------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Britain Nuclear Accident Probed
Hundreds remember Kohl's late wife
India's rocky path to greatness
The Pentagon's Trojan Horse
Rumsfeld Charts Missile Defense Course
Raising Russian sub a delicate operation
Journalists and the Bomb
The Nuclear Option Revisited

MILITARY
Ethiopia slashes defence budget by 27%
Small Arms' Global Reach Uproots Tribal Traditions
With Pain and Hope, Bulgaria Curbs Weapons Trade
Colombia War Highlights Arms Trade
Arms Shipments Sent to Iran Via Queens Company, U.S. Says
Milosevic ordered hiding of bodies
Forensic Team Exhumes Bodies in Bosnia
Embattled Army hit by crime wave
Where a Little Coca Is as Good as Gold
Cocaine a Consuming Problem in Brazil
New Test Developed for Drug Users
Crack Iranian troops target rockets on Israel
West Studies Iraq's Ballistic Firing of Missiles
Army erects Ulster barriers
Money Problems Abound for NASA
Navy looks at Fallon as Vieques alternative
For Tomorrow's Army, Cadets Full of Questions
Guns secret set to haunt US

OTHER
Arizona execution defied the Hague
Where Have All the Windmills Gone?
Move to Curb Biotech Crops Ignores Poor, U.N. Finds
Bush Weighs Stem Cell Decision Amid Reminders of Suffering
AIDS Deaths in Prisons Fall Sharply
China Expands Falun Gong Campaign
World Bank President Praises Putin
CIA cash funded drugs trade

ACTIVISTS
Report on Demonstration at Fylingdales
Australians Rally Against NATO


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

Britain Nuclear Accident Probed

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Britain-Nuclear-Mishap.html?searchpv=aponline

LONDON (AP) -- Spent fuel rods were accidentally dropped onto the reactor floor of a nuclear power plant in Scotland last week, its operator said Sunday.

British Nuclear Fuels stressed that the ``low-level'' incident during refueling Thursday in Chapelcross plant's Reactor No. 3 posed minimal danger.

The reactor has been shut down while the company determines how to retrieve the 24 uranium rods, a spokesman said.

The government's watchdog agency, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, has launched an investigation.

The BNFL spokesman said the rods dropped about 2 feet to the floor during the remote-operated refueling operation.

A large cylindrical basket holding the irradiated fuel elements appeared to come loose as it was being lowered to a cooling pond, he said.

Emergency workers were called in and carbon dioxide was sprayed over the basket to ensure it did not catch fire.

``At no time was there any increase in radiation within the area and no personnel were affected,'' he said. ``There is also no indication that the fuel has been damaged.''

Refueling has been suspended at all reactors in Chapelcross, just a few miles from Scotland's border with England, and at another British plant that uses an identical system.

The spokesman said it was unclear how long it would take to recover the rods and complete the refueling.

-------- germany

Hundreds remember Kohl's late wife

Lincoln Journal Star
July 8, 2001
http://www.journalstar.com/nation?story_id=5186&date=20010708&past=

FRANKFURT, Germany - Hundreds of Germans lined up in Berlin on Saturday to write in a condolence book for former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's wife, who killed herself in desperation because of a severe sunlight allergy.

A reporter who had been a friend of Hannelore Kohl, 68, wrote in the Bild daily that she had received a call from her three days before her body was found Thursday at the family house in the western city of Ludwigshafen.

Dona Kujacinski wrote that Hannelore Kohl had sounded very tired, lost and confused. Asked by Kujacinski how she was doing, the former chancellor's wife said, "Very bad."

"I just wanted to tell you that I just broke off another therapy because it also failed to help me," Hannelore Kohl told Kujacinski.

"The news of her death hit me like lightning," said one of the mourners. Although he'd never met Hannelore Kohl, the man said she was a "wonderful woman" and that he owed a lot to her husband.

"Without Helmut Kohl, the (Berlin) Wall would still be standing," he said. "Then I never would have come to the West and met my wife and had my child." Team will attempt to raise Russian sub MOSCOW - Eleven months after a Russian nuclear-powered submarine sank in the Arctic Ocean, an international team is to begin this week an attempt to raise it without triggering its torpedoes or spilling radiation from its reactors.

Officials with the Russian navy and the Dutch companies hired to lift the submarine, the Kursk, said the first divers are due in the next several days at the site above the Arctic Circle. They will race against the calendar and the onset of winter weather to recover the Kursk by late September.

During Russian naval maneuvers in the Barents Sea in August, two unexplained explosions sank the sub, killing its 118 crew members. Russian President Vladimir Putin promised crewmen's families the bodies would be recovered.

While acknowledging the risks of the operation, the officials contend they are manageable.

Critics say Russia is pressing ahead with the project too quickly. U.S. Treasury head expects rebound ROME - An upbeat U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill insisted that the gloomy global economy is poised for a rebound, telling his counterparts from the world's richest countries Saturday that people must have "some perspective" about growth.

"Higher is better, but this is not terrible," O'Neill assured his colleagues at the one-day Group of Seven, or G-7, meeting. "There is some perspective required here as to where we are."

The faltering U.S. economy should climb to growth rates above 2 percent in the fourth quarter of this year and above 3 percent next year, O'Neill predicted.

The optimistic forecast contrasts with that of many economists who expect U.S. growth for the just-completed second quarter to come in below the first quarter's 1.2 percent rate. TV station director killed in Ukraine MOSCOW - A Ukrainian television station director who had been banned from journalism and took his case to an international human rights court was beaten to death by assailants wielding bats, news reports said Saturday.

Ihor Alexandrov was attacked Tuesday at the entrance to his office in the eastern Ukrainian town of Slavyansk, the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said. He died of head injuries after three days in the hospital, Russia's ITAR-Tass and Interfax news agencies reported.

Reporters Without Borders said violence against journalists in Ukraine is now worse than in any other European country. Croatian government discusses extradition ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) - Croatia's government met in an emergency session Saturday on how to deal with the first indictments from the U.N. war crimes tribunal against its citizens for wartime atrocities against Serbs - the biggest challenge of its 18-month term.

There is little alternative for Prime Minister Ivica Racan but to act on the indictments, which call for the extradition of the suspects for trial at The Hague, Netherlands, or brace for international isolation, perhaps even sanctions.

That leaves his government in a tight spot, facing likely protests from nationalists and other Croats who hail Croat military leaders for defending the country from 1991 Serb assaults.

Seeking national consensus on such a sensitive issue, Racan first spoke to the five parties' leaders Saturday. -

-------- india / pakistan

India's rocky path to greatness

July 8, 2001
James Zirin
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010708-91512912.htm

Sonia Gandhi, leader of India's opposition Congress Party, was in New York for lunch the other day, telling the Council on Foreign Relations about how her country, a mere third world nation, could teach the United States the superpower a few things, notably how to tabulate votes accurately, how to handle political defections and how to deal with electrical power failures.

Her message was that India is on the build; that it welcomed free foreign trade; that its help will come from the brainpower and capital of the "Indian Diaspora" that left Bangalore for the riches of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and for whom it is now payback time; and that it will one day be a great power.

Mrs. Gandhi told her audience that she looks for a new regional stability stemming from the historic summit meeting with its nuclear neighbor set for July 14, when Pakistan's politically embattled President Musharraf journeys to Delhi to meet with Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee. The two are ready to discuss a package of peace measures involving the battleground Himalayan province of Kashmir, as well as most favored nation status for India, an issue that Indian officials see as a deal breaker.

But Ms Gandhi, who may well be the next prime minister if the Congress Party prevails in the next election, might be advised to consider her party's position on a few vexing economic and social issues that overshadow a country in many respects still trying to extricate itself at the margin from medieval times.

India's progress in the 54 years since independence has been uneven. One of the world's richest countries with vast arable lands, sunshine and rainfall, rivers and mineral wealth, its agricultural productivity is the lowest in the world. And with a surging population, now one billion, it has the largest number of illiterates in the world. With 36 per cent of its citizens scrabbling for a living below the poverty line, India has much to do to realize Mahatma Gandhi's dream for an independent and modern nation where Hindu and Moslem would live in brotherhood.

India needs to privatize. Its communications, transportation and banking systems are all government owned. All are grossly inefficient. When I was there in February, I heard that Indians prefer cell phones to land phones because the government owned land phone system offers unacceptable connections at exorbitant prices. Planes and trains get cancelled or delayed with routine frequency. The banking and currency systems obviously require wholesale restructuring.

India needs to ecologize. Its most sacred river, the Ganges, is a cesspool of pollution. In Agra, site of the Taj Mahal, smog caused by industrial waste is virtually unbearable. Inadequate hygienic and sanitary conditions, elaborated by the filth-ridden public lavatories of Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, are pervasive.

India needs to legalize. While Mrs. Gandhi boasted of a rule of law unparalleled in the third world, there is virtually no protection for intellectual property, a situation that deters Western drug manufacturers from selling India needed medications, particularly to combat the AIDS pandemic and indigenous manufacturers from doing research and development on new pharmaceuticals.

India needs to educate its children. It houses the largest number of the world's illiterate, over two-thirds of whom are women. While at the high end, Indians are superbly trained and assume challenging and complex roles in the new economy, more than one-half of their countrymen drop out of school before the eighth grade, particularly in rural areas. This contrasts dramatically with China where nearly all children get at least 10 years of school education.

India needs to sanitize. Over 2.2 million die each year from preventable diseases. Levels of infant mortality in India are unacceptable even for a third world nation. Health care, in both prevention and treatment, is substandard, with AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria among the leading killers. AIDS testing is not even encouraged for reasons of cost.

Most economists say that globalization with its attendant increased movement of information, capital, trade and labor is the key to India's progress. This means foreign investment; and, indeed, there has been some interest.

Bill Gates says that he is impressed with the keenness of India's politicians to use the Internet in government and education. Global heavyweights General Electric and Citicorp are also bullish on India. They see the country as a great place to do business and predict that it will move to a more central role in the global economy.

Global insurance giant AIG has recently returned to India after 30 years to invest in a joint venture marketing commercial and personal lines of property casualty insurance. AIG says that permission to market life insurance is expected shortly.

But it will take a lot more. The tensions with Pakistan have made Kashmir a nesting place for terrorists and warlords. India defies international non-proliferation consensus as it secretly amasses a nuclear stockpile and a missile arsenal.

The threat of terrorism by fundamentalist sects gives the country's airports the air of a garrison state. Couple all this with a degraded infrastructure, a caste system that perpetuates an underclass, and one senses the awesome dimension of India's problems.

And there are appalling human rights issues as well. There is a generally acknowledged mistreatment of women at all levels of society, including tolerance of the barbaric practice of dowry murder where the family of the groom feels free to murder the bride if her family reneges on the marriage's financial expectations. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, 18 to 45 per cent of husbands physically abuse their wives.

There is harassment of Christian missionaries who in certain states have been the targets of murderous attacks. And this is only one aspect of a systemic repression of non-Hindu religions that seems to pervade the country. There is a cavalier official attitude towards police responsibility for disappearances and secret cremations of Sikhs in the Punjab that journalist Patwant Singh calls "the worst genocide in independent India."

Henry Kissinger notes that India has survived through the centuries by "combining cultural imperviousness with extraordinary skill in dealing with foreigners." This explains a foreign policy that has been largely geopolitical, staying aloof from foreign entanglements not affecting its vital interests. Mr. Kissinger sees India as basing its security in the south on the cultivation of friendly regimes in the arc from Singapore to Aden and in the north on nuclear weapons for potential use against Pakistan, China or perhaps Afghanistan.

The U.S. national interest in India parallels Mrs. Gandhi's position. It is to prevent regional warfare, promote democracy and stability, expand trade and investment, and invite cooperation on a host of global challenges, ranging from fanatic Islam in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan to drug trafficking and environmental degradation.

India's polity has been described as "the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched by the American and French revolutions." But, between the momentum and the moment falls the shadow.

James D. Zirin, a lawyer, is a partner in the New York office of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood.

-------- missile defense

The Pentagon's Trojan Horse
It's Theater Missile Defense

By Geov Parrish,
In These Times,
July 8, 2001

For months the Pentagon's space warriors and the White House's space cadets have publicly fantasized about scrapping the world's arms control structure and hurtling forward with National Missile Defense (NMD): a costly, perhaps technically impossible system intended to protect the United States from attack by a long-range missile threat that--with the exception of about 20 warheads in China--doesn't exist.

"Missile defense doesn't make any sense, and everybody realizes that," says retired Rear Adm. Eugene J. Carroll of the Center for Defense Information. "The least likely threat we face is some third-rate nation developing an ICBM and launching it at the United States knowing they will get back 50 times what they send. There are all kinds of ways that are cheaper and more reliable--smuggling in a suitcase bomb, for example--to inflict harm and not be subject to instantaneous retaliation."

The idea of hitting incoming missiles with outgoing missiles as some sort of "shield"

U.S. SPACE COMMAND has been around as a Pentagon concept for at least four decades. And Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and Congress, under both parties, have steadily funded--at least $60 billion since the budget-busting "Star Wars" delusions of the '80s--the often futile research. Now, George II and his merry band of Strangelovian pranksters are pushing funding for the next generation of research (and, eventually, at least another $200 billion) by citing the missile threat of "rogue states" like North Korea or Iran and trying to develop China as a new Cold War enemy. The Bush administration is likely to get at least some of what they want. Activists have followed the noise, bracing themselves for a looming congressional battle.

But on another, perhaps more dangerous front, there's almost no vocal opposition. Theater Missile Defense (TMD) is the quiet sibling of NMD. In last year's budget, Pentagon funding for the two was about equally divided. The Clinton administration already cut a deal with Russia to create exceptions to the ABM treaty to accommodate TMD, so research is further along. And leading Democrats who have expressed reservations about NMD, like new Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D-Delaware), want to proceed full speed ahead on TMD.

TMD is more politically achievable and technically feasible, and, because it is to be deployed on land, sea, air and space around the world, much more immediately threatening to allies and potential enemies alike. When Europe, China, Russia and the rest of the world have sent up howls about the Bush administration's ballistic missile plans, TMD is what frightens them the most.

Defining the difference between NMD and TMD systems has been bugging military and arms control planners for years because while the stated intent differs, technically there isn't much difference at all. Essentially, while NMD is designed to protect the U.S. mainland from long-range missile attack, TMD is designed to protect U.S. troop deployments, bases and allies against short- and medium-range missile attacks--the kind of missiles that rogue states already have and can deploy. A 1997 ABM protocol agreement between Clinton and Boris Yeltsin defined the differences, for the purposes of arms control treaties, in two ways: by limiting a TMD system's geographic size, and by limiting the height, trajectory and speed with which missile interceptors can travel (and hence, the distance it can cover).

Like NMD, the Pentagon plans to deploy TMD facilities from as many platforms as possible: fixed sites, trucks, ships, submarines, planes and satellites. But TMD is far more flexible. If the NMD, for example, is designed to counter the North Korean threat of a long-range missile, it can't respond to a similar threat from a different country, or a different threat from the same country. Even if NMD can be made to work, it's as inflexible as it is expensive; this is why, as French President Jacques Chirac recently noted, the sword always defeats the shield. Chirac, unlike Dubya, remembers the Maginot Line.

TMD has a number of components; together, they could be deployed in Japan, for example, to protect U.S. bases from North Korea; or they could be deployed more provocatively to encircle China with platforms in Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Australia and at sea. But no single system can perform multiple duties. That's why the natural evolution for TMD systems--especially if the United States ignores the ABM treaty--is to bundle them.

The 1997 Clinton-Yeltsin agreement prohibited this, but China, Russia and Europe reason that if the Bushites intend to develop NMD anyway, they could just as easily develop TMD as a global system, intended to attack the types of cheaper, more plentiful missiles that most countries rely upon. If TMD systems around the globe are managed using a shared tracking and coordination system, the Pentagon suddenly would have a global system designed not just to protect the U.S. mainland, but as a forward, much more immediate network that could impose American will anywhere on the planet.

TMD relies upon a number of different weapons systems, one of which is already in operation (the Patriot PAC-2, a successor to the missiles deployed with such famous inaccuracy during the Gulf War). The rest are under development. They can be divided into two types: those that target missiles in the early "boost phase," and those that target missiles in later stages.

The later-stage systems also have two types of components, lower-tier and upper-tier. These are meant to be a layered approach to defend in the lower or upper atmosphere, and vary in their trajectory, speed and potential distance. Lower-tier TMD systems include the truck-mounted, short-range (600 km) Patriot PAC-2; the PAC-3, with a longer range (1,500 km) and wider area under its "shield" (40 to 50 km); the MEADS (Medium-range Extended Air Defense System); and the Navy Area Defense, a chance for another service to get in on the funding with a short-range, ship-based system capable of shielding 50 to 100 km.

Then there are the upper-tier, high-altitude TMD systems. THAAD (Theater High Altitude Area Defense), whose spectacular test failures predated those of NMD last year, is ground-based but transportable by aircraft. It includes short and medium-range missiles with a range of up to 3,500 km, and an umbrella of a few hundred kilometers.

