Naskid Sarishvili is the owner of the Khamovniki brewery. Armenians have some control in show business, medicine (plastic surgery), food industry, transportation and service centers. Azerbaijanians deal with commerce; it is said that Moscow's flower business is controlled by Azerbaijanians. Several large shops are held by Azerbaijanian Agalarov. The Moscow-Efes brewery that produces Efes Pilsner and Stary Melnik is controlled by Azerbaijanians and Turks. Analysts with Azerbaijan's Monitor magazine have estimated that 12 per cent of Azerbaijans' circulating capital fall at industry, 20 per cent - commerce, 23 per cent - at banking and 38 per cent - at criminal business. Total amount earned by Azerbaijanians in Russia is $25 billion. Special services state that Azerbaijan groups control 35 per cent of Moscow's narcotics market. National diasporas of Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Georgians and Turks share commerce. At that, Tajiks deal with illegal heroin sale. Kazakhs deal with commerce, IT technologies and printing. Jews are a particular group among national diasporas. They control exclusive fashionable stores in Moscow. They also have control over several websites such as port.ru with 1.7 million unique visitors - the owner is Yeugeny Goland, who also owns mail.ru and Rusnews. Tatars have control over alcohol sale and banking. Russians must realize that phenomenon of a clan is really dangerous in the business sphere. The medieval clan principle has transformed and adapted to the present-day reality. Today, we have clans of tradesmen, gangsters and even policemen who co-operate as a well-regulated system. Such people have their acquaintances in all possible spheres. In case of emergency they get united and solve problems together. All ethnic groups take each other as a single whole and are ready to help any of them any moment. These facts are actually rather dangerous not only for Moscow's economy, but for the Russian economy as well.

The Korea Times 23 feb 2004 times.hankooki.com The Dawn of Modern Korea] Ethnic Koreans' Deportation to Central Asia By Andrei Lankov In October 1937, railway stations of the Russian Far East were crowded with people. Thousands and thousands were waiting for the trains, and then boarded the cargo carriages under the watchful eyes of the guards. They were ethnic Koreans, who were deported to Central Asia by a special order of the Soviet government. Their only crime was being Korean. This was the most tragic episode in the long and eventful history of the Korean community in Russia-USSR-CIS, which is now nearly half a million strong. This turn of events came as a surprise to many, especially because the ethnic Koreans in Russia were initially amongst the most fervent supporters of the Communist revolution. This was understandable. The Communists promised to give land to the peasants – and many of the hundred thousand Korean immigrants residing in Russia at that time were tenants. The Communists were fervently anti-imperialist in general and, due to the situation in Russian Far East, anti-Japanese in particular – and many Koreans came to Russia to flee the Japanese colonial regime. The Communists were internationalists and, as we would say now, ‘multi-culturalists’ – and the Koreans were an ethnic minority, often discriminated against by the Tsars and their officials. Thus during the Russian Civil war of 1917-1922, a large number of the Koreans volunteered for the Red Army. Among these volunteers there were people who had fought against the Japanese as independence fighters and then later fled into exile. Once the Japanese invaded Russia, they took up arms against this old enemy, and became allies of the Red Army (the Russian Whites allied with the Japanese against the Communists). Generally speaking, communism drew great support from among Russian Koreans. Some of them were quite prominent in Russian politics – like, say, Alexandra Stankevich (nee Kim), who was the chief foreign policy negotiator of the Far Eastern communist administration at the initial stages of the Civil War. For the first decade after their victory, the Communist government tried to keep its earlier promises; and it invested much effort into promoting non-Russian cultures, including Korean. During this period there were more than three hundred Korean schools where Korean was the primary language of instruction. A Korean-language junior college and, later, a university with four-year courses, were established for training Korean youth in their native tongue. At that time that university was a unique institution; no Korean-language universities existed elsewhere, including Korea itself. A number of Koreans came to occupy important positions in the state system, army, and police, including the dreaded OGPU/NKVD, Stalin’s security police. The Korean community was growing fast and reached some 180 thousand by 1937. However, in the late 1930s, the situation of the Soviet Koreans began to deteriorate. The Soviet government was gradually abandoning its initial ‘internationalist’ approach in favor of a more traditional nationalism and xenophobia. Particularly unlucky were those ethnic groups who had their homelands outside the USSR, like Germans, Poles, or Hungarians. These peoples were regarded with increasing suspicion as potential spies and defectors, acting in the interests of their native countries and undermining Stalin’s Empire. Although in its official declarations the Soviet government always took care to distinguish between the exploited Koreans and their Japanese masters, it is obvious that the Koreans in Far East were seen by the Moscow authorities as ethnic brethren of the Japanese subjects just across the border. The relations between the Soviet Union and Japan reached their nadir in 1937 when both countries fought a bloody undeclared war in Outer Mongolia. A large-scale war with Japan was a distinct possibility. Under these circumstances the presence of nearly 200,000 ‘almost Japanese,’ in a strategically vital area around Vladivostok, was seen as a serious potential threat. Such supposition and rumor was stirred up by the reports of countless ‘Japanese spies’ allegedly unmasked in the Soviet Far East. Most of these reports were completely false: the ‘spies’ had nothing to do with spying, and their confessions were extracted from them by torture. Nevertheless, this hysteria contributed to the fateful decision taken in Moscow. In the autumn of 1937, all Koreans were ordered to pack their belongings and report to railway stations. There they were herded into the trains and moved to Central Asia. Central Asia was to become a center for the Soviet Koreancommunity for many decades to come. But that is another story.

www.radicalparty.org 17 Feb 2004 | CHECHNYA: MESSAGE FROM ELENA BONNER-SAKHAROV TO OLIVIER DUPUIS ON THE THIRTIETH DAY OF HIS HUNGER STRIKE Brussels, 17 February 2004. “Dear Olivier, your courage and your hunger strike to protest against the genocide of the Chechen people, which has now lasted almost three weeks, has broken down the wall of general indifference. Your appeal has found a way into the hearts and the consciences of many people in Europe and the United States. I hope they will become allies in your struggle to stop the bloodshed in Chechnya. But for this to happen you must conserve your health and your strength. Today, on St. Valentine’s Day, the symbol of love and goodwill, I appeal to you to end your hunger strike in order to continue your fight for justice and peace with the same determination you have shown in recent weeks. Elena Bonner, 14 February 2004” COMMEMORATION OF THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEPORTATION OF THE CHECHEN PEOPLE: DEMONSTRATIONS IN 11 EUROPEAN CITIES Demonstrations to commemorate the deportation of the Chechen people to Central Asia on 23 February 1944, carried out on the orders of Stalin, will take place in the following cities: Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Ekaterinburg, Moscow, Prague, Rome, Strasbourg, Vienna, Vilnius, and Warsaw. Detailed information on the exact times and places of the demonstrations can be found at www.radicalparty.org COLLECTIVE FAST IN SUPPORT OF THE PEACE PLAN FOR CHECHNYA FROM 20 TO 23 FEBRUARY: OVER 150 PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY JOINED Over 150 people from Albania, Belgium, Chechnya, Chile, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States have already decided to join the collective fast (Satyagraha) that will take place from 20 to 23 February in support of the Peace Plan for the establishment of an interim United Nations administration in Chechnya.

gazeta.ru 18 Feb 2004 Rally in memory of deportation of Chechen people banned in Moscow Moscow city authorities have not allowed to hold a rally to mark the 60s anniversary of mass deportation of Chechens to Kazakhstan, the head of the all-Russia movement “For Human Rights” Lev Ponomaryov told reporters on Wednesday. He said that a number of HR organizations had intended to hold a rally on February 23 near athe monument to victims of political repressions on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square. “We wanted to remember this sad date, talk about the Chechen people’s tragedy and about the possibilities of peaceful settlement in Chechnya,” Ponomaryov said. The HR activist also said that his organization had not received a written refusal to issue a permit for the rally, but they had been told that as February 23 is a holiday the city centre would be closed for all sort of mass actions. Ponomaryov said that his colleagues intended to appeal the ban.

interfax.ru 23 Feb 2004 Organizers of unauthorized picket detained in Moscow MOSCOW. Feb 23 (Interfax) - Moscow police have detained the organizers of an unauthorized picket marking the anniversary of the exile of the Chechen people in 1944. Lev Ponomaryov, head of the all-Russian For Human Rights movement, told Interfax that he and another picketing organizer, Nikolai Khramov, head of the Russian Radicals movement, are being held at the Kitai Gorod police headquarters. "Over 100 members of various organizations, in particular the For Human Rights movement, the Transnational Radical Party, and the Anti-Military Committee, assembled at the Solovetsky Stone today to lay flowers marking the anniversary of the Stalin- ordered deportation of the Chechens," Ponomaryov said. The picketing involved about 50 people and lasted no more than 25 minutes, he said. An official in police headquarters confirmed the detention of Ponomaryov and Khramov and said that a decision on how to proceed will be made within an hour. The prefecture of Moscow's Central Administrative Area earlier suggested that the protesters stage their event outside the city center, so as not to interfere with events marking Defenders of the Fatherland Day, the official said. The movement For Human Rights intends to appeal this decision in court. .

