------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
China Accuses U.S. of 'Nuclear Blackmail'
U.S. Sees Progress on China Missile Dispute
Saudis press Cheney on Israel
U.S. and North Korea Hold High-Level Discussion
Missile shield test successful: Pentagon
New Missile Defense Test Succeeds
Rocket Intercepts Missile in Test
Missile defense test conducted successfully
Pakistan not to initiate N-tests: Musharraf
Powell Tries to Reassure Russia
Russia Opposes U.S. Defense Plans, Continues Talks
114 Kursk Submariners Identified
Cheney Says Next Goal in U.S. War on Terror Is to Block Access to Arms
Coast Guard Encounters Big Hurdles in New Effort
US may fund new nukes, say experts
Nuclear Trash Cans? Not in Nevada's Yard
Fallout at the nuclear frontier
Bush Pushes for Defense Funds
Powell denies change in U.S. policy
MILITARY
Needy Afghans Stream to Mine-Filled Dump
Anaconda in its 'final sweeps'
Rwanda Denies Offensive in Congo
U.S. envoy held in Belgrade
Spy Claim Saga Fuels Rift in Serbia
Lockheed to Get Competition
Colombian Army Strikes Rebels, Kills 28
Afghan farmlands abloom in poppies
Fighting Drug Cultivation With a Double-Edged Sword
Crackdown Moves Opium Market Underground
EU says it can take over Macedonian peacekeeping mission
Holy site calm as ritual is blocked
UN helps Iran plan for flood of refugees
Iraq Able to Resist U.S. Military Action - Saddam
Russia denies it might accept anti-Iraq strikes
Israel Withdraws From Most Towns in the West Bank
Israel scales back forces
Military Gulf Separates U.S. and European Allies
U.N. Human Rights Panel Convenes
Missing pilot's status in question
ENERGY AND OTHER
Putting OPEC Over a Barrel
'IMF Go To Hell'
ACTIVISTS
Oppose Backdoor Attempts to Institute a National ID!
Barcelona Police Fire Rubber Bullets at EU March
In Reagan Papers, an '80s Stroll
Interior Slow in Paying Royalty Checks to Indians
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
China Accuses U.S. of 'Nuclear Blackmail'
By REUTERS
March 16, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-china-usa.html or
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020316/wl_nm/china_usa_dc_13
BEIJING - China, using its strongest language against the United States in months, accused Washington on Saturday of ``nuclear blackmail.''
State television said Vice Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing called in U.S. Ambassador Clark T. Randt Jr to deliver ``solemn representations'' on a Pentagon nuclear policy review and a visit to the United States by Taiwan Defense Minister Tang Yiau-ming.
It said Li protested strongly at a U.S. policy review reported to describe contingency plans to aim nuclear weapons at China, among several other countries.
``China wants to make it very clear that China will never yield to foreign threats, including nuclear blackmail,'' the television report quoted Li as telling Randt.
``The days when China could be bullied are gone forever,'' he was quoted as saying.
Threats would ``simply increase the determination of the Chinese people to safeguard their sovereignty,'' he added.
Li also accused Washington of encouraging independence activists in Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a rebel province to be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary, by allowing Tang in and letting him meet senior U.S. officials.
Beijing has a standing threat to invade the island if Taiwan declares independence or drags its feet indefinitely on reunification talks.
It always issues angry protests when a senior Taiwan official is allowed into the United States.
But Beijing was particularly incensed by Tang's talks with U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the highest-level documented U.S.-Taiwan defense talks in at least 22 years.
China's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that Tang's visit, and his meeting with Wolfowitz at a private conference in Florida, jeopardized a recent warming in Sino-U.S. ties.
The talks focused on U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and were seen by some analysts as a U.S. bid to counter China's growing military power.
``PRETEXT''
On Wednesday, an official Chinese newspaper accused Washington of using the policy review as a pretext to resume nuclear tests and develop new nuclear arms to extend its military dominance in the world.
But Li's language was the strongest China has used against the United States in many months and stood out sharply against the background of improved ties since Beijing backed the U.S. war on terror following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Li accused Washington of breaching three joint communiques, which paved the way for a normalization of ties, by offering Taiwan advanced weapons.
``The United States must abandon the idea of Taiwan as an unsinkable aircraft carrier,'' he was quoted as saying.
``Taiwan has been a burden on the U.S. shoulders for more than half a century. We don't see any good in the U.S. continuing to shoulder that burden,'' he said. ``It will simply drop a stone on its own toes.''
In the three communiques, Washington recognized Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan, promised to reduce arms sales to the island gradually and to maintain unofficial links to Taipei.
President Bush reaffirmed that recognition of Chinese sovereignty during a visit to Beijing last month, but he also said Washington would honor its commitment to protect Taiwan in the face of attack or provocation.
Last year, Bush said he would do ``whatever it took'' to help Taiwan repel any Chinese invasion.
----
U.S. Sees Progress on China Missile Dispute
March 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-china-usa.html
WASHINGTON - China has told the United States it is cracking down on nuclear, chemical, biological and missile exports, stoking optimism that a festering non-proliferation dispute can be resolved soon, U.S. officials say.
The Bush administration has demanded adherence to a November 2000 agreement that aimed to halt China's export of ballistic missiles technology to Pakistan and other states.
The dispute has marred a relationship that has improved markedly, especially on anti-terrorism cooperation, since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
U.S. officials told Reuters in recent days that during talks in Washington last week, top Chinese arms control negotiator Liu Jieyi provided new assurances that go beyond the missile issue.
``We had good talks that were far more substantive than the previous talks I had last fall,'' said U.S. negotiator John Wolf, assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation affairs.
``We had a good discussion on a variety of non-proliferation issues especially related to export controls, and not just in the missile area ... Liu provided new information. We're considering it. And I suspect we'll want to talk again,'' he said in an interview.
Other officials provided more specific details about the status of negotiations that some on the U.S. side mistakenly thought could be resolved by the time of President Bush's trip to Beijing last February and his meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
It did not come together then but now U.S. officials say they believe agreement is possible in late April, when Vice President Hu Jintao -- Jiang's heir apparent -- visits Washington or later this year when Jiang comes to the United States.
PLEDGE DATES TO 2000
China pledged in November 2000 to tighten missile export controls but the United States has accused it of continuing to supply missiles and related technology to Pakistan and imposed sanctions last Sept. 1.
Beijing wants to end the penalties, which include a ban on launches of U.S. commercial satellites on Chinese rockets.
``Liu informed us what they are doing with nuclear export controls, CBW (chemical, biological weapons) export controls and missile technology, and in all those areas they professed they are in the process of tightening their export controls. This is new information for us,'' one U.S. official said.
The Chinese said they are bringing nuclear export controls ''up to compatibilty'' with standards adopted by a group of countries called the Nuclear Suppliers Group and chemical and biological export controls ``up to compatibility'' with standards of the so-called Australia Group of countries, officials said.
On sales of missiles and related technology, Liu said China will ``take into account fully'' the Missile Technology Control Regime, an international regime under which countries agree not to transfer missiles to unstable areas, U.S. officials said.
``The Chinese have said they are doing some things independent of our (missile) discussions which is good because the point is (to show) China opposes proliferation,'' one official said.
OLD CONTRACTS UNRESOLVED
The two sides still have not settled differences over ''grandfathering,'' involving contracts that were signed but not fulfilled before the November 2000 accord.
In talks with Liu ``we had hints of clarity, but we were not able to clarify the precise nature of the grandfathering issue that concerns them,'' said one official who indicated that at least one multi-year, multi-service contract is in dispute.
U.S. officials have made clearer than ever before that a mere reiteration of Chinese support for the November 2000 accord is insufficient.
The administration has laid out five steps that would demonstrate China's ``total acceptance'' of its commitment to curb ballistic missile exports.
Whereas the November 2000 accord was merely announced by U.S. and Chinese spokesmen, a new deal is expected to be a written document that demonstrates ``the highest authorities in China are committing to our highest authorities that China is determined to make this its policy,'' one official said.
Beijing must make clear to the Chinese marketplace that it will enforce export controls by demonstrating a will to take judicial action when the laws are violated, officials said.
China traditionally has defended its long-standing military ties to Pakistan and demanded the United States curb arms sales to Taiwan, something Washington has refused.
-------- israel
Saudis press Cheney on Israel
Saturday, 16 March, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1876000/1876351.stm
Saudi Arabia is an important US ally US Vice President Dick Cheney has held talks in Saudi Arabia on the latest stop on his tour to drum up support for the "second phase" of the US-led war against terrorism.
But Mr Cheney is finding little support in the Middle East for military action against Iraq, widely thought to be America's next target.
The BBC's Tom Carver, who is travelling with the vice president, says that Mr Cheney is hearing the same message from Arab leaders - that America must stop the fighting between Israeli and the Palestinians before it can expect Arab support for a military assault on Iraq. There is also genuine anger at America's hands-off policy towards Israel.
Arab officials believe that the United States is the only country capable of influencing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Our correspondent says that Mr Cheney has tried to avoid getting drawn into the peace talks.
But his mere presence in the region appears to have increased Mr Sharon's willingness to agree to some kind of ceasefire in time for the arrival of the US vice-president in Israel on Monday. Issues linked
Dick Cheney's staff insist that they are here to discuss the wider war on terrorism rather than Middle East peace.
But in the minds of the Arab world the two are inextricably linked.
An open letter to Mr Cheney in the Saudi Gazette, the main English language newspaper, asks how America can justify trying to eliminate Iraq's Saddam Hussein while doing nothing to rein in Ariel Sharon.
Both men are butchers, the paper says, referring to Ariel Sharon's role in the Israeli-Lebanon war.
Mr Cheney flew to the Saudi port city of Jeddah on Saturday - the same day that he had visited Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
In an interview with the BBC, senior Saudi Government officials said they would not allow the US to fly combat missions against Iraq from Saudi bases.
Senior sources in the Riyadh government said that although they might countenance an attempt on the life of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, they would not support wide-ranging air strikes.
Peace plan
A BBC correspondent says that the Saudi ruling family fears the reaction of its own population if American war planes were to kill more Arabs and Muslims.
The official Saudi news agency SPA said the talks with Mr Cheney covered "international efforts to combat terrorism" as well as the peace plan for the Middle East put forward by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.
The proposal - which would mean Arab recognition of the state of Israel in return for Israel's complete withdrawal from occupied Palestinian land - has won strong support around the world, including in the US.
The plan is to be presented for endorsement to an Arab summit in Beirut on 27-28 March.
Visit to troops
In the UAE, the official news agency WAM said President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan had "made it known that the Emirates are opposed to any military strike against Iraq".
The UAE leader also urged the US to "put an end to the grave Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people".
-------- korea
U.S. and North Korea Hold High-Level Discussion
New York Times
March 16, 2002
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/international/asia/16PYON.html
WASHINGTON, March 15 - A senior American diplomat met this week with North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations in the highest-level bilateral talks since President Bush denounced North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," the State Department said today.
Charles Pritchard, the Bush administration's special envoy for North Korea, met with the ambassador, Pak Gil Yon, on Wednesday and agreed to continue the discussions at a later date, according to Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman.
There was no breakthrough, Mr. Boucher said, and the North Korean government has not yet accepted an American offer for negotiations at a higher level. But the encounter appeared to ease a growing war of words between the nations.
"We found the meeting useful," Mr. Boucher said today. "Both sides agree to continue their discussions at this level from time to time. And we remain willing to explore North Korea's receptivity to accepting our proposal for a dialogue."
The administration offered last June to open negotiations with North Korea as part of a strategy to curb that country's development of weapons of mass destruction in return for economic help. Last month, during a trip to South Korea, President Bush wondered aloud why Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, had rebuffed the American proposal.
Relations between the countries have been especially icy since President Bush in January identified North Korea - along with Iran and Iraq - as being part of an "axis of evil." Earlier this month, the American media disclosed that a Pentagon review of its nuclear policy identified North Korea as a potential target for a nuclear attack.
The Pyongyang government accused the United States of "preparing a nuclear war to bring nuclear disasters to our planet and humankind," and seeking to recreate the destruction of Hiroshima.
Throughout these exchanges, contacts between the governments have continued at a lower level, Mr. Boucher said.
-------- missile defense
Missile shield test successful: Pentagon
REUTERS
SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2002
The Times of India Online
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=3941974
WASHINGTON: In its most challenging attempt, the latest test in a US missile defence programme was successful on Friday when a projectile weapon destroyed a mock warhead in space over the Pacific Ocean after accurately choosing the target over three decoys, the Pentagon said.
"Tonight's (Friday) test is a major step in our aggressive developmental test program," the Pentagon said in a statement.
Out of six tests since 1999, it was the fourth to be successful in US efforts to develop a shield against a missile attack from potentially hostile states such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
Russia and China oppose the planned US missile shield, saying it could lead to an arms race to overcome new defences.
"We will continue to pursue this testing regime to achieve a layered approach to missile defence, using different architectures to deter the growing threat of ballistic missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction," the Pentagon said.
At a cost of more than $100 million, Friday's test for the first time deployed three inflated balloons in space to see if a test weapon could be diverted from tracking and colliding with a dummy warhead launched westward over the ocean from California. Previous tests had used one decoy balloon.
At 9:41 pm EST, a projectile weapon fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific intercepted and destroyed a mock warhead launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, about 4,800 miles away, Defence Department spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said.
Pressing Forward
The Pentagon later this year plans to begin a more robust testing program, which it said has been slowed by the 1972 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty drawn up between the United States and the former Soviet Union.
President Bush on December 13 gave Moscow formal six-months notice that the United States was withdrawing from the treaty in order to press ahead with more advanced testing that would have violated it.
The president said the September 11 attacks on America proved the need to develop ways "to protect our people from future terrorists or rogue state missile attacks" even though hijacked airplanes, not missiles, struck the Pentagon and New York City's World Trade Center, killing more than 3,000 people.
It marked the first time in recent history the United States has abandoned a major international arms treaty.
For three decades, the treaty stood as a bedrock of US-Russian nuclear stability. Moscow says it remains a cornerstone agreement upon which other arms accords rest, while Bush argues it is a Cold War relic.
Speeding balloon decoys
In the test, the mock warhead was lifted into space on a modified Minuteman-booster rocket along with the three balloon decoys.
The balloons separated from the Vandenberg rocket along with the warhead and inflated in space, with all four objects speeding westward toward Kwajalein. On the other side of the test, the "kill vehicle" weapon separated from its rocket booster more than 1,400 miles from the warhead and used infrared and visual sensors and radar data to locate the target, the Pentagon said.
The weapon collided with the mock warhead more than 140 miles above the ocean.
The first anti-missile test on October 3, 1999, resulted in the successful intercept and destruction of the warhead target. The second on January 19, 2000, failed due to a clogged cooling pipe on the "kill vehicle". The third also failed on July 8, 2000, due to an unsuccessful separation of the weapon from its booster rocket over Kwajalein.
The fourth and fifth tests last July 14 and December 3 resulted in successful intercepts.
----
New Missile Defense Test Succeeds
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 16, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Test.html
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon's latest missile defense test was successful, but many more experiments are necessary to prove that the U.S. system can shoot enemy warheads out of the sky, military officials and outside experts say.
``I think we can say ... our test program is proceeding and showing some quite impressive success,'' Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Saturday.
On Friday night, a prototype interceptor slammed into a dummy warhead 140 miles above the Pacific, destroying both. It was the sixth test of a ground-based missile defense prototype and the fourth successful destruction of the dummy warhead.
The military also is developing other types of anti-missile systems -- a ship-based interceptor rocket successfully hit a dummy warhead in a test earlier this year.
``I'll say right off the bat before some critic discovers it, this was not a 'realistic' test of exactly what intercepts would have to do,'' Wolfowitz said in an interview on CNN. ``But it's the first time we have had anything that looked like a decoy warhead, and it picked out the real warhead from the decoys.''
At least 19 more tests are needed before the ground-based missile defense system can be fully operational, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency. Those tests -- one is planned every three months -- will last until 2006 or 2007, Lehner said.
Missile defense skeptics said that's an important point.
``We have a long way to go before the final exam,'' said Chris Madison of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. ``I'm concerned that people have the impression, based on these tests, that we're almost to missile defense. Until we have operational testing, we'll have no idea whether we can get there.''
The Bush administration is pressing ahead with development of the anti-missile systems, saying the United States needs a defense if a rogue country like North Korea develops and fires long-range missiles at American shores.
President Bush announced last year he was pulling the United States out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which bans such missile defenses. Russia and some other countries have criticized the move.
Domestic missile defense critics say the program is too costly and too easily defeated with simple countermeasures or by firing a larger number of missiles.
Designing, testing and building a system of land- and sea-based missile defenses would cost between $23 billion and $64 billion by 2015, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year.
The interceptor in Friday's test, launched from Meck Island in Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific near the equator, destroyed the dummy warhead at 9:41 p.m. EST, Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said. The test warhead was carried on a modified Minuteman II missile launched 4,800 miles away at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Friday's test was the most complex of its kind so far, although it was still a developmental test, not an operational one. The dummy missile jettisoned three balloons to try to fool the interceptor. The previous test in December included only one decoy balloon.
The interceptor used its own sensors to pick out the warhead, track it and move in to collide with and destroy it, a Pentagon statement said.
Wolfowitz told Congress last month that the Pentagon hoped to have four prototype anti-missile rockets stationed in Alaska in two years.
That would happen before operational tests, which will use the most realistic scenarios. The Missile Defense Agency hopes to shift to tests over the North Pacific after 2004 for its more realistic tests, Lehner said.