The ship-based equivalent, with a similar range but larger shield, is the Navy Theater Wide: It can only intercept very high missiles, at an altitude above 80 to 100 km. A second generation, Navy Theater Wide Block II, is planned for after 2010. Each upper-tier system would have a larger defended area if a satellite-based missile tracking system now being developed is deployed. Unlike THAAD, which was exempted in the Clinton/Yeltsin agreement, Navy Theater Wide is being developed in violation of the ABM treaty.

All of these systems propose to use technology similar to NMD. But TMD, with its more immediate global reach, gets the Pentagon closer to where it really wants to go: space.

-The U.S. Space Command's "Vision for 2020" makes the Pentagon's intentions clear: "dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment."

- http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2517/parrish2517b.jpg

The U.S. Space Command's "Vision for 2020" pulls no punches about the intent or purpose of what the Pentagon is developing: "Dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment."

The Airborne Laser (ABL) system, a "boost phase" component of TMD, is envisioned as a high-altitude laser. Its technology dovetails with another project approved last December by the Department of Defense: the Space-Based Laser. Both eventually will be able not only to intercept missiles, but to attack fixed targets anywhere. A second space-based laser, the Alpha High-Energy Laser, is already under development and in testing.

These are the highest expressions of Theater Missile Defense, and their clear intent is to control the world. As Sen. Bob Smith (R-New Hampshire) says: "It is our manifest destiny [to control space]. You know we went from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States of America settling the continent and they call that manifest destiny, and the next continent, if you will, the next frontier, is space and it goes on forever."

The Pentagon's focus is not on the vision sold to the public of protecting the country with NMD from attack by weapons that don't exist, from dictators who won't live long enough or ever have enough money to develop them. Instead, its goal is to enforce American preferences and provide military protection for the U.S. economic regime (i.e., to "protect U.S. interests and investment"). Institutions like the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as well as pacts like NAFTA and the FTAA, are intended to enforce transnational corporate desires for economic and political policies; the Pentagon is planning to ensure that nobody, anywhere, steps out of line.

Beyond the ABM treaty, the United States plans, with much less domestic opposition, to run roughshod over another, even more basic pact: the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the fundamental international agreement on the use of space. On November 20, 2000, the U.N. General Assembly, in a resolution titled "Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space," reiterated that 1967 pact; 163 countries supported the resolution, and only three--the United States, Israel and Micronesia--abstained.

"Our affiliates in Japan, South Korea and the Middle East understand the implications [of TMD], because that's where the United States wants to deploy it first," says Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. "Developing NMD is a Trojan horse for the real Star Wars that's coming down the road."

Gagnon sees TMD, not NMD, as the route to this apocalyptic long-term vision. "[Support of TMD] seems to be endemic within the Democratic Party," he adds. "They're against NMD deployment, but they think [TMD] deployment is the way to go to protect our troops and ships, when in fact it's very much part of the U.S. first-strike policy in places like the Pacific."

And because Democrats like Biden enthusiastically support TMD under the guise of protecting U.S. troops aboard, Gagnon charges, even peace groups like Project Abolition, Peace Action and the Council for a Livable World--all of which oppose Bush on NMD--are refusing to take a stand against TMD or the R&D efforts that Gagnon predicts eventually will make some sort of space-based system inevitable.

At the conclusion of George W. Bush's tense trip to Europe in June, the United States was handed a completely predictable threat from Russian President Vladimir Putin: If the United States persists in planning to violate international ballistic missile agreements, so will Russia. One of the biggest criticisms leveled at NMD is that it will trigger a new, global arms race. That criticism has had an impact on congressional consideration of NMD, as has the price tag and the succession of favorably rigged but still disastrous test results.

Yet none of those problems seem to be slowing down the funding for research, development and deployment of TMD. In an interview after Bush's Europe trip, Biden was explicit on this point: "No one is saying don't spend the money on the research. No one is saying don't continue down this road."

Would any of it work? Who knows? TMD might not intercept missiles very well, but it will unquestionably succeed in enraging the world and enriching military contractors. The smoke you smell is a combination of your tax dollars being burned, and the torches of 6 billion angry people marching up the hill toward our castle.

For more information on Theater Missile Defense, visit the Web sites of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org), the Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org), the Council for a Livable World (www.clw.org) and the Center for Defense Information (www.cdi.org).

--------

Rumsfeld Charts Missile Defense Course

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Defense.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration wants to greatly expand the number and kinds of testing it believes is needed to build effective missile defenses, and is willing to spend billions more to do it.

In a sense, military planners have gone back to the drawing board to fulfill President Bush's goal of creating a reliable defense against ballistic missile attack on the United States, its allies and U.S. forces abroad.

The Bush administration sees no less urgency in obtaining a missile defense capability. But after months of reviewing options and studying the Clinton administration's approach, the Pentagon has decided to explore a wider range of technologies before deciding when the system could be ready for use.

``The focus of missile defense is no longer on deployment,'' says Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which manages the Pentagon's missile defense work.

The focus is on testing, and lots of it. ``It is going to be structured and disciplined,'' Lehner said.

It is also going to be expensive.

Intercept tests conducted during the Clinton administration cost about $100 million apiece. The Bush administration envisions more elaborate and more frequent tests.

The proposed 2002 defense budget submitted to Congress on June 27 provides $8.3 billion for missile defense, a nearly 40 percent increase over the current budget. It would be expected to take tens of billions more before a system is ready for use, although the administration has provided no firm figure.

For starters, the Pentagon is piecing together a plan to create a Pacific ``test bed'' -- a collection of test ranges from Fort Greeley and Kodiak Island in Alaska to Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands -- to pursue more realistic missile intercept tests.

Up to now, the only flight tests of interceptors designed to shoot down long-range missiles have involved launching an unarmed target missile from Vandenberg and trying to hit it with an interceptor launched from Kwajalein.

Just such a test is scheduled for July 14 -- the first intercept attempt in 12 months. Last July's attempt failed, and several weeks later President Clinton announced that the technology was not sufficiently mature to go ahead with deploying missile defenses.

Clinton was operating under a congressional requirement that he deploy a missile defense as soon as it was technologically feasible.

His administration chose to focus the bulk of its missile defense effort on a ground-based interceptor designed to collide with a hostile missile outside the earth's atmosphere during the midcourse of its flight. It did so because that technology is more advanced than others, such as interceptors fired from ships or lasers fired from satellites or airplanes.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has decided that the midcourse system alone is insufficient to provide global protection.

He wants to build a ``layered'' system -- a combination of missile defense weapons. Some would be designed to attack a ballistic missile in the boost phase of its flight while it is easiest to detect, others in the descent phase and still others in midcourse. Some of these anti-missile weapons would be based on land, others at sea, others possibly aboard aircraft.

``As we proceed in time, and technologies are proven or disproven, we narrow down heading toward a solution,'' the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, Pete Aldridge, told reporters late last month.

Lehner said the Pentagon is aiming for deployment sometime between 2004 and 2008, but it has not firm target date.

In its new approach, the Pentagon will not only pursue different combinations of missile defense technologies -- some well advanced, some largely untried -- but also test them in ways not done before.

For example, the Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, about 250 miles south of Anchorage, Alaska, would be used to launch target missiles over the Pacific. Kodiak also would have interceptors for test flights against target missiles launched from Vandenberg in California toward Kwajalein.

The Pentagon also would use Fort Greeley, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, as a site from which to launch ground-based interceptors at target missiles fired from an aircraft.

The government decided in 1995 to close Fort Greeley, but the 2001 defense supplemental bill before Congress now contains language permitting the secretary of defense to retain the base for missile defense purposes.

This more aggressive testing effort reflects Bush's determination to ``set aside'' the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids the testing of missile defense weaponry from other than fixed points on land. Thus the Kwajalein-to-Vandenberg approach is allowed, but not testing from aircraft or ships.

Even more fundamentally, the ABM treaty bans any missile defense that is designed to protect an entire nation.

Having declared the ABM treaty a Cold War relic, the administration plans to go ahead with testing without regard to treaty limitations, although it has not yet said definitely that it will withdraw from the treaty. It hopes to persuade the Russians to either amend it or to replace it with a new ``framework'' in which the United States, its allies and Russia could pursue missile defenses cooperatively.

The treaty's limitations are not an immediate problem because testing of the kind that would violate the limits is not likely to be ready for another year or more.

-------- russia

Raising Russian sub a delicate operation

The Seattle Times Company
Nation & World :
Sunday, July 08, 2001
By Liam Pleven
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=sub08&date=20010708

MOSCOW - Eleven months after a Russian nuclear-powered submarine sank in the Arctic Ocean, an international team this week will attempt to raise part of it without triggering its torpedoes or spilling radiation from its reactors.

Officials with the Russian navy and the Dutch companies hired to lift the Kursk, said the first divers are due in the next several days at the site, above the Arctic Circle. They will race against the calendar and winter weather to recover the Kursk by late September.

During Russian naval maneuvers in the Barents Sea in August, two unexplained explosions sank the sub, killing its 118 crew members. Russian President Vladimir Putin promised crewmen's families the bodies would be recovered.

Officials contend the risks of the operation are substantial but manageable. The salvagers will cut off the damaged nose of the sub and lift the remainder about 350 feet to the surface.

"The danger is there. ... But we think we can control this danger. Otherwise, we wouldn't do this operation," said Lars Walder, a spokesman for Smit International, a Dutch salvage company that will work with Mammoet, a Dutch company that specializes in heavy-lifting projects, and the Russian navy.

Critics say Russia is pressing ahead with the project too quickly. The Russian government decided abruptly in May to hire Smit and Mammoet after another consortium reportedly wanted to postpone the operation until next summer.

Last week, the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority requested more information about the safety precautions taken for the project and noted the risk of an environmentally damaging leak from the Kursk's two reactors, which are in the portion to be lifted.

"It is better to wait a year," said Per Strand, a spokesman for the Radiation Protection Authority. "The Barents Sea is one of the richest fishing areas in the world. ... Even small releases are unnecessary."

Russian officials and experts have said the reactors - which they believe shut down when the accident occurred - are being closely monitored.

Whether the operation will help explain what sank the Kursk is uncertain.

Some experts suggest there were problems with the torpedoes, while Russia's navy contends there might have been a collision with a foreign submarine.

But this summer's salvage effort won't include raising the front of the sub and whatever clues it might hold.

Officials with the Russian navy and the salvage companies say the nose is unstable and might snap off if it were raised with the rest of the sub.

Once raised, the back of the Kursk will be towed more than 500 miles to the Russian port of Murmansk.

There, in what might be the project's most emotionally wrenching operation, Russian officials hope to recover the bodies of 106 sailors still inside. Twelve bodies were recovered during preliminary salvage efforts last autumn.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Journalists and the Bomb

July 8, 2001 -
AFSC Peacework Magazine
http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0107/010708.htm

--Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan are graduate history students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and American University, Washington, DC, respectively. They research and write about Hiroshima and American culture. For an excellent companion piecea to this article, see "Second Guessing Hiroshima," Peacework issue 297.

Every August, the American news media note the anniversary of one of the most important events of the twentieth century--the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities. Most reporters and commentators who write about Hiroshima and Nagasaki uncritically support the popular assumption that the use of atomic bombs was absolutely necessary to end the war and save American lives. Many journalists also proclaim the widely-held but mistaken notion that only untrustworthy "revisionists" or members of the irresponsible 1960s generation have criticized the atomic bombings.

If the news media's uncritical acceptance of mass violence wasn't disturbing enough, its fondness for name-calling and half-baked historical theorizing threatens to prematurely close the debate on a deeply disturbing moment in American history.

American news analysts once knew better. In fact, many influential journalists concluded in 1945 and soon after that the use of the atomic bomb was both immoral and unnecessary. Even those with close ties to military and political leaders didn't hesitate to go public with their critical views. Consider the following:

David Lawrence, the conservative editor of U.S. News & World Report, wrote within days of the Hiroshima bombing that Japanese surrender had appeared inevitable for weeks. The claim of "military necessity," he argued, rang hollow. Official justifications would "never erase from our minds the simple truth that we . . . did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children."

A few months later, one of the most popular radio commentators during the war years, Raymond Swing, declared in an ABC broadcast that the Japanese had been "looking for an opportunity to surrender, and the testimony of various Japanese leaders indicates that some other excuses would have been found at an early date even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped."

Henry Luce, the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, raised critical questions about the atomic bombings in the late 1940s. In a 1948 speech Luce stated: "If, instead of our doctrine of 'unconditional surrender,' we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended soon without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience."

Hanson Baldwin, military editor of the New York Times, a graduate of the US Naval Academy and a staunch cold warrior, argued in a 1950 Atlantic Monthly article that ". . . the Japanese would have surrendered even if the bomb had not been dropped, had the [Allied declaration at Potsdam] included our promise to continue the Emperor upon his throne."

On the day of his retirement in 1953, Washington Post editor Herb Elliston was asked by his newspaper, "Any regrets, now that you're out from under the daily deadline pressure?" Elliston replied, "Oh yes, plenty. One thing I regret is our editorial support of the A-bombing of Japan. It didn't jibe with our expressed feeling [before the bomb was dropped] that Japan was already beaten."

In 1960 Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most respected and influential US newspaper commentator of all time, added his voice to the list of prominent media dissenters when he remarked on a CBS television program, "Japan was ready for surrender before we dropped the bombs. And in my view, we should have negotiated a surrender before we dropped them. One of the things I look back on with the greatest regret, as an American, is that we were the ones that first dropped atomic bombs."

In his 1991 memoir another New York Times journalist, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Pulitzer Prize winner James Reston, explained that "the diplomatic course was inadequately explored before the military strategy was accepted."

These are but some of the prominent media voices that were once critical of America's use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They appear in stark contrast to the now common media stereotype that opposition to the atomic bombings emerged only in the 1960s, or that critics must, necessarily, be pacifists, "revisionists," or disgruntled members of the Sixties generation.

Renewed notice of the mostly forgotten comments of such influential news analysts of an earlier generation should prompt today's journalists to rethink their uncritical acceptance of the conventional wisdom they so often dish out to the public on Hiroshima anniversaries. Only in this way will Americans be able to honestly and critically confront one of the most disturbing episodes in our nation's past.

-------- us nuc power

The Nuclear Option Revisited
As fossil fuels become scarcer, we must look to the atom's great reservoirs of energy.

Sunday, July 8, 2001
Los Angeles Times
By WILLIAM TUCKER
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20010708/t000056100.html

WASHINGTON--The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has won accolades during California's electricity shortage for keeping the lights on in Los Angeles without raising rates. Yet has anyone bothered to ask where the DWP gets its power?

More than 50% of the municipal utility's electricity comes from coal plants in Arizona, Utah and Nevada. More than 25% comes from natural-gas plants located around Los Angeles. The bulk of the remainder is split between the Palo Verde nuclear reactor in Arizona and Hoover Dam and other hydroelectric facilities. Unlike most other utilities in California, the DWP gets virtually none of its power--a mere 2%--from "alternate sources" like wind and geothermal plants. Why? The California Public Utilities Commission decided not to saddle the DWP and other municipal utilities with expensive and often unreliable alternate energy sources.

The lesson is instructive. No matter how much people talk about "conservation and solar" or "drilling for more oil and gas," the nation's real choice in generating electricity remains between coal and nuclear. In 1980, when nuclear seemed poised as the fuel of the future, we generated 51% of our electricity by burning 569 million short tons of coal. Today, we generate 56% of our electricity by burning 978 million short tons of coal. This is the principal source of our greenhouse gases.

The nuclear effort died in 1980 because of excessive costs, environmental objections and the Three Mile Island accident, which gave the technology a forbidding aura. After 20 years of lurking in the shadows, nuclear power is again emerging as a promising technology. Nuclear produces no carbon dioxide, as does coal, oil and even "clean" natural gas. Moreover, as we attempt to reduce auto emissions by switching to electric cars (as California is now mandating), an even greater energy burden will be placed on the electrical grid.

There are three main questions about nuclear energy: 1) Can reactors be made safe? 2) Is exposure to low levels of radiation dangerous? 3) Is there any way of solving the problem of nuclear wastes?

After Three Mile Island, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began an aggressive program for safety improvements. Each of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors now has a simulated control room in which operators practice and train one day out of four on the job. Ownership has shifted from passive, regulated utilities to more ambitious private energy specialists such as Exelon and Duke Power.

At first, the NRC was horrified at the idea of private ownership of reactors. In 1993, Ivan Selin, the commission chairman, warned that running reactors for a profit might create "incentives to cut corners." Today, the NRC admits it was wrong. "The industry has made tremendous strides," says Victor Dricks, spokesman for the commission. "Both the number of safety-system activations and scrams [automatic protective shutdowns] are about one-tenth of what they were in 1985."

Safety and profit, it turns out, go hand in hand. "We spend 24 hours a day thinking about safety," says Karl Neddenien, spokesman for Constellation Energy, which owns three reactors in Maryland. "If one reactor in the country had a meltdown, we'd lose our whole fleet."

Nuclear reactors now run nearly two years without shutdowns. In 2000, the nation's fleet of reactors ran at an astounding 90% of capacity. By contrast, coal plants run at 69% capacity, and oil and natural gas at less than 35%, mainly since fuel is so expensive, it pays to shut them down. Hydroelectric dams, at the mercy of rainfall and snowmelt, ran at only 40% capacity in 2000.

"Combined with the drop in uranium prices, this has made nuclear the nation's cheapest source of electricity," brags Marvin Fertel, director of business operations for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade group. "This can only improve as natural gas becomes more expensive."