BBC 22 Feb 2004 Remembering Stalin's deportations Zulpa was 10 when she was deported but remembers the horror On 23 February 1944 the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, deported the entire Chechen people, and their Ingush neighbours, from the Caucasus to Central Asia. Chechen BBC journalist Sapiet Dakhshukaeva talks to some who survived. Zulpa, one of my relatives, was deported with her family from a village in the mountain district of Shatoy. She was only 10 years old, but she remembers that day 60 years ago as if it were yesterday. "All of us were herded into the nearby collective farm, and we spent the night there. They wouldn't let us spend our last night at home. And our cows were calling to us. "We were forced to leave them. It was as if they were crying, and saying farewell. This constant mooing and mooing." The cows stayed behind. The humans were loaded into cattle trucks. "We were travelling in those cattle trucks for 19 or 20 days." Shot dead "Somewhere, the wagons stopped and the soldiers came round and asked Are there any dead in there? We said no, but they came in and checked. I remember very clearly how one sick woman in our wagon was asking for water. She was saying, "Water, water, water," and her son ran to get her some. SOVIET DEPORTATIONS Stalin deported about a dozen entire nationalities from western regions of the USSR to Central Asia between 1941 and 1944 He accused most of these 1.4 million people of collaboration with the invading Nazi army About 387,000 Chechens and 91,000 Ingush were deported on 23 February 1944 and the next few days The deportations were a taboo subject until Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, condemned them in 1956 Chechen and Ingush survivors were allowed to return home in 1957 Their exile left deep scars which helped fuel separatism in the 1990s "Just as he came back to the wagon, a soldier shot him dead. He fell to the ground, and the water container lay there beside him. He was just left there." Another person I spoke to was a teacher from Ingushetia, Khanifa Uzhakhova, whose family was deported from the Ingush village of Kantyshevo. She was six years old. "It was in the morning. We had been making corn bread on an iron stove. It was cooked on one side and we'd just turned it over when the soldiers came. "One of them said something, and I remember my aunt burst out crying. My mother was also very upset, with tears in her eyes. I remember very clearly how we were put in Studebaker trucks. "I only found out later that that was what they were called. Another deep impression from that time is the trains. As they started moving, there was a great cry of anguish from everyone inside, then the sound of everyone weeping." Siberia gulags The Studebaker trucks had been supplied by the US to assist the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. Many young Chechen and Ingush men were then at the front, hundreds of miles to the west, in Ukraine or Byelorussia. Many commanders valued the courage and determination of their Chechen fighters, and went to great lengths to deceive the authorities and hang on to them Mohmad Musaev An order was sent to all units that everyone from the repressed nations, whether officers or soldiers, should be gathered together in one place. There was no explanation. They were then sent to the gulags in Siberia, to work in logging gangs. Most of them had their papers and military decorations confiscated. Later, they joined their families in exile in Central Asia. That was the fate of most of the soldiers - but there were exceptions. "Many commanders valued the courage and determination of their Chechen fighters, and went to great lengths to deceive the authorities and hang on to them," says Mohmad Musaev, head of the Chechen National Archive. "Most of those who escaped in this way fought all the way to Berlin. A unit commanded by the famous Chechen Movlit Visaitov was one of the first to break through to meet up with the Americans on the River Elbe in May 1945." Dying of hunger Mohmad himself was about four years old when the deportation started, and the ordeal killed his mother. He points out that those deported from mountain villages, whose only wealth was their livestock, usually suffered most on arrival in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Many Chechens still live outside Chechnya - the result of war "The people from the valleys were able to take possessions with them which they could later sell in order to survive. The mountain people were forced to go empty-handed, leaving everything behind. They died in great numbers," he says. "The most terrible time, when people were dying of hunger, were the early years, before people had settled and adapted. "That was the time when the dead didn't get buried because there were too many of them. Dying people were crawling to the cemeteries so as not to be eaten by dogs. Fortunately I was too young to understand." In some cases soldiers killed people rather than deporting them. Up to 700 people were burned alive in the mountain village of Khaibakh, Mohmad says. There are other reports of people being drowned in mountain lakes. No-one knows how many people died in total. "Some researchers say a third of those deported died. Some say half," says Mohmad. "Which is right, I can't tell you."

Kavkaz-Center 22 feb 2004 kavkazcenter.com Chechen Diaspora in Belgium commemorates 60th anniversary of deportation of Chechen people and Day of Revival of Chechen Nation Press service of Association of Chechens of Belgium reported that February 17 in the city of Antwerp a memorial evening was held, dedicated to the deportation of Vainakh nations to Siberia and Kazakhstan in 1944. The action was held in the cultural center of Berchem-Sainte-Agathe commune. Chechen guests from various cities of Belgium, Netherlands, France and Germany, as well as Belgians, attended the memorial evening. On February 23, 1994, the Day of Deportation of Chechen People was declared as the Day of Revival of Chechen Nation by the special order of the first President of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (CRI) Dzhokhar Dudayev. The Diaspora's elders were recalling about the tough years of Stalin's deportation and about their return after 13 long years of exile. Famous Chechen writer Sultan Yashurkayev made a speech in front of the participants. He mentioned that Russia has been systematically exterminating the Chechen nation for the past several hundred years. He also drew attention of the participants to the importance of raising the Chechen youth and to the necessity of preserving the nation's spiritual values in the conditions of today's emigration. The next speakers were: Sultan Satuyev, Sultan Bairakov, Ramzan Ampukayev, Tina Ismailova, and Jabrail Mahmayev. The program of the evening was very rich and lasted for over three hours. Young poetess Larisa Burtayeva and famous poet Umar Yarychev read their poems. Bards and accordion players were performing their songs: Emiddi Shagayev, Emish Sheripov, Umar Guluyev, Apti Shahiyev, and Mansur Hachukayev. The guests had the opportunity to meet the Chechen children's dance group from the city of Antwerp; the youngest dancer of that group is only three years old. The group was created thanks to the efforts made by Tina Ismailova. This is the second Chechen children's dance group in Belgium. Besides, Mrs. Oda Dupuis, spouse of famous European politician Olivier Dupuis, was present at the commemoration evening. During her speech she said that she was deeply touched by the fact that in spite of the tough lot, the Chechens are still preserving their culture and are remaining devoted to it in Chechnya as well as in Belgium. Mrs. Dupuis said that on the 30th day of the hunger strike her husband was received by President of the European Commission Romano Prodi to discuss the Chechen problem. Mrs. Dupuis ended her speech with a phrase in Chechen language: «Dala Muqlah Nokhchiychura t'om kesta d'abyorzur bu». («God willing, the war in Chechnya will soon be over»). Chairman of the cultural center in Antwerp, Saipuddi Halikov, asked the guest to tell Mr. Olivier Dupuis to stop the hunger strike. Mr. Halikov also expressed serious concern about his health condition. In the concluding part of the evening awards were given to distinguished Chechen students and sportsmen. The evening ended with the Dua Prayer, read by Chechen Imam Ramzan-Haji Jabrailov, in memory of those who died during the deportation and those who are dying today..

WP 24 Feb 2004 A History Written In Chechen Blood By Khassan Baiev Tuesday, February 24, 2004; Page A21 Yesterday was Armed Services Day in Russia, so, of course, there were observances in Moscow. But yesterday also was the 60th anniversary of a Soviet crime perpetrated against the Chechen people -- and, of course, there was no official observance in Moscow. In fact, a proposed ceremony was banned, and the small number of people who nevertheless gathered to solemnize the event were dispersed by the police. But the past will not be so easily dispersed -- it must be dealt with if there is to be a political settlement of the cruel Chechen conflict. The crime was Joseph Stalin's deportation of the Chechens on Feb. 23, 1944. This event is to Chechens what the Holocaust is to the Jews or the genocide is to the Armenians. That day, when Stalin packed the Chechen population of 1 million into cattle cars and shipped them to the wastes of Siberia and Central Asia, lies in our collective memory. One-third of the population died on the journey. Many others perished under the harsh conditions of exile. During Soviet times, the deportation was a taboo subject, talked about behind closed doors. As a small boy, most of what I learned was from old women gathered in our kitchen. Once, when they thought I wasn't listening, I heard my mother tell my sisters how women were so ashamed to relieve themselves in the railroad cars in front of men that they held on until their bladders burst. Only when I was 14 years old did I understand the true horror of what had happened. That summer my father showed my twin brother and me the cliff near our ancestral village of Makazhoi, over which troops of the NKVD (the secret police of the time) pushed resisters, including some of our relatives. Stalin claimed that the Chechens were Nazi sympathizers. This was an insult to most Chechens, including my father, who fought on the northeastern front and was wounded during World War II. In spite of his wounds, my father was ordered deported. He returned to Chechnya from Kazakhstan in 1959 after Nikita Khrushchev allowed the Chechens to go home. Only after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power were my father and other Chechens who fought in the war recognized as veterans and given pensions. He wore his medals with pride. Chechnya has been struggling for independence for 400 years. The 1944 deportation is not the only one we have suffered. Chechens were pressured to leave for Turkey, Jordan and Syria in the 19th century. In view of our history and what is going on in Chechnya today, it is not surprising that we believe Russia wants to liquidate us. About one-quarter of our population has been killed since 1994. Fifty percent of the Chechen nation now lives outside Chechnya. Ethnographers say that when this happens, a nation ceases to exist. Estimates claim that 75 percent of the Chechen environment is contaminated. I recall a physician from Doctors Without Borders telling me, "The Russians don't need to bomb you, the environment will kill you." I didn't believe it at the time. But now as a doctor I can testify that Chechnya is a medical disaster area. Pediatricians report that one-third of children are born with birth defects. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is rampant. The population is suffering from post-traumatic stress. Depression and insomnia are widespread. Young men are having heart attacks. As in all modern wars, including Iraq, the main victims are civilians. In Chechnya, the human rights violations, documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights and Russia's Memorial, are horrendous. Chechnya has become a lucrative business operated by the Russian military and its Chechen criminal collaborators. Their trade is kidnapping young men, selling corpses back to relatives, looting property, stealing oil and selling guns. In August 2000, Russian soldiers burst into my sister's house and removed my 20-year-old nephew Ali. He was tortured and held in a pit for 39 days until his release was negotiated. It cost our family $10,000 and eight rifles to get his freedom. The Kremlin has done a brilliant job of convincing the world that Chechens are bandits and terrorists. Yes, horrible acts of violence are committed in Chechnya, not only by Russians but by some criminal Chechens. But Chechen killings, including the suicide bombings, are largely motivated by a desire to take revenge for a family member killed by the Russians. People who have lost everything think they have nothing more to live for. They are desperate. Blood revenge, rather than religious extremism imported from the Middle East, governs the violence. And I believe it will continue as long as 100,000 Russian troops remain in Chechnya. Acts of terrorism are also being committed outside Chechnya, such as the recent subway bombing in Moscow. The Chechens are immediately blamed for these barbaric acts before any investigation takes place. Repression follows. Meanwhile, Russian newspaper articles and two recent books suggest that the Russian secret police played a role in earlier bombings. Unlike my generation, which lived in comparative peace with Russia, today's young Chechens are growing up full of hatred for Russians. The younger generation is ignoring our traditions. They no longer obey their elders. If world nations do nothing to support a peace settlement in Chechnya, there is no guarantee that these young people won't be radicalized or forced into the arms of religious fanatics. Then Russia will have a far more serious problem with history and terrorism than it has today. The writer, a Chechen physician, received political asylum in the United States in 2000. He is the author of "The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire." .

