------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
U.S. official arrives to continue work on new arms control agreements
Environmentalist plans Chernobyl bike ride
Nuclear Waste on the Highways
World Arms Control Boss Defies U.S. Bid to Oust Him
Venezuela coup linked to Bush team
Democracy and U.S. Credibility
The Selling of an Energy Policy

MILITARY
UK report: 'IRA buys new arms from Russia'
IRA 'stocking up on guns in secret while disarming'
Well before `evil axis' label
Taiwan's president consolidates his power
Venture Capital Firms Chase Defense Spending
World Arms Control Boss Defies U.S. Bid to Oust Him
Australian police fume over giant joint joke
Opportunity for pot-law debate
Blair: No decision yet on Iraq
Jenin survivors describe Israeli operation
US deplores "human tragedy" in Jenin, Israel accepts UN probe
In Rubble of a Refugee Camp, Bitter Lessons for 2 Enemies
Sharon Says 'This Stage' Is Over
U.S. Official at Jenin Sees 'Terrible Human Tragedy'
Sharon said to want half of West Bank land
New Russia-NATO relations crucial shift for European security
Pakistan breaks up anti-referendum demonstration
Bombs Kill 14 and Injure Dozens in Philippines
Battle Over Media Controls Creates a Rift in Poland

POLICE / PRISONERS
U.S. Weighing New Doctrine For Tribunals

ENERGY AND OTHER
Energy seekers look to ocean's power
Bush Policies Have Been Good to Energy Industry
Senate Marks Earth Day with Global Warming Debate
Eco-coffee saves habitats, supports farms
Senate Marks Earth Day with Global Warming Debate
British Activist Seeks Kissinger Arrest
World Bank pushes education; US absent
G-7 Leaders Back Action Plan

ACTIVISTS
Tens of thousands gather in Washington
Thousands to gather in Washington for new protests
Protests are pleasantly peaceful
Demonstrators Rally to Palestinian Cause
Anti-globalization protesters rally outside World Bank, IMF meetings
Thousands march in S.F. protest



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- russia

U.S. official arrives to continue work on new arms control agreements

Sun Apr 21, 2002
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020421/ap_wo_en_ge/russia_us_70

MOSCOW - A key U.S. negotiator arrived in Moscow on Sunday to continue work preparing new arms control agreements expected to be ready for the U.S.-Russian summit next month.

John Bolton, undersecretary for arms control and international security, has two days of meetings scheduled with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov, Interfax news agency reported.

Other U.S. and Russian negotiators are expected to attend the meetings.

President George W. Bush has promised to cut the U.S. arsenal to 1,700 to 2,200 strategic nuclear warheads, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia could go even lower, to 1,500 warheads from the current 6,000 that each country is currently allowed under the 1991 START I treaty.

Bush initially favored an informal deal, but later acceded to Putin's push to formalize the cuts in a written, legally binding agreement.

While U.S. and Russian officials say that the agreements are nearly ready, talks have been difficult because of Moscow's objection to the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s decision to stockpile decommissioned nuclear weapons rather than destroy them.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said last month that the Kremlin wouldn't mind if Washington put some of the decommissioned weapons in storage, but Russian negotiators are still pushing for some kind of compromise from the United States.

Both sides are eager to get an agreement ready in time for Bush's arrival in Russia next month.

The United States and Russia, former Cold War foes, have grown closer since Putin gave his firm backing to the U.S.-led war against terrorism.

-------- ukraine

Environmentalist plans Chernobyl bike ride

Sun Apr 21, 2002
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020421/ap_wo_en_ge/britain_chernobyl_biker_1

LONDON - A British environmentalist plans to bike 2,000 miles (3,200 kms) to the scene of the world's worst nuclear accident to call for more ecologically friendly forms of energy.

Steve Bond, 28, will start his ride to Chernobyl, in Ukraine, on Friday, the 16th anniversary of the explosion at a nuclear reactor there. He plans to set out from the Hinkley Point nuclear power station near Bridgwater, in southern England.

"Nuclear energy is not really the way forward, and there should be more investment in other forms of energy," Bond said. "I am going to gather information in words and pictures which is relevant to the energy debate. ... How we manufacture and use energy is crucial in how we influence our environment."