While nuclear power's fuel costs drop lower, however, construction costs remain high. Gas-fired plants can still be built for $500 per kilowatt; nuclear reactors cost $2,400 per kilowatt. Even as energy companies rush to extend their reactor licenses for another 20 years, no one is proposing any new plants.

But this may also change. "Under state regulation, every new reactor has been designed from the ground up," says Fertel. "We're trying to get the NRC to approve a standard format." If nuclear reactors can be built off-the-shelf, with uniform architecture and interchangeable parts, they will become much cheaper.

One promising development is "pebble-bed" technology, invented in Germany in the 1980s. Pebble-bed reactors package their nuclear material in tens of thousands of graphite-coated spheres the size of tennis balls. A dense silicon-carbon coating ensures that no radioactive gases can escape. Because of this insulation, nuclear fuel can't overheat and cause a meltdown. The technology makes it possible to build reactors without expensive containment vessels. "We call the pebble-bed design the politically correct reactor," adds Andrew C. Kadak, professor of nuclear engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose class is working on a 110-megawatt "modular" reactor. "It's environmentally friendly."

During the 1970s and 1980s, nuclear opponents argued that the toxic effects of high doses of radiation should be extrapolated downward to the lower levels associated with nuclear plants. Such activists as John Gofman and Ernest Sternglass regularly conjured up nightmare visions of thousands of children dying from cancer within sight of a nuclear plant.

This thinking has now been discredited. In 1991, the National Cancer Institute published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that concluded there is "no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living in 197 U.S. counties containing or closely adjacent to 62 nuclear facilities." Demographic studies have shown that cancer rates are actually lower in areas with high natural radiation. People living on the Rocky Mountain Plateau receive the highest doses of background radiation in the country, yet have the lowest rates of cancer. This phenomenon has spawned a counter-theory: Higher levels of background radiation may be healthy because they may stimulate the body's genetic-repair mechanisms, just as vaccines stimulate the immune system against microbial invaders. Since living on the property line of a nuclear plant adds only 1 millirem per year to normal radiation background levels of 250-350 millirems, the whole issue seems inconsequential.

Finally, there's the problem of nuclear wastes. The Department of Energy has chosen Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a repository for long-term storage. The site is geologically stable and rises 1,000 feet above the water table. "It's a safe, solid geological repository," says Bruce Babbit, former secretary of the Interior. The real problem is political. Nevada residents don't want to be known as the nation's "nuclear dumping grounds." Yet, if the issue can be reframed in terms of a civic virtue--and if adequate financial compensation can be devised--the problem may solve itself. "At least we know where our wastes are," says Rod McCullum, project manager for used-fuel management at the Nuclear Energy Institute. "We're not dumping them into the atmosphere as coal plants do."

The best way to understand nuclear energy's potential is to recognize the significance of Albert Einstein's equation, E=mc. The formula reveals that most of the energy in the universe is locked up in matter. When nuclear energy is tapped, as is done in the sun or a nuclear power plant, the amount of energy produced is one sextillion times the amount of matter transformed, as opposed to multiples of only 10 or 100 in the release of the chemical energy stored in coal. This explains why a small handful of uranium can produce more energy than a 100-car trainload of coal.

The Earth's vast reservoirs of fossil fuels will eventually become harder and harder to access. If we are to persist as a civilization--without burning up half the Earth's furniture in the process--it seems sensible that we should avail ourselves of the much greater reservoirs of energy in the atom itself.

William Tucker Is the Author of "Progress and Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism."

-------- MILITARY

-------- africa

Ethiopia slashes defence budget by 27%

Times of India,
July 8, 2001
http://www.timesofindia.com/080701/08afrc1.htm

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia: Six months after the end of its two-year border war with Eritrea, Ethiopia slashed its defence budget by 27 per cent.

Parliament approved the 15.12 billion birr budget for 2001-2002 Friday. Of that, the defence appropriation was about 20 per cent, or 3 billion birr.

The new budget, which takes effect Saturday, was $11 million smaller than last year's.

Ethiopia's defence budget shot up to $840 million at the height of the 1998-2000 conflict. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said that Ethiopia, one of the world's 10 poorest countries, had been spending at least dlrs 1 million a day in fighting Eritrean forces over a territorial dispute that erupted in May 1998.

After a 30-year guerrilla war, Eritrea won independence from Ethiopia in 1993, but the 1,000-kilometre border was never formally demarcated.

In the budget, about $243 million is allotted to foreign and domestic debt servicing, $357 million for capital expenses, of which 70 per cent is for roads, and $40 million for education, health and other social services.

The government is expected to cover the budget mostly from tax and tariff revenues. The 5.4-billion birr deficit is expected to be covered by multilateral and regional financial institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank and bilateral donors.

Donors suspended assistance to Ethiopia during the war, but aid was resumed after a peace agreement with Eritrea last

----

Small Arms' Global Reach Uproots Tribal Traditions

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2001; Page A01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30209-2001Jul7?language=printer

KOLOWA, Kenya -- In the calculus of Africa's semi-arid and ever more violent grazing lands, there is no measuring the cost of a human life. But everything else is computed in cows.

Guns, for instance. In 1967, when the rangy, proud Pokot herdsmen of northwest Kenya bought their very first rifles, the weapons were old and heavy Lee-Enfield Mark IV guns of World War I vintage and their price was heavier still: 60 cows apiece. By 1986, the price was down to 15 cows and the rifles were more likely much deadlier AK-47s. Today those automatic Kalashnikovs run only five head of cattle each.

"Even four," said Joshua Yatta, a Pokot chief.

So it comes as no surprise that, in a society that a generation ago relied on spears to beat back rivals who attacked with poisoned arrows, the assault rifle has become the weapon of choice. "The Pokot need guns," said Yatta, whose tribe once lost hundreds of square miles and thousands of cows to raiders who got guns first.

All over the world, small, low-cost weapons are proliferating into private hands at an accelerating rate. In countries as diverse as Indonesia, Colombia, Macedonia, Somalia, Sri Lanka and Liberia, an infusion at the village level of light weapons known as "small arms" -- assault rifles and pistols, grenades and shoulder-fired rockets -- has altered life and death alike.

On Monday, delegates from close to 180 countries will sit down at U.N. headquarters to try to begin negotiating the world's first international treaty to reduce illicit trade in small arms. A draft program of action would have the conference begin crafting a global system to identify and track lines of arms supplies and to restrict production and trade to companies authorized by states.

The treaty is a favorite cause of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, a West African who has argued that the trademark weapons of the civil wars of recent times perpetuate "the cycle of violence by their mere presence."

The world today has at least 550 million firearms, according to the Geneva-based research group Small Arms Survey. Most are controlled by national armed forces or legally owned by private citizens, many of them Americans. But the driving force behind the the U.N. conference is the estimated 1 million guns in the hands of insurgents and the huge numbers -- the survey doesn't attempt an estimate -- that are illegally owned by ordinary and often impoverished people like the Pokot.

The guns are bought from the backs of trucks driven by faceless arms merchants or looted from the armories of disintegrating governments. Often they are wielded by children. UNICEF estimates that there are 300,000 child soldiers in various conflicts of the world; most often the victims of the fighting are not combatants but civilians.

As military technology, small arms are hardly advanced killing machines. But their impact often goes far beyond their role in combat. When introduced into societies such as that of the Pokot, they can have a profound effect on how people govern, discipline and feed themselves. The weapons of death change the fabric of life.

A visit to the Pokot community illustrates the point well enough: In the rocky northern reaches of the Great Rift Valley, even a warrior society has found occasion to wonder what all those guns are doing to the people they were supposed to save.

Power, which from time immemorial in African society has accrued with age, suddenly comes from the barrel of a gun. Village elders who once mulled every crucial decision are today deferring to armed "youth elders," who are often governed by hot blood. And women who formerly fashioned songs that glorified the physical strength of a generation now sing about automatic weapons.

"The gun culture has just completely undermined the principles of warfare here," said Sam Kona, a northwest Kenya native who works in conflict resolution for the British-based aid group Oxfam. "Somehow, the seat of authority has moved from the elders to the youths, and that has some very, very bad consequences for managing conflict."

The worst of those consequences exploded at dawn on March 12, when several hundred young Pokot, many carrying AK-47s, mounted a raid on the Marakwet, their neighbors to the south and west. By the time the raiders retreated back to their side of the Kerio River, the valley had been dubbed The Valley of Death. Schools, houses and shops had been torched, and most of the 47 dead were women and children, traditionally spared by a culture forbidding attacks on noncombatants.

"They did what isn't supposed to be done," said John Rutto, a young Pokot man, voicing an opinion widely expressed in Kolowa, a Pokot trading center. The raid prompted a spasm of introspection among the Pokot. Like other pastoral communities across East Africa, they have seen cattle-rustling slide from an occasionally violent but orderly tradition -- the raiders announcing their presence by drums and chants, never by ambush -- to something messier.

"Guns are changing things," said David Kakuo, 23. "The major thing is, it breaks discipline. The young ones, they don't respect elders."

"Guns created people who put away cowardice," said Jackson Kirop, also 23. "You also can end up using all your animals to buy a gun."

If you don't have a weapon, said Rutto, "your grave is open."

Among educated Pokot -- those who have been to school at all, unlike the youths who carried out the Kerio Valley raid -- opinion is divided on whether the "incident" was the nadir of a downward spiral of exceptionally nasty raiding, or a harbinger of something more sinister just getting started.

But no one is really talking about giving up guns. After the Kerio Valley slaughter, the Kenyan government declared an amnesty period for turning in weapons, which after all are illegal in Kenya. The grand total surrendered: one.

"It is not about saving a way of life," said Yatta, the local Pokot chief, of the pastoralist love affair with the rifle. "It is about saving our lives."

Yatta, at 32, bridges the Pokot experience before and after firearms. He was born when boyhood was marked by graduating from herding stick, at age 6, to shooting bow and arrow at age 8, to receiving a spear in a ceremony that announced him as a man, at age 18. Even so, a Pokot man might not be allowed along on a raid until he was 30.

All that began to change in the early 1970s, when the sound that Yatta's parents had warned him about -- the rip of gunshots that the Pokot verbalize as tool-tool -- sent him and his family into the bush at dawn. A fierce rival tribe from the north, the Turkana, were driving the Pokot ever-farther south. They were using guns they had been given decades earlier by Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II, who was fighting Italian invaders.

In Kenya, British colonial overseers had long prevented the nomadic Turkana from using these weapons, brutally enforcing a ban on intertribal fighting that northern Kenyan communities remember today with nostalgia. After the country's independence in 1963, the Kenyan government managed less well, and by the time Yatta's family stopped running, the Turkana had chased the Pokot scores of miles.

The running ended because the Pokot, in turn, upgraded their armory. The handful of World War I Lee-Enfields they had acquired in the 1960s were discarded in the 1970s for AK-47s. Ethiopia and Somalia were at war, and the light, hardy Kalashnikovs spilled into Kenya, which shares a border with each. Other AK-47s were brought down from neighboring Sudan, home of another long-running civil war.

But the biggest haul came from Uganda, where the chaotic war to depose dictator Idi Amin opened an arms depot to the populace at large.

The balance of terror eventually quieted the conflict with the Turkana in the 1980s.

At that point, the Marakwet, the foes of the Pokot in the March violence, were not yet enemies. Herding communities generally raid other herders, and the Marakwet, settled in the relative lushness of the Kerio Valley, were essentially farmers. They lived peacefully beside the Pokot, trading and intermarrying, until a Marakwet shot a poisoned arrow into a Pokot during a drunken argument in 1991. The Pokot mounted an avenging raid, and in ensuing years there were sporadic skirmishes stoked by tribal politicians on both sides.

"We have had several peace meetings with the Marakwets, but the only people who attend them are old people," Yatta complained. "The young just say, 'So you went to a meeting, what is the good of that?' "

The Marakwets make the same complaints.

Schools around Tot, the Marakwet town closest to the Pokot side, have recently seen something extraordinary in Africa: more female than male pupils. Young men have been dropping out to become moran, or warriors. Many in the once-peaceful community have even adopted the warrior-culture Pokot custom of wearing bead necklaces. A string of white beads means you have killed.

As a local official recently drove by a meeting of Marakwet elders -- several dozen wizened figures, resplendent in colored beads, brass earrings and huge tin lip studs -- she dismissed a reconciliation effort with the Pokot as preliminary at best.

"The person who is killing people is the boss, not us," said the official, Lydia Bailengo, a councilor in Tot. "We will have to consult with the youth elders to see if they will support the effort."

The Marakwet have guns now, too. The story is that they got the first from a Pokot arms dealer, Domotepa Kamarkorot, who crossed the river in 1997 and sold a bundle of Kalashnikovs to his enemies, who then shot him dead with their new purchase. The incident provoked a fresh round of fighting.

"It is strange," Yatta acknowledged. "He was a traitor to the Pokot. But the Pokot said, 'Why did you have to kill him?' "

In its bitter illogic, the incident presaged the appalling March raid on the Kerio Valley. Its roots lay in last year's drought, which thinned the Pokot's elderly and sent the tribe's cattle from parched Pokot lands into the better-watered valley to graze. There, the cows were confiscated by Marakwet, who proceeded to do what no pastoralist tribe would think of doing: They slaughtered the hump-backed beasts by the hundreds.

"Because we don't want to take care of cows for the Pokot to come and take them back, it is better for us to eat them," said Bailengo, the councilor. "You could go house to house to house and meet meat in every house."

The Pokot were infuriated. By slaughtering the cows, the Marakwet had "broken the rules of this game," Yatta said. Young Pokot men picked up their guns and crossed the river to attack. By killing women and children, they too broke rules.

Afterward, the Pokot raiders were nowhere to be found. The Pokot said they had gone to "cleanse themselves," smearing themselves with waste from a black goat and exiling themselves from their families for one month. The ritual is a solemn tradition that must follow taking a life.

But Kona, the Turkana who now makes peace for Oxfam, said the cleansing ritual is seldom observed faithfully now that guns have made life so cheap. And as one elder recently told him, the trauma that goes unpurged remains to torment the killer, and keeps his guiding spirits out of balance.

"They say a generation of mad people is growing," Kona said. "These people just kill and kill."

-------- arms sales

With Pain and Hope, Bulgaria Curbs Weapons Trade

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2001; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31704-2001Jul7?language=printer

KAZANLUK, Bulgaria -- Through the 1990s, the weapons factories of this decaying industrial town and others like it in Bulgaria churned out a broad selection of reliable, low-cost "small arms" -- AK-47s, mortars, mines -- for sale to outlaw governments and rebel armies around the world.

In 1997 and 1998, for instance, 37 flights operated by a transport airline called Air Cess left the Black Sea city of Burgas carrying Bulgarian-made military equipment, ostensibly for a legal sale to the West African nation of Togo. The weapons never got there; United Nations investigators say they ended up in Angola in the hands of the UNITA insurgent army.

Cash from such deals provided desperately needed income for a shrinking weapons industry that sought new markets, however suspect, following the collapse of communism and a variety of Soviet-bloc customers.

But today, the Bulgarian government has cracked down on arms trafficking in a major way, officials in that government and Western diplomats here say. The stinging revelations of a U.N. investigation, together with Bulgaria's desire to join NATO and the European Union, helped push it toward that economically painful step.

In the past 18 months, foreign arms sales have dropped to about $100 million a year -- a 90 percent decline from the country's peak years under communism, according to Western officials who have spoken to executives at the Bulgarian arms-trading company Kintex.

Defense workers grumble -- 1,000 here in Kazanluk have lost jobs in the last nine months alone -- and the country's struggling post-communist economy is being pinched further by the loss of income. But political leaders say they are determined to create a new image for the country and a respectable place in the world economy.

As delegates from close to 180 countries gather at the U.N. headquarters in New York this week to try to negotiate a worldwide treaty regulating trade in small arms, a key goal will be to create more cases like Bulgaria, a major producer that has weaned itself away from the illegal arms trade, according to Western diplomats.

Under communism, Bulgaria became an important maker of small arms in the Soviet bloc, supplying Warsaw Pact countries, Soviet client states in the Third World and Soviet-sponsored rebel groups. At its peak in the 1980s, the Bulgarian defense industry produced $1 billion worth of arms annually, and only 5 percent of them were for the domestic market.

Arms accounted for 10 percent of Bulgaria's total exports. The industry employed 115,000 people with another 400,000 workers dependent on it through subcontracting and supplies.

With the fall of communism, traditional arms markets collapsed too and contracts were not honored. In 1992, the country had an estimated $800 million worth of surplus arms on hand and production lines that continued to pump out light weapons.

As the industry contracted, losing 85,000 jobs over 10 years, it tried to diversify into civilian products. For instance, Arsenal, the major factory in Kazanluk, which is famous for its Kalashnikov assault rifle, began making machine tools as well.

But industry executives also looked for new places to sell the products they made best: weapons. And in a world where legitimate buyers were increasingly demanding NATO-standard equipment, that often meant selling into underground markets.

In the 1990s, Bulgarian small arms reached countries under international sanctions, such as Iraq and Libya, warring factions in the former Yugoslavia, genocidal forces in Rwanda and separatist guerrillas in West Bengal, Yemen, Angola and Sri Lanka, to name just a few illicit destinations, according to Western diplomats, U.N. investigations and human rights groups.