St. Petersburg Times 24 Feb 2004 www.sptimesrussia.com Nationalists Disrupt Meeting on Deportations By Galina Stolyarova STAFF WRITER Photo by Sergey Grachev / SPT Young nationalists disrupted a solemn St. Petersburg commemoration on Monday of the 60th anniversary of the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush people. Formerly the Soviet Army Day, Feb. 23 is now called The Day of Defenders of the Fatherland. On the same date in 1944 Stalin deported the North Caucasian ethnic groups, allegedly for collaborating with the German invaders during World War II. "It is a tragic day for our country," said Sergei Khakhayev, chairman of the local human rights group Memorial. "We are often told not to spoil the holiday, but how many people know that Army Day was used against the Chechens back in 1944: it was an excuse to gather them together so that they could be put in railway wagons and sent away. Every third person died on the way to exile." Not everyone in Khakhayev's modest audience agreed. "Those nations [Chechens and Ingush] shouldn't exist at all," a young man suddenly shouted during Khakhayev's speech. He struggled with several companions who prevented him getting closer to the speaker. Some of the youngsters started distributing a nationalist newspaper. The meeting organizers tried to remove the nationalists, but the youngsters resisted, shouting out more insults against Chechens. The organizers asked the police, who were monitoring the meeting, for help. Several people were detained. The gathering was otherwise quiet with a little over 100 representatives of local human rights groups gathered near the Solovetsky Stone on Troitskaya Ploshchad. The stone was brought from the Solovetsky labor camp and is the city's main memorial to victims of totalitarian regime. The human rights groups remembered Feb. 23, 1944, for bringing pain and sorrow to the families of 400,000 Chechens and 200,000 Ingush, who were deported to the gulags of Siberia and exile settlements in Central Asia. Some people trace the unrest in Chechnya today to the divisions and hatred that arose from the deportation. The exile of the Chechens launched a greater campaign that eventually resulted in the deportation of 3.33 million people, including 1,247,000 Volga Germans, 228,000 Bulgarians, Armenians, Greeks and Crimean Tatars, 94,000 Turks and Kurds, 91,000 Kalmyks, 50,000 Lithuanians and 41,000 Poles. In Moscow, authorities banned a rally on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, where another Solovetsky Stone stands in the center in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service. However, people still went to the stone to lay flowers and light candles and eventually a political meeting took place that was quickly broken up by the police. Lev Ponomaryov, chairman of the all-Russia movement For Human Rights, was arrested and is due to appear in court on Tuesday, radio station Ekho Moskvy reported. St. Petersburg has witnessed several apparently racially based actions in the last fortnight, including the murder of nine-year-old Tajik girl Khursheda Sultanova, the desecration of a Jewish cemetery and the painting huge black swastikas over the Eternal Flame monument on the Field of Mars. Many speakers at Monday's meeting expressed serious concern over a recent trend to blame the entire Chechen nation for the actions of a few individual terrorists. They said this trend is growing across Russia and can be seen in St. Petersburg. A bloody vendetta against a particular Caucasian is seen by local nationalists as a successful support of Russian soldiers in Chechnya, they said. Human rights advocates said they were frustrated both by the appearance of nationalists and the low turnout of people. "Thousands of Russians marched against the war in Iraq last year and look at our tiny, wretched gathering - it is shameful," said Peter Rausch, a member of the Committee For Peace in Chechnya and a representative of the League of Anarchists. "Everyone prefers to turn a blind eye to this problem and just hope to miraculously escape from the next terrorist attack." Yuly Rybakov, a democratic politician and former State Duma deputy, said the Day of Defenders of the Fatherland should not merely be a remembrance day for Red Army soldiers who fought against fascists during the World War II, but also as a memorial day for all soldiers who fought for the independence of their native land. Sixty years ago hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars were deported because the Soviet authorities decided that these nations could have contributed much more to the victory against Hitler, he said. "All of them were made accountable: little children, young women, old people," Rybakov said. "Everyone knows that there were plenty of war heroes among Chechens, Ingush and Tatars." Human rights advocates are warned against a repeat genocide. Rausch went so far as to say that those who disagree with the Russia's policy in Chechnya should go as far as to boycott the presidential elections on March 14. "The war has been going on for seven years now, having taken the lives of more than 200,000 civilians and 15,000 Russian soldiers," Rybakov said. "The government is now trying to turn everything upside down so that the Russians - living in poverty and uncertainty - will direct their anger against the Chechens, Jews, anyone else but not against the authorities who are really to blame." Khakhayev said aggression and intolerance against Caucasians has become widespread. "Didn't you all hear that young man shouting that all Chechens must die," he said. "There are dozens of nationalist groups in town that hold the same views. But imperial ambitions in any country anywhere in the world only result in mass killings, on both sides." At least one voice at the meeting was strictly self-critical. "When we hear about another blast in Moscow or elsewhere and begin to feel hatred against Chechens growing inside our heart, we should suppress it - and if everyone wins this little battle with themselves, then there will be more peace in the country," said Pavel Viktorov, who edits a pacifist newspaper in St. Petersburg.

www.errc.org ERRC Letter to Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda Concerning Events in Zahorska Ves February 12, 2004, Budapest. The ERRC today sent a letter to Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda, expressing alarm at events in the village of Zahorska Ves in Western Slovakia, where in recent months Roma have been subjected to a number of serious human rights abuses, including violent racist attacks, destruction of property and threatened expulsion from the village by the local mayor. The ERRC called on Prime Minister Dzurinda to intervene to remedy abuses which have taken place and which are ongoing. The letter was copied to a number of other relevant Slovak authorities. The full text of the letter, including a description of the events of recent months in Zahorska Ves, follows: Honourable Prime Minister Dzurinda, The European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), an international public interest law organisation which monitors the situation of Roma in Europe and provides legal defence in cases of human rights abuse, is alarmed at reports it has received concerning the situation of Roma in the western Slovakia village of Zahorska Ves. According to documentation received by ERRC partner organisations, Roma in Zahorska Ves have recently been subjected to a number of serious human rights abuses, including violent racist attacks, destruction of property and threatened expulsion from the village by the local mayor. According to information provided to the ERRC by its Bratislava-based partner organisation League of Human Rights Advocates (LHRA), which is providing legal representation to individuals involved in issues raised below, the situation of Roma in Zahorska Ves has deteriorated in recent months. The following outlines the most serious of the reported incidents and issues coming to the attention of the ERRC, as documented by the LHRA: Violent Racist Attacks Against Roma According to the testimony of Ms Olga Sarkoziova, the 56-year-old Romani resident of Plot 310/4 on Polna Street, Zahorska Ves, at around 9:00 PM on September 29, 2003, approximately seven men wearing facemasks jumped over the fence surrounding the homes of her family and the Romani family Malik and attacked members of both families with baseball bats and other unidentified objects. The Sarkozi and Malik families comprise 16 people in total, including 7 children and one pregnant woman, all of whom were beaten during the assault. According to Mr Stefan Sarkozi, Ms Sarkoziovas 59-year-old husband, a medically certified invalid pensioner, one of the assailants took out a handgun and shot the screen of their television, causing it to explode. Ms Sarkoziova, Mr Sarkozi, and their sons - Mr Roman Sarkozi, aged 28, and Mr Josef Sarkozi, 25 - were seriously injured during the attack. According to their medical reports, Olga suffered a concussion and injury to her left arm, Stefan sustained a broken arm, contusions to his head and abrasions to his forehead, Roman sustained a broken arm, and Josef suffered concussion. The Sarkozis underwent 6 weeks of medical treatment for their injuries. Later in the year, at about 8:30 PM on December 25, 2003, nine men wearing facemasks again jumped over the gate into the compound and violently attacked the inhabitants with baseball bats, iron bars and truncheons, according to the testimony of Mr Roman Malik. The perpetrators destroyed the belongings of the three families, then poured inflammable liquid substances throughout the houses and set them on fire. In the fire, Roman Malik Jr, a 2-year-old infant, sustained third degree burns to 25 percent of his body according to a medical certificate issued subsequently. The buildings and property inside belonging to the families were completely burned in the fire. All their personal documents, including birth certificates, identification cards and documents proving eligibility for state-provided social welfare and health insurance, were destroyed in the blaze. The attackers then moved to the home of Mr Josef Zeman, a Romani man living nearby, and attacked his family, breaking windows and doors in the house. During the assault, Mr Zeman and his children were able to unmask one of the assailants. They therefore subsequently stated that they know the identity of their attacker, but being afraid of retaliation, they would be willing to testify only if the police provides them with protection. Mr Malik, Mr Stefan Sarkozi, Ms Sarkoziova, Mr Roman Sarkozi, and Mr Josef Zeman were severely beaten during the assault. According to the victims, the perpetrators shouted racial slurs such as, "You black dirty Gypsy, you will be slaughtered today" and "Gypsy black prostitutes" during both the September and December attacks. Failure by Police Adequately to Investigate Alleged Crimes According to the LHRA, the Malacky District Police Department officially opened an investigation into both racially motivated attacks described above, but has not undertaken any visible actions in the investigation. On October 3, 2003, the LHRA reportedly filed a complaint with the Malacky police regarding the September attack and, at the beginning of January 2004, the LHRA filed a complaint regarding the December attack. After having called the victims to give testimony, the investigating officer, Captain Jan Paucik, and the head on-duty police officer, reportedly refused to allow the Romani victims to enter the police station, alleging that they carried infectious diseases, as one of the children had Hepatitis. On January 21, 2003, the LHRA complained to Mr Jaroslav Spisak, vice-president of Slovak police, about the failure of Slovak police to properly investigate the attacks and requested that Mr Spisak ensure thorough investigation into the attacks. A preliminary investigation by police set to begin on January 23, 2004 reportedly did not take place, allegedly at the instruction of Mr Simkovic, the mayor of Zahorska Ves. On February 5, the Malacky District Police Department informed the LHRA that it had closed its investigation into the September attack due to a lack of evidence. According to the LHRA, to date, police have not taken steps to investigate the December incident. Arbitrary Actions by the Mayor of Zahorska Ves From January 8 through 31, 2004, the municipality provided temporary accommodation in the form of one-room mobile homes to the Sarkozi and Malik families. On January 22, Mayor Simkovic sent a letter to Dr Columbus Igboanusi of the LHRA, asking his assistance in relocating the Sarkozi and Malik families to the village of Kubanova, over 350 kilometres away, because as to the affected families, "nobody wants them in the village, not even their own close relatives." Following consultations with the Sarkozi and Malik families, on January 23, the LHRA responded to Mayor Simkovic that the families, who had lived in the village for more than 100 years, did not want to move but rather wanted to rebuild their houses. The LHRA also reportedly offered to provide the Sarkozi and Malik families with temporary housing on the site of their former homes and to assist in rebuilding their homes. In a written response of the same date, Mayor Simkovic rejected the proposed solution and stated that temporary housing for the families in the village would not be allowed due inter alia to lack of space and the fact that the families had no land in the village. Mayor Simkovic reiterated his position that the Sarkozi and Malik families must be relocated outside the village since no one wants them in the village. The ERRC has seen copies of the correspondence at issue. Members of the Sarkozi and Malik families have reported that Mayor Simkovic has refused outright to issue them a document confirming that they were born in the village, which is necessary to have replacement documents issued by the police. As of February 5, 2004, none of the documents lost in the fire had been replaced. As of February 5, 2003, the Malik family was living on the street in Bratislava and the Sarkozi family had returned to Zahorska Ves to again ask Mayor Simkovic for temporary accommodation. The families are severely traumatised. Their children are no longer attending school, adults are unable to collect their social welfare benefit and no longer have access to their state-provided medical insurance. Threats and Intimidation According to the LHRA, Mayor Simkovic has reached an agreement with the Malacky District Department of Social Affairs whereby the latter is to take into state custody the children of the families who refused to leave the village. On January 20, 2004 the Malacky District Court granted the Department of Social Affairs permission to take the children of Ms Olga Sarkoziova Jr into state custody. In addition, since he asserted the ownership by the municipality of the land on which the Romani houses had been located on January 27, 2004, Mayor Simkovic has refused the Sarkozi and Malik families access to the land and has employed coercive tactics to force them to leave the village. During a telephone call to the LHRA on the same day, Mayor Simkovic threatened that any mobile homes brought to the village for the purposes of housing the persons concerned would be destroyed. Since that date, Mayor Simkovic has employed a private security company to guard the village. Members of the Zeman family claim to have been threatened with violence by Mayor Simkovic and his acquaintances should they get involved in the case. Further, on February 5, members of the Zeman family sent a typed letter to the LHRA requesting that its representatives not go to their home anymore or get involved in their affairs, an act the LHRA regarded with suspicion, since none of the members of the Zeman family can read or write, and they do not own a typewriter.