On the Net:
Missile Defense Agency: http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo
--------
Rocket Intercepts Missile in Test
New York Times
March 16, 2002
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/national/16MISS.html
WASHINGTON, March 15 - In the latest test of the rudiments of a missile defense system, a rocket fired from the Marshall Islands scuttled an intercontinental missile launched about 4,800 miles away, the Pentagon said tonight.
The rocket, which was equipped with a kill-vehicle interceptor, took flight 21 minutes after the authorities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California launched the target, a modified Minuteman II ballistic missile, with a mock warhead and three balloon decoys, at 9:11 p.m., the Pentagon said.
About 10 minutes later, the rocket intercepted the missile more than 140 miles above the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the missile's projected flight, it said.
The test involved multiple elements of the proposed missile defense system, including a space- based missile warning sensor, ground-based early warning radar, prototype radar and communications at Kwajalein Atoll and the Joint National Integration Facility in Colorado Springs.
The test is the Pentagon's sixth of the missile defense program. Four resulted in interceptions. Two tests in 2000 failed because of malfunctions by the rockets and their kill vehicles.
Some arms-control advocates voiced skepticism about the artificial conditions in the test. The kill vehicle, they noted, is told when the target will be launched, what it looks like and where it is headed.
"Our concern about these tests is that the American people are getting unrealistic expectations," said Chris Madison, the director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. He said testing under realistic conditions was essential before deployment.
----
Missile defense test conducted successfully
March 16, 2002
Around the Nation
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020316-89202757.htm
An interceptor rocket smashed into a dummy warhead 140 miles over the Pacific last night in the fourth successful test of its kind, a Pentagon spokeswoman said.
The interceptor, launched from a tiny Pacific island near the equator, destroyed the dummy warhead at 9:41 p.m., Cheryl Irwin added.
The test was the sixth of a prototype of a ground-based missile defense system. The interceptor successfully destroyed the dummy warhead in three of the previous five tests, including the most recent one in December.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan not to initiate N-tests: Musharraf
March 16, 2002
Pakistan International News (Jang)
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2002-daily/16-03-2002/main/main4.htm
TOKYO: President General Pervez Musharraf on Friday categorically stated that Pakistan would not be the first to set off another nuclear test. "We will exercise full restraint in this regard," said the president, adding, "We have offered a no war pact to India. We believe in de-militarisation of South Asia,"he told Japanese reporters at the end of his four-day state visit to Japan.
The president said that Pakistan was not violating the missile regime, and said the country had its own indigenous missile programme. "We have our own nuclear and missile technology which is completely indigenous," he added. The president warned against compartmentalising civilisations and called upon the world community to address political disputes on the basis of rights of the people. "We should not talk of clash of civilisation. We should not compartmentalise civilisations, this is a very dangerous concept."
The president, who met editors of five major Japanese newspapers and two news agencies, ahead of his scheduled departure in the noon, emphasised that the so-called civilisations should not be seen as adversaries. "They are complementary to each other and learn from each other," he observed. "Why the millions of students travel from East to West to acquire knowledge and skills," he posed a question.
President Musharraf emphasised that there were political disputes and the world community must address them "not in terms of civilisations but in terms of rights of the people." He said the United States, as a sole super power, must play an active role in the just resolutions of disputes in the Muslim world.
With regard to China-India relations, the president said every country has its own national interests, which is a constant factor. "Policies keep changing around the national interests." The president said: "We should appreciate and not worry about it. We should look at things according to our national interests."
-------- russia
Powell Tries to Reassure Russia
March 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Powell-Interview.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell says Russia should feel reassured -- not threatened -- by a Pentagon report that raises the possibility of using nuclear weapons against countries that endanger the United States.
At the same time, Powell said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press that the United States would stand by a 24-year pledge not to use its arsenal of nuclear weapons against states that don't have them.
Initially, Russia expressed alarm about accounts of the classified Pentagon report, which outlines the possible use of nuclear weapons against countries that possess or are developing weapons of mass destruction -- Russia among them.
The Nuclear Posture Review also identified six other nations: China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria.
Following the first news accounts, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov demanded an explanation and said the plan, if true, would ``destabilize and exacerbate the situation.''
Powell said Russians need not be concerned.
``If anything, they should feel less threatened than they might have felt before having read this study because the study in a number of places says Russia is no longer an enemy,'' Powell said.
And Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters after a visit to Washington that U.S. explanations ``satisfy us.''
President Bush said this week he was leaving ``all options on the table'' as the Pentagon reworks its nuclear weapons policy to deter any attack on the United States, including from non-nuclear states such as Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria.
A U.S. pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states was taken by President Carter's administration in 1978 and reaffirmed, most recently, by the Clinton administration in 1995.
``We have not changed our policy,'' Powell said.
Powell also offered assurances that the United States did not have nuclear missiles targeted on Russia or any other nation. But, he said, to be ``perfectly honest,'' a missile can be redirected quickly and ``we have nuclear weapons obviously that are capable of being targeted.''
By contrast, Powell said up to 13,000 of the 28,000 long-range nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile during the Cold War were targeted on the Soviet Union and its allies, even at specific streets.
Russian officials reacted angrily to the U.S. nuclear policy review.
But, Powell said, ``once they got over the headlines'' and received an explanation from administration officials, ``they could see that, if anything, they should feel less threatened than they might have before reading the study.''
On other subjects, Powell:
--Expressed hope that Israel's pullback of troops and tanks on the West Bank would continue as U.S. mediator Gen. Anthony Zinni tries to set up security talks with Israel and the Palestinians. But, Powell cautioned, ``There is nothing permanent about staged withdrawals. Obviously, you could take a tank out of reverse and put it back in forward.''
Powell demanded a complete Israel military withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza in a telephone call Monday to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The demand was couched in terms of improving prospects for Zinni, who is shuttling between Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to try to work out a truce.
--Said Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has been trying to show a ``more positive and benign face to the world'' but that there was clear evidence he is attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction. ``I think it's idiotic on his part.''
--Called Cuba an anachronism in an otherwise democratic hemisphere, and he predicted the eventual demise of its communist system. ``I think historic forces and pressures are such that Cuba eventually will be part of this American revolutionary 21st century. How it will happen, I don't know. ... We are not getting ready to invade.''
--------
Russia Opposes U.S. Defense Plans, Continues Talks
March 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-russia-usa.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov reiterated on Saturday Moscow's opposition to U.S. missile defense plans, but said Russia would continue talks with Washington on new rules for strategic arms control.
The United States has decided to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) pact with Russia, which outlaws the missile shield Washington wants to create against attacks from potentially hostile states such as North Korea or Iraq.
``U.S. withdrawal from the ABM pact contradicts the interests of the international community,'' Ivanov said, speaking on Radio Mayak hours after Washington conducted a new test of its missile defense program in space over the Pacific Ocean.
Russia says the U.S. departure from the ABM treaty has damaged the fabric of post-World War Two strategic stability.
After its attempts to rescue the pact had failed, Moscow has focused on negotiating with Washington a new framework of relations to replace Cold War-era nuclear deterrence.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised to match the U.S. decision to cut the number of nuclear warheads to 1,500-2,000 from current levels of around 6,000.
Moscow also hopes to sign a broad strategic agreement with the United States during President Bush's visit to Moscow in late May.
But Washington appeared increasingly reluctant to sign any binding treaties or get involved in any kind of strong verification system, something Moscow considers a must.
``There are forces in the United States who do not want any deals with Russia or any other country,'' Foreign Minister Ivanov said. ``But we will continue talks and aim at reaching agreements.''
Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Friday he had failed to overcome differences over nuclear disarmament during his visit to the United States earlier this week.
-------
114 Kursk Submariners Identified
March 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Investigators and grieving relatives have identified the remains of all but four of the 118 sailors who died when the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank to the Barents Sea floor after a devastating explosion, officials said Saturday.
The remains of the submarine's commander, Capt. Gennady Lyachin, were identified Friday, the last to be matched with the names of victims, officials in the Military Prosecutor General's office told Russian news agencies. Four bodies have not been retrieved.
The Kursk sank on August 12, 2000, after a series of blasts ripped through its bow during naval exercises. All 118 men on board were killed.
Twelve bodies were taken out of the Kursk during an underwater operation in 2000, and the rest of the remains have been retrieved since the submarine -- minus its shattered bow -- was raised and brought to dry dock last year.
Russian authorities had initially said they expected many of the bodies were obliterated by the explosions and could not be retrieved.
``The results of the investigation have surpassed all our expectations,'' the chief prosecutor of the navy's Northern Fleet, Vladimir Mulov, said in televised comments, apparently referring to the number of bodies investigators were able to identify.
Lyachin's remains were identified by his widow, Irina, said Leonid Troshin, chief spokesman of the Military Prosecutor General's office.
Mulov said four bodies were unaccounted for, possibly lost at sea in the explosions or still in the Kursk's bow. The navy plans to send divers to retrieve fragments of the bow from the sea floor this summer, hoping they will provide more clues about the cause of the disaster.
Russian officials have said that the Kursk sank after a practice torpedo filled with unstable fuel detonated, sparking the blasts that tore through the bow. But they have not issued a final conclusion on what caused the initial explosion.
-------- terrorism
THE VICE PRESIDENT
Cheney Says Next Goal in U.S. War on Terror Is to Block Access to Arms
New York Times
March 16, 2002
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/international/16CHEN.html
ABOARD U.S.S. JOHN C. STENNIS, in the Arabian Sea, March 15 - Sending a signal that the Bush administration is determined to confront Iraq despite criticism and skepticism among Arab leaders, Vice President Dick Cheney said today that the United States' next goal after Afghanistan is to stop terrorists and rogue states from developing weapons of mass destruction.
"Our next objective is to prevent terrorists, and regimes that sponsor terror, from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Cheney told thousands of cheering sailors on the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis.
"We take this threat with great seriousness," he added. "That is our duty as responsible officers of the American government. The United States will not permit the forces of terror to gain the tools of genocide."
On his trip through the Middle East, which has taken him so far to Jordan, Egypt and some Persian Gulf states, Mr. Cheney has heard repeated objections from Arab leaders that a possible American military campaign to dislodge Saddam Hussein would destabilize the region and harm the Iraqi people.
Mr. Cheney did not mention Iraq by name today. But his very appearance on an American aircraft carrier conveyed the message that Washington intended to maintain a military presence in the region. His argument about the seriousness of the nuclear, chemical and biological threat also seemed to be an answer to Arab officials insist that Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction is not a major threat to the region.
"Wherever threats are forming against the civilized world, we will respond and respond decisively," he said.
For days, Mr. Cheney has had to respond to complaints from Arab leaders that the Bush administration was not doing enough to quell the violence in Israel and was alienating Arab public opinion by considering a new front with Iraq.
On the Stennis, the reception was warm, and Mr. Cheney pronounced it the highlight of his trip.
With more than 70 planes, the Stennis has been on station for about three months and directly involved in the war in Afghanistan. Its pilots conduct bombing runs over Afghanistan and played an important role in attacking targets during the recent fighting south of Gardez, using laser- guided and satellite-guided bombs.
The Stennis' battlegroup has also sought to prevent Al Qaeda fighters from escaping on the high seas. It has questioned some 9,600 vessels, most by radio, and boarded some ships. In some cases Navy Seals have forced themselves on board in what a Navy officer today termed "nonconsensual" settings.
So far, however, not a single member of Al Qaeda has been discovered.
The Stennis is about 700 miles from Afghanistan. The carrier has a flag from the World Trade Center, which was sent to officers from a naval reservist in New York. A random sampling of sailors and pilots on the ship, who under Navy rules could not be identified by more than their first names, showed no hesitancy about extending the military campaign to Iraq.
"If they ask us to do it, we'll do it," said Keith, who serves as an administration officer with the Prowler electronic warfare squadron on the plane.
Mr. Cheney was whisked by helicopter to the Stennis after a visit to Masirah Island, Oman. Reporters were not allowed to accompany Mr. Cheney for that part of his trip. Oman has served as a base for American Special Operations Forces and B-1 bombers in the war in Afghanistan. Because of Omani sensitivities, however, the presence of American forces is not officially acknowledged by either side.
The Stennis has a crew of almost 5,200. Wearing a white helmet bearing the initials "V.P.," Mr. Cheney watched FA-18's laden with bombs roar down the deck and take off for their missions over Afghanistan.
He also visited the Combat Direction Center, where he heard a briefing on how the Air Force and the Navy had adapted to each other's mid-air refueling practices, a matter that seemed to interest him considerably - probably as a result of his years as defense secretary during the first Bush administration.
He ate in the mess hall with a group of sailors and swore in a group of sailors who had decided to re- enlist.
Mr. Cheney also made his case for focusing on Iraq. Soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Mr. Cheney said there was no evidence linking Iraq with the attacks.
Those comments were made when the Bush administration was focused almost exclusively on Afghanistan and destroying Al Qaeda's bases there. In recent days, Mr. Cheney seems to be trying to broaden the campaign against terrorism so that it covers Iraq.
In essence, Mr. Cheney is arguing that the risk that nations that possess weapons of mass destruction might provide them to terrorists represents a grave threat to the United States and its allies - a threat that may even extend to "genocide."
After presenting the danger, Mr. Cheney seemed to offer his answer to the threat, saying United States security rested on one thing: a well- trained military.
--------
BORDER SECURITY
Coast Guard Encounters Big Hurdles in New Effort to Screen Arriving Ships
New York Times
March 16, 2002
By JOEL BRINKLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/national/16COAS.html
WASHINGTON - Shortly after Sept. 11, the Coast Guard began a program that requires every commercial ship destined for the United States to send the authorities a list of crew members' names 96 hours before docking, so that they can determine whether any terrorists are on board.
If anything looks awry, the Coast Guard boards and searches the ship, an act it has performed more than 2,000 times since Sept. 11.
The program is part of a governmentwide effort to secure the nation's borders and prevent further terrorist attacks. But Coast Guard officials acknowledge that it has large gaps that may take years to fill.
Chief among the problems are a shortage of equipment to detect chemical, biological and nuclear materials, and an inability of government databases with the names of terrorism suspects and visa violators to communicate with one another.
Under the new program, the Coast Guard receives several thousand names a day. But it has no way to know whether a given name is the true identity of a crew member, or an invented one. Further, most names are sent by fax, on sheets that are frequently illegible or with notations in languages that officials cannot read.
Then, because of the lack of coordination among databases, the Coast Guard has no access to the most important criminal and immigrant computer files, and must rely on other agencies to run the checks on the names. Officials say that coordinating the databases - kept by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Customs Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency - is one of the priorities set by President Bush after Sept. 11 and that an effort to remedy the problem is under way.
But even if a suspicious ship is identified, the Coast Guard crews that search it have no training to identify terrorists or their equipment, and no sensors or related detection devices that can locate chemical, nuclear or other weapons. The proper detection equipment will not be in place for at least a year or two, said Capt. Tony Regalbuto, chief of the Coast Guard's Office of Policy and Planning for Waterways Management.
Coast Guard officials acknowledge that these loopholes and other shortcomings prevent them from confidently determining whether terrorists or weapons of mass destruction are on board even the ships that are searched.
"Our heart's in the right place," said Frances Fragos-Townsend, the agency's director of intelligence, "but I can't say we haven't had kinks, bad backlogs and other problems."
Before Sept. 11, commercial ships approaching the United States had to report to the Coast Guard office at their destination 24 hours before arrival. The report was intended simply to alert the office that a ship was on the way, and the Coast Guard's primary interest was marine safety, not security. Crew members' papers were not checked until the ship reached port.
But on Oct. 5, the agency announced that every ship bound for the United States would have to e- mail or fax a complete crew list, cargo data and other information four days before arrival.
The agency established a new office, the National Vessel Movement Center, in Martinsburg, W.Va., where those reports from arriving ships are now sent - from 200 to 300 ships a day, each carrying 20 or 30 crew members, on average. That can be as many as 9,000 names a day.
Most of the names come in by fax, and often the clerks at the center cannot read the faxes or understand their foreign-language notations, Coast Guard officials say. The agency wants the ships to use a common online form for the reports, but enforcing that request will probably require legislation, Captain Regalbuto said, and may be years away.
From the West Virginia center, the names are forwarded to a Coast Guard intelligence office in Maryland, where some of them are pulled out for further scrutiny, under criteria the Coast Guard does not disclose. Then those names are forwarded to other agencies so they can be checked against criminal and immigrant databases.
The Coast Guard has no access to those databases, because the agency's computers cannot communicate with those from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Customs Service or the Immigration and Naturalization Service, for example. In some cases, ships are already in port before the names are run through the various computer files.
Ms. Fragos-Townsend, the Coast Guard intelligence director, said she was confident that the other agencies "are running the names we give them."
"But do I have confidence," she said, "we are not being given false names and false documents?" She shrugged and shook her head.
Names that arrive at the immigration service are checked against the Inter-Agency Border Inspection System database, which holds many thousands of names of people on immigration and other watch lists. The I.N.S. component of this database has for years been a subject of criticism from the office of the Justice Department's inspector general, because of poor record-keeping and long delays between the receipt of new information and its entry into the database.
Last December the inspector general found that the clerks who put information about dangerous or illegal immigrants into the database managed to enter from 62 to 93 such records each business day last fall and had a backlog of 1,610 records, with more of them pouring in all the time.
Still, agencies checking names for the Coast Guard do sometimes spot one that raises suspicion. In those cases, a Coast Guard boat intercepts the ship before it reaches port and conducts a search. And there more problems lie.