In another completed deal, 70 tons of Bulgarian-manufactured Kalashnikovs were parachuted to religious militants in India, according to Human Rights Watch and other international monitors. There was even an attempt to sell surface-to-air missiles to a Colombian drug cartel.

"Bulgaria has earned a reputation as an anything-goes weapons bazaar where Kalashnikov assault rifles, mortars, antitank mines, ammunition, explosives and other items are available for a price -- no matter who the buyers are or how they might use the deadly wares," wrote Human Rights Watch in a report on the trade in the 1990s.

When called to account, Bulgaria claimed it was duped by forged end-user certificates, the basic documents that validate legitimate sales. Repeatedly, Bulgarian officials argued that if weapons were diverted to a third party once they were beyond Bulgaria's borders, Bulgaria was not responsible.

"You can control the first buyer, but then you lose track," said Ivan Ivanov, the former director of Arsenal, where Kalashnikovs sell for about $120 each wholesale.

The putative Togo deal was typical of the sales in those days. The equipment never reached Togo but Bulgarian authorities later turned over to U.N. investigators a list of what was put on board the Air Cess planes. The list included: 20,000 mortar bombs, 6,300 antitank rockets, 1,000 rocket launchers, 790 assault rifles, 500 antitank launchers, 100 antiaircraft missiles and nearly 15 million rounds of ammunition.

Bulgaria had received 18 end-user certificates for the arms signed by Col. Assani Tidjani, formerly army chief of staff and later defense minister of Togo. Many were sent by express mail from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, by a man named Victor Bout, the Russian owner of Air Cess, according to the U.N. investigation. Forensic examinations later showed that the Togo end-user certificates supplied by Bout were all forgeries based on a genuine document that Togo, a supporter of the UNITA rebels in Angola, had handed over to one of UNITA's senior arms procurers, Marcelo Moises Dachala, in 1997. Investigators concluded that UNITA was almost certainly the ultimate recipient of the guns.

"The U.N. report scared . . . Bulgaria and they've cleaned up their act," said a senior Western diplomat in Sofia, the capital. "It was always a matter of political will and word going down the line that it had to stop. . . . And we have no intelligence of illegal shipments in the last 18 months."

In April, the Bulgarian government listed 20 countries under U.N. or EU embargoes to which it would not sell arms. But it has still failed to pass promised legislation tightening the processes governing arms exports.

Officials here said the country is already using the proposals in the planned law, including lengthy risk assessments of arms delivery to certain countries, stringent review of end-user certificates and verification of delivery.

"We've taken these measures as a result of this unpleasant case," said Bojidar Penchev, head of the defense industry department at the Ministry of Economy in Sofia, referring to the Togo incident. Christo Antansov, another official at the ministry, said that in the last year the new administrative checks have led the country to reject 20 arms deals valued at several million dollars in total.

But "it's not over for Bulgaria," cautioned Lisa Misol, author of the Human Rights Watch report, whose organization is also examining arms sales by the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania. "All the changes are administrative changes that are not formalized in law, and can be reversed. It still depends on the goodwill of the authorities."

In depressed Bulgarian cities that depend on the defense industry, there is still intense economic pressure to keep the factories open and the weapons flowing. And there is widespread suspicion that foreign economic interests, not any concern for peace in the Third World, are driving the local defense industry into the ground.

Kazanluk, a city of 60,000, was once a boomtown famous for guns and roses, the latter grown in the surrounding agricultural land and sold to international fragrance manufacturers. Today the central Bulgarian city has a 30 percent unemployment rate, its decaying smokestacks testament to fading industrial glory.

The criticism "was a U.S. plot to eliminate Bulgaria from the arms market," said Matei Karastoyanov, 58, who worked at Arsenal for 31 years making springs for Kalashnikovs. "Now the Americans have taken over what used to be the Bulgarian market niche. The whole policy of the U.S. was to finish off the Bulgarian defense industry in exchange for promises of NATO membership." U.S. officials deny such charges.

Kazanluk Mayor Stephan Dervishev noted bitterly, however, that the United States is the world's leading arms merchant and in the 1980s sent weapons to rebels in Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

"Our Kalashnikovs are the best in the world," he said, "but now we can only sell where we are allowed to sell."

----

Colombia War Highlights Arms Trade

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Colombia-Arms-Trade.html

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- The smuggling operation showed how fueling a war in Colombia can be nearly as easy as stepping into a Miami gun shop.

Colombian arms dealers in the United States on tourist visas purchased assault rifles in Miami shops, packed them in bubble wrap and sent them home on cargo flights, listed as machinery parts.

Their destination: guerrillas trying to overthrow the South American country's elected government.

The smuggling operation, which Colombian and U.S. officials say was operating during 1997 and 1998, illustrates just one of the myriad ways that black market weapons elude national and international controls to fuel the violence of Colombia's 37-year civil war, rampant drug trafficking and sky-high common crime.

The smuggling network from Miami to the Caribbean city of Barranquilla was also one tiny link in a global small arms trafficking problem that will be the focus of unprecedented attention with the start of a U.N. conference in New York on Monday.

The 11-day conference, presided over by a Colombian diplomat, aims to combat an illicit trade believed to be worth billions of dollars a year and contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths in conflict zones from Africa to Latin America.

The impact is severe in Colombia, with more than 3,000 people killed in the civil conflict annually and one of the world's highest per capita homicide rates.

Many of the guns flowing into Colombia are left over from civil wars fought during the 1980s in Central America or come from stockpiles in the former Soviet bloc. In recent years, authorities have seized handguns and assault rifles from the United States, Brazil, China, North Korea, Bulgaria and Romania.

Some recent high-profile cases:

-- A fugitive Brazilian trafficker was caught in the Colombian jungles in April, accused of trading guns for cocaine with the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

-- Peruvian authorities are investigating allegations that disgraced former spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos arranged for at least 10,000 AK-47 assault rifles Peru purchased from Jordan to be diverted to the FARC in an airdrop last year.

-- Colombia's top rightist paramilitary leader claimed last year that he had arranged to purchase a large cache of Chinese-made arms from traffickers in Suriname, but that the FARC outbid him for the shipment once it arrived via Brazil.

The U.S. government has provided Colombia army counterdrug battalions with grenade launchers, mortars and M-60 machine guns as part of a $1.3 billion aid plan. There have been no reported cases of selloffs of U.S.-provided weapons by corrupt soldiers.

With coasts along two oceans, long chains of Andean mountains and rivers, and 3,700 miles of sparsely populated borders with five different countries, Colombia is particularly vulnerable to smuggling.

The number of illegal firearms confiscated here grew from about 23,000 in 1994 to 42,000 last year, according to police. Ten times that amount are believed to be entering the country undetected.

Colonel Alberto Ruiz, director of the DIJIN, Colombia's judicial police force, says intelligence-sharing by Colombia's neighbors has helped stem arms trafficking, but that more far-reaching measures are needed.

``We really need wider accords with countries that manufacture the guns, to try to get more control over the legal sale of weapons,'' says Ruiz, ``Because most illegal arms begin as legal arms.''

The assault rifles being shipped from Miami to Barranquilla were headed for the National Liberation Army, Colombia's second largest rebel band, according to Detective Edgar Gonzalez of the DAS state security agency.

Colombian intelligence officials intercepted a phone conversation in February 1997 revealing a sale about to occur. Agents pounced on a house outside the city and captured dozens of Kalashnikov assault rifles.

The smugglers got away, but Colombian officials with the help of the U.S. Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms traced the weapons' serial numbers back to sales made a several Miami gun shops, Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said authorities have traced more than a hundred assault rifles seized here from rebels and criminal gangs back to the Miami purchases. ATF officials said they believe the group purchased at least 600 assault rifles in the United States.

The five Colombians involved in the smuggling operation are now behind bars -- three here and two in the United States. But authorities acknowledge they may barely have dented the flow of illegal U.S. arms into Colombia.

``There are an estimated 200 million firearms in the United States and they are readily available for purchase,'' said Scott Pickett, the ATF's chief of international programs in a phone interview from Washington. ``This makes working these trafficking cases very difficult,'' he added.

--------

Arms Shipments Sent to Iran Via Queens Company, U.S. Says

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By STEPHANIE FLANDERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/world/08INDI.html

A German businessman has been arrested by United States Customs agents in Arizona and accused of exporting parts for military aircraft to Iran using a Queens-based freight company.

The suspect, Gunter Kohlke, 64 was arrested on Thursday after a two-year undercover operation involving Customs agents and Commerce Department investigators in Tucson, Ariz., New York and other cities, officials said.

Dean Boyd, a Customs Service spokesman, said that agents considered Mr. Kohlke "a very significant target" because he was believed to have been exporting military equipment from the United States for more than a decade.

Customs officials said that they had started investigating Mr. Kohlke after a tip from a Tucson business in early 1999. An agent then posed as an aircraft-parts supplier. That operation and further work by federal agents in New York City resulted in an 11-count felony indictment by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn on June 28.

The indictment, which charges Mr. Kohlke with conspiracy, said that from 1996 to 1999 he illegally exporting gearshafts and machine gun parts for military helicopters through New York to his company in Switzerland, Aircraft Components AG. Prosecutors said that he would then send the parts to Iran.

According to the indictment, Mr. Kohlke used a Jamaica, Queens freight-forwarding company, Modern Aire Expeditors, to ship the parts to Switzerland. But prosecutors have not suggested that Modern Aire knowingly conspired in any crime. The company did not respond to a message left yesterday seeking comment.

In addition to conspiracy charges, Mr. Kohlke has been charged with violating the Arms Export Control Act, which requires exporters to obtain a license to ship such components from the United States, and the Emergency Economic Powers Act, which prohibits most commercial exports to Iran.

Kyle Barnett, an assistant special agent for the Customs Service in Tucson, said Mr. Kohlke was arrested on Thursday after undercover agents persuaded him to meet with them, ostensibly on business, before a planned trip to Florida.

"He flew into the U.S. from Switzerland to attend an air show, and we were able to persuade him to come and meet with us," Mr. Barnett told The Arizona Daily Star when the indictment was unsealed Friday.

Mr. Kohlke is being held in Tucson pending a court hearing on Tuesday. He will be transferred to New York before facing trial.

Customs officials said that the source of the tip, a Tucson-based company that has not been named, alerted agents to Mr. Kohlke's activities after he asked the business to test several gearshafts for a Chinook CH-47 military helicopter. The request was suspicious because it was for an older model that is no longer used by United States forces.

-------- balkans

Milosevic ordered hiding of bodies

Bob Graham, Belgrade and Tom Walker
UK Sunday Times
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/07/08/stifgneur02004.html?

THE former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic ordered the bodies of hundreds of civilians murdered in Kosovo to be dug up, driven to Belgrade and reburied to conceal atrocities during Nato's airstrikes two years ago, war crimes investigators have established.

Officials from the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia believe their evidence that Milosevic initiated one of the biggest cover-ups of mass murder since the second world war will help prosecutors secure a life sentence at the end of his trial in the Hague.

Milosevic ordered the removal of butchered men, women and children from the killing fields of Kosovo during a meeting at the "white house", his presidential palace, on March 30, 1999, six days after Nato's bombing began.

The corpses of ethnic Albanians murdered by state-run Serbian paramilitary groups were hastily exhumed and taken by truck for disposal in the heart of Serbia. Investigators have unearthed 150 bodies that were reburied by Serbian forces. They expect to find up to 650 others at one site alone.

"In a war marked by inhuman deeds, the digging up of the civilians who had been killed by Milosevic's military and paramilitary groups marked the dirtiest deed of them all," said one investigator.

A prosecution source said the order to conceal the murders showed that Milosevic was "as guilty as if he'd pulled the trigger".

Milosevic, who made a defiant first appearance before the Hague tribunal last week, took his fateful decision as air-raid sirens wailed over Belgrade, heralding a sixth consecutive night of Nato attacks.

Around a new mahogany table in the palace, he scowled at his inner circle. His country's only white-goods factory had been blown up that day, radar stations had toppled and critical fuel stocks had been engulfed in flames. In Kosovo, army and police bases lay in ruins.

Milosevic was not going to give in to Nato, that much was certain. But, according to the prosecutors, he realised his ruthless repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians was out of control. More than 200,000 troops and police were in the province and far too many civilians were being killed.

He gazed at his three most trusted acolytes: Nikola Sainovic, the political apparatchik co-ordinating policy in Kosovo, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, who headed the interior ministry and its murky security substratum, and Rade Markovic, chief of state security. Then he calmly gave his order.

"All civilians killed in Kosovo have to be moved to places where they will not be discovered," he said. Milosevic called the operation Asanacija, a Serbian word with a chilling connotation that implies the sanitisation of an area.

Government sources in Serbia say the tribunal's information appears to have come from a senior officer questioned after Milosevic's fall from the Yugoslav presidency last autumn.

By the end of March 1999, Milosevic knew that Nato spy satellites had already pinpointed at least seven mass graves in Kosovo. He was determined to outwit any war crimes investigation that might follow at the end of the conflict.

The Asanacija plan went into immediate effect. At his interior ministry building in Kneza Milosa Street - destroyed days later by six Nato Tomahawk missiles - Stojiljkovic called in his senior officers, including General Vlastimir Djordjevic, and passed the order down the chain of command.

Within 48 hours, regional commanders were organising the appalling task of digging up the often hideously mutilated bodies. The first week of the war had seen much of the ugliest killing, as Serbs in the province responded brutally to what they saw as Nato's support for their enemies in the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.

Passions spilt over and for local thugs and outside paramilitaries alike the opportunity for retribution was irresistible. It was their dirty work that had to be mopped up and many civilians were quickly mobilised for a task that would leave psychological scars.

Mass graves were be dug up and the bodies moved to Serbia to conceal atrocities

At least 15 of those involved in exhuming and transporting the bodies have been interviewed. "Some could not wait to say what they had seen and had done. They had held it inside themselves for more than two years and they had taken it very hard," said Dragan Karleusa, a senior detective.

He said the men were ordered to keep the reburials to themselves or face violent reprisals.

Experienced tribunal investigators say the prosecution's greatest challenge in investigating Milosevic has been an almost total lack of written commands from the former president.

However, the testimony compiled is felt by one senior prosecutor to be "sufficient already to obtain a certain conviction". Paperwork handed over from two key ministries in recent weeks has helped to confirm the extent of Milosevic's involvement in the Kosovo brutality, the tribunal sources say. It is understood that American reconnaissance planes intercepted telephone calls made by Milosevic and his advisers.

Hague prosecutors and police investigators in Belgrade have proved together that many of the bodies removed from Kosovo came from two places: Suva Reka and Srbica.

The ultimate fate of those massacred in a cafe in Suva Reka has been uncovered in a field just north of Belgrade, at the Batajnica training base of the much-feared SAJ anti-terrorist unit, the frontline fighters of Milosevic's war in Kosovo.

The first mass grave opened there by forensic experts has yielded 36 bodies comprising 14 women, 13 men - most of them elderly, eight children and a foetus aged 7Å months. Old Yugoslav identity documents have confirmed that they were from Suva Reka, with seven of the victims coming from the same street.

Today the forensic teams will return to Batajnica to open a second mass grave. Altogether there are thought to be five in the wooded compound next to the Danube.

Other grave sites from the Asanacija programme have been located in the east and centre of the country. With the exception of bodies dumped in a bomb crater on the main motorway south from Belgrade, the grave sites were all on land used by the SAJ.

Investigators believe that the Asanacija programme will strengthen the cases against Stojiljkovic and Sainovic, both of whom have been indicted by the Hague on the same crimes-against-humanity charges faced by Milosevic. Investigators are hoping that a written command by Stojiljkovic for the transportation and reburial can be found among interior ministry documents.

The evidence against Sainovic is powerful and includes transcripts of intercepted telephone calls made when he was in charge of political affairs in Kosovo. The electronic bugging of Sainovic's calls by American intelligence channels picked up an order for Serbian forces to "go in hard" against Albanians in Racak in January 1999. The slaughter of 45 ethnic Albanians that followed set in motion the Rambouillet peace talks, whose failure triggered Nato's intervention.

Western financiers have suggested that the release of further aid money to Yugoslavia could be made conditional on the handover of Milosevic's inner circle, although the Hague insists that its "most wanted" list is still topped by Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, and Ratko Mladic, his senior general.

The two have been in hiding since the end of the Bosnian war in 1995. Rumours emanating from the wooded valleys near the east Bosnian town of Foca suggest that Karadzic has shaved off his bushy hair, has grown a long beard and has taken to dressing in the robes of the Orthodox priesthood.

Mladic, however, remains protected by the Yugoslav government. Last week The Sunday Times visited his home in a western suburb of Belgrade where, for the past three years, he has been given refuge in a heavily fortified villa.

At 119 Blagoja Parovica, a four-storey house in a quiet cul-de-sac, armed guards spring into the path of any unwelcome visitors. When a photographer attempted to take a picture of the house, the cameras were confiscated.

"You are not welcome here; just go before you have much bigger trouble," threatened one of a team of armed guards who identified themselves as officers of the Yugoslav army.