AP 5 Feb 2004 A 'genocide' through paperwork By WILLIAM J. KOLE Associated Press LJUBLJANA, Slovenia -- On a bright morning in 1992, Zoran Vojinovic awoke to the realization that he no longer existed. Not on paper -- when his identity card expired, officials refused to renew it. Not at the hospital -- when he got sick and sought treatment, he was told he had lost his health benefits. Not in government computers -- when he asked an agency for help in finding a job, he was turned away as an illegal alien. Vojinovic, 29, is among 18,000 people in Slovenia known ominously as "the erased ones" -- non-Slovene residents whose names were deleted from the population registry a year after the country declared independence from Yugoslavia. Under pressure from the European Union, which Slovenia joins in May, voters will decide in a referendum, likely next month, whether to restore permanent residency and rights to those who suffered what critics call "administrative genocide." "In Bosnia, fascists walked around doing horrible things with weapons. Slovenia did the same thing with paperwork," said Aleksandar Todorovic, an archaeologist born in Serbia who heads the Association of Erased Persons. For the erased, it's a question of recovering dignity and the right to drive a car, get health care, own property and collect pensions. Permanent residency also would carry the option of citizenship. The dispute also underscores the murky Cold War-era pasts confronting the EU as it expands to take in a part of the continent stained by nationalism and strife. Most of the erased were Bosnians and Serbs stripped of their rights in February 1992 after declining offers of citizenship. Many say they were hesitant because of unrest in Bosnia and Croatia, and thought Slobodan Milosevic might retake Slovenia. Nearly all 18,000 lost their jobs, and at least seven people committed suicide in despair. Some were arrested for simple offenses such as jaywalking and were deported for lack of documents. Zoran Vojinovic , 29, was erased even though he was born in Slovenia to Serbian parents and has never left. Deputy Interior Minister Bojan Bugaric, acknowledging that the erasure was a "mistake," said his office approved retroactive residency for 40 people this week and would issue permits to others. Parliament is expected to enact a law soon laying out guidelines for seeking damages. But the government is under fire by boisterous right-wing opposition parties who could use the dispute to make gains in October parliamentary elections. Vojinovic now has a job supervising a cleaning crew at a shopping mall. "I was cheated, and Slovenia should be ashamed," he said. [izbrisani" (erased ones), izbrisati (delete, expunge, obliterate, red pencil, rub out, score out, scratch out, )] Drustva izbrisanih -- Stran Drustva izbrisanih drzavljanov Republike Slovenije (Society of Erased Residents of Slovenia)

Jerusalem Post 9 Feb 2004 jpost.com Suicide art taken off display in Sweden By JPOST.COM STAFF Ambassador Zvi Mazel Photo: David Rubinger Advertisement Printer Friendly E-mail This Article Sign up for SMS alerts Subscribe More Latest News 4 no-confidence motions Monday evening Israeli wounded near Jenin IDF develops code of ethics for fighting terror Katsav decries 'crummy deal' Poll: Palestinian support for violence down more » News Modified fence plan excludes settlements Local authorities reject deal Balad men held for forming Hizbullah cell Editorial The limits of tolerance The Gaza referendum Waterworld Features In the doldrums Street politics 'A life cut short in its prime' The controversial exhibit shown at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm, entitled 'Snow White and the Madness of Truth', was taken off display Sunday, Israel Radio reported. The exhibit featured a small ship carrying a picture of Islamic Jihad bomber Hanadi Jaradat sailing in a rectangular pool filled with blood-colored water. The exhibit was not purchased by any other museum for display. Israel's ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, sparked a diplomatic incident last month when he wrecked the museum display that he said glorified the suicide bomber who murdered 21 Israelis at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa last year. Mazel unplugged three spotlights illuminating the exhibit and apparently threw one of the spotlights into the pool. 'I felt that I was standing in front of a horror, I felt that I was standing in front of an exhibit that, while it was in an historic and big museum in the heart of Europe, was glorifying genocide," the ambassador said. "I was standing before an exhibit calling for genocide, praising the genocide of me, you, my brothers and sisters. I pulled the plug on the three spotlights and plunged the exhibit into darkness. I think one of the spotlights fell into water.' Mazel was asked to leave, but refused. The creators of the exhibit are musician Dror Feiler, an Israeli who has lived in Sweden since 1973, and his Swedish wife Gunilla Skold Feiler. Feiler composed the music that accompanied the exhibit, and his wife created the visuals.

UN News Centre - UN rights chief calls for new measures to fight genocide, Internet hate-mongering 3 February 2004 – The top United Nations human rights official called today for further measures to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing and the propagation of hatred through the Internet. “Stamping out discrimination is not only a matter for lofty statements, it is a matter for determined, preventive action,” Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertrand Ramcharan told the intergovernmental working group on the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action of the 2001 World Conference against Racism. Mr. Ramcharan asked the panel at its four-day meeting in Geneva to look at five specific areas for further standard setting. These are the need for an international convention on the prevention of ethnic cleansing; an international convention on human rights education; a protocol to the Genocide Convention enshrining strong measures for the prevention of genocide; an international declaration to counter discrimination against indigenous populations; and an instrument to prevent the propagation of hatred through the Internet. “At the start of the twenty-first century it is overdue that we set new courses for the prevention of discrimination and the prevention of gross violations of human rights,” Mr. Ramcharan declared. “It is a sad fact of the contemporary world that hatred is being spread through the Internet by unscrupulous and misguided people. The Internet is one of the most effective medium of communication we have in the contemporary world,” he said, calling for an international convention to work out the strategies and norms required. He called ethnic cleansing “the most shocking form of discrimination in the contemporary world” and stressed the need for human rights education to begin with the minds of the young.