Coast Guard crews are well trained in finding caches of drugs hidden on ships. But they have no training in counterterrorism.
"They don't necessarily know what a weapon of mass destruction looks like," Captain Regalbuto said.
And though he added that they do know "how to use their eyes and ears as sensors to see if anything is out of the ordinary," he and other Coast Guard officials acknowledge that what the agency needs most is detection equipment that can signal the presence of nuclear material, chemical weapons or explosives.
To detect chemical weapons, Captain Regalbuto said, attaining "the ability to determine the difference between legitimate cargo and illegitimate cargo" is of "monumental" importance.
As a matter of policy, the Coast Guard does not ordinarily even board container ships, since there is no way to inspect the contents of the containers. Often they are stacked six-deep and -wide, and so gaining access to many of them is impossible until they are unloaded, even though containers that may hold terrorists or weapons of mass destruction are a central concern in Washington.
With all those many hundreds of boardings since Sept. 11, the Coast Guard has found no terrorists or weapons, and has made no arrests.
But Captain Regalbuto said he and his staff believed it was much better to have begun the program, even with the inevitable problems, than to have done nothing at all.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
US may fund new nukes, say experts
AFP
SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2002
The Times of India Online
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=3928928
WASHINGTON: The new US nuclear posture review, which hints at abandonment of an international moratorium on nuclear testing, could lift the taboo on use of such weapons and possibly encourage proliferation, experts suggested on Friday.
"One cornerstone of nonproliferation agreements is the idea that there is a norm against the use of nuclear weapons, whether it is moral or military or whatever," said Chris Helman of the Center for Defense Information, a liberal Washington-based think tank.
"There is a widespread acceptance that they are unsuitable weapons, but as soon as they have a value, other people will have them," he added.
The Nuclear Posture Review, a secret report to Congress leaked by the US press, suggests the need for new nuclear trials "to meet the nation's defense goals in the 21st century."
It points to the potential use of US nuclear strikes against non-nuclear armed nations pursuing weapons of mass destruction, as well as former Cold War enemy Russia and China.
The United States must be prepared for potential national security contingencies involving non-nuclear armed neighbors "in setting requirements for nuclear strike capabilities," the review said.
Immediate contingencies could include an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors, a North Korean attack on South Korea, or a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan, the report suggested.
Iran, Syria and Libya could also become immediate contingencies because of their "long standing hostility toward the United States and its security partners," it said.
The review also underscores the Pentagon's concern that a growing number of countries and hostile groups rely on deep underground facilities to hide their weaponry and command posts.
According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, at least 10,000 such bunkers currently exist in over 70 countries.
More than 1,400 of them are used as strategic storage sites for weapons of mass destruction, concealed launch pads for ballistic missiles as well as leadership or top echelon command and control posts, the DIA estimates.
"At present the United States lacks adequate means to deal with these strategic facilities," the review pointed out.
The answer, in the US military's view, lies in developing and testing a new generation of smaller but more effective nuclear weapons, capable of destroying these underground facilities.
"Today's nuclear arsenal continues to reflect its Cold War origin, characterized by moderate delivery accuracy, limited earth penetrator capability, high yield warheads, silo and sea based ballistic missiles with multiple independent reentry vehicles, and limited retargeting capability," the review said.
"New capabilities must be developed to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply buried targets ... to find and attack mobile and relocatable targets, to defeat chemical or biological agents, and to improve accuracy and limit collateral damage," it added.
Seeking to dispel some of the criticism leveled against Washington both at home and abroad with disclosure of the report, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday hailed the "good work" that went into producing it. He also insisted there was nothing earth-shattering contained within it.
"It has not caused any difficulties with Russia," he insisted in a Pentagon briefing. "The Russians had been briefed on it previously, as had our allies."
The United States has maintained a moratorium on nuclear tests since 1992, along with Britain, China, France and Russia, and has sought to reach agreement with Moscow over reducing the stockpile of nuclear weapons.
US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Thursday told a US Senate subcommittee that a 10 million-dollar study was ongoing to see whether existing nuclear warheads could be modified to serve as bunker-busting armaments, for use possibly in conflicts similar to the ongoing campaign in Afghanistan.
The cave and tunnel complexes buried in the mountains of that central Asian country would be ideal targets for the burrowing weapons, Defense experts have suggested, as would the bunkers of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whose regime is thought to be the next target of the Bush administration's anti-terror war.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Nuclear Trash Cans? Not in Nevada's Yard
New York Times
March 16, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/opinion/L16YUCC.html
To the Editor:
Re "Disposing of Nuclear Wastes" (editorial, March 9):
I agree that it is time to figure out how to dispose of nuclear wastes. But no one really knows how, and therefore we will never know with absolute certainty that Yucca Mountain is safe. Nevadans have made their intentions clear and will use every resource available to prevent nuclear wastes from reaching our soil.
The Energy Department and President Bush are placing all their bets on one alternative simply because it's the only one they have and because they have already spent more than $4 billion over two decades on still- inconclusive research on it.
The government must find new solutions, like better on-site storage and decomposition. Why expose the entire nation - including Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the United States - to the deadliest known substance by openly transporting it across our country on a daily basis for years to come? TOM KAPLAN Las Vegas, March 11, 2002
•To the Editor:
Re "Disposing of Nuclear Wastes" (editorial, March 9):
We can nit-pick the technical details about the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada for the next millennium and never satisfy everyone. Just as with the space program, we cannot solve every problem ahead of time, but we can be sure systems are in place to learn all we can and to deal with issues as they arise.
The bottom line is that the material is far safer at Yucca Mountain, even as a temporary storage location, than spread across the country at dozens of reactor sites. The United States needs to find a satisfactory resolution to its nuclear waste issue, and this is an important step. Congress now needs to come to the same conclusion.
ALAN E. WALTAR College Station, Tex., March 11, 2002 The writer is a professor of nuclear engineering, Texas A&M U
-------- us politics
Fallout at the nuclear frontier
Martin Schram
Washington Times
March 16, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20020316-12454503.htm
What was strange, after the newest news leak of a secret Pentagon document changing the threshold for America's use of nuclear weapons, was the sound we didn't hear.
We didn't hear the traditional wailing of top administration spokespeople - the folks who typically react to such scoops by performing like pro wrestlers pounding the mat in feigned pain.
There was the Pentagon's classified Nuclear Posture Review splashed all over the unclassified front pages of the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, March 9, and the New York Times on Sunday, March 10. It told the world of a new American planning blueprint that was the first public indication that the United States is now considering a first-use policy for nuclear weapons in certain circumstances.
The contingency document disclosed that the Bush administration is drafting plans for the first use of nuclear weapons against nuclear nations such as China and North Korea and (although it is not considered foreseeable) Russia. And in certain circumstances, for the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations that have supported terrorists - Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. The Pentagon document called for the development of a smaller nuclear weapon suitable for battlefield use and for a nuclear device capable of busting underground bunkers and facilities that are now too deep to be penetrated by non-nuclear bombs.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the secret document said U.S. nuclear weapons could be used in three circumstances: against targets that were able to withstand non-nuclear attack; in response to an attack by any weapon of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical or biological; or, in the catchall phrase quoted from the document, "in the event of surprising military developments."
The newspaper reports noted prominently that the secret report had been provided to some members of Congress on Jan. 8. This predictably sparked the conventional wisdom in Washington that this was a journalistic wink-and-nod code meaning that meant someone in Congress leaked the document.
And that in turn, led to one of those merry moments on the Washington Sunday brunch circuit. A prominent senator told me the leak surely seemed timed to complicate things for Vice President Dick Cheney, who was embarking that day on a trip to countries in the Middle East - adding Mr. Cheney must be fuming, the senator opined.
To which I opined right back that it is possible the senator, while wise in all manner of things, had this one all backward. Because: This was not the sort of saber-rattling message a president wants to deliver in a speech. Nor was it one that a vice president would relish springing on unsuspecting diplomats at every stop. But now all Mr. Cheney had to do was calmly put things in context, big-time. He didn't have to be the big-stick bearer of bad news - we in the media have done that - just the calm-but-firm explainer.
Well, at that the senator nodded and opined that this made sense. So I confessed that I had cheated. I had seen the Sunday morning talk shows and the administration's Sunday mainstays hadn't wailed about the leak at all, as we have seen so many of our top brass do after other secret documents were splashed all over the news.
"We should not get all carried away with some sense that the United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in some contingency that is coming up in the near future," said Secretary of State Colin Powell. "What the Pentagon has done with this study is sound, military, conceptual planning and the president will take that planning and he will give his directions on how to proceed."
And presidential national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the document was really "nothing new," just a few options about "how do we deter the use of weapons of mass destruction against us?" Actually, it is quite new. And in the days that followed, Washington's nuclear think-tankers weighed in to say just that. Nuclear weapons have always been deemed valuable for their role in deterrence against other nuclear nations. That was the Mutual Assured Destruction policy of the Cold War. But any policy contemplating first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations, even evil ones, is a major change.
Consider how India and Pakistan, nuclear nations now in a standoff over Kashmir, might view a new U.S. first-use policy. The development of a new generation of small nuclear weapons for first use against non-nuclear wrongdoers can only be interpreted as a sign that Washington, hometown of thinkers who in another context and another time came up with the policy of "Don't ask. Don't tell," have now come up with a new one: You can't. We can.
Martin Schram is a nationally syndicated columnist.
----
Bush Pushes for Defense Funds
At Ft. Bragg, President Urges Quick Action on Pentagon Budget
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 16, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35160-2002Mar15?language=printer
FORT BRAGG, N.C., March 15 -- President Bush surrounded himself with airborne soldiers and their cheering families today as he tried to pressure Congress to pass his huge defense budget quickly and in its entirety.
Bush watched helicopter gunships swoop within 10 yards of his head for a mock rescue of an embassy, and shed his tie for a trip through the chow line after giving a speech urging lawmakers to take up his defense budget before any of the other annual spending bills. The defense budget traditionally is taken up last because of its size and complexity.
Rallying troops at a base that is home to many of the Army Special Forces operating in Afghanistan, he said prompt passage of his full Pentagon request would provide a sign of lawmakers' commitment to sustaining a long war on terrorism.
"Now is not the time to play politics with the defense budget," Bush said. "We need to send that clear message that not only are we in this for the long haul, but the elected representatives of the United States people understand it, as well."
Besides sending a message to Congress, today's appearances were designed to continue Bush's efforts to prolong the country's patience as the war heads into the second of what could be many phases. "We're in for a long struggle and, therefore, we must make sure that our United States military must have everything it needs to meet the objective," he said.
Bush has proposed a spending increase of $38 billion, or 12 percent, with an additional $10 billion in unspecified funds for what he calls a war reserve. The House is to vote on the budget next week. Several Democratic senators said they support the president's proposed increase, which would be the largest for the defense budget since Ronald Reagan was president. But the senators said they will ask for more details.
"They're asking for a lot of leeway," said an aide to a senior Democratic senator. "While everyone is supportive, no one is going to give it a free pass."
Bush's call to handle the budget on his terms comes at a time of increasing complaints from members of both parties that the White House is not being respectful of the perquisites of the legislative branch. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who will decide the sequence of the 13 annual appropriations bills, issued a statement chastising Bush for refusing to allow Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to testify about administration plans to double federal spending on domestic defense.
"There will be no laxity on the part of Congress to fund the war effort," Byrd said. "At the same time, to those who ask for quick action on legislation, Congress will act much faster if we receive quick and complete answers to our questions."
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the administration wants to balance the legitimate needs of Congress for information with Bush's need to receive confidential advice. "Our attempts to negotiate a satisfactory resolution to this dispute have been rebuffed by Senator Byrd," Johndroe said.
The Senate Appropriations Committee's ranking Republican, Ted Stevens (Alaska), joined Byrd in writing to Bush today to urge him to reconsider his decision about Ridge, noting that several prominent presidential advisers had testified before various Senate committees during World War II. The senators asked Bush for a meeting and said, "If Governor Ridge does not testify on homeland defense, we would have no recourse but to invite witnesses from more than 80 federal departments and agencies that participate in homeland defense programs."
Bush ignored the escalating dispute in his remarks. He said he is proud of the bipartisan spirit that has supported the war on terror and said he wants to "make sure we've got some good budgeting practices to go along with it." Bush acknowledged that his $379 billion Pentagon spending plan has critics but added that because nothing is more important right now than national defense, that means that "nothing is more important than our defense budget."
"I've heard some of them talking about, it's too big up there," he said. "Let me just make this as clear as I can make it: The price for freedom is high, but it's never too high, as far as I'm concerned."
Seventy-five Rangers, half a dozen helicopters and two "assault motorcycles" were involved in the practice attack on hostile forces outside the U.S. embassy in the imaginary nation of Pineland. "That was exciting," Bush said as he walked across the roof of the cinder-block "embassy" afterward. "I think we're well trained. I'm glad they're on my side."
----
Powell denies change in U.S. policy
Washington Times
March 16, 2002
From combined dispatches
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020316-16097443.htm
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that U.S. policy on the use of nuclear arms had not changed, despite a Pentagon review that raised the prospect of using atomic weapons in a wide range of conflicts.
"We have not changed our policy," Mr. Powell said in an interview with the Associated Press when asked about a 1978 U.S. pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.
President Bush's denunciation of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil" and the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism already had raised chances of using American military power generally.
Mr. Bush said at a news conference Wednesday he was leaving "all options on the table" as the Pentagon reworked its nuclear-weapons policy to deter any attack on the United States, including from non-nuclear states such as Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria.
The 1978 pledge was made by the Carter administration and reaffirmed, most recently, by the Clinton administration in 1995.
Despite both pledges, U.S. officials have never ruled out the use of nuclear weapons - a position reflected in Mr. Bush's remarks.
In an interview with The Washington Times last month, John Bolton, undersecretary of state for international security and arms control, said about the 1978 pledge: "We are just not into theoretical assertions that other administrations have made."
Washington is "not looking for occasions to use" its nuclear arsenal, but "we would do whatever is necessary to defend America's innocent civilian population," Mr. Bolton said.
In case of an attack on the United States, "we would have to do what is appropriate under the circumstances, and the classic formulation of that is, we are not ruling anything in and we are not ruling anything out," Mr. Bolton said.
In 1978, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance made the following statement on behalf of President Carter:
"The United States will not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty or any comparable internationally binding commitment not to acquire nuclear explosive devices, except in the case of an attack on the United States, its territories or armed forces, or its allies, by such a state allied to a nuclear-weapon state, or associated with a nuclear-weapon state in carrying out or sustaining the attack."
In 1995, Warren Christopher, the first secretary of state in the Clinton administration, reaffirmed Washington's commitment. Along with the pledges of the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, who are all nuclear powers, it became part of a U.N. resolution, which the council adopted on April 11, 1995.
But a year later, Defense Secretary William Perry said the United States would not hesitate to retaliate with nuclear weapons to an attack with chemical or biological weapons.
"If some nation were to attack the United States with chemical weapons, they have to fear the consequences of a response from any weapon in our inventory. ... We could have a devastating response without use of nuclear weapons, but we would not forswear that possibility."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Needy Afghans Stream to Mine-Filled Dump
Area Bombed by U.S. Is Rich in Metal and Peril
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 16, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35942-2002Mar15?language=printer
TAPAI MUHAIMAT, Afghanistan -- Afghanistan has its own ground zero, and it could be the most dangerous place on Earth.
When U.S. bombs and missiles rained on this munitions dump six miles southeast of Kandahar on the night of Oct. 11, the fifth day of the bombing campaign, exploding ordnance lit the sky with flames and tracer bullets for hours, shook the ground and sent debris sailing in all directions. Some fragments landed in villages six miles away, residents said.
Today, the dump and the area that surrounds it arguably constitute one of the most hazardous pieces of real estate in the world, littered with tens of thousands of unexploded grenades, mortar rounds, rockets, mines, tank shells, missiles, bullets and other ordnance from what was once one of Afghanistan's largest ammo caches.
At the epicenter, the ground is so thick with bombs and bullets that it is impossible to walk without stepping on live ammunition. It is a scene of utter chaos, with Chinese bullets, 10-foot-long Russian missiles and U.S. rockets strewn across the landscape as a result of three straight days of U.S. attacks.
For some desperate Afghans, this dangerous hillside represents an opportunity. Every day, several come to scavenge through the debris, looking for brass and other items to sell in the local markets.
For the government of Afghanistan and the international community, this lethal wasteland is an extreme example of one of the great challenges of Afghanistan's reconstruction: how to clean up after 23 years of war and make the countryside safe.
Between 50 and 100 people are injured or killed every week in Afghanistan in incidents involving land mines and unexploded ordnance, according to the United Nations. At this site, one person has died since mid-November, one lost both legs and another lost both feet when rockets they were handling unexpectedly exploded, guards here said. Three other men were seriously injured when one of them stepped on a mine.
"I'm nervous, but I have to come here," said Khudaid, 35, an unemployed father of three who was delicately walking around the ammo dump, picking through the rubble. In one day, explained Khudaid, who like many Afghans uses only one name, he can collect about 30 pounds of metal that can fetch more than $5 in town. "If I had bread, I'd never come here. But we are so hungry."
Noor Ahmad Azimi, an official with the Mine Clearance Planning Agency, an independent de-mining organization, said it could take years to clear the site, but that no one had even begun researching the project. "We are paying attention right now to clearing mines from agricultural lands and fields," he said. "That's the biggest problem." Besides, he said while surveying the landscape, "the cleanup here arguably should be the responsibility of the people who did it."