The war crimes tribunal is believed to have watertight cases against both Mladic and Karadzic. However, Karadzic has sent dossiers to the Hague detailing what he claims to be evidence of his innocence. He is said by his lawyers to be especially keen to distance himself from the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which up to 7,000 Muslims died.

Military sources say radio transcripts suggest Karadzic had no warning of a rampage by Mladic's troops through the UN "safe haven". The tapes reveal him screaming at Mladic: "I want to know what the hell's going on."

"F* you, this is a military matter," comes the reply.

Four Croatian ministers, including the deputy prime minister and defence minister, resigned late last night after the government voted to arrest and hand over Croatian generals indicted as war criminals to the Hague court.

----

Forensic Team Exhumes Bodies in Bosnia

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bosnia-Mass-Graves.html

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Forensic experts have recovered more than 100 sacks of human remains from several mass graves in eastern Bosnia, an official from the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons said Sunday.

Murat Hurtic said the victims are believed to be Muslims from Srebrenica, the site of one of the most horrific atrocities during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.

Forensic experts, who have been working on the exhumations for several weeks, said it would not be possible to determine exactly how many bodies were in the graves or to identify any of the victims until DNA analyses had been completed.

In the latter part of the Bosnia war, Srebrenica was declared a safe haven by the United Nations, and thousands of Muslims flocked to the town to escape Serb attacks. Then, in July 1995, Bosnian Serb soldiers rounded up and executed up to 8,000 men. Six years later, thousands are still unaccounted for.

Sarajevo authorities announced last week that a commemoration service for the Srebrenica victims would be held July 11 in the town. A marble stone with the inscription 'Srebrenica, July 1995' will be unveiled to mark the site where victims of the massacre will be reburied.

Officials have organized more than 100 buses to return some 5,000 Muslims to their prewar hometown for the ceremony. Srebrenica is now located in the Serb-held part of Bosnia.

Some 1,200 local police officers supported by international police units and NATO-led troops deployed in Bosnia will be on hand to provide security for the unveiling.

During Bosnia's 1992-95 war, some 200,000 people were killed and another 20,000 are still missing and are presumed dead.

-------- britain

Embattled Army hit by crime wave
Official statistics may hide full extent of surge in serious - sometimes horrific - offences by servicemen

Jason Burke, chief reporter
Sunday July 8, 2001
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,518468,00.html

Servicemen are committing tens of thousands of crimes a year, including serious offences such as rape and murder, an Observer investigation has revealed.

A new study by Dasa, the Ministry of Defence's statistics agency, shows that an average of 6,000 personnel from the three services are punished in military or civilian courts each year.

More than a third are given custodial sentences or dismissed, but experts say only a fraction of cases reaches the courts. The figures will embarrass the military, still striving to improve its image to attract recruits and protect its £23 billion budget.

Senior officers have been shaken by a spate of violent crime, much of it horrific, involving British troops. Recent cases include the alleged rape of a male Dutch corporal by two British soldiers at an army base in Bosnia in June, and the alleged killing of a 14-year-old boy in a clash between SAS and Gurkha personnel in Belize in May.

In February a Fijian serving with the Highland Regiment assaulted an 80-year-old woman while serving in Germany and 40 Royal Highland Fusiliers were disciplined after a drunken brawl with Turkish immigrants when Glasgow Rangers played the Turkish side Galatasaray.

The figures reveal that in 1999 more than 2,000 servicemen, not counting officers or NCOs, received custodial sentences or were dismissed by courts martial, civilian courts or at summary trials. Some 3,600 offenders from the Army alone were found guilty of an offence, one in 23 of its 83,600 trained 'other ranks'. Though the Ministry says there has been no rise in convictions for years, legal experts say the figures may hide an increase.

Robert Peterson, a lawyer specialising in military offences, said he was frequently contacted by the Military Police's Special Investigations Branch when cases it has worked on for months are dropped for lack of resources.

'Many of my clients have made successful claims after incidents that the Army were unable or unwilling to properly investigate. Such incidents don't get anywhere near the statistical record,' he said. 'These figures are just the tip of the iceberg.'

Experts also say that many soldiers who have committed more serious crimes are charged merely with a 'disciplinary offence'. There were 3,537 such convictions in 1999, the most recent year for which figures are available. Military sources said many of them were for 'having dirty boots or being late on parade'.

However, in 1999 there were more than 800 convictions for 'violence against the person', 300 for theft, robbery and burglary and nearly 160 for criminal damage.

In that year, 1,342 soldiers were convicted of unauthorised absence or desertion. Absenteeism has been a consistent problem. Earlier this year The Observer revealed that the problem is worse than at any time since the end of National Service. The huge number of soldiers going absent threatens to jeopardise the military's ability to meet combat and peacekeeping obligations.

The Army is stretched by heavy commitments overseas and has suffered acute recruitment problems. Some blame bullying and an unrelenting 'macho' culture. In March four soldiers from the Welsh Guards were jailed after admitting attacking soldiers from a rival unit with pick-axe handles. In May a court heard allegations that two drunken army instructors in Devon had forced a rookie soldier to eat cold kebabs by punching and kicking him. Senior officers called the Dasa statistics 'deceptively dramatic'.

'Our well-disciplined forces are the best in the world, there has been no upward trend over the years, and our fine record of achievement and public spiritedness should not be obscured by the actions of a few,' one MoD source said. 'Only a very small minority of the offences are serious. We have a very high clear-up rate and always insist on the very highest standards of discipline.'

The vast majority of servicemen are men aged between 18 and 25, the social group most prone to offending in civilian life.

The armed forces are going through a period of profound change and that is generating tensions. 'We all want a humane and pluralistic army that is culturally close to society as a whole,' one infantry officer told The Observer recently. 'But we also have to produce fighting soldiers who are prepared to suffer enormously and kill people in horrible circumstances.'

Academics say that, like all 'closed societies', the Army finds reform difficult.

jason.burke@observer.co.uk

-------- colombia

Where a Little Coca Is as Good as Gold

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/weekinreview/08FORE.html

THE DRUG CENTER, the only pharmacy in the stiflingly hot jungle town of Camelias, deep in southern Colombia, looks ordinary, with wide glass counters and shelves stacked high with medicines. Then the customer pays the bill.

The customer produces one of the clear plastic bags in which people here carry around coca paste. The pharmacist, Socrates Solis, scoops out a bit of the paste, weighs it on a digital scale and gives back change - the excess he had ladled out.

Welcome to the Caguan River valley, a swath of jungle towns and coca fields in far-flung Caqueta province, a part of Colombia with no government presence, only guerrillas. The economy is built on coca production, and coca paste has become a main currency.

In the pharmacy, for example, everything is priced in grams. Expensive antibiotics retail for 45 grams, worth roughly $36; a bottle of aspirin costs a little more than a gram, or $1; medical exams are given to prostitutes for 12 grams, or $10.

"I was speechless when people would drop by the pharmacy and pay for the doctor's bills or their medicines with coca instead of money," Mr. Solis, 35, told the photographer Carlos Villalon when he visited the town. "The first three months I worked here we collected six and a half kilos of base."

In this part of Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia run things, patrolling roads, punishing law breakers, even building bridges over creek beds. Perhaps most controversially, the rebels regulate and tax a thriving trade in coca leaves and coca paste. Traffickers buy the paste, process it into cocaine and ship it by the ton to quench the United States' insatiable appetite for the drug. It is a business that President Andrés Pastrana's government says fortifies the rebel army and helps fuel Colombia's brutal civil conflict.

But in a dozen towns in the region, coca paste is seen in much less nefarious terms. Paper money is in short supply, since conventional businesses are few. Instead, everything revolves around coca, as evidenced by thousands of acres of coca fields and the coca-processing laboratories in the jungles.

It is not unusual for people to be paid for their work in coca. They, in turn, pay for necessities with the paste, which is soft and powdery like flour. Need a pair of shoes for the little one? El Combate general store in Sante Fe takes coca paste. Groceries at Los Helechos in the village of Peñas Coloradas? Just drop the powder on the scale, the merchant says with a smile.

It feels quite normal for Wilber Rozas, 34, of Peãs Coloradas to spend 1.08 grams (worth 90 cents), for a large glass of juice at the Peñas Juicery. Or for villagers at the annual festival in Santa Fe to lug bags of coca paste to buy clothing from traveling salesmen or to bet in the cock fights. "I would like to always take cash, but if I do not receive coca base I might as well shut down my restaurant," said Selmira Vasquez, who owns the Buenos Aires restaurant in Peñas Coloradas.

As a currency, the coca paste is as good as gold. When traffickers arrive every few weeks to buy coca paste, they pay with a wad of bills - and soon money is flowing again. The merchants have cash. So do workers. The value of the paste, however, is unpredictable.

"The price of paste can go up or down, like having money in the bank," explained Ms. Vasquez. "When the dealers show up, the prices could be lower or higher than when I bought, so it is like gambling."

The region's bartering system does not mean the inhabitants themselves are cocaine addicts or gang members. The rebels keep the peace by prohibiting drug consumption. Those who violate the ban end up on road- paving or bridge-building duty.

The guerrillas also forbid those most susceptible to drug use - the young, single men who have come from across Colombia to pick coca leaves - to be paid in coca paste. They receive coupons they can cash once the traffickers arrive with money.

"That is the way it works in the Caguan river region," explained Jose Sosias, 28, a villager. "We are a coca culture. Our money, some times during the year, is coca base but we just use it as currency. No one here consumes the drug."

-------- drug war

Cocaine a Consuming Problem in Brazil
Drug-Fueled Violence Turns Slums Into Urban Battlefields

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28372-2001Jul6?language=printer

RIO DE JANEIRO -- There is a deadly new drug problem in Latin America's largest country: cocaine consumption.

Brazil, a sprawling country of 170 million, once was mainly a transit point for cocaine smuggled from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru and bound for the United States and Europe. But today, Brazil has become one of the world's largest markets for illicit drugs, particularly cocaine.

The sharp increase in Brazilian consumption has changed an important dynamic in the drug war: a belief in Latin America that U.S. demand alone has fueled the vast illegal drug industry in countries where coca leaves are grown and transformed into cocaine and from which the drugs are smuggled north. Recent surveys conducted by governments and anti-drug groups in a number of other Latin American countries -- Peru, Bolivia, Mexico and Colombia -- indicate a rise in illicit drug use, especially cocaine.

"Cocaine use is becoming globalized," said a U.S. diplomat in Latin America. "We're all in this together now."

But Brazil leads the way. Although consumption levels are difficult to measure, U.S. officials and Brazilian academics estimate the volume of cocaine and its cheaper derivatives being sold and consumed here -- including crack and low-quality powder -- has equaled or surpassed that sold in developed European nations such as Germany and France. The United States, with its 280 million inhabitants, they say, is now the only nation clearly consuming more cocaine than Brazil, although other, smaller nations may have higher per capita consumption.

White powder cocaine has long been consumed by the glitzy rich of Rio and Sao Paulo, but in small quantities. The new consumption boom stems from a surge in cheaper forms of cocaine that even Brazil's vast underclass can afford. In Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city and the third-largest in the world, crack cocaine has hit the ghettos. Here in Rio, the drug of choice is low-quality powder cut with aspirin and sold in small plastic bags for about $1.50.

A recent U.N. report estimated that about 900,000 people in Brazil use cocaine, or 0.7 percent of the population. Although this falls far short of the U.S. consumption rate -- around 3 percent of the population, or 5.3 million people -- Brazil's new "cocaine culture" has set off a highly magnified version of the urban drug violence once so common in U.S. cities.

Brazil's continuing role as a major shipping point makes cocaine comparatively cheap. Along Brazil's porous borders with Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, cocaine costs as little as $2,000 a kilo. The price is roughly $4,000 on the streets of urban Brazil, or about 20 percent of the street price in New York City, authorities here say.

Brazilian slums, meanwhile, have turned into urban battlefields ruled by "drug commands" that act as alternative governments. They offer slum dwellers security patrols, food baskets and even new soccer fields. They also offer entertainment. At packed weekend dance parties, guarded by youths carrying AK-47 assault rifles, cocaine is openly sold at prices as low as 50 cents a line.

At the same time, the cocaine industry has infiltrated Brazilian politics and business. A recent 18-month congressional investigation tied 827 prominent Brazilians to drug trafficking, dealing and money laundering. They included two national congressmen, 15 state legislators, four mayors, six bank directors and a host of police officers and judges.

"Cocaine is now infecting nearly every aspect of our society," said Argemiro Procopio, professor of international relations at the University of Brasilia and one of the country's leading experts on drug consumption. "Not only are we witnessing an alarming hike in cocaine consumed by the rich and middle class, but cocaine has become democratized. Even the poor are getting hooked. We can't hide from this problem anymore."

The Brazilian government has launched a major education initiative, intensifying the spread of a national program similar to DARE, the U.S. drug awareness effort. But churches have perhaps been the most active, attempting to teach children about the danger of drugs.

"The [poor] kids often become cheap labor for the traffickers," said Monique Vidal, chief of the Rio police department's Office for Children and Adolescents. "And then they get guns. We're fighting boys as young as 11 years old with machine guns in their hands. Once the dealers get to them, they don't last very long. They die quickly. Certainly before they understand what a big mistake they've made."

To defend themselves from rival gangs and police, drug commands deploy not only guns, but what police here dub "weapons of war" -- including high-powered explosives and, on at least one occasion, antitank missiles.

A loaded pistol in his lap, police Sgt. Marcos Valerio cruised by broken-down dwellings riddled with bullet holes one recent morning on a steep road in the shadows of Rio's towering statue of Christ on Mount Corcovado. Stopping at an entrance to the Crown Hill slum, he got out of his unmarked car and pointed. "This," he said, "is where the war was last night."

Wielding assault rifles, firing armor-piercing bullets and lobbing hand grenades, a band of 40 "cocaine commandos" as young as 14 had launched an offensive from a neighboring slum to expand their turf and grab a bigger share of the cocaine market. They made it as far as the entrance, where they encountered a police patrol. After a half-hour shootout and desperate calls for reinforcements, two squads of officers dispersed the attackers with M-16s and 9mm submachine guns.

Partly as a result of such turf wars, Brazil's annual murder rate has more than doubled since the mid-1980s, to 28 homicides per 100,000 people. The number of homicides in Sao Paulo jumped to 3,249 last year, a 41 percent increase from five years ago. In all of Brazil, more than 70 percent of homicides are now caused by firearms, the highest rate of any country not at war, according to Brazilian research firms and U.N. reports.

The link to drugs, Brazilian government officials say, is obvious. "Our estimates are that 70 to 80 percent of violent crimes are now directly or indirectly related to drugs," said Gen. Alberto Cardoso, director of Brazil's anti-drug program.

Drug-related violence is devastating poor urban families, who analysts say are struggling with greater rates of marital separation and domestic violence. The drug habit is also overburdening prisons; overcrowding and poor conditions have sparked several deadly uprisings this year. In Sao Paulo, for instance, 50 percent of inmates are incarcerated on drug-related charges, more than three times the rate in 1980.

The surge in consumption stems partly from increased use by the upper and middle classes. A report this month in Brazil's largest news magazine, Veja, indicated that concern over cocaine and marijuana use has caused many Brazilian businesses to begin yearly drug testing programs for executives as well as low-level employees.

In Rio, one of Brazil's main cocaine centers, the drug is delivered as easily as pizza. In her popular tell-all book "Oh, What Madness," Rio socialite and party organizer Narcisa Tamborindeguy writes: "To obtain cocaine in Rio, all it takes is a phone call. The drugs are delivered at home through a kind of powder delivery service."

But in a country with a tiny rich elite and a vast underclass, the real explosion stems from the advent of poor addicts. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the favelas, the hillside shantytowns of Rio.

In Rocinha, Latin America's largest slum, a festering ghetto of 170,000 people that creeps up one of the jade-colored hills of south Rio, most adults turn away when asked about the dealers. But not Michael Jordan da Silva.

Michael, 11, explained how it works. "Look, they are based up there, at the Smoke Mouth," he said, using the term for all drug headquarters in the favelas, and pointing toward the top of the slum. "You don't get in or out of [Rocinha] unless they let you."

"My brother is using it now," Michael said, referring to cocaine. "My mother says he better do it alone, and not in front of me and my brothers and sisters. And she also says he better not get caught because she won't bail him out of jail. But everyone is using it now, so I guess it's not such a big deal."

Asked if he knows people who have died from drugs or turf wars, Michael lowered his head. "What do you think? Of course. The guns go off every night."

At the Mare slum in north Rio, one of the most drug-infested in the city, a worker for a nonprofit organization who asked not to be identified, said she as well as city officials must call ahead and ask for permission from the dealers to enter the slum. But once they get to know you, she said, they are courteous.

Sometimes they are courteous to the extreme.

When her cellular phone was stolen last year during one of her frequent trips to work with children in the slum, she complained to a middleman close to the drug dealers. Her phone was recovered in a matter of hours. The body of the thief, shot to death, was found in front of the local sports complex.

Researcher Robert Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.

----

New Test Developed for Drug Users

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-EXP-Drug-Tests.html

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Workers who use mail-order or herbal products to disguise traces of narcotics in standard drug tests could soon find they can no longer get away with it.

Researchers at East Tennessee State University's Quillen School of Medicine in Johnson City have found a screening technique that not only detects ``adulterants'' in urine samples, but identifies them.