Turkish Daily News February 6, 2004 QUIJERA: TURKEY SHOULD JOIN THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT SPOT: CICC EUROPEAN COORDINATOR: THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT DOES NOT CONFLICT WITH THE MEMBER COUNTRIES' RIGHT OF SOVEREIGNTY; IT WORKS IN COMPLEMENT WITH THEM Salih Efe Irune Agirizzabal Quijera, European coordinator for the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), has said that Turkey is the only Council of Europe member that has not signed the Rome Statute, saying that this is not good for Turkey's appearance and that Turkey should adopt legislation in compliance with the statute. Here is the full text of an exclusive Turkish Daily News interview conducted with Quijera: TDN: What is the CICC and when was the organization set up? QUIJERA: The CICC was set up in 1995; it is the umbrella organization for more than 2,000 nongovernmental organizations all around the world, created to establish the permanent International Criminal Court and now monitoring the process of ratification, universality, implementation and monitoring of the court. TDN: What is your position within the ICC and the CICC? QUIJERA: I am the European coordinator of the CICC and also responsible for this month's target country, namely Turkey's ratification campaign. TDN: Do you have any relationship with the ICC itself? QUIJERA: Well, I also work for the court, but I am not here representing the court. I am here in Turkey as European coordinator of the CICC. TDN: Do you have a title within the court? QUIJERA: Yes I do, but I prefer not to be related to the court here because it is judicial, and I am not making an institutional visit representing the ICC in Turkey. TDN: Do the ICC and its member countries support your organization? QUIJERA: Yes, absolutely, the Assembly of State Parties gave its approval to a resolution in September 2003 giving the NGO coalition a special status as coordinator and facilitator of the work before the assembly. One of things the coalition does is facilitate the participation of NGOs from around the world in the assembly. We provide materials, we facilitate accreditation before the United Nations and other places where the assembly will be meeting. So far it has been in New York, but now we will be in The Hague -- the negotiations and meetings will take place in The Hague. The coalition has had an incredible relationship with governments from around the world. There was a very interesting synergy between government, the NGOs and the United Nations, and so like-minded governments created a group called "The Friends of the ICC." We also go as observers. So we do have a very important relationship with the governments. TDN: What is your purpose in Turkey? QUIJERA: My purpose is to convince the authorities in Turkey of the importance of Turkey's accession to the ICC; that is the main purpose. We want two things: One is for Turkey to accede to the ICC, but Turkey should also implement legislation in compliance with the Rome Statute. They need to adopt laws in order to cooperate with the court, but they also need to include the crimes under the Rome Statute in the penal code. We know that the Penal Code is in the process of being drafted now, so we are telling them they should make sure that the crime of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are also included in the new penal code. We have learned, and I am very happy, that this process might be finalized in 2004. This is very important because Turkey will be expecting to obtain a date for the start of the negotiations from the EU at the end of 2004. I think this is very important to the EU, so if there are important advances in strengthening the mechanisms of justice in Turkey, this will clearly facilitate the process as well. TDN: With whom have you already met, and with whom are you going to meet? QUIJERA: We met with Turkish NGOs such as the Human Rights Association, Human Rights Foundation, Amnesty International, Mazlum Der, the Helsinki Citizens Assembly and the Association of Human Rights Agenda and so on. I met with the Foreign and Justice ministries, with all human rights commissions in Parliament, and with the president of the human rights committee, Vahit Bicak. I also met with the representative of the EU in Turkey and with the German ambassador, and I am also going to meet with the Spanish ambassador. So the EU has adopted a common position on the ICC, and it is very important that the EU understands the importance of Turkey's ratification of the Rome Statute. TDN: What do you aim to get from your visits here in Turkey? QUIJERA: Turkey acceding to the Rome Statute and becoming a member of the ICC. TDN: What has the EU approach towards the ICC been so far? QUIJERA: They are the leading supporters of the ICC; without EU support we would not be here today. Of course, many other countries and nations are very supportive, but I think the EU member-countries were very intelligent when they adopted a common position on the ICC in 2001. This is why I can tell Turkish authorities that the EU attaches a lot of importance to the ICC. TDN: What approaches have the candidate countries taken so far? QUIJERA: All of them are members of the ICC; all of them signed the statute, including Bulgaria and Romania. All the candidate countries -- we are not talking about only the countries acceding in May. Croatia, which is going to be candidate, also ratified it. All the Balkan countries have signed the Rome Statute. The only country in the Council of Europe that did not sign is Turkey, and the only country that has not ratified yet is the Czech Republic, but they have signed. Turkey, however, has not signed yet. TDN: Why do you think Turkey hasn't signed the Rome Statute? Was it due to political considerations? QUIJERA: No, I think it was very unfortunate that Turkey did not sign it. They did not realize how important this issue was. The deadline for signature was the end of 2001, but only on Dec. 31, 2001 did the the United States, Israel and Iran sign. Turkey probably was not quick enough to affix its the signature; Turkey did not realize how important it was for them. Turkish delegations in the negotiations said they could not sign it because the Rome Statute did not cover the crime of terrorism. The ICC will only have jurisdiction on "genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity", not on terrorism, because the delegations could not reach an agreement on terrorism. I think that has been the argument, but I don't think it is an argument any longer. In my meetings with the ministries, they did not raise this issue, so I am very happy about that. I think it is very interesting now. Also, I want to tell you that the Turkish Foreign Ministry has already asked to become a member of the group called "The Friends of the ICC," composed of approximately 40 states in the Assembly of State Parties, and it has been accepted. This gives an indication of the change in attitude of the government of Turkey towards the ICC. We are expecting this policy to be pursued more by Prime Minister Erdogan and by the Foreign Ministry, clarifying the position of Turkey. TDN: Does the EU set ratification of the Rome Statute as a precondition for starting accession talks? QUIJERA: I don't think it has been issued as a precondition to start negotiations, but I think if Turkey is finally given a date for starting the negotiation, it will be one of the issues at that point. The ICC is part of the acquis communitaire, so it is very important. TDN: How is Turkey viewed in this regard? QUIJERA: For the EU it is very important that Turkey become a member of the ICC. TDN: What do you expect after your visit? QUIJERA: On the political level, the ICC is not the top priority for Turkey; EU accession is the top priority for the Turkish government. The ICC is very important to the EU, so Turkey should link it to the EU process. But it is not so important that if they don't become a member of the ICC, the EU will not start negotiations; however, it is part of the same package. One of the packages that Turkey has to finalize before the end of 2004 is the reform of the penal code, and there Turkey has an opportunity to include the crimes under the Rome Statute, namely the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. So there are links. My expectations are: 1) I am happy because Turkey is member of "The Friends of the ICC." 2) I am still not satisfied because Turkey is not aligning itself in position for the ICC, so I think Turkey should make it clearer that they are supportive of the ICC. 3) Turkey should show that they are working on acceding to the ICC. On the legal level, they need to show there will be changes in the penal code. I think they need to start working with the EU partners to learn how they ratified and changed the constitution and the legislation. I am hopeful that this new government will understand that their being a member of the international community is very important and that 93 countries already are members of the ICC and that Turkey should be one of them. TDN: I know 92 countries have ratified the Rome Statute, but which was the last one to do so? QUIJERA: Georgia. And we expect Yemen to ratify and to be the 94th country to ratify the Rome Statute. TDN: Do NGOs in Turkey support your activities and the ICC? QUIJERA: Yes, they are going to create a coalition for the ICC, and they are going to be members of the international coalition. TDN: How is your campaign of ratification doing worldwide? QUIJERA: It is going well. The U.S. opposition to the ICC is challenging the universality effects of the ICC that the EU and the NGOs are trying to achieve. The United States approved legislation, the "American Service Member's Protection Act," which states, "The state parties that do not sign bilateral agreements granting immunity to U.S. officials will suffer sanctions from the U.S. administration." The United States has already sanctioned dozens of countries, and this is obviously affecting the ratification of the campaign. Although we think this is really damaging the court, we also think that the court is going to prove that it is credible and that it is working efficiently and that this is a necessary court, because this court has only one purpose, which is to end impunity and to make sure that the perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity do not go unpunished. So this court does not conflict with countries' sovereignty; it works in complement with them. So only if Turkish courts are unwilling or unable to try those crimes, we do not think it will happen. That is why the penal code has to be amended; the ICC will step in and deal with those cases. So in general there is no reason to fear the ICC. The ICC is just an extension of national jurisdiction. The attitude of countries like the United States is very damaging. The United States and Israel repudiated their signatures. The attitude of Iran is not bad. Iran has signed the statute, and there are signs that things could be happening in Iran. Yemen is going to ratify the statute, and Jordan and Djibouti have already signed. So in the Arab world the ICC is underrepresented, but we are working with those countries. Russia also signed the statute but has not yet ratified it. We think one of the main reasons for their attitude is the ongoing conflict in Chechnya, but there are signs that they support the ICC, and we are hoping that after the presidential election the ICC will again be on their agenda. China is moving more positively towards the ICC. There was a conference on the ICC in China last year, and the government supported the ICC. China is not pleased with the U.S. attitude in the Security Council, where the U.S. government wants to take the ICC's references out of every resolution. Sometimes this becomes very embarrassing, as with the Liberian resolution in the summer. In the "Resolution on Humanitarian Personnel," in which a reference to the ICC was made, the United States blocked the resolution until the reference was taken out. This is really embarrassing, and China and Russia are not happy with this opposition. I think the United States today is the country that is really strongly opposing the ICC, but we hope the election in the United States will also help us. The situation is very complex in the United States, but we do not have to be obsessed with them. Ninety-three countries have already ratified the ICC. Turkish lawyers, judges and prosecutors can apply to the court for an internship and learn more about the ICC. TDN: Do you put Turkey in same category as those countries that have not yet ratified the statute? QUIJERA: No, I do not place Turkey in the same situation as these countries. Each country's position is different. The United States, Russia and China have different positions and considerations. Only the United States has a negative attitude towards the ICC. Russia, China and Iran do not have that much of a negative attitude; Turkey is the only Council of Europe member that has not yet signed the Rome Statute. I think this is not good for Turkey's appearance, and I think Turkey should join the ICC. TDN: Thank you very much for your very informative explanation.

belfasttelegraph.co.uk 3 Feb 2004 Sharp rise in race hatred sparks anger Attacks on Chinese double By Jonathan McCambridge k 03 February 2004 RACIST attacks against members of the Chinese community have almost doubled in two years, startling new figures have revealed. The shock new figures come as Lisburn council has issued a statement condemning a racist incident where a Chinese tourist was verbally abused in the city. The new figures were released by Criminal Justice Minister John Spellar who was asked how many reported racial incidents had been reported against members of the Chinese community in the last three years. Mr Spellar said that in the financial year from April 2001 to April 2002 there were 33 attacks. From 2002 to 2003 there were 44 attacks. However, the updated figures from last April until December show that there have already been 58 reported attacks in the current financial year. Lisburn councillor Seamus Close has condemned an incident where a Chinese tourist was verbally abused by young people near a cinema in the city. He said the abuse was particularly abhorrent at a time when people were remembering the Holocaust and the genocide of the Jews in the Second World War. "For idiots, thugs and hoods to abuse people from abroad in this way makes me sick," he said. Mayor Billy Bell said every member of the council should be disgusted by what had happened. Meanwhile UUP leader David Trimble has urged Northern Ireland's political parties and the Government to tackle racism "in a genuine way". Mr Trimble was speaking after a meeting in Stormont yesterday with Patrick Yu, chairman of the Northern Ireland Council of Ethnic Minorities. The discussions were set up in the wake of a series of racist attacks in Belfast, resulting in a number of families being forced to flee their homes. Mr Trimble said: ""We agree with NICEM that the present spate of racist attacks requires an urgent and robust policing and judicial response."