Experts estimate that Afghanistan has more than 300 square miles of uncleared mine fields -- mostly in agricultural and grazing areas -- and that as many as 14 million antipersonnel and antitank mines might be present in those and other, undiscovered fields. U.N. officials estimate that another 190 square miles of Afghanistan have been littered with unexploded bombs, shells and mortar rounds, including about 25,000 "bomblets" from cluster bombs, since the start of the U.S. military campaign.
The United Nations estimates that it would take seven years and cost about $660 million to clear Afghanistan of its unexploded ordnance and mines. Finishing the job in three years would raise the price tag to about $900 million.
No one here questions the legitimacy of the U.S. attack on Tapai Muhaimat. According to residents of the area, the ammunition dump was in a remote part of a military complex that was the region's largest Taliban and al Qaeda base, housing as many as 5,000 soldiers. The base itself was not bombed until a day after the first attack on the ammo dump, they said, when virtually all of the soldiers had fled.
Today, a 100-foot-wide, 40-foot-deep crater stands where the barracks once stood. Dozens of tanks are upturned, split open and destroyed, their shells scattered everywhere. In some areas, so many small-caliber bullets cover the ground that they are as thick as gravel.
Three young boys from a nearby village were collecting shotgun shells on the base and smashing them with rocks, trying to extract the gunpowder to sell.
Told that what he was doing was dangerous, 6-year-old Nasser Ahmad shrugged and continued his work. "We need the money," he explained.
----
Anaconda in its 'final sweeps'
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 16, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020316-96731224.htm
The United States has withdrawn all but 500 of the 1,200 troops it sent to Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, as the once-ferocious battle is winding down into "final sweeps" for fleeing enemy fighters, the Pentagon said yesterday.
There are now 500 American and 500 allied and Afghan fighters in the Shah-e-Kot mountain region, south of Gardez, in a mopping-up phase. Hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban soldiers were killed in two weeks of fierce gunbattles and devastating air strikes, local Afghans say.
"They have in fact gotten to the point now where they're going through the final sweeps of the area, looking into the caves that have been uncovered and those types of things," Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, told a Pentagon press conference.
He spoke two weeks after U.S. Central Command kicked off Operation Anaconda with the war's first combined conventional ground and air assault. Maj. Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the 10th Mountain Division commander who devised the plan, declared victory this week in a battle that killed off perhaps the last major concentration of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda army inside Afghanistan.
"The enemy forces that were there, to the best of our ability to monitor, are not there now," Gen. Pace said. "Some have been killed; some have escaped. We don't know the exact numbers."
Differing numbers from varying sources have been offered for how many enemy fighters had assembled in the 50-mile-square Shah-e-Kot valley and how many of them died there. Anti-Taliban Afghans say as many as 800 were killed. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on Monday that a "great many" al Qaeda fighters were killed. U.S. soldiers in the field suggest the death toll is between 300 and 500.
Eight U.S. Special Forces troops were killed on March 3.
Whatever number is correct, it adds up to victory for U.S. forces. "From a standpoint of the military operation," Gen. Pace said, "the intent to go in and to take this area in Afghanistan and to clear it of Taliban and al Qaeda - that has been highly successful."
On Monday, Mr. Rumsfeld said he had seen no reports of enemy fighters escaping, as they did in the mid-December clash at Tora Bora north of Shah-e-Kot. Yesterday, he conceded that an undetermined number had gotten away. It likely means that at a future time and a new place, American forces will have to attack another al Qaeda pocket.
Mr. Rumsfeld suggested that some relatively senior al Qaeda leaders were killed in Operation Anaconda. Units have collected the remains of some in hopes a positive identification can be made using DNA samples from a family member. The FBI is trying to build a repository of DNA samples with which to identify senior members of bin Laden's terror network.
U.S. commanders do not believe bin Laden, or his top aide, Ayman al Zawahiri, were in Shah-e-Kot during what became the war's largest battle. Intelligence officials believe bin Laden is on the run somewhere in eastern Afghanistan, or across the border in Pakistan.
-------- africa
Rwanda Denies Offensive in Congo
France Says Thousands of Troops Advancing on Remote Town
By Colum Lynch
The Washington Post
Saturday, March 16, 2002; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35906-2002Mar15?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, March 15 -- French and Congolese officials today accused Rwanda of launching a "major military offensive" against Congolese forces in a remote town in southeastern Congo, threatening to scuttle a fragile cease-fire in the large Central African country.
Rwanda swiftly denied the allegation, and U.N. officials said they could not confirm that a large-scale offensive was underway because the Congolese army has denied U.N. observers permission to travel by helicopter to the area around Moliro, the town where the fighting was reported. Over the past week, they said, observers detected movement by only two small clusters of 50 and 100 Rwandan-backed rebel forces in nearby towns.
"We can't confirm that there is movement of thousands, but there is some movement," said U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe.
The accusation leveled against Rwanda came one day after the Congolese government's delegation pulled out of the so-called Inter-Congolese Dialogue, a conference aimed at charting a new political course for the fractious war-torn country.
Congo has effectively been split in two since 1998, when Rwanda and Uganda orchestrated a rebellion against the country's ruler, Laurent Kabila, whom they helped bring to power the previous year. Rwanda and Uganda also poured thousands of troops into eastern Congo to fight alongside their rebel clients; Kabila's Congolese army held onto the west with the support of thousands of troops from Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
Though the two sides reached a peace accord in 1999, a cease-fire and troop withdrawals were not achieved until last year. Now, nearly 3,400 U.N. troops and observers are sparsely deployed throughout Congo to monitor implementation of the accord.
Today, France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, told the Security Council that as many as 10,000 Rwandan troops were advancing south from their barracks in Kalemie to try to overrun a Congolese military encampment at Moliro.
"Rwandan forces have launched a major attack," Levitte said. "It seems that seven battalions of Rwandese troops -- 10,000 people at least -- are engaged in an offensive action."
Though Levitte said the military action represented the most flagrant violation of Congo's cease-fire in more than a year, U.N. officials say that the cease-fire accord gives the Congolese army no legal claim to Moliro in the first place.
The Congolese armed forces informed the United Nations this week that fighting began Tuesday evening in the town of Lunangwa, several miles north of Moliro. Levitte said today that the forces were gathering about six miles north of Moliro.
The Security Council registered its concern Thursday about renewed fighting in the area, and the U.N. commander, Maj. Gen. Mountaga Diallo of Senegal, met with Rwandan officials in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to press them to honor the cease-fire.
The Rwandan government today denied participating in military operations in Congo. "We are not involved in any fighting, if there is any fighting at all," Karenzi Karake, a senior Rwandan military official, told the Associated Press in Kigali.
But a senior member of a Rwandan-backed rebel group known as the Congolese Rally for Democracy told the AP that it was battling government forces in the area. "We are victims of attacks by the government," said Azarias Ruberwa, the rebels' secretary general.
-------- balkans
U.S. envoy held in Belgrade
March 16, 2002
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020316-743146.htm
A U.S. diplomat and the Serbian deputy prime minister were detained by Yugoslavian military police in Belgrade yesterday, and the American was roughed up and held for 14 hours, State Department officials said.
The Serbian official, Momcilo Perisic, was charged with passing secret documents, possibly evidence of Slobodan Milosevic's involvement in war crimes, to the U.S. diplomat, who was identified by the Yugoslav military as John David Neighbor.
The diplomat was having dinner with Mr. Perisic when the two were accosted by military men wearing civilian clothing, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
The diplomat did not need medical treatment and was not hospitalized after he was released to the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade.
"The United States is outraged by this unwarranted detention of a U.S. diplomat," Mr. Boucher said.
"We are forcefully protesting these actions by the Yugoslav military to the Yugoslav civilian authorities, including the president's office.
"Those who detained them were later identified as military police of the Yugoslav army. They were not wearing uniforms, they presented no identification, and they proceeded to interrogate our diplomat," Mr. Boucher added.
Mr. Perisic was a former chief of staff of the Yugoslav army. He was fired in 1998 for opposing Mr. Milosevic's policies of repression against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Danas newspaper told Reuters news agency that investigators found audio recordings of meetings of the Yugoslav army chiefs of staff in the diplomat's briefcase.
Other reports said Mr. Perisic was passing documents to the U.S. diplomat.
Mr. Boucher, who would only identify the U.S. diplomat as a first secretary, said there is no justification for detaining an accredited diplomat, no matter what his actions.
Even diplomats caught in the process of espionage may not be detained under international diplomatic rules and may only be expelled.
Yugoslav media reported that the Yugoslav and Serbian governments held a joint session, with the latter demanding the release of Mr. Perisic.
Radio B-92 said Mr. Perisic had been brought to the Serbian government building "dressed like a detainee," with the laces removed from his shoes. Reporters later saw him driven away in an army van escorted by two jeeps.
The incident was likely to exacerbate tension between the government of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and moderate nationalist Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, who commands the army.
Mr. Djindjic called the arrests "a first-rate scandal" and said the military secret service has "gone out of control."
The U.S. diplomat "was detained with a bag over his head, had no translator nor a lawyer," Mr. Djindjic said.
Croatia convicted Mr. Perisic in absentia for shelling the Adriatic city of Zadar when he was a Yugoslav army commander in 1991 at the start of the Croatian war. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1996.
After he split with Mr. Milosevic, currently on trial for genocide at The Hague, Mr. Perisic founded the Movement for Democratic Serbia, joined the coalition that toppled Milosevic in 2000, and in January 2001 became a deputy prime minister in the Serbian government.
A ranking Yugoslav government official, who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Perisic was arrested "on suspicion of espionage."
----
Spy Claim Saga Fuels Rift in Serbia
By Slobodan Lekic
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, March 16, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37996-2002Mar16?language=printer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The military said Saturday it might charge Serbia's deputy prime minister with spying for the United States, fueling tensions between the Serbian leadership and army hard-liners left over from the era of Slobodan Milosevic.
The arrest of Momcilo Perisic on Thursday has angered Washington, which protested the treatment of an American diplomat in the case. The diplomat was detained along with Perisic and held for 15 hours, at one point reportedly with a hood over his head.
The diplomat was released Friday, and Perisic was freed Saturday. But controversy boiled over the detentions, which highlighted a rift between hard-line generals, backed by the Yugoslav president, and Serb leaders trying to impose civilian control on the military.
Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said his deputy had been "set up" and that military intelligence was "out of control."
An adviser to the president of Montenegro, which along with Serbia makes up the Yugoslav federation, said the federal army was becoming "increasingly dangerous."
The arrest "demonstrates that the military is not subject to any parliamentary or civilian control," said the adviser, Blagoje Grahovac.
Military agents snatched Perisic and the U.S. diplomat, whom they identified as John David Neighbor, on Thursday night as the two dined together in a restaurant. Perisic was held on suspicion of passing secret documents to the American.
Perisic and two other Yugoslavs arrested as well were released without charge. But the military said Saturday that evidence pointed to "the criminal act of espionage," and the military prosecutor's office said it would examine the evidence to determine in the next few weeks whether to indict or not.
"I do not consider myself guilty," Perisic told the independent Beta news agency after his release. His aide, Nebojsa Mandic, said Perisic was "ready to appear before state authorities ... and reveal a plot against him and the people of Serbia."
Perisic was the head of the Yugoslav military until then-President Milosevic fired him in 1998 for criticizing the army's campaign in Kosovo. Since Milosevic's fall in 2000, Perisic has continued his criticism, saying Yugoslavia cannot grow closer to NATO until hard-line commanders from the war against the alliance are sacked.
The army also distrusts Djindjic, who promotes close links with Washington. It has not forgiven the Serbian prime minister and his government for delivering Milosevic to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands, where he is now on trial for alleged atrocities during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica defended the army's actions as being within legal limits.
"Everything should be done to determine the real truth on the basis of evidence," Kostunica said. The president, a nationalist who opposes handing over suspects to the Netherlands-based war crimes court, has been an intense political rival of Djindjic.
The Yugoslav military said Saturday its arrest of Perisic had broken up "illegal activity." It said one of the suspects in the case, Lt. Col. Miodrag Sekulic, had furnished Perisic with confidential documents, "some of which he later passed on to a foreign citizen."
Perisic's aide, Mandic, denied that Perisic had any such documents, and Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic accused military agents of planting incriminating documents in Perisic's briefcase.
The United States was "forcefully protesting" the treatment of the diplomat and "this apparent move against an elected Serbian civilian official," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday.
The arrest comes as Djindjic has been pressing for reforms to bring the military under civilian control. Kostunica and military hard-liners favor less radical changes such as reducing the army's size and reorganizing its command structure.
"This is the first time a serious attempt is being made to limit (the military's) freedom of action and to make it accountable to democratically elected institutions," said Tanja Petovar, a coordinator for the Southeast European Democracy Support Network, a Brussels-based consultancy.
After World War II, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, himself a field marshall, used the army to crush any opposition to communist rule. In return, the generals got a free hand to run the military and to build a commercial empire.
In the early 1990s, the military backed Milosevic in his effort to carve out an enlarged Serbia from the remains of the old, six-member federation. However, after losing four wars in the past decade, the army has been additionally humiliated by revelations of human rights abuses and war crimes.
-------- business
Lockheed to Get Competition
Saturday, March 16, 2002; Page E02
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35892-2002Mar15?language=printer
Raytheon has won a chance to bid for an air-traffic control contract worth as much as $1 billion that the Federal Aviation Administration once planned to give to Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin without competition. The En Route Automation Modernization Program, or ERAM, contract calls for improving the integration of software in the FAA's primary computer system. The computer is used in 20 air-traffic-control centers that direct planes at high altitudes.
-------- colombia
Colombian Army Strikes Rebels, Kills 28
March 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-colombia-combat.html
BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian security forces on Saturday struck their hardest blow against FARC rebels since peace talks collapsed last month, killing at least 28 of the Marxist guerrillas and seizing a massive cocaine store, the army said.
The fiercest fighting took place around the village of Vista Hermosa, inside the former ``demilitarized zone'' set aside by the government for the rebels during three years of futile peace talks and which troops are attempting to retake, the army said in a news release.
Soldiers killed 17 guerrillas there in one of the few clear victories for the army in what has been a frustrating start to the campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- a 17,000-strong force known by the Spanish initials ``FARC.''
The FARC, which had kept up attacks outside its government-mandated southern Colombian safe haven throughout the years of tortuous talks, has recently avoided direct confrontations with the army.
Instead the guerrillas have emerged from their jungle and mountain hide-outs to blow up power lines throughout the country and sabotage infrastructure. They have also planted bombs in abandoned cars and trucks to block traffic on country roads.
In other outbreaks of fighting, the army killed six guerrillas in the mountains near the capital Bogota, and five more in other areas of the country.
The army said it suffered no casualties.
The FARC is fighting a 38-year-old war which claims about 3,500 mainly civilian lives a year. The conflict also involves smaller leftist rebel groups and far-right paramilitary outlaws.
SEVEN TONNES OF COCAINE DESTROYED
Police said they destroyed seven tonnes of cocaine together with two makeshift drug laboratories inside the former demilitarized zone.
The FARC's drug activities were cited by President Andres Pastrana in February as a key reason for abandoning three years of attempts to negotiate peace with Latin America's oldest, richest and most powerful insurgent force.
With annual output estimated at about 580 tonnes, Colombia produces about 80 percent of the world's cocaine, and the government accuses the FARC of heavy involvement in drug-trafficking. The rebels say they only ``tax'' smugglers.
The FARC, fighting for socialist reform and land redistribution, has negligible popular support, opinion polls show, but money from drugs and kidnapping allows it to sustain its war effort.
In private, military officers say they believe the FARC, a largely peasant army, is saving its firepower for attacks around the May 26 presidential elections -- which polls say will be won by tough-talking, anti-guerrilla independent Alvaro Uribe.
The U.S. government said on Friday that it would ask Congress to authorize Colombia to use its American military aid against the FARC and other illegal groups in non-counter-narcotics operations.
The United States has provided Colombia more than $1 billion in mainly military aid to fight the drug trade, training troops and supplying helicopters.
-------- drug war
Afghan farmlands abloom in poppies
March 16, 2002
By Charles J. Hanley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020316-11878608.htm
NOOR MOHAMMED KHAN CHARAI, Afghanistan - Mohammed Gul, tattered shoes planted in the mud, will keep a close watch on his two little acres in the coming weeks, waiting for the buds to bloom. He won't be alone.
Five hundred miles up, racing silently through space, U.S. reconnaissance satellites will be watching, too, camera eyes cocked for the first signs of vivid red, the flowering of opium poppies.
Here on the edge of Afghanistan's Desert of Death and onward east and north across this deeply poor land, the deadly narcotic is again the raw material of life and livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people.
"All my land is in poppy. I've grown it for 30 years," Mr. Gul said. "Every year except one."
That one was last year, when the Taliban, the Muslim zealots who ruled most of Afghanistan, banned poppy growing as un-Islamic.
Now the Taliban have been scattered to the harsh Afghan hills, ousted from power in a lightning U.S.-led war, and America and its allies, including the new Afghan regime of Hamid Karzai, have inherited the dilemmas of the land of poppy.
Mr. Gul, who sowed his seeds as he saw the old regime fall, is thankful.
"We hear that this government's a good one, not cruel like the Taliban," he told a visitor. "They banned our poppy. I don't think this new government will come and tear up our crops."
The rout of the Taliban is only one reason this poppy farmer is indebted to the United States. It was that rich distant nation, after all, that sent engineers here in the 1950s to build a vast irrigation project that turned the arid wastes green. Today, those canals and gates channel water to countless fields of poppy along the banks of the Helmand, the slow, silty river that snakes through the biggest opium-producing area of the biggest opium-producing country in the world.