This could be the first ``proof positive'' test for these compounds, which federally certified drug testing labs will be required to begin screening for in August, lead researcher Dr. Kenneth Ferslew said.

The test uses a laboratory technique known as capillary ion electrophoresis (CIE) that was initially developed to analyze contaminated wastewater.

As an academic exercise, Ferslew, an East Tennessee State forensic toxicologist specializing in urine analysis, wondered if the technique could be applied to drug testing.

``The more I looked at that the more I thought, 'Well, urine is a water sample and people are dumping salts in it (to beat a drug test). Why couldn't we test a urine specimen?''' he said.

``I didn't develop a new box,'' added Ferslew, who had no outside funding for his research. ``But it is a new application of a technology to a specific problem. In this case, we adapted it to adulterants.''

Millions of drug tests are administered every year for employers.

While adulterants are probably present in only a small number of them, products are readily available to mask drug tests and their users offer the most serious challenge to public health and safety, said Bob Stephenson, director of workplace programs within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The technique developed by East Tennessee State would add another layer of confirmation to employers, he said, and perhaps give pause to drug users trying to mask a test.

``This isn't flunking a drug test, this is flagging yourself as a cheater,'' he said. Drug users ``believe they can go undetected, so they have no fear. They are probably the most dangerous drug user.''

The East Tennessee State procedure requires only a drop of urine, which is sent through a tube or capillary the size of a horse hair and zapped with electricity.

The negatively or positively charged molecules separate over a few minutes. Aided by a computer, scientists can chart their concentration and identify the substances -- notably nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, chloride and chromate, the various signature elements found in compounds intended to fool a drug test.

East Tennessee State reported in May in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that the technology was useful in identifying such products as Urine Luck and KLEAR that disguise illegal drugs with a false negative test result.

While their test was more complicated, it also was more specific than tests that use color strips to indicate the presence of substances that dilute or adulterate urine specimens, the researchers wrote.

``We are trying to develop tests so that when we identify an adulterant, we are absolutely sure what is there and why it is there,'' Ferslew said. ``And that is much stronger in court.''

Delta Air Lines was challenged by its pilots union last year when it tried to fire five employees for failing tests designed to verify if they had substituted their urine samples. The airline has suspended the policy while the Department of Health and Human Services reviews how the tests are conducted and prepares new guidelines for drug testing labs.

Brian Murphy, spokesman for Milford, Mass.-based Waters Corp., which built the CIE machine used by East Tennessee State, was not involved in the research but was impressed with the results.

``It is a pretty unique and novel way of using the technology,'' he said.

Waters Corp. spent 10 years trying to convince the Environmental Protection Agency that the process would work on wastewater. EPA agreed in April.

-------- iran

Crack Iranian troops target rockets on Israel

Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv,
July 8 2001
UK Sunday Times
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/07/08/stifgnmid02002.html?

SMALL groups of elite Iranian soldiers who have infiltrated southern Lebanon are preparing for rocket attacks on Israel. They have come closer to their avowed enemy than any Tehran forces since the shah was toppled more than 20 years ago.

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, has been told by military intelligence that the Pasdaran, or Revolutionary Guards rocket unit, has trained long-range Fagr-5 rockets on cities in northern Israel.

Sharon expressed concern about the development to the French and German governments last week during a whistlestop European tour, and has also warned President George W Bush. At home Sharon told Maariv newspaper of "an unprecedented airlift to Lebanon of long-range rockets that can strike the centre of Israel".

Confirmation of the Iranian advance came when a Pasdaran soldier defected to Israel last week demanding political asylum. His reasons for fleeing are unclear and the Israeli authorities have refused to give details of his interrogation. But the defector, known by his surname of Mehrabi, is understood to have confirmed that the Pasdaran unit is operational.

One intelligence source said the rockets were "strategic weapons to deter Israel from launching a large-scale military onslaught against the Palestinians" and feared they could be used if Sharon carried out a threat to bring down Yasser Arafat's Palestinian authority.

Menashe Amir, an Iranian-born Jewish commentator, said Pasdaran troops had been deployed at 20 outposts along the Israeli border. "In some cases the distance between the Iranian and the Israeli troops is not more than a couple of hundred metres," he said. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards' involvement in Lebanon dates back to 1982 after Sharon - then defence minister - led its invasion.

The Iranians established the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which claims to have driven out the Israelis in May last year after a 20-year struggle. The Palestinians believe they can drive the Israelis from the occupied territories in the same manner.

The Iranian deployment has alarmed a military establishment still humiliated by its retreat from Lebanon. "Personally, I believe the rockets are Iran's doomsday weapon to deter Israel," said General Shimon Shapira, military secretary to Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister.

Sharon is adamant that the Iranian presence could not have been established without Syrian permission. "Syria allowed Iran to use its airfields for the arms airlift to Lebanon," he said.

Danny Leshem, a defence expert, said the 240mm Fagr-5 rockets are carried on mobile launch platforms and have a range of about 50 miles, sufficient to strike the port city of Haifa. "They were made by the Iranians with North Korean and Chinese assistance," Leshem said. The rockets are far from accurate, with a "circular error probability" of about half a mile at the limit of their range.

This weekend tension has run high along the border after Israeli jets destroyed a Syrian radar station in Lebanon, the second such strike since Sharon took office. Syrian officials have vowed to respond "when and where appropriate" and the Iranian rockets have lent a new menace to the fragile equation.

Israeli soldiers shot an 11-year-old Palestinian boy dead and wounded two other children during violent clashes in the Gaza Strip yeaterday. Two Israeli soldiers were also injured.

-------- iraq

West Studies Iraq's Ballistic Firing of Missiles

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-mi.html?searchpv=reuters

KUWAIT (Reuters) - Western forces are studying Iraq's use of ballistic missile technology to test-fire surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) last week, a senior Western defense source said on Sunday.

``On July 2, Iraq fired SAMs ballistically, which we watched with great interest,'' the source told Reuters. The missiles were fired close to the Kuwaiti border in southern Iraq where U.S. and British warplanes fly almost daily patrols.

``No one is naive, and with United Nations inspectors absent from Iraq for almost three years, Iraq is getting more and more dangerous. This latest development is being assessed,'' he said.

The inspectors were forbidden from returning to Iraq after the United States and Britain launched the four-day Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraqi targets in December 1998.

The source was commenting on a report in Kuwait's daily al-Rai al-Aam newspaper on Sunday.

Quoting Western defense sources, the daily said Iraq tested ''advanced'' SAMs ahead of their deployment against U.S. and British warplanes that patrol no-fly zones over southern and northern Iraq.

Western sources told Reuters Kuwait could be concerned that former occupier Iraq would fire SAMs into its territory using ballistic technology.

Although the range of SAM weapons appears to fall within limits imposed on Iraq after its defeat in the Gulf War, Baghdad's foes are exploring violations of an arms import ban and looking into whether some countries are secretly abetting them, another Western defense source told Reuters.

In February, American and British warplanes launched a brief bombing campaign against Iraqi targets in retaliation for what Western officers said was increased firing at their aircraft.

The latest development is of concern to pilots patrolling the no-fly zones. ``It is no secret that Iraq is trying anything to get an aircraft down,'' a defense source said.

Washington and London set up the zones to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north of Iraq and Shi'ite Muslims in the south against possible attacks by Baghdad forces.

Air raids within the zones have become commonplace since Iraq, which does not recognize the zones, vowed in 1998 to challenge the patrols with its anti-aircraft defenses but has so far failed to down a warplane.

The United States led the Gulf War alliance that forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait after a seven-month occupation of the oil-rich state.

-------- ireland

Army erects Ulster barriers

Washington Times
World in Brief,
July 8, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010708-18137210.htm

PORTADOWN, Northern Ireland -- With the future of Northern Ireland's peace pact in doubt, British army engineers erected miles of barbed-wire barricades yesterday on the eve of an annual Protestant march that has erupted into violence in the past.

This time, the troubled province's police chief predicted that outlawed Protestant groups responsible for orchestrating much of the previous violence would mount no organized attacks on his riot-hardened forces.

Several thousand local members of the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's once-dominant Protestant brotherhood, are expected to march today from the center of Portadown through predominantly Protestant streets to a rural Anglican church on Drumcree hill.

-------- space

Money Problems Abound for NASA

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Space-Station.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- With robotic and computer problems finally under control, NASA is gearing up for another round of space station construction -- this time to install a front door for spacewalking astronauts.

After a month's delay, space shuttle Atlantis is set to blast off Thursday with the $164 million air lock. The pressure chamber will complete a major phase of construction for the 2 1/2-year-old international space station and provide its residents with easier access to spacewalks.

Yet at a time when managers should be reveling in their success 240 miles up -- this will be the seventh shuttle flight to the station in less than a year -- mundane money problems abound.

This time, it's not the Russian Space Agency.

It's NASA.

With space station budget overruns topping $4 billion over the next five years, NASA is being forced to slash major projects -- and shrink space station Alpha and its work force in orbit and on Earth.

This strategy to meet President Bush's budget would limit the international space station to a crew of three, its current number, rather than the intended six or seven. That would drastically curtail research aboard a laboratory described by NASA as the most sophisticated one ever flown.

As it is, two space station residents spend virtually all their time keeping the place running while the third also devotes a good part of each day to operations. Science work is minimal.

Equipment problems have added to the crew's load.

In April, command-and-control computers broke down in quick succession, snarling space station operations. The shoulder joint of the newly installed Canadian robot arm had to be nursed in May and June via software, delaying Atlantis' upcoming flight.

A. Thomas Young, a retired Maryland aerospace executive who is heading an external review of NASA's budget crunch, fears the space station research objectives could go into a ``death spiral'' if the proposed cuts are carried out.

``If you say, OK, we've only got a three-person crew, then it's easy to say we don't need all the science because the people can't operate the science,'' Young said late last week. ``Then you don't buy the hardware. Then if sometime in the future something changes and you've got the (full) crew size back, then you wouldn't have the hardware.''

By scaling back on research and commercialization, and eliminating a U.S.-funded lifeboat and living quarters that would accommodate seven people, NASA hopes to cover all but $484 million of the budget shortfall through 2006. The space station overruns escalated to $4.8 billion in recent weeks, but settled around $4 billion after managers found an additional $800 million in savings.

Michael Hawes, deputy associate administrator for the space station, acknowledges that NASA's problems become the European Space Agency's problems, and the Japanese Space Agency's problems, and the Canadian Space Agency's problems. These countries were counting on a full-size crew in order to conduct their own research and fly their own astronauts. The Italians, in fact, are considering supplying the habitation module for NASA so more of their own people can fly.

NASA says it did not realize the magnitude of building and staffing the international space station until the launch of Russia's service module one year ago this week.

The service module, essentially the crew quarters, went into orbit on July 12, 2000, following more than two years of delay caused by Russia's economic crisis. The hiatus proved expensive for NASA; the agency had to conduct extra tests on its stockpiled space station parts and keep a vast work force in place for development longer than intended.

Some money, though, was poorly spent.

NASA's inspector general office reported late last month that the space agency spent $97 million and 19 months on a propulsion module for the space station before determining the design was unacceptable. The project was canceled in March.

The space station, estimated by some to cost $94 billion before it's finished, is ``the money pit of all government money pits,'' retired NASA engineer Don Nelson says in his new book, ``NASA New Millennium Problems and Solutions.''

``It is not being driven by a need for advancements in space or science,'' Nelson writes. ``Its momentum is based on the gluttonous appetite of a government jobs program.''

-------- u.s.

Navy looks at Fallon as Vieques alternative
Bombing range may host more training missions

Las Vegas Review-Journal -
Sunday, July 08, 2001
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.lvrj.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?/lvrj_home/2001/Jul-08-Sun-2001/news/16492978.html

FALLON -- Plans to end bombing exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques have the Navy sizing up the Fallon Naval Air Station as an alternative training area.

The Fallon base, 60 miles east of Reno, could join a patchwork of bases replacing the Vieques training station.

President Bush said last month that exercises on Vieques will end by May 2003.

Base spokeswoman Anne McMillin said Fallon could host more training missions, but plans were uncertain.

"Ranges are at a premium in the Navy, and right now we're running at 75 to 80 percent of our range time," she told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "We already get air wings and squadrons from both coasts."

Environmental groups oppose more bombing exercises in Nevada, however.

"Puerto Rico wants the Navy out, so what makes the military think we would want more bombs dropped on Nevada?" asked Kalynda Tilges of Reno-based Citizen Alert. "There is a childhood leukemia cluster in Fallon that shows the area obviously has some kind of environmental disaster going on. Once again, the military is being short-sighted and irresponsible."

Fourteen Fallon children have been diagnosed with leukemia since 1997, and one has died. An environmental cause is suspected, but health officials have no answers yet.

The Navy has said its activities in the area have nothing to do with the epidemic.

Tilges said the Navy already exploits Nevada land for training without considering the long-term environmental consequences of its actions. She said Nevadans want less, not more, combat training in their state.

"The Cold War is over," she said. "The Navy is ignoring the consequences of its pollution, and the nation continues to throw money into a big, black hole."

McMillin said pilots' training at the Fallon base is crucial to national defense. She said lessons learned at Fallon have saved American lives from the Gulf War to Bosnia.

"We can't maintain readiness without training," she said. "We balance the need for training with environmental stewardship of the land."

McMillin said the Fallon base could accommodate more fighter plane training, but it "can't duplicate everything they do at Vieques." The island also hosts Marine landings and bombardments from naval warships.

----

For Tomorrow's Army, Cadets Full of Questions

New York Times
July 8, 2001
WORD FOR WORD / The Long Gray Line
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/weekinreview/08SCHM.html?pagewanted=all

WEST POINT - THERE is the reassuring sense of a permanent Fourth of July here: of deeply rooted national purpose and pride, of courage, optimism. Wholesome cadets in vintage gray tunics snap salutes and hold seminars on the "warrior ethic," with the stirring words of Douglas MacArthur etched into their souls as firmly as they are in the granite pedestal of his monument: "Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable - it is to win our wars. All other public purposes will find others for their accomplishment. Yours is the profession of arms - the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that the very obsession of your public service must be duty, honor, country."

Yet in a day spent behind the great stone walls of the United States Military Academy - in classrooms, faculty lounges and the cavernous cadet mess - it becomes evident that General MacArthur's invocation has become a distant and elusive ideal in a post- Communist world of ethnic flare-ups, alliance politics and fuzzy missions.

The talk here is of the proliferation of MOOTW's (military operations other than war); of a top-to-bottom Pentagon review of what the military's purpose really is; of the pernicious effects of thinking that wars can be won without casualties or planned around the goal of "casualty aversion" - in short, of a noble vocation trying to find its intellectual and ethical bearings.

What does "victory" mean in Kosovo, Macedonia, Somalia or Haiti, where there are no battle lines, no massed enemies? What does "our wars" mean when operations need consensus with 19 other NATO members? What is "duty" when soldiers are precluded from risk and aviators ordered not to drop below 15,000 feet? What happens to the military ethic when former Senator Bob Kerrey confesses that a Navy Seal team he led killed civilians in Vietnam, and the predominant reaction is: Hey, isn't that what soldiers do in war?

Those questions are in the air, and so it is easy for an interviewer to pose them to cadets - to men and women, in class or in small groups. To hear their answers, unrehearsed and unrestricted, is to get a sense of how the United States Army's next generation of leaders is groping to understand what MacArthur called "your mission":

FIRST CADET In one of my classes we read a book by James Toner, "Morals Under the Gun: The Cardinal Virtues, Military Ethics, and American Society," and he sort of highlights that there are four degrees of fighting - to prepare to kill, to kill, to prepare to die and to die. And I think that the notion of a casualty-free war sort of strips away the second theme, which is preparing to die. . . .

SECOND CADET What's so wrong with that? I mean if it saves American lives and we're trying to serve American interests, wouldn't our interest be to save American lives? Sir, I know that's tough because then you're reducing another person to a blip on a computer screen, but it's not natural to want to go out and kill somebody, so if you can make it easier on yourself to serve your interests, then go for it.

THIRD CADET I really have to disagree. I think war should be devastating and horrible and hopefully that would encourage people not to fight as much. I think the easier it is, the more you cheapen human life, the more obviously people are going to choose that option as a means of policy. I think it should be demanding, I think it should be horrible and I think -

INTERVIEWER Visibly horrible? People should see?

THIRD CADET Yes, people should see. And hopefully that will encourage people to resolve their conflicts in a different manner. And war should be a last resort, not something that is so easy that policymakers can just choose. That's why the casualty-aversion thing is troubling to me. As policy makers perceive that it's working, that now we can just bomb wherever we feel like and be casualty averse, it becomes easier to just throw a couple airplanes at a problem rather than, say, taking the trickier diplomacy route.

The Vietnam war is distant to today's prospective officers. But the nightmare of Mogadishu, Somalia, where the bodies of Army Rangers were dragged through the streets after 18 were killed in October 1993, is a pertinent lesson - a parable of an army equipped and trained for great wars reduced to helplessness and ridicule by a band of thugs. By contrast, the Gulf War of 1991 is held high as a classic feat of arms. In a conversation among three other cadets, one argues that Somalia showed that sophisticated weapons can prove a detriment.

CADET A Technology might even make a war more complicated. And we saw that in Somalia, where we had, like, sophisticated weapons, communications, but that didn't turn out for the best.