NYT February 3, 2004 Blair Sets Up Inquiry on Prewar Iraq Intelligence By PATRICK E. TYLER ONDON, Feb. 3 — Prime Minister Tony Blair announced today that he had set up an inquiry into the prewar intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons, but he added that the committee will not have a broad mandate to examine the political decisions to go to war. The inquiry, to be headed by Lord Butler, who served as private secretary to former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, will work largely behind closed doors and report its findings to Mr. Blair before Parliament adjourns this summer. As such, it will be of much shorter duration than the inquiry that President Bush said Monday that he will establish to examine intelligence on Iraq and report in 2005. "I think it is right," Mr. Blair said in a morning meeting with a parliamentary committee, "that we have a look at the intelligence that we received and whether it is accurate or not." But the prime minister said he was opposed to any inquiry that reviewed the political judgments to go to war and how intelligence findings were used in support of those judgments. Mr. Blair made the announcement during a question-and-answer session with parliamentary committee chairmen. In shirt sleeves, the prime minister was affable and in good humor, admitting recent mistakes in how he had handled major legislation and asserting that the period for questioning his integrity over the preparations for war had come to an end with Lord Hutton's verdict last week. Lord Hutton found that the government had not exaggerated or deliberately distorted the intelligence on Iraq to persuade a reluctant public to go to war. Mr. Blair said that Lord Hutton's was the third full inquiry into circumstances related to the war and that the only thing left to examine was the intelligence process itself. "I honestly think that the political judgment has got to be in the end the government and Parliament and you can't subcontract that to a committee and I don't believe frankly that the committee would want to look into that," Mr. Blair said. "What we should have is a proper inquiry into the intelligence," he added, but "we do not in my view need an inquiry into the political decision to go to war." Hours later, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, appeared before the full house and spelled out the mandate of the new inquiry. The announcement touched off a lengthy debate in Parliament over whether the inquiry will settle the most contentious questions of how political leaders used intelligence findings. In the view of some experts the findings should have been subjected to more rigorous questioning before they were used to support the assertion that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the region and to "the stability of the world," as Mr. Blair warned in September 2002. Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary under Mr. Blair, asked from the floor of the House of Commons, "Does he really believe he can separate the intelligence judgment on the threat from the political judgment to go to war?" But other members, like Ann Clwyd, pointed out that even the Kurdish leaders of northern Iraq believed that Mr. Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that he was ready to use on them in March 2003. She called it a "disgrace" that the international community had not acted sooner to end the "genocide" that she said Mr. Hussein was practicing against ethnic Kurds and Shiite Muslims. Michael Howard, the Tory opposition leader, said his party supported the inquiry because Mr. Blair had promised that all questions on how intelligence was used in the political decision-making "came fairly and squarely within the remit of this inquiry." That assertion by Mr. Howard is likely to be tested early as the panel gets down to work. Also appointed to the inquiry were Sir John Chilcot and Field Marshal Lord Inge and two members of the House of Commons, Ann Taylor from the Labor Party and Michael Mates from the Conservative Party. The Liberal Democratic Party refused to endorse the inquiry after lengthy negotiations with Mr. Blair and his aides on Monday night. Menzies Campbell, speaking for Liberal Democrats during today's debate, said that he had concluded that Mr. Blair had walled off an examination of political decision-making. The party therefore withdrew because "any inquiry" that failed to address the foundation of Mr. Blair's judgments over going to war "would be unlikely to command public confidence." For his part, Mr. Blair said an inquiry had become necessary after a chief weapons analyst, David A. Kay, said in Washington that stocks of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons may not have existed and that intelligence assumptions about the immediate threat from Mr. Hussein may have been broadly wrong.

AFP 6 Feb 2004 India, Britain target high technology to boost strong ties NEW DELHI (AFP) - India and Britain have identified high technology as a priority area for cooperation, Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha said Friday. Describing India-British ties as being in the "finest fettle", Sinha said "there is also a challenge in there to take it to a higher plane". Both sides had identified "high-tech as the driving force of our relationship in the future", Sinha told reporters in New Delhi after a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Straw, who arrived in New Delhi late Thursday and held talks with Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and Commerce minister Arun Jaitley, said trade and investment were issues that required attention. He also met India's main opposition leader Sonia Gandhi and delivered a lecture on "Defeating Terrorism for Global Order." Straw voiced support for Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's peace moves with Pakistan and said the initiative would deny "the terrorists the oxygen of mistrust and the sense of injustice which they exploit." "To tackle terrorism effectively, we need also to address a wider agenda. As well as a determined and robust security response, we need political strategies which promote reconciliation and dialogue, to resolve tensions from which terrorists feed," said Straw. "As our experience in Northern Ireland has shown, this is a long-term process, but it can achieve impressive results." "In the subcontinent, the renewed dialogue between India and Pakistan can play a vitally important role in denying the terrorists the oxygen of mistrust and of the sense of injustice which they exploit." India and Pakistan reached an accord last month to reopen peace talks. They nearly came to their fourth war in 2002 over India's charges that Pakistan was arming and training rebels in the Indian zone of Kashmir. More than 40,000 people have died in Kashmir since the eruption of an anti-Indian Muslim insurgency in 1989. "The whole British government welcomes the recent breakthrough in India's relationship with Pakistan and the start on a composite dialogue on 16 February. Britain will continue to follow this process closely," said Straw. He voiced support India's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. "Our relationship with India crucial to achieving almost every one of our strategic priorities. That is one reason why we are strong advocates of India gaining a permanent seat on the UN security council," said Straw. India has long sought a Security Council permanent seat, contending that current members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- no longer represent today's world order. Straw also said UN to better respond to terrorism and crises where genocide or the possibility of genocide become apparent. "Much of the multilateral system was designed more than half a century ago... It is healthy that we are beginning to debate the international framework," said Straw. "International law has to be living, evolving law or it withers and dies." On Saturday, Straw is to visit the southern IT showcase city of Bangalore and visit India's second-largest software exporter, Infosys. While in Bangalore, Straw will also deliver a lecture on relations with India.