On the banks of the far-off Potomac, the challenge of Afghanistan has kept lights burning late in government offices since September 11, not least in the glass-sheathed tower of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in suburban Virginia.
It was a stunning turn of events. From one of the great success stories in decades of drug wars - when the Taliban "just said no" in July 2000 - Afghanistan has reverted overnight to its role as the Iowa of opium, the raw stuff of heroin. Early indications are that this spring's crop will reach the high levels attained before the Taliban edict, drug enforcement officials say.
Across the Potomac from DEA headquarters, at the State Department, specialists are conferring with the British, French and other allies about how to attack the Afghan problem. The Europeans are vitally concerned - it's their addicts who consume the bulk of Afghanistan's heroin.
The British have floated the idea of a straight buyout of spring opium production. That might cost several hundred million dollars. Others stress the need for immediate aid programs steering farmers to alternative crops. The U.N. Drug Control Program is reopening its office in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital. The DEA is planning to move staff to the U.S. Embassy there.
"The DEA is hopeful that a law-enforcement presence will be put in place there that is friendly to work with, that will work with the international community to combat drug trafficking," said DEA spokesman Will Glaspy.
Despite all the talk and action, however, the spring opium is as good as harvested. The current interim regime in Kabul is too weak to stop it.
A few miles from Mr. Gul's village, in the Helmand province center of Lashkar Gah, a dust-blown place of donkey carts and earthen houses, the new local administration takes a pragmatic view.
"This year, we're not able to destroy the crops. If we try to enforce a ban on the farmers, it wouldn't be good for us," Haji Pir Mohammed, top deputy to Helmand's governor, said in an interview. In muddy lanes nearby, speedy Toyota pickups, suited for long-distance runs across the desert, came and went bearing loads of opium.
Poppy has been cultivated in Afghanistan for centuries, but it wasn't until the wars of the 1980s and 1990s that the red and white flowers began taking over large swaths of prime farmland. Afghan warlords shipped out opium gum to finance their militias.
By 1994, the United Nations' annual survey found poppy growing on 177,000 acres, and Afghanistan was supplying more than 70 percent of the world's opium. The narcotic had become the country's major source of income.
Heroin use worldwide grew steadily as well. The U.N. Drug Control Program now estimates there are 9 million users globally, 3 million of them in Europe - at the end of a processing pipeline that smuggles Afghan opium through the Middle East or the former Soviet Union, and converts it into heroin along the way. The number of ruined lives and overdose deaths goes uncounted.
After the Taliban swept the warlords from power in 1996, the hard-line Islamists opened on-and-off negotiations over opium with the U.N. drug agency. Finally, in July 2000, Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar announced the ban on the crop.
Diplomats believe the Taliban, pariahs because of their violations of human rights standards elsewhere, were seeking international respectability and financial aid. They won some of both. U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called it "a decision by the Taliban we welcome."
Washington sent $43 million in emergency aid.
The Taliban may have acted, too, because of the upsurge in addiction in Afghanistan, where users generally smoke opium, rather than inject refined heroin. "Drug Abuse Is Submission To A Gradual Death," declares a lone sign the Taliban posted at the entrance to their stronghold city of Kandahar.
Last spring, the U.N. agency sent out hundreds of trained workers to inspect more than 10,000 Afghan villages in its annual survey. In mid-2001, it reported that the Taliban edict had been almost totally successful: Opium production was off by 96 percent. The American DEA agreed, relying on satellite imagery. Fear of the Taliban's stern hand had all but rid the countryside of poppy.
Then, last October, Washington began its war on the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization, al Qaeda (the Base), and the drug fighters saw the sudden remarkable gains in Afghanistan explode among tons of bombs dropped from American B-52s.
The new Karzai administration declared its own opium ban on Jan. 17, but it was too late. The farmers had already done their fall poppy planting.
Economics dictated it. They could earn 10 times more profit from an acre of opium than from an acre of wheat, and poppies require less water, long term, than other crops - a key consideration going into Afghanistan's fourth year of drought.
Dirt-poor farmers like Mr. Gul are locked into the poppy cycle in another way as well. Drug traffickers advanced loans to many of them for seed and supplies. Only the harvest will free them from the debt.
Foreign-aid organizations, private and governmental, are re-entering Afghanistan with plans to encourage alternative crops - fruit or cotton, for example. But the challenge is daunting.
"There's no alternative crop near the value of poppy," said Kim Johnston, operations director for Mercy Corps International. In a telephone interview from the aid group's Oregon headquarters, Miss Johnston said more than development aid is needed. "It will work only if there's a simultaneous commitment from the government to support eradication through enforcement."
But force and eradication are unlikely anytime soon.
In this land of feuding tribes and clans, the new central leadership is too weak to risk alienating ordinary Afghan farmers. Besides, it can't: It has no anti-drug police, in fact no real police force at all. And it relies on the good will of tribal chieftains and militia warlords, many of whom have long profited from the heroin trade.
A long-faced farmer squinted into the gray afternoon light as he took time to answer a visitor's questions.
"Nobody's come yet from the government," he said. "They're too busy with a hundred other jobs."
His two young sons went on hurriedly shoveling earth to form the narrow dikes for poppy plots. He was planting very late, and reluctantly, after concluding his family would be ruined if they depended on their money-losing vegetables.
"I know it's wrong. It's bad for human beings. But what can I do?" said the gray-bearded man. Embarrassed, he wouldn't give his name, citing his position - agriculture teacher at a local school.
Across the sluggish Helmand, in "Group Six," a settlement of 100 families, "100 percent" of them planted poppy this year, villagers said. The 80-year-old village elder, Haji Ghulam Dastagir, acknowledged the crop was "a bad thing."
----
Fighting Drug Cultivation With a Double-Edged Sword
Afghan Plan to Ruin Poppies Threatens Farmers' Livelihood
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 16, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35415-2002Mar15?language=printer
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan -- Abdul Sattar is in charge of the anti-drug agency in the largest poppy-growing province in the leading opium-producing country in the world. While sitting on the floor of his office recently, he took inventory: no desk, no chairs, no phone, no car, 10 men, two guns.
"Our office has nothing -- it's paralyzed," said Sattar, an official on the front lines of the interim Afghan government's efforts to enforce a ban on opium cultivation -- imposed largely to please the United States and other countries that helped topple the Taliban last year. A bumper harvest is expected in just 10 weeks, he said, but "right now, we're not doing anything."
When the conversation turned to the government's threat to plow under and destroy the poppies before the harvest, the agency's watchman, a farmer named Habibullah Zabet, grew angry. With Afghanistan entering the fourth year of its worst drought in memory, the government's plans would hurt farmers badly.
"I knew the government would ban opium cultivation, but we had to [grow] it because opium needs only a little water," explained Zabet, who said he has about 125 acres of poppies, which produce raw opium that can be refined into heroin. "If we cultivate wheat and corn and tomatoes, we can't get the money back that we paid to plant it."
Listening to his watchman, Sattar smiled forlornly. "Right now, some of my friends are upset with me," he said. "I have many friends and relatives growing poppies. Even some of my brothers grow it."
Afghanistan's poppy fields are the ultimate source of about 80 percent of the heroin in Europe, drug experts say, and 95 percent of the heroin in Britain. Even though little Afghan opium makes it to U.S. streets, American officials say they are keenly focused on eradicating the drug in Afghanistan because it was a key source of funding for Taliban and al Qaeda operations, possibly even the terrorist attacks against the United States.
"Drugs and terror go side by side, and we are the victim of that," said Ahmed Wali Karzai, a top official in Kandahar and the younger brother of Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai. "The world community helped us defeat terrorism and it needs to help us defeat this evil. We cannot solve this problem by ourselves."
A year ago, Afghanistan achieved the near-impossible: It almost eradicated its opium crop on orders from the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar, who said that cultivating drugs violated Islamic tenets. Afghanistan ranked as the world's largest producer of opium in 2000, with an output of more than 3,600 tons, or about 75 percent of the world's supply, according to U.N. statistics. But last year the country produced just 206 tons -- a decline of 94 percent.
Many analysts say they believe the Taliban's real aim in imposing the ban was to control the opium market and drive up prices that had fallen steeply. Whatever the motive, the prohibition was carried out, largely because people feared being killed if they were caught violating it, farmers here say.
"What happened was an historic event," said Leslie Oqvist, a top U.N. official who has been stationed in Kandahar for more than five years. "Afghanistan was the biggest opium producer in the world, and then in one year, it was almost totally gone."
"We can do it again, but we need to give them alternatives," he said. "You cannot take a piece of bread from a starving man and expect him to lay down and die."
The virtual eradication of poppies, however, did not erase Afghanistan's drug problem. Experts estimate that there are still about 2,200 tons of raw opium stockpiled in Afghanistan, and they say this year's harvest could add another 2,000 to 3,000 tons.
The interim government is eager to ensure that the stockpiles cannot be replenished. Its official position is that the poppies will be destroyed, with no compensation to the farmers who planted them, lest they replant next year so as to be repaid again. The hope in Kabul is that international aid agencies will step into the breach with programs that help farmers switch to legal crops.
Much of the effort will be focused here in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province. About twice the size of Maryland, the province grows about 57 percent of the country's opium crop. Anti-drug officials, aid workers and farmers agree that almost every landowner in the area has planted poppies.
The farmers have strong incentives: Wheat needs more than twice as much water as poppies, and at current values, a poppy crop is 32 times more valuable. Today, a half-acre of poppies would produce opium worth about $3,500, compared with $108 for wheat from a plot of equal size.
"It's too difficult to ban or destroy this year's crop without giving the farmers something in return," said Helmand Gov. Sher Mohammed. "Politically, the people will rise up against the government" if it wipes out their poppy harvest, he said.
Sattar, the anti-drug chief, said he feared armed clashes with poppy growers. In interviews, farmers themselves said they would defend their fields, most of which were planted in November and December, before the interim government announced its prohibition in mid-January.
"If the government comes to destroy our field, we won't let them -- we'll fight," said Abdul Rashid, a laborer in a poppy field on the outskirts of Girishk, a small desert town about 20 miles northeast of Lashkar Gah.
But Yusuf Pashtun, spokesman for Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai, played down the possibility of violence, saying people were "fed up" with it.
Besides, he said, "if we don't eradicate [this year's crop] we will lose the support of the international community, and that's more important to Afghanistan right now than a few 100 or 1,000 families in the countryside."
Poppies have helped finance wars for years and remain an integral part of a wartime economy. Farmers receive cash advances to plant the crop, and they often repay the loans with a percentage of their harvest. Field workers are also paid with a percentage of the yield. If the crop is destroyed, farmers fear that loans received in the past year will be almost impossible to repay.
Zabet, the watchman, said that during the Taliban's ban he sowed wheat on his land that cost almost 6 cents per pound to plant and harvest. It brought only 3 1/2 cents per pound at market, though, leaving him unable to pay off about $3,700 in debts at the end of the season. This year, he had to take out another $5,800 loan to plant his poppy crop.
"I don't want to grow poppies -- I have to do it," he said. "It's against Islam, it's against humanity, it's against international law -- it's against everything. But we have nothing else to do."
That the U.S. and Western military campaign against the Taliban has liberated Afghan farmers to again plant poppies is not the only irony. Helmand province -- which in a good year produces more than 40 percent of the world's raw opium -- yields as much as it does in part because of a U.S. funded project 50 years ago to dam the Helmand River.
Finished in 1953, the 300-foot-high, 887-foot-long Kajaki Dam, located about 65 miles northwest of Lashkar Gah, created a 32-mile-long reservoir that now feeds thousands of miles of canals that crisscross parts of Helmand and Kandahar provinces, creating oases where poppies thrive.
Farmers here say they appreciate the role the United States and other countries played in vanquishing the Taliban. They do not want to repay that, they said, by sending death and addiction to the West.
"We understand that it's killing people, and if the U.S. or U.N. helps us, we pledge not to grow it, but we have no choice," said Tawaz, 40, a poppy laborer. "It's not a matter of the drought, it's just the money. If we grow wheat, we cannot feed our families."
What they want and need, farmers and aid workers said, is basic development aid -- programs that would build roads, hospitals and schools, expand the network of canals to facilitate the cultivation of other crops, open factories for alternative types of employment and give farmers credit, access to foreign markets, high-yield and drought-resistant seeds, fertilizers and tractors.
Juma Gull and his family share a 125-acre poppy plot with five other families in Ainak, a small farming community about five miles outside Lashkar Gah. The group has taken out about $10,000 in loans to plant the field and feed themselves, he said, and they hope to split a profit of about $33,000 after the harvest.
The families have a total of about 80 children, and last year, when the Taliban banned poppy cultivation, he said, they left the land barren and the men emigrated to Iran to find work.
"The government of the Taliban banned poppies, but they did nothing for us in return and did not attack any of our problems," said Mohammed Akka, 55, one of the partners in the field. " . . . If this government does the same thing, it won't succeed either."
----
Crackdown Moves Opium Market Underground
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 16, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35943-2002Mar15?language=printer
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Last month, Kandahar's new police chief summoned the prosperous merchants of Narcotics Street to his office and ordered them to close their opium shops.
Within days, the plastic bags of sticky, black raw opium disappeared from the shops' shelves. The trademark brown handprints that covered the walls as advertisements for the narcotic were slathered in fresh white paint.
Now, in many shops the shelves are bare. In others, brightly colored packets of snack foods hang on the walls and tin cans of cooking oil are stacked neatly across the front.
But the klatches of turbaned men sipping tea on the floors of the open-front cubicles aren't interested in snacks or groceries. They are here to haggle over the price of the raw opium that still leaves Kandahar to be processed into heroin for sale in Europe, with some making its way to the United States.
"Today we have no narcotics in the shops," said a 28-year-old merchant who has sold raw opium on Narcotics Street for four years. "Now people will store it elsewhere. They'll make the exchanges in different places."
In recent weeks, international officials have hailed the crackdown on Narcotics Street as a milestone for post-Taliban Afghanistan. But, as with many efforts to tame the excesses of a country ravaged by years of war and international neglect, the anti-drug campaign here in the Taliban's birthplace has done little more than move the drug trade underground.
Merchants estimate that, of the 40 shopkeepers who sold their wares openly, five quit their businesses, about 20 continue to sell secretly from their stores and the rest are making drug transactions from their homes or other locations.
"We still have dealers," said one merchant, hunched on the floor of his boxlike shop, now devoid of any product -- legitimate or illegitimate -- on public display. The shopkeeper, like each of the half-dozen drug sellers who agreed to be interviewed, spoke on the condition that his name not be used.
The merchants of Narcotics Street, which stretches two blocks in one of the city's busy commercial neighborhoods, said they have grown accustomed to the vagaries of Afghanistan's changing governments. The street -- a chaotic gridlock of pedestrians, horse-drawn wagons and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- has become a reflection of each new government's attempts at social reform.
Before the Taliban took over Kandahar, the street was known as Weapons Place. The shops were stuffed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, rocket launchers and boxes of bullets, shopkeepers said. In a region where banditry and lawlessness were the norm, trade was brisk.
Then the Taliban seized power and abolished the arms trade. Savvy merchants were undaunted.
"When the Taliban took away the weapons, all the shops switched to the narcotics business," said one shopkeeper, a gray turban wrapped around his head and beads draped over one hand.
The price of raw opium jumped dramatically and profits exploded, according to those who made the switch. As a barometer of the money the drug trade brought to the former arms merchants, monthly rents on the tiny shops skyrocketed after Weapons Place was redubbed Narcotics Street.
"Business was great," said the 28-year-old drug seller. "Trucks and cars would pull up to your shop and fill up with narcotics. It was open. Nobody said anything, neither the government nor the local people."
At that time Afghanistan was producing 70 percent of the world's opium, three times the output of Burma, its closest competitor, according to U.S. and international law enforcement agencies.
Two years ago, the Taliban shifted its drug policy and banned the cultivation of opium poppies, merchants said. The ban was largely ignored the first year. Last year, however, the Taliban government "got serious," said one drug dealer.
If a farmer was caught growing poppies, Taliban police would hang poppies around his neck, blacken his face with charcoal and parade him around the village.
But where poppy farmers found fear, drug merchants saw opportunity.
"When Mullah Omar announced the ban, we saw it as a chance for a great profit for everyone, especially in Kandahar," said one Narcotics Street merchant, referring to Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. "I bought everything I could find and stored it."
Raw opium purchased for about $25 a pound at the time of Omar's declaration sold for as much as $300 a pound a few months later, according to dealers here.
Though Omar assailed the negative effects of narcotics in his radio announcements, his government largely ignored the profitable trade on Narcotics Street.
"I didn't stop," said one merchant. "Nobody stopped. There was no ban on buying or selling, just on growing."
The rise in the fortunes of one twentysomething merchant during the Taliban's rule exemplifies the obstacles Afghanistan's new government will face in trying to put the men of Narcotics Street out of business.
The man said he had struggled to support his wife and three children with a used-car business that brought him a monthly profit of about $100. His father's almond and raisin sales were the principal support for the man, his family, his four brothers and their families -- all of whom lived with his parents.
Now, after four years of operations on Narcotics Street, the same young man is the primary means of support for 28 family members. In the best months, he said, he made $6,000 -- a fortune by Afghan standards.
"Before, I was dependent on my father," he said. "He paid everything. Now I pay everything."
This year, he financed his parents' $3,200 trip to Saudi Arabia for the hajj pilgrimage.
In a country where the majority of the population is barely scratching out a living, that kind of story frustrates Kandahar Police Chief Zabit Akram.