CADET B I thought Somalia was the opposite. I thought, like, people would have been more dedicated to the mission if we had provided more resources. Then we wouldn't have had those problems. Like, if we would have had tanks out there, we wouldn't have run into those problems with those Rangers.

INTERVIEWER What did "winning" mean in Somalia?

CADET B I don't know, and that's the question. Maybe it wasn't clearly outlined, and we didn't really know.

Many seniors know that their first assignment will be in Bosnia or Kosovo, or some other distant place where they will be police officers and administrators first, and soldiers a distant second.

FIRST SENIOR I'm a tanker, you know, I'm supposed to be trained to kill the enemy as fast as possible, stuff like that, and I'm here, as the mayor of a city, walking around, while my tank's left back in Germany. Is that my purpose? Is that why I came here?

SECOND SENIOR I think the notion of warfare in general has changed because when you look at World War I or II or even Korea and Vietnam, to the extent you had the "us-them" mentality, you knew this is who we're fighting. And now, I think a lot of times when soldiers leave you don't really have that unified `We're going to beat so-and-so.' It's more `These are people we're trying to help,' and so you don't want to be too mean but you don't want to be too nice either. So it's kind of like a parent trying to discipline a child. What's the best way to discipline a child, keeping them on your side and at the same time getting them to do what you think is best for them?

THIRD SENIOR I think it'd be pretty egotistical for us to say that warfare, military operations, are more difficult now than they were before. I think without a doubt that in World War II they were dealing with the same types of issues as we are now. Anytime the United States deploys to a place where you're going to have civilians on the battlefield, you're going to deal with these situations. Battlefields aren't insular. So I think that the moral underpinnings of the profession and the officer's role is just timeless. It's just as important and it always will be important. And that we can draw from those lessons, then to now. What has changed is the nature of the operations that we're doing.

The discussions, often fervent, go on. It is clear that the new role of the military, the ethical implications it carries, and the notion of an ancient caste whose members are willing to sacrifice their lives are subjects constantly discussed here. And not just among students. Listen for a moment to Gen. Daniel J. Kaufman, the dean of the academic board, speaking of the hazards of "casualty aversion":

I think it's pernicious, because what it says is officers no longer have the right to use their judgment, to make decisions based on the situation on the ground and act decisively in accordance with what they believe to be the requirements of carrying out their mission. You don't deploy somewhere to protect yourself. If you want to do that you stay in Kansas. You deploy somewhere to accomplish a mission. And, oh, by the way, an ancillary part of that is you never put your soldiers in harm's way recklessly, but you understand that in operations that's the nature of war.

The general has similar disdain for those who would excuse someone like Mr. Kerrey for the killing of civilians on the grounds that Vietnam was a particularly nasty war.

I reject the notion that somehow an officer is relieved of his or her responsibilities because it's `that kind of war.' They're all 'that kind of war.' I can't think of an instance in which any senior leader that I knew ever said, `It's that kind of war, we're going to go in there and anybody we find is considered to be hostile.' Wrong. I fundamentally reject that notion. I mean, that's not what officers do.

Later, in a round-table discussion with instructors, Don M. Snider, a political science professor and retired colonel, speaks of a professional ethic under siege by a changing world.

We are "servicing targets." Listen to the language. You dehumanize war. Well if we dehumanize war then there is the potential to dehumanize the enemy. That's the difference between killing another soldier and "servicing a target."

In a recent study published by the Institute of Strategic Studies, Mr. Snider wrote that the shifting demands of the last half-century have left the Army's officer corps "in the midst of an intellectual muddle." But not all the officers are so pessimistic. Col. Anthony E. Hartle, a professor of philosophy and English who helped design the Academy's ethics curriculum, says the answer is to train cadets "to exercise uncommon judgment" - a requirement that may not be so new. One case history with which he confronts students involves an American officer in postwar occupied Japan who learns that some defeated soldiers are about to commit ritual suicide. The question is: Should he intervene?

INTERVIEWER And what's the right answer?

COLONEL HARTLE Well, there really isn't a right answer. It's how they go about trying to decide what the right answer is.

--------

Guns secret set to haunt US
War crimes hunt turns heat on Croatia's ally

Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy
Sunday July 8, 2001
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4217941,00.html

The Croatian government met in emergency session yesterday to decide how to respond to sealed indictments issued by the international war crimes tribunal this weekend against two former generals accused of murdering Serb civilians, threatening a new political crisis in a country still struggling to recover from war.

The indictments of the generals - for the massacres of hundreds of Serb civilians between 1993 and 1995 - is also threatening to lift the lid on one of the murkiest episodes of the Balkan wars: the secret arming of the Croats by the United States.

While neither Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the Hague tribunal nor Croat Prime Minister Ivica Racan has disclosed the names of those charged, the likely suspects are Ante Gotovina, a commander during the 1995 offensive, and Rahim Ademi, who is of Kosovo Albanian origin. Both men have now retired.

Ademi is likely to be charged with responsibility for the killings of dozens of Serbs during a 1993 offensive in central Croatia against the Serb rebels.

While the crimes allegedly committed by Ademi predate the period of US military assistance, those allegedly committed by Gotovina fall squarely into it. They came during a time of stunning military successes for the Croats on the battlefields of the Serb occupied Krajina and eastern Slavonia, in which US personnel were heavily implicated. The history of US assistance to the nationalist regime of former President Franjo Tudjman dated back to March 1994 when the Croatian Defence Minister, Joko Susak, approached the Pentagon to ask for help with military training.

While the Pentagon turned down the request it directed the Croats to a Virginia-based military consultancy firm, Military Professional Resource Inc (MPRI), staffed by former generals whose main client was the US army. A contract licensed by the Pentagon was signed with the Croatian army.

While MPRI denied that its advisers were involved on the ground during the Croatian offensives, UN officials in the Balkans at the time refused to believe it.

At the same time that US advisers were training Croat soldiers for Operation Storm - the drive to retake Krajina - in how to conduct large-scale operations, both the American Defense Intelligence Service and the CIA were building up their strength at the US embassy in Zagreb. Part of that operation, said sources at the time, was to provide the intelligence for the Croat assaults.

In 1995 The Observer reported claims by United Nations officials that American intelligence and forces were deeply involved in Bosnia and Croatia, and that the US breached the UN arms embargo with flights carrying arms to both the Bosnian and Croat forces.

The new indictments have come as as the war crimes tribunal has accelerated its efforts to bring to justice all those it believes responsible for directing atrocities in the wars of the former Yugoslavia.

Last week Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic led a delegation to The Hague saying his government, which has hitherto refused all co-operation with the tribunal, was 'ready to extradite' the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, now the Hague's most wanted fugitives. Ivanic was given short shrift from Del Ponte, who promptly lambasted the Bosnian Serbs, saying: 'At any given time, the authorities of the Bosnian Serb Republic know, or are in a position to know, the whereabouts of our most wanted fugitives.'

She added: 'It is a well-known fact that at any time, Ratko Mladic has been enjoying the protection of the Bosnian Serb military.'

The potential for embarrassment from the UN war crimes process is not limited to Del Ponte's accusations against the Bosnian Serbs, it also threatens to lay bare the conduct of the international community during a decade of Balkan crises.

Already Slobodan Milosevic has threatened to embarrass at his trial international negotiators he says 'rehabilitated him' in secret deals. And the hunt for Karadzic is threatening to expose French complicity in his evasion of arrest.

The pressure to deliver him falls not only on the Bosnian Serbs but on the French peacekeepers in whose zone he has moved freely for six years since the war's end. Indeed a last-minute French tip-off to Karadzic is alleged to have stymied an attempt by the British SAS to grab him in 1997.

The tribunal regards the capture of Karadzic and Mladic as crucial to the cases it is building, with some officials concerned that a trial of Karazdic and Mladic should precede that of Milosevic.

Karadzic is regarded as the crucial bridge connecting the captive Milosevic to three and a half years of bloodshed in Bosnia.

Guardian Unlimited


-------- OTHER

-------- death penalty

Arizona execution defied the Hague

July 8, 2001
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010708-835384.htm

Neither Arizona officials nor State Department diplomats are in peril of being hauled before the World Court on human rights charges in the wake of the recent ruling that they defied the court's order to halt an execution.

The World Court, also known as the International Court of Justice, has no jurisdiction over Arizona's government, and any call to punish the federal government must go to the United Nations Security Council, whose permanent members, including the United States, have veto power.

However, the U.S. State Department - fearing retaliation against an estimated 2,500 Americans in police trouble abroad at any given moment - still bows to the Hague-based court, despite a Supreme Court ruling that federal law forbids intervention when mistakes are discovered too late.

Like the 1998 case that produced that ruling - Paraguay's failed lawsuit to block Virginia's execution of Angel Breard - the new decision sought to block an execution because the Vienna Convention on Consular Affairs requires notification of foreign governments when their nationals are arrested.

"The requirement is that they allow foreign nationals to get in touch with their consulates. The incentive of doing it is simply the knowledge that there's a legal requirement for the United States to do it," said Karolina Walkin, a spokeswoman for State's consular affairs section.

Responsibility for that program has been transferred from the State Department legal affairs section to consular affairs, said a State Department official, who called the transfer timing a coincidence unrelated to the June 27 ruling.

"We have more people and resources to do this work," the official said. "It was a good time to make the switch."

In the past 31/2 years, the State Department trained police forces in 34 cities in addition to putting out the word at police conventions. It distributed 93,000 brochures spelling out in 72 pages what the treaty requires, translations in 13 languages and 400,000 pocket cards for police officers. Notification also is required when foreign nationals die or invoke diplomatic immunity.

(The full 72-page document, "Consular Notification and Access," is available on the World Wide Web at http://travel.state.gov.)

The latest case involved Germany's claim it might have helped German brothers Karl and Walter LaGrand avoid death sentences if German diplomats had been notified when they were arrested and charged with murder committed during a bank robbery.

U.S. officials said Arizona police did not know the men were German, a claim contradicted by Bruno Simma of the German legal team.

Germany obtained an 11th-hour World Court order on March 3, 1999, to stop the second execution, but Arizona officials ignored it. Germany asked for U.S. assurance that such lapses never would happen again, but the World Court refused because such dictates are not part of the treaty.

Germany is not among the 57 nations to which such notification is mandatory under that 1969 agreement by 131 nations. It is among signatories whose citizens must be told of their right to contact a consulate personally.

The consular representation right is in addition to rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, including the right to consult a lawyer.

A key U.S. defense at the World Court in both the Breard and LaGrand cases was the pledge by State Department lawyer Catherine W. Brown that the United States was expanding efforts to educate local police to notify consulates.

At the November 2000 World Court hearing, Mr. Simma said Miss Brown gave the same assurances two years earlier in the Breard hearing before the same court.

"After listing and specifying recent efforts in this regard [in 1998], Ms. Brown concluded ... 'Nothing more is required.' I repeat, 'Nothing more is required,'" Mr. Simma said.

Spokesman Michael Mattler said the legal affairs bureau had no comment and declined to reconcile State Department positions with rulings of the Supreme Court. They include the jurisdictional questions from the Breard ruling and a decision that federal officials may not require local or state police to take action for which funding is not provided.

By allowing the 1998 execution of Breard, the Supreme Court also said foreign nations may not sue American states, which are immune to lawsuit under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution.

Primarily, though, the justices ruled 6-3 that the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act trumps the 1969 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in cases where mistakes are discovered too late.

-------- energy

Where Have All the Windmills Gone?

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By JAMES STERNGOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/weekinreview/08STER.html?searchpv=nytToday

LOS ANGELES - WHEN California's electricity market began to malfunction last year, sending wholesale prices soaring, the market for solutions to the problem soared, with innovations plentiful and cheap.

But as the weather warms and the prospect of regular blackouts grows, the debate over how to solve the crisis has become stale, mired in one issue: Gov. Gray Davis's pleas for the Bush administration to cap wholesale prices. In fact, when some federal controls kicked in for the first time last week, officials in California and Nevada said they may have made matters worse.

Of course, the state is quietly at work, making conservation efforts and speeding power plant construction. But most of the myriad ideas floated earlier have been pushed to the margins.

Sometimes with good reason. Like the one about the Navy docking a couple of its nuclear- powered aircraft carriers in San Diego and turning the reactors into power generators. Others suggested, tongue planted in cheek, using nuclear submarines instead, since they could be submerged and would not be so unsightly.

Some say cloud seeding could ease the drought-related shortage of hydropower. And a physicist has proposed - quite seriously - that the state put a layer of white paint on rooftops to reflect rather than absorb heat. The state has offered funding for a pilot program, but has not instituted a giant whitewash.

Some consumer groups have sought to punish utilities with self-imposed blackouts. But analysts say the protests probably just create more demand before and after.

On a larger scale, the state could, through its pension funds, buy stock in generating companies, which have been earning windfall profits, and use the profits to subsidize ratepayers.

Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California's Energy Institute, said the stock prices were already a little too high. "It's a great idea if this was 1998," he said. "But then," he added, taking a swipe at the Bush administration's strategy of playing down conservation in favor of drilling for oil, "most of Dick Cheney's ideas are great 1998 ideas, too."

As the politics of the energy crisis grow more bitter, however, wholesale prices have begun moderating on their own, and there has been a trickle of modest, pragmatic, less costly ideas, unobtrusive enough to fly below the partisan radar screens .

In one instance, the state has offered modest sums to install new meters for large power users - so-called real-time meters - which allow consumers to cut costs by shifting usage away from peak hours when power is most expensive.

"It's not like we just began talking about this," said Doug Kline, a spokesman for Sempra Energy, which owns San Diego Gas and Electric. "When these are installed, they will really provide reductions in demand, right away. Isn't that the question we began with?"

-------- genetics

Move to Curb Biotech Crops Ignores Poor, U.N. Finds

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/world/08NATI.html

UNITED NATIONS, July 6 - Opposition in richer countries to genetically modified crops may set back the ability of the poorest nations to feed growing populations, according to a new United Nations survey.

A movement against these crops, genetically changed for various reasons - including higher yield, more nutritional value and pest or disease control - is strongest among Western Europeans and to some extent Americans.

"The current debate in Europe and the United States over genetically modified crops mostly ignores the concerns and needs of the developing world," according to the survey, the Human Development Report 2001. It is published by the United Nations Development Program and will be released on Tuesday in Mexico City.

"Western consumers who do not face food shortages or nutritional deficiencies or work in the fields are more likely to focus on food safety and the potential loss of biodiversity," the report states, but "farming communities in developing countries are more likely to focus on potentially higher yields and greater nutritional value, and on the reduced need to spray pesticides that can damage the soil and sicken farmers."

The report draws a comparison to successful Western-led efforts to ban the use of the industrial pesticide DDT worldwide, which has allowed a resurgent population of mosquitoes to devastate tropical countries with several virulent strains of malaria.

Still, the United Nations remains concerned about the consequences of genetic advancements, too. In Geneva on Friday, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization jointly recommended that governments test all genetically modified organisms before they enter the market, looking especially for the potential to cause allergic reactions.

Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, which publishes the 11-year-old annual survey, said the report moved in a new direction this year by challenging some cherished opinions about what the third world needs. The 2001 report looks at three areas - food, medicine and information systems - where high-technology can be made relevant and useful to poor countries, as long as risks are well managed.

Mr. Malloch Brown recommended a closer look at recent history and a move away from what he called "an anti-technology bias." He added that advances in food production - the "green revolution" of the early postcolonial years - were based on crop science.

Turning to information technology, the report created a new technology achievement index that ranks countries in four categories: leaders, potential leaders, dynamic adopters and the marginalized. The new index offers some surprising findings based on factors such as inducements to innovation, prevalence of old technologies like telephones and general educational levels.

While India, for example, has islands of high technology, it ranks at the bottom of the dynamic adopters category, just above marginalization - not only well below China by virtually every measure, but also far behind Southeast Asia, Latin American and parts of Africa and the Arab world. At the other end of the scale, Japan and Korea rank fourth and fifth on the leaders list, which is led by Finland, the United States and Sweden. Singapore outranks a majority of European countries.

The core of the 2001 report remains the broad human development index, devised in 1990 by the late Mahbub ul Haq, a Pakistani economist. This year, Norway rose to the top of the index that measures quality of life very broadly. Australia, Canada, Sweden, Belgium and the United States followed.

At the bottom of the list is Sierra Leone, in last place among 162 nations surveyed. Of 36 nations considered lowest in human development, 29 are African.

--------

Bush Weighs Stem Cell Decision Amid Reminders of Suffering

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/politics/08STEM.html

KENNEBUNKPORT, Me., July 7 - As President Bush inches closer to a decision about federal support for embryonic stem cell research, he is surrounded by reminders - in Republican circles, in his White House and even in his family's past - of the lives diminished by afflictions that the research might help fight.

A sister, Robin, died of leukemia at age 3. The Republican Party's most beloved living hero, former President Ronald Reagan, is wasting away with Alzheimer's disease.

And the father of Andrew H. Card Jr., Mr. Bush's chief of staff, battled Parkinson's disease for years until his death in 1994. Mr. Card's mother developed Alzheimer's and died late last year. Parkinson's and Alzheimer's are among the diseases for which treatment could perhaps be advanced the most by the research.