WP 15 Feb 2004 British Drawing Stirs Anti-Semitism Debate Jewish Groups Divided in Response to Award-Winning Anti-Sharon Cartoon By Glenn Frankel Washington Post Foreign Post Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A24 LONDON -- As Dave Brown tells it, when he sat down last January to compose an editorial cartoon about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the Independent newspaper, the idea was to make a powerful statement condemning Sharon's policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. What he drew was so shocking to some readers, it is still reverberating a year after it appeared. Patterning his cartoon after a Goya painting from the 1820s, Brown drew a naked Sharon, his private parts covered by a "Vote Likud" badge, kneeling in the rubble of Gaza City and about to take a bite from an infant. "What's wrong. . . . you never seen a politician kissing babies before?" the cartoon Sharon asked. Many British Jews reacted with revulsion, accusing Brown and the newspaper of anti-Semitism. Some said the drawing echoed the virulent Jew-hatred of cartoons that appeared in Nazi publications such as Der Stuermer before and during World War II, while the Israeli Embassy here contended it perpetuated the ancient "blood libel" that Jews prey on non-Jewish children. But Brown and the Independent have stood their ground, insisting that the drawing represented fair criticism of a head of government. They claimed vindication after the state-run Press Complaints Commission dismissed a formal complaint from Sharon and the embassy, and again, more recently, when the illustration won the annual award for best drawing from the Political Cartoon Society. Still, the cartoon remains at the center of a simmering debate in Britain and throughout Europe over the distinctions between anti-Sharon, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views. Most of the discussion of anti-Semitism is focused on physical violence, such as attacks on synagogues and beatings of individual Jews, largely by Muslim youths, in countries such as France. But Jewish groups and some independent observers argue that a second, more subtle wave of anti-Semitism among intellectuals, politicians and media outlets, especially on the left, has infected political discourse in ways that are equally damaging. Besides the Sharon cartoon, critics point to remarks made last year by Tam Dalyell, the most senior member of the House of Commons, charging that Prime Minister Tony Blair, in formulating his Iraq policy, was unduly influenced by a "cabal" of Jewish advisers. A European Union poll last fall reported that 60 percent of those surveyed named Israel as the country that poses the greatest threat to world peace. Recently, a senior member of Britain's Parliament from the third-party Liberal Democrats, who once compared the plight of residents of Gaza City to that of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, declared that she might feel compelled to become a suicide bomber if she lived in Gaza or the West Bank. And David Johnson, the No. 2 diplomat at the U.S. Embassy, was asked at a meeting at the prominent Royal Institute of International Affairs whether the U.S. government could ever impose an equitable peace settlement in the Middle East, "or is it perhaps that the Jewish lobby in America is too strong to make that politically feasible?" Johnson responded that the question was "an ethnic slur," adding that he was increasingly troubled by "the willingness of European audiences to skirt up against the side of anti-Semitic language in a political criticism." But the audience applauded another speaker who said it was "absolutely outrageous" for Johnson to interpret the question that way. The exchange was first reported in the Independent. Near the surface of many of these incidents is a set of assumptions about Israel and the United States -- that Israel is an illegitimate and even dangerous state, along the lines of Nazi Germany or apartheid-era South Africa; that Jews in the United States are the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy; and that criticism of Israel and criticism of Jews are interchangeable. "Judeophobia" is the word that Barry Kosmin and his colleagues at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research have coined for these assumptions. "This isn't classic anti-Semitism," said Kosmin, the institute's executive director and co-editor of a new book on the subject. "It's not genocidal. It's not Jew-hatred, in the old-fashioned sense. But it's real." One of the striking features of the debate is that Jews themselves can be found prominently on both sides. Billionaire George Soros recently said the policies of President Bush and Sharon were contributing to the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe. Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League in turn branded Soros's remarks "absolutely obscene." "There are deep divisions within the Jewish community," said Sidney Brichto, a U.S.-born rabbi who has lived here for four decades and heads the Israel Diaspora Trust, a nonprofit group. "In the 1980s the argument was between hawks and doves. Now it's whether or not anti-Semitism is or isn't a threat." Jews are less inclined than in the past to stand by passively when they feel attacked. When an Oxford University professor sought to exclude an Israeli from his class because the student had served in the Israeli Army, the ensuing furor compelled the professor to apologize. Dalyell, who insisted his remarks were not anti-Semitic, eventually apologized under pressure. The BBC last fall appointed a senior executive to field complaints about its Middle East coverage. And Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker, resigned as a party spokesman last month after party leader Charles Kennedy called her suicide bomber remark "completely unacceptable." British editorial cartoons can be savage and graphic: They often depict political leaders such as Blair and Bush committing lewd acts or roaming the world stage with blood dripping from their hands. In that context, Brown said he believes that his Sharon cartoon, which appeared the day before Israel's elections last year, fell well within acceptable bounds. "I did the cartoon on a Sunday for the Monday paper," he recalled. Noting that the deputy editor in charge of the editorial page that day was Jewish, as is the editor of the newspaper itself, Brown added: "No one had a problem with it. It passed off without a question really." "I was very careful," he said. "I was very aware not to use the Israeli flag because of the Star of David, or other Jewish symbols. I made it specifically Sharon and Likud." Still, thousands of people wrote or e-mailed to express outrage. Pro-Israel groups in the United States, including HonestReporting.com and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, known as CAMERA, urged supporters to protest. Brown said he received dozens of phone calls, some of them threatening. The newspaper felt compelled to publish a follow-up debate under the headline "Is this satire? Or anti-Semitism?" Brown conceded that some readers might have been genuinely offended by the cartoon. But he contended that much of the public outrage was drummed up by the Israeli Embassy and its supporters. "To me it was an obvious case of being a manufactured outrage," he said. "I've no doubt a large number of people willfully misinterpreted the cartoon." But Winston Pickett, spokesman for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a middle-of-the-road organization, said the cartoon neatly fit the definition of Judeophobia. "Was it blatant classic anti-Semitism? No," Pickett said. "But was it offensive and hurtful? Yes. The real issue here is the consequences, the effect rather than the intention of the person when he was doing it. It's not simply a question of artistic merit. We're living in dangerous times, and this stuff doesn't help." Some prominent Jews disagreed. Peter F. Halban, an independent book publisher who sits on the institute's board, said he understood what Brown was trying to achieve and did not find it anti-Semitic. "It was very powerful," Halban said. "It was not very agreeable. But what the state of Israel and its leaders are doing is not agreeable either." The furor was reignited late last year when the drawing won the Political Cartoon Society's award. Chairman Tim Benson said the society registered 73,000 hits on its Web site after the award was announced and received what he called 400 "hate mails" a day. Someone broke a window at the society's office. "The phone didn't stop ringing," Benson said. "People were telling us we were Nazi swine, while we also had Nazi sympathizers congratulating us." Benson said he expected the fuss to resume when the cartoon goes on display this summer as part of a collection of political drawings on the Middle East conflict. "We're prepared to put it under bulletproof glass," he said. .

IranMania.com 1 Feb 2004 Feature : The new “Islamophobia” By: R. Ebrahimi Thursday 20 June 2002 During a trip I met a female American tourist. It was the time of hostage taking of Western tourists in the Philippines by members of Islamist commando Abu-Sayaf. This young lady asked me if I was feeling responsible… I didn’t understand what she wanted to insinuate. Responsible for what and for whom? She then explained to me: “as a Muslim, you should feel responsible for what your coreligionists commit. It seems normal, specially for someone sensible.” I had a very hard time believing what I was hearing. I, the Iranian child of the Middle East, living thousands of kilometers away from Philippines, and frankly having no knowledge of this country, should feel responsible (this is nothing to take lightly) about what Abu-Sayaf was committing there in the name of Islam. Regardless of who I am or what my beliefs are. My being born Muslim should be enough to engage my person and my responsibility. -Yes, I feel responsible, I replied. This seemed to satisfy her, she was surely thinking that she was having a sensible Muslim as a rare specimen in front of her. -And you, do you feel responsible? I asked her. She frowned; she didn’t seem to grasp my question. Responsible for what? She asked me in turn. -Of what your coreligionists committed indeed, Inquisition, Crusades, the Saint-Bartholomew massacre, colonization, genocides, slavery, serfdom, Napoleonian Wars, First World War, Holocaust, the 60 million of human casualties of the Second World War, atomic bomb, Vietnam, and the assassination of Iraq, to cite only the most atrocious. She thought it was not similar. Indeed it was not, because among Muslims there is no individuality. We only form a single fabric, although we are more than one billion in number. An act committed by one of us is enough to accuse us all. That’s the least of what people like her think. And this interesting dialogue took place long before the events of September 11, before Islam became unofficially but openly the vociferous Nemesis of our beautiful Western values of democracy and human rights. Something must have replaced the deceased Communism. Another negative pole must have been found to justify political acts, military actions and wars against terrorism. World’s polarization must have regenerated. We are well and truly living the new Islamophobia. On both sides of the Atlantic, demagogic voices, terrifying of violence scourge Islam, the so-called Islamic civilization, and Muslims. These voices dangerously recall anti-Semitic lampoons of late 19th Century or even Mussolini and Hitler’s racist discourses. It makes one believe that the world retains no historical lessons. Mr. Silvio Berlusconi, the present chief of the Italian State declared that “Muslim civilization is inferior to Europe and its history”. Berlusconi is occupying now the seat that half a century ago was Mussolini’s. And honorable American professor Samuel P. Huntington echoes his “clash of civilizations”. Can these levelheaded personalities give us to begin with a definition of what they call “Islamic civilization”? A Senegalese, in the depth of sub-Saharan Africa, an Arab from the Middle East and an Indonesian of the farthest Far East are members of the same “civilization” on the pretext that those among them who practice Islam turn toward Mecca to pray? Again, there is no individuality recognized in Muslims. Muslims became pawns of a supranational and supra-individual concept: Islam (or Islamism), a very poorly understood concept because of its actual absurdity, supposed to regroup all Muslims under a single enormous label. I would even not evoke what Muslims brought to the world; I will not talk about mathematics or medicine, I would not like to lower myself to the level of engaging in “comparison of civilizations” just as if it was a question of height measurement or a Hollywood rating of the best commercial productions in film. An Italian journalist named Oriana Fallaci just published a book, “Anger and Pride”. This book hits records of sale in Italy and Spain. Ms. Fallaci carries out a strongly grotesque amalgam between Muslims, delinquent immigrants, and terrorists and pretends to uncover the real face of Islam. She exploits all hyper-mediatic themes of our sad era: terrorism, insecurity in Europe, prostitution, and fundamentalism; she blames them on Islam, incites to racial hatred, and thus sells books. She pretends that Muslims “urinate in baptisteries and multiply like rats”. This book has been published and sold. Imagine for a single instant if a personality as much enlightened as Ms. Fallaci holds similar talks about Jews. She would be accused of being an anti-Semite or a revisionist, and it’s highly probable that her book would not be published at all. Trials would justly shower down upon her. But when racism and revisionism target Islam and Muslims, it apparently does not disturb anyone. It is rare for intellectuals to raise their voices against it. Does a cause need a holocaust to be intellectualized? Islamophobia has evidently a much harsher and more repulsive face in the United States by conjugated action of latent ignorance of the American People on this subject, Zionist glorification and the events of September 11. In the United States, being a Muslim often equates with exclusively being a Palestinian terrorist (if supposedly they are 10,000, what do they represent in a total Muslim population of 1.1 billion?) In this country, even the evocation of an eventual Palestinian people and their sufferings is politically incorrect and can result in your being a participant of anti-Semitism and subsequently of anti-Americanism. It happens daily during political meetings or academic conferences. The American alternative press reports it every day. The mass culture which wants Islam to be equal to violence, terrorism and peace refusal is reinforced by the silence of intellectual and political authorities to refute such categorizations. Misinformation amplifies this phenomenon. The Arab-Israeli conflict is reported by mainstream media (often right-winged and conservative) through an exclusive siding with one specific party’s viewpoint: Israel. One of the techniques commonly used by Islamophobes is the arbitrary reference to Koranic texts, taken out of their contexts and presented to masses to demonstrate a so-called intimate and organic relation between Islam and violence. An American personality, whose confession and political orientations have no importance here, appeared recently on the radio with many references to Koran in order to demonstrate that Muslims’ Book encourages Jihad (implying crusade in this case), expansionism, and consequently violence and war. I could also devote myself to this idiotic and malicious game by citing such reference to the Torah (Deuteronomy 7, 23 & 24), which uses even more extreme terms than Koran: “But the LORD thy God shall deliver those nations unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be exterminated. And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have exterminated them.” Taken out of its context the above phrase sounds like nothing more than an incitation to genocide. On the CNN TV channel, a very mediatic American priest maintained, with many references taken out of the Koran too, that a religion like Islam not recognizing women’s rights can not be fair and peaceful. I could, in reply to this honorable lover of the Christ and of its apostles, evoke this injunction announced by the Apostle Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians (chapter 11): “The head of the woman is the man (…). Therefore if a woman is not covered, let her also be shaved. (…) A man indeed ought not to have his head covered, being the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man. (…) Neither was the man created for the sake of the woman, but the woman for the sake of the man. For this reason (…), the woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head.” All racist discourses based on religion are interchangeable. Muslims have today enemies called amalgamation, ignorance, misinformation, propaganda, intolerance and demagogy. The repeated attacks of the media and of some dark and repulsive personalities like Mrs. Fallaci, who make themselves out to be intellectual elites of our era bring me out of my reserve. One should not be surprised if confronting such a perception shared by so many non-Muslims, being Christian, Jewish, or even Hindu, would in retaliation inspire Muslim youth of the four corners of the world to sustain fundamentalist organizations: the only haven validating their identity. Meditate on this simple fact: in Gujarat and in Ramllah, men and women are assassinated because their only crime is being born a Muslim, not a Hindu or a Jew. In Italy a book sells based on its only merit of abusiveness and despise towards and for Muslims. Without an intent of downplaying events, victims of what is called “Islamophobia” incomparably outnumber those of the Twin Towers or those of Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem. And all this seems to occur in an atmosphere of general indifference.