"We're trying our level best to ban these bad activities," said Akram, wearing the olive drab uniform of the new police force. "But it's up to you, to America, to make the world understand it needs to help these poor people."
His department doesn't have the money or the manpower to do much more than make radio announcements beseeching farmers and dealers to stop the drug business, he said. On Feb. 14, he supervised the first public burning of a small pile of hashish and raw opium confiscated by his men at road checkpoints.
The merchants of Narcotics Street are feeling some pressure, however. Since the fall of the Taliban, drug prices have dropped sharply because couriers have been reluctant to travel to the Iranian and Pakistani borders, where most of the raw opium is taken, sellers said.
Dealers said the price they receive for raw opium has dropped nearly 40 percent since the start of the U.S. bombing campaign on Oct. 7.
"People are trying to sell now," said one dealer. "When the U.S. attacked, they thought Bush was not only against Osama bin Laden, he was also against narcotics. Some people are afraid if they are caught, the Americans will come and take them to cages in Cuba."
The dealer said he considers the obstacles and the slowdown in the market temporary, however. With a huge percentage of farmers in surrounding provinces already cultivating a new crop of poppies, the curtailment of overt sales on Narcotics Street will only prompt merchants to become more savvy, he insisted.
"I'm buying a satellite phone," he said with an air of confidence.
-------- europe
EU says it can take over Macedonian peacekeeping mission
Saturday March 16
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-95259.html
BARCELONA, Spain - European Union leaders agreed on Saturday that the 15-nation bloc should soon be ready to take over peacekeeping duties from NATO in Macedonia if the mission needs to be continued.
The EU wants a planned rapid reaction force to make its debut in the former Yugoslav republic but it must first reach a deal with NATO on access to the alliance's facilities. A row between historic rivals Greece and Turkey is blocking an accord.
"(The EU) expressed its availability to take responsibility following the Macedonian elections and at the request of the government to follow the (NATO) mission," the leaders said in a communique after a two-day summit in Barcelona.
Such a mission would only go ahead, however, if the EU had reached "a permanent arrangement" with NATO on facilities, the leaders said.
"This is a matter of considerable urgency," the host, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, told a news conference.
"It is difficult to believe 12 or 13 of our countries can deploy troops in Afghanistan when we can't even sort ourselves out closer to home," he said, clearly frustrated. Spain holds the EU's rotating presidency.
Aznar said EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana would step up efforts to clinch an agreement "in the next few weeks".
On Friday, Solana told Reuters he hoped an agreement would be possible by the end of the Spanish presidency on June 30.
GREEK OBJECTIONS
EU and NATO member Greece objects to the terms of a deal recently negotiated with Turkey under which non-EU members of NATO -- meaning Turkey -- could be invited to join missions of the new EU force on a case-by-case basis and consulted on missions which have an impact on their national security.
Greece has long been at odds with its larger eastern neighbour over territorial issues in the Aegean Sea as well as the divided island of Cyprus. The two NATO allies came close to war as recently as 1996 over an uninhabited Aegean islet.
Greek Prime Minister Costa Simitis said in Barcelona on Thursday that Greek and Spanish officials would meet next week to discuss the problem.
Spain and France, in particular, have been pushing for the rapid reaction force to be deployed in Macedonia as soon as possible, but some other countries, including Britain, insist this can only happen after a deal has been clinched with NATO.
About 700 NATO troops have been overseeing a peace deal between the Macedonian government and ethnic Albanian rebels.
-------- india
Holy site calm as ritual is blocked
March 16, 2002
By Shaikh Azizur Rahman
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020316-65116792.htm
AYODHYA, India - The Indian government averted a potentially violent clash between Hindus and Muslims yesterday by blocking a Hindu ceremony on the site of a destroyed mosque.
Thousands of Hindu activists and holy men, however, chanted prayers and carried two consecrated pillars near the site of a razed mosque where they plan to build a temple. The pillars were later handed over to a government representative.
Nearly 40,000 activists were detained all over the country to prevent a confrontation at the disputed site.
India's top court, on Wednesday, barred the activists from entering the disputed site. The ceremony yesterday was held outside the protected zone established by the court.
Hindu nationalists had planned to defy the ruling and dedicate the pillars near the rubble of the Babri mosque in a symbolic start to building the temple. But in a last-minute compromise, the activists agreed to hand over the pillars to the government for safekeeping and stay away from the disputed area.
In 1992, Hindu hard-liners razed the 16th-century mosque at the site that they believe is the birthplace of a most revered Hindu deity, Lord Rama. Muslims oppose the building of the temple at the site.
About 3,000 Hindu activists led by priests marched toward the disputed site yesterday afternoon, chanting praises of Lord Rama. The ceremony ended without incident, but there were reports of religious strife elsewhere in the country.
Some violence was reported in the western state of Gujarat; parts of Ahmedabad, the state's largest city, were placed under curfew. A train carrying Hindu activists was torched in Gujarat last month. In the religious clashes that ensued, more than 700 Hindus and Muslims were killed.
Associated Press reported that clashes broke out in Gujarat yesterday between Muslims, who were leaving at the end of Friday prayers, and Hindus, who were chanting and beating drums to coincide with the ceremony in Ayodhya. At least one man was killed, and seven were injured.
Security was heaviest in Ayodhya, where more than 1,000 Hindu activists were arrested on the eve of the ceremony.
Activists of the hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Council, did not try to break the police cordon around the disputed 67-acre zone, despite earlier warnings that they would defy the ban by "facing police bullets" if need be.
The Hindu nationalist government led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had appealed for calm and urged the activists to stay away from the disputed site.
VHP spokesman Praveen Togadia said the ceremony was a success because the government accepted the ceremonial pillars, signaling - in principle - support for the construction.
"No power on earth can stop the construction of the temple" at the disputed site, he said.
Some Muslim leaders criticized the government for sending an official to receive the pillars, saying it points to taking sides in the dispute.
"It is simply a green signal for the construction of the Rama temple" while the case is still before the court, said Mohammed Aslam Bhure, a prominent Muslim leader.
-------- iraq
UN helps Iran plan for flood of refugees
Contingency Tehran starts stockpiling tents and medicine
Jonathan Steele in Tehran
Saturday March 16, 2002
The Guardian (UK)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,668512,00.html
The United Nations has started moving tens of thousands of tents and blankets to western Iran in readiness for a huge wave of Iraqi refugees who are expected to escape across the border if the US and Britain launch military action to topple the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein.
The move, which is the first concrete sign that international and Iranian officials are taking the threat of a US-led war against Iraq seriously, is described as a "contingency plan" by Pierre Lavanchy, who heads the Tehran office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).
"We've started to prepare for a possible influx. We are in discussions with Iranian officials", he told the Guardian yesterday. "We are taking stocks which were in place in south-eastern Iran for refugees from Afghanistan and moving them across the country to be near the border with Iraq."
As well as tents and blankets, the supplies include kitchen utensils, plastic sheeting, pots, and jerry cans for water.
They will go to the main UNHCR depot at Ahwaz, and at an office in Orumiyeh.
Food and medicine is expected to be added after a meeting tomorrow of all the Iran-based UN agencies, including the World Food Programme and the World Health Organisation.
"We are already moving enough for 40,000 people. It's better to have at least a minimum in place," Mr Lavanchy said.
Although Mr Lavanchy declined to give a figure for the total number of refugees expected to flee across the border because of US air strikes and ground operations, some diplomats believe it could reach 150,000, even though Saddam Hussein is expected to close the frontiers, as he did in previous conflicts. Tens of thousands of others would be displaced inside Iraq, unable to bypass or bribe the Iraqi border guards.
During the US bombing of Afghanistan, both Pakistan and Iran mounted extra guards on their respective borders to keep refugees out.
By contrast, in the case of a US attack on Iraq, Iran is expected to open the door.
"Foreign ministry officials have said that they will allow refugees from Iraq to enter," Mr Lavanchy said.
"The Iraqi lobby here is much stronger than the Afghan one."
The policy difference also seems to stem from the size of the refugee communities that are already in Iran.
Iran felt it could not take any more Afghans after a registration drive last spring discovered that 2.36 million Afghan refugees were already inside the country.
Only 203,000 Iraqis were recorded.
The Iranian government is just about to launch a new programme, with the UNHCR, to persuade Afghan refugees to return home now that the Taliban have been defeated.
The exodus from Iraq is expected to consist mainly of Kurds from northern Iraq.
Arab Shi'ites from the southern Iraqi marshlands, which provided some of the main battlegrounds in the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, were driven from their homes in the early 1990s by Saddam Hussein's strategy of damming rivers and draining the marshes to destroy the livelihoods of communities that he suspected of being hostile to him.
The area is now almost empty. Around 100,000 of the marsh Arabs fled to Iran, while others fled to Iraqi cities.
Apart from creating a new refugee crisis, a war in Iraq is also likely to put an abrupt end to a cautious refugee and prisoner-of-war return programme which Teheran and Baghdad started just two months ago, almost 14 years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, which left some 500,000 dead.
----
Iraq Able to Resist U.S. Military Action - Saddam
March 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-usa-saddam.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said on Saturday his country would be able to resist U.S. military action but could not prevent it.
During a meeting with visiting Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Thi Binh, Saddam said Washington was more interested in imposing its will on Iraq than in seeing Baghdad implement U.N. resolutions.
He also blasted what he called U.S. double standards in its Middle East policy.
His remarks came two days after President Bush said the Iraqi leader was a problem and that the United States would deal with him.
``Probably we cannot prevent the aggression, but we will be able to resist it,'' the Iraqi News Agency INA quoted Saddam as saying.
``America can harm the Iraqi people by launching guided missiles...but it cannot thwart their will,'' he said.
Speculation has mounted that Washington might launch military action against Baghdad after Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea last month as forming an ``axis of evil'' developing weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring terrorism.
``They (Americans) are lying when they say they want (us) to respect international law -- rather they want to impose their will under the cover of world law,'' Saddam said.
Saddam was referring to a standoff between Washington and Baghdad over U.N. weapons inspectors, hunting for weapons of mass destruction.
Washington accuses Baghdad of developing prohibited weapons and says Iraq should allow U.N. arms experts to return or face severe consequences.
The inspectors left Iraq on the eve of a U.S.-British bombing campaign in December 1998. They have not been allowed in since.
Saddam also accused Washington of double standards in its Middle East policy. He said Iraq would respect Washington and the U.N. Security Council if they pressed the Israelis ``to withdraw from Syria's Golan Heights, parts of Lebanon and Palestine,'' in the same manner they pressed Iraq to implement U.N. resolutions.
Iraq has always taken a hard line toward Israel. It fired Scud missiles at the Jewish state during the 1991 Gulf War. It also opposes peace agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians and those signed with other neighboring countries.
On Saturday, Saddam sent his Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz to four northern African countries to rally opposition against possible U.S. strikes on Iraq. His move is seen here as a counter to the current tour by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Middle East which includes talks on gaining support for military action against Baghdad.
----
Russia denies it might accept anti-Iraq strikes
AFP
SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_ID=3904635
MOSCOW: Russia Friday described as "absolutely groundless" a report in the British daily The Times that Moscow might not object to possible US attacks on Iraq.
The newspaper said in its Friday edition that Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov hinted in an interview that Moscow would not back out of the US-led anti-terror coalition if Washington launched unilateral strikes on Iraq as part of its anti-terror campaign.
"It would not be expedient to issue any ultimatums to say that we would withdraw from the coalition," The Times quoted him as saying in what the paper saw as a hint that it might not cut off its help in the US-led campaign.
But foreign ministry spokesman Sergei Yakovenko said that Ivanov "spoke unambiguously against any unilateral armed action against Iraq," the Interfax news agency reported.
He quoted Ivanov as saying that the strikes would "make not only the Iraqi settlement process but also the general situation in the region more difficult," Interfax said.
Washington, and to a lesser extent London, has stepped up warnings that the alleged Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction must be "dealt with," raising fears that the war on terror could soon be broadened to Baghdad.
As quoted by The Times, Ivanov insisted that only the United Nations was authorised to take action against a country, and said Russia "cannot but be concerned" by unilateralism in US foreign policy.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Withdraws From Most Towns in the West Bank
New York Times
March 16, 2002
By SERGE SCHMEMANN with TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/international/middleeast/16MIDE.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank, March 15 - Israel pulled its forces out of all West Bank towns save Bethlehem today, bringing an unfamiliar calm to much of the area as Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the American mediator, concluded an intensive first round of meetings in search of a cease-fire.
No details were immediately known, but after his first two days, General Zinni radiated optimism. He said he had come with a "vision and a plan" from President Bush, and was encouraged "that we are going to identify the mechanism that would allow us to implement that plan."
Senior American officials in Washington said General Zinni was prepared to undertake high-level talks among political officials from both sides, in tandem with talks about security issues between lower-level officials, in an effort to jump-start a peace effort. The suggestion was that participants in the high-level talks would be of cabinet rank.
"Part of the agenda has always been to organize not only a security process and discussions, but a higher-level group to try to establish the cooperation that would lead us into political discussions," one senior Bush administration official said.
After meeting through the day with the Israelis, General Zinni drove to Ramallah in the evening to meet for two hours with Yasir Arafat at the headquarters where the Palestinian leader has been effectively cooped up for three months.
"I have held two days of meetings and all these meetings were extremely positive," General Zinni said afterwards. "I think everyone is committed to getting out of this terrible situation."
The meeting in itself marked a triumph for the Palestinians, because a major focus of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's actions - endorsed until recently by Washington - had been to marginalize Mr. Arafat.
"We waited for him so long," said Mr. Arafat, standing alongside General Zinni, a retired marine. "Thanks for President Bush and Secretary Colin Powell for sending you in this speed and at these difficult circumstances that we are passing through."
For his part, President Bush called the Israeli troop pullback "a positive development" and added, "I appreciate Prime Minister Sharon's decision," which Secretary Powell had demanded earlier in the week.
A senior Bush administration official said that since Mr. Sharon visited Washington last month, Mr. Bush and his senior advisers had grown increasingly skeptical that he had a coherent strategy for ending the violence. The official said Mr. Bush reached "a turning point of sorts" last week, after Mr. Sharon declared that his aim was "to increase the number of losses on the other side."
"He knows what Israel needs to do to maintain security," the official said. "But when it looks like they're just inflicting harm and hardship with no security benefit, then the president's concerned about that, and concerned that it doesn't help tomorrow."
General Zinni saw his first two visits to Israel, last year, end in failure. But he plunged directly into this one on his arrival, meeting on Thursday evening with Mr. Sharon, Mr. Peres, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and the heads of the military and intelligence. Today he held further meetings with Mr. Peres and Mr. Ben-Eliezer before heading off for Ramallah.
An Israeli diplomat in Washington said Mr. Sharon had agreed in his first meeting with General Zinni on Thursday night to restore a committee of higher-level Israeli and Palestinian officials, like one that had operated under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
But another official cautioned that in the past, such discussions had become a forum for recriminations and were of limited use. And the Israeli diplomat said: "It's hard for me to get very excited. What does it mean, apart from symbolism? Everything depends on the security situation."
General Zinni will be joined early next week by Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been touring Arab capitals in search of support for a campaign against Iraq. The American envoy is also expected to gather high-ranking Israeli and Palestinian security officials.
In contrast to the high daily death tolls of recent days and weeks, the day's violence seemed tame. The Israeli Army said it killed three Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including one who was reportedly trying to plant a bomb. Also in Gaza, a Palestinian mother and her four children were killed when a mine exploded under their donkey cart. The Palestinians blamed Israel, but Israel denied having anything to do with it.
In Ramallah, the last Israeli tanks withdrew in the morning, ending a 72-hour occupation by an Israeli force of armor and elite infantry. After lying low for three days, residents crowded into the streets to examine flattened cars, smashed-in doorways and other debris of the operation. Long funeral processions wound through central streets for the last four of the 13 Palestinians killed in the town.
The tanks were nowhere to be seen. But Palestinians said they had only withdrawn to nearby settlements and bases, and could be back in minutes.
The Israeli Army also pulled out of Qalqilya and Tulkarm, on the West Bank. But tanks and armored personnel carriers remained in positions in Bethlehem and some adjacent villages and refugee camps overlooking the nearby Jewish neighborhood of Gilo. Israel said they would remain there until it had received assurances that there would be no more shooting at Gilo, or at the road used by Jewish settlers.
Israel also held funerals today for the three soldiers most recently killed, when their tank was blown up by a Palestinian mine in Gaza. But Israeli security officials lowered their alerts of potential terror strikes, issuing 10 such alerts, compared to 60 a week ago.
Though most commentators remained skeptical of a lasting cease- fire, a public-opinion poll published in the newspaper Maariv showed that while the Israeli public was prepared to support forceful measures against the Palestinians, it was also increasingly willing to consider alternatives. Thus, while 71 percent of the respondents supported the past two weeks' operations inside Palestinian refugee camps, majorities also supported a unilateral separation from the Palestinians, or a Palestinian state, or even the evacuation of Jewish settlements in Gaza.
"Some will see this as disillusionment, and others will see it as fatigue, surrender to terrorism, but there are buds of change in the air as spring arrives," wrote the political analysts Hemi Shalev in a commentary on the poll. "After 18 months of intifada, after we tried everything and nothing worked, the Israeli public is coming full circle and returning to the starting point, before the terrorism and the bereavement, before the intifada, before Camp David."