Several people who know Mr. Card, including two administration officials, said his father's experience helped shape his view about research using cells from human embryos, which they said he favored. One official said he was certain that Mr. Card, who was at some of the president's White House discussions about the issue, had shared his feelings with the president.

But other officials and Bush advisers outside the White House said that Mr. Card had largely kept his feelings to himself. Mr. Card, through a White House spokesman, declined a request for an interview.

Mr. Card's family story, like Mr. Reagan's illness and many other examples of suffering in Mr. Bush's immediate and extended circles, underscores the deeply personal nature of the debate over federal support for the research. It also suggests that Mr. Bush's deliberations, no matter what decision they yield, are being influenced by more than political ideology and abstract morality.

"It's one of the things that makes it so difficult," one of Mr. Bush's aides said. Like other aides, this one said the White House had been bombarded by passionate pleas from people arguing for or against the research - and that the issue had been the most volatile one Mr. Bush had encountered since taking office.

But in this case, the official said, the appeals are coming not just from advocates on each side of the issue. They are sometimes coming from friends or acquaintances who have watched someone suffer from Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, juvenile diabetes or a number of other illnesses, and who have become fervent proponents of the research for that reason.

"There has been an awful lot of traffic on this - tons," the aide said.

Daniel Perry, the executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research, an advocacy group that supports research using embryonic stem cells, said that one member of his organization's board was friendly with Vice President Dick Cheney and went fishing with Mr. Cheney in Montana a month ago. The board member, whom Mr. Perry would not identify by name, used the opportunity to make his case for the research.

Mr. Cheney "got an earful," Mr. Perry said.

Kenneth M. Duberstein, a chief of staff for Mr. Reagan, has made it publicly clear - and thus clear to Mr. Bush - that many of Mr. Reagan's advisers and friends want the research to go forward.

Mr. Duberstein's comments also seemed to signal to Mr. Bush that invoking Mr. Reagan's name would be a wise and effective way to explain a decision to permit the research to religious conservatives, many of whom oppose it but revere the former president.

"It's not a political decision," Mr. Duberstein said. "It's the right decision. This could make a difference for many people bedeviled by the same disease as our beloved Ronald Reagan. Old Reagan hands would applaud."

These sorts of testimonials and points of reference have made a decision more difficult and complicated for Mr. Bush, who is also receiving a deluge of phone calls and letters from some Roman Catholics and religious conservatives. These people contend that using embryos for research is sanctioning the destruction of life and puts the country on a slippery slope that could lead to an even more permissive approach to abortion.

"On the passion meter, this is as high as it gets," one administration official said.

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush had agonized over what to do. One said that for several weeks Mr. Bush had brought the issue up almost daily, even in meetings not directly related to the topic.

"It's come up in economic policy meetings," the official said. "He says, `Hold on,' and we get back into stem cell. He has talked about the issue an awful lot. He has been studying this issue comprehensively."

And yet, several aides said, Mr. Bush has not given clear signals about what he plans to do. One aide said that Mr. Bush concluded a recent meeting on the subject by saying, "I'll make up my mind when I make up my mind - and then I'll tell you."

While people close to Mr. Bush are reluctant to talk about his deliberations, several said they were certain he knew that many people he respected had personal or family medical histories that inclined them to favor stem cell research.

Those people include, for example, former Senator Connie Mack, a Florida Republican, who was seriously considered as a running mate for Mr. Bush in the 2000 election. Mr. Mack, a Roman Catholic who opposes abortion, has been an ardent advocate for embryonic stem cell research, a position informed by his family's experiences with cancer. Both of his parents, his wife, his younger brother, his daughter and he himself have battled various forms of cancer.

He is just one of many current and former members of Congress who have personal connections or family stories that have heightened their awareness of what could be gained from the research and who have come to support it despite an opposition to abortion.

Mr. Card has been quiet on the issue publicly. In the past, he has been active with the American Parkinson's Disease Association. Jim Maurer, the former president of the Massachusetts chapter of that group, said that Mr. Card served on his board of directors in 1996 and 1997 and "was really good about letting us use his name."

Mr. Card, who is from Massachusetts, was transportation secretary in the first Bush administration.

Mr. Maurer, 69, who has had Parkinson's for more than a decade, recalled meeting Mr. Card when his father was alive and a participant in support groups for people with Parkinson's and their family members.

"His mother and father were very diligent about attending," Mr. Maurer said. "His dad was quite advanced for many years. He was in a wheelchair. I can remember his mother pushing that wheelchair, even in the middle of winter."

Mr. Maurer said he kept in touch with Mr. Card but was reluctant to push him on stem cell research.

"I know that he's in touch with the facts," Mr. Maurer said.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Card usually deferred in meetings to the administration's designated experts on a given subject.

"Andy likes for the people in charge of the issue to lead the briefing," Mr. Fleischer said.

-------- health

AIDS Deaths in Prisons Fall Sharply

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-AIDS-Prisons.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- AIDS-related deaths in the nation's prisons have fallen sharply because of better treatment, but increasing numbers of inmates have tested positive for the virus that causes the disease, a Justice Department study says.

In 1999, 242 state prisoners died from AIDS-related causes, down from a 1995 peak of 1,010, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Sunday.

There were nearly 10,000 confirmed AIDS cases in federal, state and local correctional facilities in 1999: 6,200 in state prisons, 3,100 in local jails and 430 in federal institutions. The overall inmate population was 1.9 million.

From 1995 to 1999, the number of state and federal prisoners testing positive for HIV rose 1,500 to nearly 25,800. New York held 7,000 HIV-positive state and federal inmates in 1999, more than any other state.

The decline in deaths and increase in the number of people with the virus occurred as the inmate population in federal, state and local correctional facilities soared 19 percent from 1995 to 1999. The number of HIV-positive prisoners grew at a slower rate, 6 percent, than the overall prison population.

``It does seem there are some positive trends reflecting decreasing death rates, but AIDS cases in prison are still five times the rate of the U.S. population generally,'' said Jennifer Kates, senior program officer for HIV/AIDS policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif.

The Justice Department also found that incarcerated women are at greater risk. The HIV-positive rate was 3.4 percent among female inmates in state prisons, compared with 2.1 percent among male inmates.

Advocacy groups say much more needs to be done in caring for inmates.

With the introduction of different drugs and therapies, ``There has been vast improvement in the effectiveness'' of care, said the study.

While prisoners ``are getting better treatment than they were five years ago, to say that they are getting decent treatment is an overstatement,'' said Carlos Arboleda, director of treatment education at the National Minority AIDS Council.

``If there is a lockdown, inmates may not have access to treatment,'' Arboleda said. ``Security always supersedes treatment and that's the nature of prisons. I don't know if it's ever going to change.''

The study did not indicate whether inmates had contracted AIDS or HIV before they entered prison or after.

-------- human rights

China Expands Falun Gong Campaign

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Banned-Sect.html

HONG KONG (AP) -- While forging ahead with its attempt to eradicate the Falun Gong movement at home, China is taking its campaign against the spiritual group abroad.

Chinese diplomats are seeking to discredit the sect and undermine its image in the United States, Australia and other countries by pressing public officials not to have dealings with the group or allow its participation in local activities.

Critics of the Beijing regime say Hong Kong authorities are caving in to the anti-Falun Gong campaign. They contend officials weakened the enclave's autonomy by barring about 100 Falun Gong practitioners from entering in early May during a visit by Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

Falun Gong remains legal in Hong Kong, under Western-style freedoms left behind by the British. But its active presence here has provoked much local friction as members lash out against China's suppression.

The conflict between China and the sect escalated last week over the deaths of some imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners at a labor camp in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang in June.

Chinese officials offered conflicting numbers, with some saying three deaths and others 14, but all said the women hanged themselves in a mass suicide. Falun Gong, which says its teachings prohibit suicide, insisted Chinese authorities had fatally beaten 15 inmates to death.

China's government is drawing criticism for its efforts to weaken Falun Gong overseas.

In the United States, some mayors have complained that Chinese diplomats attempted to stop them from giving public recognition to Falun Gong.

Falun Gong members in Australia accuse the Chinese Embassy of spreading distorted information about the group and attempting to persuade Australian officials to ban its participation in local events such as village festivals.

China's government fears Falun Gong's organizational abilities -- the group was once estimated to have up to 100 million followers in China, or more than the Communist Party's 64.5 million.

Because the sect has no formal membership, it is hard to gauge the number of practitioners worldwide. Taiwan is believed to have the biggest following outside China, with 100,000 adherents.

Falun Gong says it has about 500 members in Hong Kong, 3,000 in Australia, 10,000 in the United States, 1,000 in Singapore and 3,000 in South Korea. There are also small communities in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan.

Beijing's attempts to use diplomatic pressure to silence Falun Gong have enraged members and government officials in the United States.

Stan Bogosian, the former mayor of Saratoga, Calif., said that a few days after he signed a proclamation late last year declaring a week in honor of Falun Gong, two officials from the Chinese consulate urged him to rescind it.

When he refused, Bogosian said, the Chinese asked him to remain neutral on the issue and asked about his stance on Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province. Angered, Bogosian called a news conference to denounce the Chinese government for ``highly irregular'' actions.

``The Chinese government should not be interfering in the political process,'' Bogosian told The Associated Press. ``The issue of whether Falun Gong is a cult or not is not important. For me, these are basic human rights.''

To Bogosian and many others, Falun Gong is a harmless qigong group, whose adherents, clad in their yellow T-shirts, practice controlled breathing exercises and move slowly to ethereal music in parks.

At least a dozen other mayors from cities in California, Illinois, Washington, Maryland and Michigan have reported pressure from Chinese officials who often pointedly mention the importance of U.S.-Chinese trade.

``The whole thing sounded like a propaganda pitch to me,'' said Tod Satterthwaite, mayor of Urbana, Ill., who ignored the Chinese demands.

Others have yielded. In 1999, mayors in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Baltimore -- all important shipping centers -- revoked proclamations honoring Falun Gong.

Falun Gong adherents in Australia say Chinese officials have sent letters to civic leaders describing the group as ``an out-and-out heretical sect, which is anti-science, anti-humanity and anti-society in nature.''

``The letters were sent to local government offices in order to try and persuade them to disallow perfectly legal activities being conducted in the area,'' said Michael Molnar, a spokesman for Australia's Falun Gong.

The Australian government said the Chinese Embassy had denied sending the letters.

Rebecca Tromp, spokeswoman of the Blacktown City Council, said officials from the Chinese consulate in Sydney raised the issue of Falun Gong participation in a festival sponsored by the city government.

``We advised them that any participation Falun Gong has is within our festival and that is what they do and we would continue to allow them to participate,'' Tromp said.

-------- imf / world bank

World Bank President Praises Putin

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Russia-World-Bank.html

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) -- The president of the World Bank praised President Vladimir Putin's promises of economic and legal reform but said the changes should benefit everyone, not just the elite.

Arriving in St. Petersburg on Sunday, James Wolfensohn told reporters that the bank ``fully backs what Putin is doing to transform Russia into a very serious competitive state.''

Later, at the opening of an international conference on court reform, he said he was ``impressed with how elegantly and vigorously Putin was talking about the importance of judicial questions.''

Putin has pledged sweeping reform of Russia's cumbersome and often corrupt judicial system, which remains largely unchanged since the Soviet era. Bills introducing jury trials and requiring court orders for arrests are working their way through parliament, but it will take years for some of the changes to take hold.

Wolfensohn said the overall goal of reforms, judicial or otherwise, should be to improve the standard of living of all Russians.

``The question of poverty is not just a question of money, it's a question that gets to the very rights of people,'' he told the conference in the czarist-era Tavrichesky Palace.

He said St. Petersburg was an appropriate choice for the conference because it held Russia's first parliament, before the Bolshevik Revolution, and Russia's first jury trial.

The deputy chief of staff of Russia's presidential administration, Dmitry Kozak, delivered a greeting from Putin and urged efforts toward developing an independent judiciary.

About 400 people, including justice ministers, judges and parliament members, were expected to attend the conference.

Wolfensohn arrived Sunday for a six-day visit that will include talks on World Bank projects in Russia, including education reform and upgrading heating, water and sewage systems.

On Monday, he will travel to Moscow to meet with Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. Later he is to meet with Central Bank chief Viktor Gerashchenko and Economic and Trade Minister German Gref, among other officials.

The World Bank, among Russia's most eager lenders, has launched 49 projects in Russia since 1992 worth a total of $11 billion. The bank was the first to offer money to Russia after Putin's election last year.

-------- spying

CIA cash funded drugs trade

By Nick Peters in Washington
Sunday, 8th July 2001
Scotland on Sunday
http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/world.cfm?id=CIA08071&feed=N

WHILE Peru's disgraced former spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos awaits trial in a maximum security jail in Lima, it has emerged that millions of dollars donated by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency not only helped him amass a small personal fortune, but was also responsible for one of the most embarrassing espionage debacles of recent years.

Skimming off money that the CIA intended for use in Peru's anti-drug trafficking efforts, Montesinos set up a major arms deal in the Middle East that funnelled 10,000 AK47 rifles to left-wing FARC guerrillas in Colombia, thereby fomenting the very uprising that America has pledged $1.3bn to stamp out.

FARC has transformed itself from a Marxist insurgency group trying to seize power in Colombia into a quasi-drug cartel, making millions from the drug smugglers who operate under their protection.

Bill Clinton's administration decided it was worth investing spectacular amounts of cash to help the Colombian government stamp out the guerrillas and thus leave the smugglers unprotected.

At first Vladimiro Montesinos looked as if he could be a significant asset in the US fight against both Communism and the drugs trade. In the mid-1970s, while an officer in the Peruvian army, he came to the US to show the CIA evidence of Soviet arms deals with Peru. It was enough to get him on the agency's payroll.

Montesinos rose to become spymaster for the controversial former president of Peru, Albert Fujimori, himself now being sought on suspicion of human rights violations.

Throughout the 1990s the flow of money became a torrent, the stated intention being to help Peru fight the trans-Andean drug trade.

But after years of little or no oversight over how the cash was spent, Montesinos started turning the money to his own ends. He was, according to prosecutors, also guilty of flagrant human rights violations against political opponents, including murder.

The CIA was well aware of his actions but did little to rein Montesinos in. But the CIA had not banked on Montesinos' double-dealing. According to Peruvian prosecutors he was also taking protection money from drug traffickers, which joined a stream of corrupt cash that amassed him a fortune close to $264m.

The CIA decided to call a halt when the FARC arms deal demonstrated conclusively that he had gone too far.

Montesinos became a fugitive in October 2000 and was captured at the end of last month by Venezuelan agents in Caracas.

Today Montesinos is on hunger strike in protest against being held in the same jail, one he actually designed, as many of his former enemies.

If found guilty, the ex-spymaster faces the rest of his life in prison.

That at least would ease the CIA's embarrassment.

But in the US, the CIA's involvement in the Montesinos case has raised barely a ripple of comment.

-------- activists

Report on Demonstration at Fylingdales

8 July 2000
by Nigel Chamberlain,
CND
http://www.gn.apc.org/cndyorks/yspace/articles/july8.htm

Around 200 people made the journey to the North Yorkshire Moors on Saturday for CND's 'Point the Finger' action at Fylingdales. They had come from across the country, from as far away as Exeter and there were more young faces proportionately, than usual.

Despite dire predictions, the weather held and the sun even managed to break through on occasions.

The march up the hill from Eller Beck looked great from the front with plenty of 'CND says No to Star Wars' and 'Point the Finger' placards with music from Karl Dallas and friends following behind the long bright yellow banner carried by Dave Knight, Lindis Percy, Jeremy Corbyn, Carol Naughton and Dave Webb.

The single but huge pyramid looked incongruous sited atop the windswept moors and was particularly menacing given its potential role in the Pentagon's 'Son of Star Wars' vision for military mastery of earth and space.

There was no triumphalism at the news that the interceptor missile had failed to destroy its target over the Pacific earlier that morning but there was a feeling of satisfaction that the militarists would have to delay their plans for early deployment of the first stage of their euphemistically called 'National Missile Defence' (NMD) system.

--------

Australians Rally Against NATO

New York Times
July 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Australia-Macedonia.html

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Thousands of protesters chanting ``shame'' marched Sunday to demand that NATO forces pull out of Macedonia and allow an unrestrained crackdown on Albanian guerrillas.

Police estimated about 5,000 people, many of Macedonian descent, took part in the peaceful protest to condemn NATO and the European Union, saying they were obstructing the Macedonian defense forces in their fight against Albanian fighters.

Australia should use its diplomatic influence to push for a NATO pullout, said Igor Aleksandrov, chairman of the Macedonian Australian Council of Sydney, which organized the rally.

``We want to see the Australian government, NATO and the European Union support an immediate and legitimate elimination of all terrorist movements from the Balkans as a basic precondition to peace in Macedonia and the Balkans,'' Aleksandrov said.

``We will continue to lobby for a stop to negotiations with Albanian terrorists and nationalist extremists,'' he said.

The protest followed NATO's role in encouraging the Macedonian government to sign an agreement with an Albanian nationalist group.

Macedonian leaders and ethnic Albanian rebels agreed Thursday to a cease-fire, clearing the way for NATO to disarm the rebels and take steps to ensure an insurgency does not engulf this Balkan nation in war.


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