PTI 19 Feb 2004 Annan wants stronger UN to counter global threats United Nations, Feb. 19. (PTI): Observing that the past year has been an extradordinarly difficult one mainly due to the war in Iraq, Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for making the United Nations strong to enable it to tackle threats to global security and poverty. "The past year has been an extraordinarily difficult one, marked above all by the war in Iraq and the events related to it," Annan told a meeting of the International Association of Permanent Representatives to the UN hosted by Ambassador Inocencio F. Arias of Spain. Those events have raised a number of wider questions about the nature of challenges facing the international community, and about the ability of the multilateral system to deal with them, he added. "Whether in combating international terrorism, alleviating poverty and hunger, stopping the spread of infectious diseases, preventing genocide, or rebuilding States after war, we urgently need to find practical ways to move forward," Annan said.

UN News Centre Past year proves need to make UN effective in meeting global challenges – Annan 18 February 2004 – The events of 2003 have underlined the pressing need to make the United Nations as effective as possible in tackling poverty and other threats to global security, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a gathering of ambassadors to the UN today. “The past year has been an extraordinarily difficult one, marked above all by the war in Iraq and the events related to it,” the Secretary-General told a lunchtime meeting of the International Association of Permanent Representatives to the United Nations hosted by Ambassador Inocencio F. Arias of Spain. Those events have raised a number of wider questions about the nature of challenges facing the international community, and about the ability of the multilateral system to deal with them, he added. “Whether in combating international terrorism, alleviating poverty and hunger, stopping the spread of infectious diseases, preventing genocide, or rebuilding States after war, we urgently need to find practical ways to move forward,” Mr. Annan said. Calling attention to the need to re-evaulate existing capacities and build new ones, he recalled the appointment of a High-Level Panel to examine the threats, evaluate existing policies, processes and institutions, and make bold recommendations for change. While some have described it as a panel on UN reform, “the object of the exercise is to find a credible and convincing collective answer to the challenges of our time,” he said. “We must show that the United Nations is capable of fulfilling that purpose,” not just for the most privileged Member States but also those that are concerned with the threats posed by poverty, hunger and disease, he said. “We must understand that a threat to some is a threat to all, and needs to be addressed accordingly.”

United Nartions 18 Feb 2004 New York - Secretary-General's remarks to the International Association of Permanent Repreesntatives to the United Nations New York, 18 February 2004 - Secretary-General's remarks to the International Association of Permanent Repreesntatives to the United Nations Excellencies and friends, It's a pleasure to join you today. I very much welcome this opportunity to meet with you under relaxed circumstances and exchange views and ideas, and I thank Ambassador Arias of Spain for helping to bring us together. I'm sure I speak for all of us in saying that the past year has been an extraordinarily difficult one, marked above all by the war in Iraq and the events related to it. Those events have raised a number of wider questions about the nature of the challenges we face, and about the ability of the multilateral system to deal with them. They have underlined the pressing need to make the United Nations the most effective instrument it can be in meeting threats to global security in the 21st century. Whether in combatting international terrorism, alleviating poverty and hunger, stopping the spread of infectious diseases, preventing genocide, or rebuilding states after war, we urgently need to find practical ways to move forward. This means re-evaluating our existing capacities, as well as building new capacities to meet the threats and challenges ahead. And that is why, in November, I appointed a High-Level Panel to examine the threats we face, evaluate our existing policies, processes and institutions, and make bold recommendations for change. Some people have described this as a panel on UN reform. And its recommendations may indeed include proposals for changes in the rules and mechanisms of the United Nations. But if they do, those changes will be a means to an end, not the end itself. The object of the exercise is to find a credible and convincing collective answer to the challenges of our time. The Charter of the United Nations is very clear. States have the right to defend themselves -- and each other -- if attacked. But the first purpose of the United Nations itself, laid down in Article 1, is “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace”. We must show that the United Nations is capable of fulfilling that purpose, not just for the most privileged members of the Organization, who are currently -- and understandably -- preoccupied with counter-terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations must also protect millions of our fellow men and women from the more familiar threats of poverty, hunger and deadly disease. We must understand that a threat to some is a threat to all, and needs to be addressed accordingly. For most of the world's people, the most immediate and real issues are those that directly affect what they hope to achieve for themselves and their families. Issues that relate to building a decent life, with access to education and health care, enough food and clean drinking water, in a healthy environment. Issues that are identified in the Millennium Development Goals. The events of 2003 distracted the world's leaders from dealing with those issues. This year, we must rebuild the momentum needed to translate the Millennium Development Goals into reality. All partners must work together to achieve significant progress on the MDGs by 2005. If we are not on track by the end of next year, all hope of reaching the goals by 2015 will soon vanish. So the agenda for the year ahead promises to be full indeed. I hope I can count on the support and commitment of your Governments across the full range of work before us. With that, I will now try to answer your questions -- and I'm sure you will question my answers. Thank you very much.

BBC 10 Feb 2004 Headscarves in the headlines France is not the only country where headscarves have proved contentious. A number of countries already ban the garment from schools and other public buildings, while elsewhere it is the failure of women to don a veil which prompts outrage. Use the map above to find out where and when headscarves have been in the headlines. Singapore Singapore, keen to avoid racial and religious tensions between its ethnic Chinese majority and the Malay Muslim minority, has banned the scarf from schools. The Singapore government believes the ban is necessary to promote racial harmony, but Muslims say it infringes upon their religious freedoms. In 2002, the authorities became involved in a stand-off with four families who defied the ban. To the consternation of Singaporean officials, politicians from neighbouring Malaysia then entered the fray, saying it would consider taking the veiled schoolgirls into Malay schools. Singapore hit back, saying the issue was a purely internal matter. The row has since died down, but relations were widely seen as strained at the time. Singapore schoolgirls defy headscarf ban Return to map Egypt A group of Egyptian female TV presenters recently alleged they had been banned from appearing on screen because they were wearing headscarves, and some even said they were considering legal action. The veil has recently made a comeback alongside Islamic revival movements in Egypt. The government is widely believed to be wary of the public display of Islamic symbols such as headscarves, fearing it could play into the hands of Islamic activists. Egypt TV 'ban veiled presenters' Return to map Germany The issue has come to a head in recent months after Germany's supreme court ruled that a school was wrong to exclude a Muslim teacher because she wore a headscarf. The judges declared that current legislation did not allow for such a decision, but added that individual states would be within their rights to make legal provisions to this effect. The German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg has already given initial approval for a law to stop teachers wearing the veil, and seven other states are considering similar legislation. Legislators believe the veil is a political symbol and that children in state education should be protected from fundamentalist influence. German state backs headscarf ban Return to map France The French parliament is widely expected to approve legislation banning overt religious symbols - including headscarves - from schools. President Jacques Chirac believes such a ban is necessary to preserve the secularity of the French state. Opinion polls suggest that nearly 70% of French people support such a ban, and that around half of France's 5 million strong Muslim community are also in favour. But others fear it will prove divisive, and simply push Muslim girls into alternative Islamic education, jeopardising rather than furthering integration. French cabinet backs scarf ban Return to map Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority recently warned of "grave consequences" if women continued to appear unveiled. He made the remarks after the country's leading businesswoman made a speech without a headscarf at a conference. She herself had warned in her address of the long-term effect if the potential of the female workforce went untapped. Unveiled women anger Saudi cleric Return to map Turkey For the past 80 years Turks have lived in a secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who rejected headscarves as backward looking in his campaign to secularise Turkish society. Scarves are consequently banned in civic spaces in the country. The Islamist-based ruling AKP party, keen to avoid confrontation with the establishment, has not moved to alter that arrangement, although a number of politicians believe it problematic that Turkish girls can wear scarves in Western universities but not at home. The issue did however rise to the surface last year when the country's president refused to invite the any headscarf-wearing wives of senior officials, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to a reception marking the republic's 80th anniversary. Nearly all the AKP's MPs boycotted the event in protest. Boycott mars Turkey celebrations Return to map Belgium Two politicians, inspired by developments in neighbouring France, are hoping to push legislation through parliament that would ban the headscarf from state schools. They believe that many young Muslim schoolgirls do not wear the scarf by choice, and that imposing a ban would protect them from those who impose it upon them. Return to map Russia Muslim women last year won the right to wear the headscarf for identification photos, which was banned in Russia in 1997. The women argued in court that the ban infringed upon their civil liberites, and were backed in this by a number of human rights groups, who also alleged that Russia was fermenting anti-Muslim sentiment to aid its mission against separatists in Chechnya. Russian Muslims hail headscarf ruling Return to map Denmark A Muslim woman last year lost a high-profile court case against a large supermarket chain in Denmark after she had been fired for wearing a headscarf at work in 2001. The court ruled that her contract contained a dress code banning headgear.