That attitude, some analysts suggested, was what gave General Zinni a chance this time. "Were Zinni free to talk, he would most likely tell the Israelis: `I don't have much of a chance, but I have something to build on,' " wrote Nahum Barnea in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot. " `I'm counting on your despair.' "
That assessment was supported by Mr. Peres, who said in an interview after his meeting with General Zinni that there were reasonable chances for a cease-fire, because "both sides want it and need it."
"What is happening now is not leading to anywhere," Mr. Peres said. "Just look at the number of losses on our side as well as on the Palestinian side."
There were also costs. Yediot Ahronot published a long interview with the Israeli Army chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, in which he said the war was costing Israel 2 million shekels a day, about $425,500 at current exchange rates.
On both sides of the struggle, the question was whether the heavy toll of recent weeks had achieved anything. The dramatic spat between Mr. Sharon and Mr. Ben-Eliezer, the prime minister and defense minister, over the operations in the West Bank had revealed a serious rift on how to deal with the Palestinians.
And in a powerful commentary written after he spent a night with Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, Mr. Barnea, the writer for Yediot Ahronot, described a meeting of commanders in which one officer quietly said, "I'm in a bit of a dilemma about the definition of this mission."
The scene after Israelis left Ramallah gave no firm answer. Led by intelligence reports, Israelis had gone directly to houses belonging to past or present political and military activists. But all the main ones had fled, and those known to have been detained appeared to be relatively minor figures. A large number of homes were thoroughly and destructively searched.
But in Al Amari refugee camp of Ramallah, residents said they had learned from previous raids, and put up no resistance, thus minimizing damage and casualties.
"They failed in achieving their aim, I believe Israel did not achieve what they wanted," said Nabil Tuabi, 45, a shopkeeper. "Their main purpose was to arrest wanted people, to arrest and kill as many armed people as they could. They did not achieve what they wanted. We won."
--------
Israel scales back forces
March 16, 2002
By Jack Katzenell
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020316-94412989.htm
JERUSALEM - Israeli troops withdrew from three West Bank towns yesterday, scaling down its biggest military operation since 1982, but failed to comply with American demands that it leave all Palestinian-controlled areas to give a boost to U.S. envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni's truce mission.
In recent fighting, nine Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Three Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza, including one accused by the army of trying to plant bombs. Also, a Palestinian woman, three of her children and her nephew were killed in a mysterious explosion in a Gaza refugee camp, and a suspected Palestinian informer for Israel was shot dead by gunmen in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, Gen. Zinni said yesterday he was confident Israel and the Palestinians can begin carrying out a cease-fire deal in the next few days. He said his meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials since arriving the previous afternoon have been "extremely positive."
"I think in the next few days that we can start on my mission and the implementation for the plan that we have brought," Gen. Zinni told reporters after a meeting with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at his West Bank headquarters.
Earlier in the day, Gen. Zinni held talks with Israel's defense and foreign ministers in his latest bid to forge a truce in nearly 18 months of violence.
Israel pulled its troops out of the West Bank towns of Ramallah, Tulkarm and Qalqilya. But troops remained in Bethlehem and the adjacent town of Beit Jalla, and tanks ringed the nearby refugee camps of Dheisheh and Aida.
The withdrawals began several hours after the envoy's arrival on Thursday and were complete by yesterday morning, though troops remained stationed close to the three towns, enforcing a blockade that kept Palestinians confined to their communities.
After his talks with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Gen. Zinni said, "Despite the conditions, I think there are the ingredients here for hope."
Mr. Peres and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer were also optimistic. The foreign minister said success was possible in Gen. Zinni's mission "because both sides want it and need it."
The United States was exerting strong pressure on Israel to leave all Palestinian-controlled areas. Israeli officials told Gen. Zinni that their troops would have to remain in some Palestinian areas to prevent attacks on Israelis by militants.
Palestinian officials ruled out any direct cease-fire talks with Israel until the troops pulled out completely.
After three days under a round-the-clock curfew imposed by the troops, thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets of Ramallah to bury four of the 13 Palestinians killed in fighting in the town since Tuesday.
Some 20,000 Israeli soldiers had been deployed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in recent days in the largest military operation since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon - Israel's response to a string of attacks by Palestinians.
In the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, a woman, three of her children and her nephew were killed when a bomb went off near their donkey cart. Palestinian security officials said Israeli troops had planted mines in the area before withdrawing earlier in the day, to prevent suspected militants from reaching the nearby border fence with Israel.
The Israeli military said it had nothing to do with the explosion.
In the bloodiest period since the fighting began September 2000, 185 Palestinians and 62 Israelis have been killed since the beginning of March.
-------- nato
MILITARY ANALYSIS
Military Gulf Separates U.S. and European Allies
New York Times
March 16, 2002
By STEVEN ERLANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/international/europe/16NATO.html
KLIETZ, Germany - In live-fire exercises here, the German heavy infantry battalion, the 421st Panzergrenadiers, look terrific, scooting out of Marder armored personnel carriers with new G-36 rifles, while the gunner clobbers a tank on the horizon with 20-millimeter shells.
But even the tank-heavy, conscript German Army knows that the collapse of Soviet Communism and high technology have irrevocably changed warfare.
Some European countries - notably Britain and France - have worked to modernize their armies and make them more mobile; Germany, too, is finally engaged in reform, even as 10,000 German troops help keep the peace in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
But the real problem is that only 1.5 percent of Germany's gross domestic product goes to the military, half the proportion allotted by the United States. "The German military knows what has to be done," said Margarita Mathiopoulos, executive director of the Potsdam Center for Transatlantic Security and Military Affairs. "But they don't have enough cash to do it."
With the war in Afghanistan exposing the disparities between the United States Army and those of the other NATO allies, Europe's perennial unwillingness to spend more for defense has undermined its credibility with the United States and damaged NATO as a military alliance, senior American and European officials say.
America's global responsibilities, matched with sizable and growing investments in high-technology warfare, from satellite communications to Predator drones, are leaving even NATO's most gung-ho European members farther behind. Even after the 1999 Kosovo war, when America's superior power was powerfully on display, Britain and France found they could not jump-start their effort to build a more effective European rapid reaction force.
European governments sense that they are increasingly becoming second-rank powers, unable to affect American foreign policy goals because they can bring too few military assets to the table.
Even NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, warns the Europeans of a choice between "modernization or marginalization." The American ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, said recently, "Without dramatic action to close the capabilities gap, we face the real prospect of a two-tiered alliance." There is a risk, he said, that the alliance "is so unbalanced that we may no longer have the ability to fight together in the future."
Kori Schake, a professor at the National Defense University who is joining the German National Security Council as director of defense policy, says the gap between the Americans and the Europeans is reaching a critical point.
After Sept. 11, she said, "American defense spending will increase dramatically, the changes in American forces will accelerate, and U.S. interest in and support for crisis management missions will decline further."
The Europeans, everyone agrees, must concentrate on some obvious improvements. They need to be able to move troops quickly by air, refuel planes in flight, deploy precision- guided munitions and operate with battlefield radar from the sky.
Their inability to do so now stems at least in part from an increasingly diverging view, compared with Washington's, of what is needed to combat the threats and poverty of the developing world.
Devastated by military conflict in the 20th century, Europe prefers to spend its money on social welfare at home and aid to poor countries abroad. The European Union provides 56 percent of the world's aid and 36 percent of the budget of the United Nations.
Britain and France are serious military and nuclear powers, but the United States is about to move into warp speed. President Bush wants to increase the Pentagon budget by $120 billion over the next five years, including a $48 billion increase next year, which would bring the military budget to $379 billion. That figure exceeds the total military budgets of the world's next 14 biggest defense spenders put together.
Even more troubling to some, there is an implicit division of labor within NATO - the Americans fight, and the Europeans clean up and keep the peace - that is eroding the ideal of a collective alliance.
The European effort to develop its own forces that can operate with NATO's aid but outside NATO is progressing only slowly. "Sept. 11 was not good, either for NATO or for the European defense project," a senior French official said. "When American security was at stake, Europeans expected to be called on to help, but the phone didn't ring."
In Kosovo but even more now in Afghanistan, European offers of military aid were largely spurned by the Americans as of little benefit. "It's all about capabilities," a senior European Union foreign policy official said. "The United States has to balance the aggravation of military partnership with its benefits, and if the benefits aren't very sizable, why bother with the aggravation?"
A senior American official said: "The reality is that we don't need the Europeans to do all that we do. We want a couple of crack divisions that can fight with us in nasty places if necessary. And they can do that by focusing their money and spending it better."
Lord Robertson, the secretary general, said in an interview that there was a need for a serious European rapid reaction force, better special forces, better communication and encryption. In particular, he said, the Europeans need strategic lift and precision-guided weapons like cruise missiles and smart bombs, "which are the only things you can now use to satisfy international law and international public opinion."
The problem can be as basic as transportation. A country as rich as Germany is still unable to deliver more than a third of the troops it promised for peacekeeping in Kabul on schedule because it must rent Russian or Ukrainian transport planes on the commercial market. One country, which NATO officials refused to identify, discussed moving troops to Kabul by railroad.
Yet a European troop transport plane, the A-400 M, a variant of the European-owned Airbus, is stuck in a financing dispute in Germany. Even worse, the plane will take 8 to 10 years to deliver.
Europe spends about $140 billion a year on the military, but on average only about $7,000 per soldier - compared with $28,000 per American soldier - on research and development.
Some fixes would be simple and not terribly expensive, officials and other experts say. To create a smart bomb out of a dumb one involves slapping on an $18,000 guidance package, said William Schneider Jr., chairman of the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, and providing sophisticated data links that have already been developed. "There is no technology transfer needed in this case," he said. "People just need to do it."
European aircraft would then be able to benefit from American airborne battlefield surveillance. Soldiers could easily have better gear able to communicate with American satellites or Predators.
A Rand Corporation study suggests that the Europeans can do enough to fight effectively alongside the Americans by spending some $25 billion to $56 billion more in the next decade, a senior French official said.
Javier Solana, the European Union's chief of foreign and security policy and before that NATO secretary general, said the Europeans could restore and maintain political credibility only by living up to their promises of increased military strength. "We do not set out to rival the United States as a military power, but where we decide to set goals, we must realize them," he said.
Now, in a phrase that has become almost a cliché, the United States is the power that fights, the United Nations feeds and the European Union finances, while European soldiers, as in Afghanistan and the Balkans, keep the peace. "This kind of complementarity is fine in the short term," the senior French official said. "But George Robertson is right. It must be a partnership or it's not stable in the long run.."
Lord Robertson complains with some bitterness that Germany is the only European country that has increased its military spending at all - $780 million from a special tax to fight terrorism - since Sept. 11. Yet he remains convinced that, in the end, "the European allies will do it - they know they have to do it."
The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, also seems to recognize that the Europeans must pool more power to remain relevant for America. "We don't have too much America," Mr. Schröder recently told the newspaper Die Zeit. "We have too little Europe."
-------- un
U.N. Human Rights Panel Convenes
March 16, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Human-Rights.html
GENEVA (AP) -- For the first time, the United States is being confined to the sidelines as a mere observer as 53 other countries -- including Sudan, Cuba and Syria -- take their seats in the U.N. human rights watchdog for the annual examination of human rights worldwide.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission, which opens its six-week session Monday, will hear hundreds of speeches from ministers and activists on issues ranging from executions to toxic waste. The spiraling violence in the Middle East will likely predominate, while repression in China is again expected to escape formal censure.
Advocacy groups say it's vital that the commission assert its moral clout as human rights come under extra pressure because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their repercussions.
``Governments around the world are cynically using the banner of anti-terrorism to justify crackdowns on internal opposition, and other countries are happy to turn a blind eye to the brutality of their allies in the anti-terror cause,'' said Reed Brody, a director of U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.
``Human rights around the world are under siege. In response to Sept. 11, too many countries have adopted the logic of terrorists that anything goes,'' he said, speaking to reporters in Geneva.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, headquartered in London, both criticize the United States for taking sweeping and secretive anti-terrorist measures, including the detention without charge of hundreds of men from Middle Eastern countries who were deemed potential suspects.
``The harshly punitive conditions in which these detainees are held appear excessive considering that many of them have been charged with routine visa violations for which they would not normally be detained,'' Amnesty said.
Human Rights Watch lambasted Washington for refusing to recognize al-Qaida and Taliban suspects interned at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay as prisoners of war with rights under the Geneva conventions.
Brody said that gross Russian violations in Chechnya were passing unheeded because of Moscow's refusal to allow in independent monitors. In welcoming President Vladimir Putin as an important ally against Muslim extremists, the West was turning a blind eye to reports of killings, torture and rape, he said.
In a report, U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson also took Moscow to task for ignoring commission requests for an independent investigation into the situation in Chechnya.
Human Rights Watch said China was using the drive against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network to justify a clampdown in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang, also known as East Turkestan. Repression in Tibet and against the Falun Gong spiritual movement had also intensified, it said.
Even since the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, China has used its economic and political muscle among the developing-country majority on the commission to block censure. This year, it is far from certain whether anyone will even submit a critical resolution.
Traditionally the United States has taken the lead in censure motions. But this year, for the first time since the establishment of the commission in 1947, it has mere observer status.
In maneuvering last year for the limited number of seats available to Western countries, the United States unexpectedly lost out -- at a time that the Bush administration was under fire for rejecting U.N. climate and disarmament treaties. Italy and Spain indicated last week they would pull out of the running for seats for the 2003 session, clearing the way for the U.S. return.
Diplomats say the United States will continue to make speeches denouncing injustices this year, even though it has no voting rights.
Full members, elected on a rotating basis, include Algeria, Burundi, Congo, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone and Sudan.
Brody said that at the least, all members should be obliged to issue a standing invitation to U.N. investigators. He cited the example of Algeria, which has refused to allow U.N. experts investigate executions and torture in the 10-year-old Islamic insurgency, which has claimed 120,000 lives.
Serious violators should not sit on the U.N. forum, Brody said.
``Countries like Sudan have no place on the human rights commission,'' he said.
-------- us
Missing pilot's status in question
March 16, 2002
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020316-77889787.htm
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday the Pentagon is investigating whether a Navy pilot shot down in the Persian Gulf war is alive in Iraq.
"We have a very real interest in his circumstance, if he's alive - indeed, in knowing about his circumstance, even if he's not alive," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
"And one would hope and pray that he is alive. We do not know," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon.
The defense secretary was asked about the case of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher after a series of reports on the case that appeared in this week's editions of The Washington Times.
A U.S. intelligence report made public this week states that Cmdr. Speicher, who was lost when his F-18 plane was shot down over Iraq in 1991, "probably survived the loss of his aircraft, and if he survived, he almost certainly was captured by the Iraqis."
Cmdr. Speicher was initially declared killed in action in 1991, but new evidence in later years led to a reversal of the designation. In January 2001, the Pentagon reclassified him as missing in action. It was the first time the Pentagon had ever made such a status change.
Mr. Rumsfeld said "a very serious effort" is under way on the part of the U.S. government over "a sustained period to try and gather as much information as possible."
Some of the information about the case is classified and some is unclassified, he said.
"Some of it is speculation," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Some of it - most of it is unauthoritative. That is to say, it is coming from people who heard from somebody about something, or believe there might be a situation that could be characterized as encouraging from our standpoint."
Pressed on whether there is evidence Cmdr. Speicher is alive in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "I've answered that to the best of my ability."
Mr. Rumsfeld said he read The Times articles and, "I have not seen any current intelligence in the last week that would enable me to cast any additional light" on the case.
Mr. Rumsfeld said he has reviewed intelligence data over the past year "because we're interested" in the case.
U.S. intelligence officials, however, said new information about the case was obtained from a foreign intelligence service in the past several months, indicating Iraq is holding an American pilot captive.
The report - based on information from someone who had been inside Iraq - stated that the pilot was being kept in isolation and only two Iraqi officials would see him.
President Bush also commented on the Speicher case this week. Mr. Bush suggested the pilot could be alive and said if he were, it would show the cruelty of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Bush said he "wouldn't put it past him, given the fact that he gassed his own people" - a reference to Saddam's ordering of chemical-weapons attacks on Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq in the late 1980s.
The intelligence community report dated March 27, 2001, stated that a team of investigators visited Cmdr. Speicher's crash site in 1995 and determined that the pilot ejected.
The investigators also believe Iraq is concealing information about the fate of the pilot and once supplied human remains to U.S. officials that upon laboratory testing turned out not to be Cmdr. Speicher's.
U.S. officials said the intelligence regarding the case includes numerous agent reports of an American pilot being held prisoner in Iraq.
"There are at least three independent sources," one official said.
Some U.S. intelligence officials have tried to dismiss the reports, saying Saddam would not keep an American pilot hostage and would have used him for propaganda if he was a captive.
However, other officials said Saddam held an Iranian pilot prisoner for 17 years, while denying Iraq held any prisoners from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
The State Department said this week that it questioned Iraqi officials about Cmdr. Speicher's fate during a meeting in Geneva. The Iraqis did not respond, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Putting OPEC Over a Barrel
Russia's Oil Could Push Western Pump Prices Down
By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 16, 2002; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35566-2002Mar15?language=printer
MOSCOW, March 15 - If the future of Russian oil could be captured in a snapshot, it might show a desolate snowy field laced with icy rivers and favored by wandering herds of reindeer, roughly 2,000 miles northeast of Moscow.
There, near the small town of Noyarbrsk, the Sibneft oil company is digging eight new wells that it says will nearly double the output from what is already its richest oil field.
Sibneft claims the new wells will produce a third more oil than the old wells, thanks to a new type of drill that bores into the earth sideways as well as vertically. About 80 workers are at work on the field, living out of converted freight cars that carried the drilling equipment from France.
It's all part of Sibneft's plans to increase its oil production by nearly 30 percent this year. And it's part of what analysts call Russia's oil renaissance, a phenomenon with potentially broad consequences for the Russian economy, the global oil market and oil-hungry nations like the United States.
Russia is pumping oil so fast it has become the world's leading producer -- thanks in part to the fact that members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have curtailed their output to prop up prices.
Oil analysts say Russia is overtaking Iran as the world's second-largest oil exporter and increasingly is able to offer itself as an alternative to supplies from the volatile Middle East, vexing OPEC.
Oil prices were little changed today after OPEC's announcement in Vienna that it will maintain its current production quotas. Crude oil prices have been rising in recent weeks, reflecting traders' worries about possible U.S. military action against Iraq and their anticipation of rising oil demand as the U.S. economy rebounds at a stronger-than-expected pace. OPEC's index of oil prices has risen to $22.79 a barrel, up 21 percent this year, Bloomberg News reported.
U.S. gasoline prices are rising as well. In the Washington area, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded self-serve gasoline rose to $1.22 yesterday from $1.15 a week ago and $1.12 a month ago, according to AAA of the Mid-Atlantic. The average price nationally was $1.25 a gallon yesterday, a similar increase from a month ago but still well below the $1.43-a-gallon level of a year ago, AAA said.
That Russia could ruffle OPEC suddenly became apparent last November when OPEC asked Russian leaders to shave exports. OPEC ministers argued then that every oil producing country needed to cut output to hold up oil prices as demand slumped amid a world economic slowdown.
Saudi Arabia and its OPEC partners sliced exports by 1.5 million barrels a day and asked Russia to cut back by 150,000 barrels a day. Russia agreed, but only reluctantly, and only for three winter months when exports were expected to drop anyway.
Now OPEC ministers are asking the Russian government to extend the export curb. This time, the Kremlin's resistance seems even stiffer.
Russia expects to produce a million more barrels of oil per day this year than it did in 1998 and much of the increase is headed for the world market. Analysts predict a 70 percent rise in oil exports this year compared with 1998.
This represents a rapid comeback from Russia's devastating collapse in oil production in the early and mid-'90s.
"Russia has a massive opportunity to rebound," said James Henderson, an oil analyst with Renaissance Capital, an investment house here. "Russia will never produce more oil than Saudi Arabia. It can't open the taps the way Saudi Arabia can. But it can be a threat to OPEC at the margins."
Russia's whole strategy for economic revival is based on the assumption that the nation's oil production will expand and that the government's budget will expand with it. The government plans to use the extra tax revenue to create economic incentives that will help diversify the economy and reduce the nation's dependence on petroleum.
If more production helps create an oil glut that forces down the price, Russia stands to lose, but not as much as Saudi Arabia.
Although 30 percent of Russia's budget comes from oil revenue, analysts say it can still be balanced even if the current world price falls to $14.50 a barrel. Experts say Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, needs a price of at least $18 a barrel because two-thirds or more of its revenue comes from oil.
"Russia absolutely believes if there is going to be a price war, Saudi Arabia would blink first," said Christopher Weafer, an oil expert with Troika Dialog, an investment house here.
President Vladimir Putin told an interviewer as much last month, saying, "Our dependence on oil exports is not that high as among the OPEC countries, which allows us to carry out an independent policy."
Oleg Gordeyev, deputy energy minister, has said Russia would think carefully before limiting exports again because Russia's domestic market is now saturated with oil.
Putin has consistently supported more oil production as far back as 1999, when he was Boris Yeltsin's prime minister. But Russia's biggest oil companies are divided over whether to go along with OPEC.
Lukoil, Russia's biggest oil producer, favors export limits. Others, like Yukos Oil, want to pump as much as possible.
Analysts say after a painful transformation Russia's oil producers are ready to grab a greater share of the market. They are now largely rid of crippling state control, although the government still owns the pipelines that carry oil for export. Behind them, too, is a period of blatant corporate thievery. Oil is now considered one of the more efficient and better-managed sectors of the Russian economy, financial analysts say.
Greater oil exports also could help accomplish in economic terms Putin's goal of integrating Russia with the West. Yuri Shafranik, Russia's former fuel minister, said Russian firms should be figuring out how to open gas stations in Europe.
"That would mark Russia's genuine integration into Europe, not just talk of it," he said. "Our market is Europe, and we should love this market!"
Russian leaders argue that Russia is only trying to recapture what it lost after the Soviet Union collapsed, wrecking production and turning former republics like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan into new, independent oil producers. However Russia already exports about as many barrels as the whole Soviet Union did in 1998, even though it produces only 60 percent as much oil, pumping 6.9 million barrels a day last year.
How much more Russia could ultimately produce is unclear. Russia is estimated to hold between 5 to 6 percent of the world's oil reserves. That's not much compared with OPEC. Saudi Arabia alone holds one-quarter of the world's reserves.
But it's more than any country outside OPEC. Experts like Henderson of Renaissance Capital say Russia may also have hidden reserves, yet to be measured. "Eastern Siberia hasn't even been looked at," he said.
-------- imf / world bank
'IMF Go To Hell'
The people of Argentina have tried the IMF approach; now they want it their way
NAOMI KLEIN
Toronto Globe and Mail
Saturday, March 16, 2002
From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>
On Tuesday in Buenos Aires, only a few blocks from where Argentine President Eduardo Duhalde was negotiating with the International Monetary Fund, a group of residents were going through a negotiation of a different kind. They were trying to save their home.
In order to protect themselves from an eviction order, the residents of 335 Ayacucho, including 19 children, barricaded themselves inside and refused to leave. On the concrete facade of the house, a hand-printed sign said: IMF Go To Hell.
What does the IMF, in town to set conditions for releasing $9-billion in promised funds, have to do with the fate of these people? Well, here in a country where half the population now lives below the poverty line, it's hard to find a single sector of society whose fate does not somehow hinge on the decisions made by the international lender.
Librarians, teachers and other public sector workers, who have been getting paid in hastily-printed provincial currencies (sort of government IOUs), won't get paid at all if the provinces agree to IMF demands to stop printing this money. And if deeper cuts are made to the public sector, as the IMF also is insisting, unemployed workers who account for between 20 and 30 per cent of the population, will have even less protection from the homelessness and hunger that has led tens of thousands to storm supermarkets demanding food.
And if a solution isn't found to the "medical state of emergency" declared this week, it will certainly affect an elderly woman I met recently on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In a fit of shame and desperation, she pulled up her blouse and showed a group of foreigners the open wound and hanging tubes from a stomach operation that her doctor was not able to stitch up or dress due to lack of medical supplies.
Maybe it seems rude to talk about such matters in the context of the IMF's visit. Economic analysis is supposed to be about the peg to the dollar, "peso-ification," and the dangers of "stagflation" -- not families losing homes and gaping wounds.
Yet reading the reckless advice that the international business community is hurling at the IMF and Argentina's government, perhaps a little personalizing is in order.
For weeks, Argentina has been scolded like a small child that shouldn't get desert until it finishes dinner. Despite a commitment to slash 60 per cent from provincial deficits, Argentina apparently hasn't done enough to "deserve" a loan. "The news is all on the surface," sniffs an economist from Credit Suisse First Boston. President Duhalde warns that Argentina's desperate population cannot support deeper cuts -- but some, such as the National Post, call this procrastination.
The international consensus is that the IMF should see Argentina's crisis not as an obstacle but as an opportunity: The country is so desperate for cash, it will do whatever the IMF wants, the reasoning goes.
"During a crisis is when . . . Congress is most receptive," explains Winston Fritsch, chairman of Dresdner Bank AG's Brazilian unit.
Rocardo Cabellero and Rudiger Dornbusch, a pair of MIT economists writing in the Financial Times, go further. "It's time to get radical," they say. Argentina "must temporarily surrender its sovereignty on all financial issues . . . give up much of its monetary, fiscal, regulatory and asset-management sovereignty for an extended period, say five years." The country's spending, money-printing and tax administration should be controlled by "foreign agents," they say, including "a board of experienced foreign central bankers."
In a nation still scarred by the "disappearance" of 30,000 people during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, only a "foreign agent" would have the nerve to say, as the MIT team does, that "somebody has to run the country with a tight grip." And that, with the Argentinians out of way, the country could be saved by prying open markets, introducing deep spending cuts, and, of course, a "massive privatization campaign."
It's obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to Argentina's social upheavals that such an economic dictatorship could only be enforced through terrifying state repression and bloodshed.
But there's another hitch: Argentina has already done it all.
As the IMF's model student throughout the 1990s, the country flung open its economy (that's why it's been so easy for capital to flee since the crisis began). As far as Argentina's supposedly wild public spending goes, a full third goes directly to servicing the external debt. Another third goes to pension funds, which have already been privatized. The remaining third alone covers health, education and social assistance. Far from spiraling out of control, these expenditures have fallen far behind population growth, which is why shipments of donated food and medicine are arriving by boat from Spain.
As for "massive privatization," Argentina has dutifully sold off so many of its services, from trains to phones, that the only examples of further assets Mr. Cabellero and Mr. Dornbusch can think of privatizing are the country's ports and customs offices.
No wonder economists and bankers are in such a rush to blame the victims of this crisis, to claim that Argentinians overspent, were greedy, corrupt. Of course, it's true that the political system here is contaminated with cultures of both payola and impunity. But the same financiers that happily lined the pockets of politicians and army generals in exchange for local contracts are hardly the ones who should be trusted to do Argentina's house cleaning.
Argentina's housewives have a better idea. Last week, on International Women's Day, hundreds took to the streets with brooms in hand and announced that they wouldn't clean their homes until they had swept the corruption out of Congress. Their protest was one tiny wave in a massive tide of grassroots mobilization that has already brought down successive governments and now is threatening to do something far more radical: bring in real democracy.
Following the model started by the Piqueteros, Argentina's militant unemployed, tens of thousands of residents are organizing themselves into neighborhood assemblies, connected to each other at the city and national levels. In town squares, parks and on street corners, neighbours discuss ways of making their democracies more accountable and filling in where government has failed. They are talking about creating a "citizen's congress" to demand transparency and accountability from politicians.
They are discussing participatory budgets and shorter political terms, while organizing communal kitchens for the unemployed and planning film festivals in the streets. The President, who was appointed when his elected predecessors resigned from the position, is scared enough of this growing political force that he has begun calling these asambleas "antidemocratic."
But there is reason to pay attention. The asambleas are also talking about how to kick-start local industries and renationalize assets. And they could go even further. Argentina, as the obedient pupil for decades, miserably failed by its IMF professors, shouldn't be begging for loans; it should be demanding reparations.
The IMF had its chance to run Argentina. Now, it's the people's turn.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Oppose Backdoor Attempts to Institute a National ID!
ACLU Action Alert,
2/28/02; linked 03/16/02
Antiwar.com
http://www.aclu.org/action/id107.html
One reaction to the terrible events of September 11 has been a renewed discussion about instituting a national ID card as a counter-terrorism measure. Direct passage of a national ID card, however, is only one possible path to such a system. A national ID is much more likely to evolve bureaucratically through existing forms of ID, such as state drivers' licenses.
The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is urging the federal government to fund and authorize a proposal to standardize state drivers' licenses and link state databases. This plan would establish a national ID and an unparalleled system of personal information sharing.
Once government databases are integrated through a uniform ID, access to and uses of sensitive personal information would inevitably expand. Law enforcement, tax collectors, and other government agencies would want use of the data. Employers, landlords, insurers, credit agencies, mortgage brokers, direct mailers, private investigators, civil litigants and a long list of other private parties would also begin using the ID and even the database, further eroding the privacy that Americans rightly expect in their personal lives.
The creation of a national ID card or system is a misplaced, superficial "quick fix" to the terrorist threat. A national ID system would not effectively deter terrorists and, instead, would pose serious threats to the rights of freedom and equality of everyone in the United States.
Urge Congress to Oppose National ID!
A national ID would not prevent terrorism. An identity card is only as good as the information that establishes identity in the first place. Terrorists and criminals will continue to be able to obtain -- by legal and illegal means -- the documents needed to get a government ID, such as birth certificates and social security numbers. A national ID would create a false sense of security because it would enable individuals with an ID -- who may in fact be terrorists -- to avoid heightened security measures.
A national ID would depend on a massive bureaucracy that would limit our basic freedoms. A national ID system would depend on both the issuance of an ID card and the integration of huge amounts of personal information included in state and federal government databases. One employee mistake, an underlying database error or common fraud could take away an individual's ability to move freely from place to place or even make them unemployable until the government fixed their "file."
A national ID could require all Americans to carry an internal passport at all times, compromising our privacy, limiting our freedom, and exposing us to unfair discrimination based on national origin or religion. A national ID would foster new forms of discrimination and harassment. The ID could be used to stop, question, or challenge anyone perceived as looking or sounding "foreign" or individuals of certain religious affiliations.
----
Barcelona Police Fire Rubber Bullets at EU March
March 16, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-eu-protest.html
BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Spanish police fired rubber bullets on Saturday at demonstrators taking part in a massive anti-capitalist protest march in Barcelona following an EU summit, Reuters journalists at the scene said.
Some demonstrators had set fires in the streets and one appeared to fire a flare at a government building.
Baton-wielding police moved in to disperse the crowd, lashing out with sticks and boots. Others fired rubber bullets.
Police had earlier estimated that some quarter of a million people had taken part in a march that had been largely peaceful for several hours before the incidents.
Most people had dispersed before the trouble began.
----
In Reagan Papers, an '80s Stroll
Newly Released Documents a Time Capsule of Rise of AIDS, Twilight of USSR
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 16, 2002; Page A03
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. - Almost 60,000 pages of documents from the Reagan administration were released today and made available for viewing at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum here.
... There are memos about dealing with peaceniks who were advocating a "nuclear freeze," which the Reagan memo writers disparage as "detentism" or, worse, "pacifism." In the summer of 1982, the staff was worried about potential riots by the "Urban Disadvantaged."
... Another exchange concerns whether to attend an event hosted by LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, an advocacy group. The note mentions that the Coors brewing company and its family owners support LULAC and have been "very friendly" to the administration, but then goes on to suggest a "no to this group is consistent with policy of not rewarding groups who don't support the P. with his appearance before them."
... Among the files released, however, there were thousands of pages removed for reasons of national security or privacy. The missing memos are described, only making them more tantalizing. For example, "Memo from Oliver North to Robert C. McFarlane re: establishment of Nicaragua Humanitarian Assistance Office."
There appear to be many holes in the documentary records, and memo exchanges are fragmented.
In all, there are 45 million pages of documents resting in the storage vaults at the Reagan library, and in the last 12 years, only about 10 percent have been released.
The documents are only produced when they are requested, and then they undergo a lengthy review process to make sure they do not contain private information or reveal national security secrets.
In the current release of 60,000 pages, the Bush administration has changed the rules, making it possible for a former president or the sitting one to withhold documents from the public. The Bush White House is continuing to keep under seal about 150 pages of the current batch of Reagan papers and tens of thousands more left behind by his vice president, George H.W. Bush.
Administration lawyers argue that the rule change will allow quicker dissemination of presidential papers. But critics in academia and journalism say it serves no one except the former administrations.
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Interior Slow in Paying Royalty Checks to Indians
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 16, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35457-2002Mar15?language=printer
Most royalty checks are still not going out to tens of thousands of Native American shareholders in the federal government's troubled Indian trust fund, according to data reported yesterday in U.S. District Court.
In an hour-long hearing before Judge Royce C. Lamberth, Justice Department lawyer John Stemplewicz said more than 30,000 checks worth a total of about $24 million had been paid out since Lamberth ordered nearly all of the Interior Department's Internet connections shut down in December.
He had ordered the shutdown because the Internet connections could be used to hack into the Indian trust fund accounts.
But those numbers offered little conclusive evidence about the restoration of the program. Stemplewicz offered no information about the amount of money that was due to be paid out in the four-month time period, or what percentage of the account holders had been paid.
Interior Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles said in testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee six weeks ago that tens of thousands of checks would go out "as soon as the system can cut them."
Since more than $500 million passes through the trust annually, and there are more than 300,000 active accounts, the payouts referred to in court yesterday appeared to be a fraction of what quarterly payouts should be.
Dennis M. Gingold, the lead attorney for the Indians, harshly criticized the government's report yesterday.
"How much money should have gone out? To how many people? The government apparently doesn't know," he told Lamberth. "These numbers themselves make very little sense."
Lamberth said repeatedly he did not understand why the Interior Department had not repaired the problem, as most of the agency's other Web sites have long since been repaired and are back online.
"I've been dumbfounded it's taken this amount of time to get Interior rolling again," Lamberth said from the bench, pointing out that the Treasury Department had solved similar problems in far less time. "This just doesn't seem that complicated."
Stemplewicz promised to give the judge a written report in seven days explaining Interior's problems. He gave no estimate on when the program might be restored.
The hearing came as Lamberth is considering contempt charges against Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and a senior deputy for allegedly misleading him about other problems in the trust fund. The 115-year-old program has been the subject of a lawsuit by Indian shareholders for six years, and trials have established gross negligence in the government's handling of the accounts.
The trust fund calls for the government to administer leases on Indian land, for everything from grazing rights to oil and gas exploration, with the fees being deposited in the trust accounts. But the government has lost or destroyed thousands of boxes of banking documents, making it virtually impossible to say how many shareholders there are, how much the accounts are worth and where the money has gone.
The Indian plaintiffs say they are owed at least $10 billion. The government disputes that figure.
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