-------- us nuc waste

Nuclear Waste on the Highways

New York Times
April 21, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/opinion/21SUN2.html

The volatile issue of whether it is safe to transport highly radioactive nuclear materials around the country has been pushed before the public by the state of Nevada in recent weeks. In a desperate effort to avoid becoming the nation's burial spot for spent fuel rods from nuclear plants, Nevada has begun to run advertising that warns the residents of 42 other states that they will be "IN GRAVE DANGER" from truck and train shipments of the waste unless they persuade Congress to block the burial plan.

That may be Nevada's best shot politically, but it ignores two salient facts. Spent fuel rods have been shipped in small quantities for decades now with no obvious harm to the public, and whatever new risks may emerge with more numerous shipments in an age of terrorism will have to be addressed in detail by federal regulators before they approve the burial plan. Nevada's hyperbole provides no reason for Congress to abort a promising plan before the issues can be closely analyzed.

The transportation issue has come to the fore in the wake of the Bush administration's formal proposal to build an underground repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to accept spent fuel rods that are now stored at the sites of nuclear power plants. Nevada has vetoed the plan, and Congress has until July 26 to override that veto and push ahead. Nevada contends that the Yucca Mountain site is unsuitable and cannot safely contain the waste for the 10,000 years required. But that is an issue that has little resonance elsewhere, so the state has buttressed its argument with alarming statements about transportation risks that, according to its governor, endanger some 123 million Americans in states along the way.

Nevada cites estimates that some 96,000 truck shipments - or about 19,000 rail shipments - would be needed to transport the waste over three to four decades, and the state says that would expose communities along the way to the risk of radiation exposure from accidents or terrorist acts. The state estimates that there might be 130 truck accidents or 440 train accidents over that period. It contends that a credible worst-case accident could release enough radioactive material to cause hundreds of cancer deaths and cost tens of billions of dollars to clean up.

These are merely speculative estimates that have yet to be subjected to the kind of rigorous scrutiny needed to form national policy. By contrast, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency designated to protect the public from such disasters, has conducted its own analyses over the years and found very little likelihood of an accident that would release enough radioactivity to harm the public. The massive casks that are used to transport the spent fuel rods are designed to survive punishing tests in which they are dropped onto hard surfaces, subjected to a puncture test, engulfed in fire and submerged in water. So far, in some 2,600 shipments of spent fuel rods since the mid-60's, there have been only four truck accidents and four rail accidents, with no release of radioactive material.

There is no question that the transportation issues will need to be explored in great depth - to make sure that the tests conducted on the casks are strenuous enough, that the probabilities of serious accidents have been reasonably and conservatively calculated and that the new threat of terrorism can be countered. But the appropriate place for those issues to be addressed is in painstaking regulatory proceedings before the N.R.C., not in rushed Congressional debate now.

-------- us politics

World Arms Control Boss Defies U.S. Bid to Oust Him

Sun Apr 21, 2002
By Paul Gallagher and Jana Sanchez
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020421/ts_nm/arms_chemical_dc_2

THE HAGUE - The head of a global body policing a chemical weapons ban defiantly refused on Sunday to cave in to a U.S. campaign to oust him over his attempts to woo Iraq into joining the organization and accept inspections.

The U.S. bid to oust the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is the second such campaign since it succeeded last week in bringing about the replacement of the head of the U.N.'s climate advisory body.

The OPCW's director, Brazilian (news - web sites) Jose Bustani, said he would not bow to U.S. pressure to resign during a three-day special session of the organization in the Hague which began on Sunday.

Bustani, who was unanimously re-elected for a second four-year term last May, survived a no-confidence vote last month after Washington accused him of mismanagement because of his overtures to Iraq -- branded by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and North Korea.

A second vote is due to take place behind closed doors on Tuesday at the OPCW's headquarters. Delegates from the 145 OPCW member states have been tight-lipped about how they will vote.

"The choices that you make during this session...will determine whether genuine multilateralism will survive or whether it will be replaced by unilateralism in a multilateral disguise," Bustani told delegates in a speech.

The U.S said Bustani's efforts on Iraq were no substitute for U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for Baghdad to allow free access for U.N. weapons inspectors. One third of its 145 member states backed the call for the latest OPCW meeting.

"It is time to set priorities as they are perceived by all of you and not just by a few so-called 'major players'. This is why I refuse to resign under pressure from a small handful of member states," Bustani said in a statement.

WEAPONS INSPECTIONS

Bustani has accused the White House of seeking to push him out because of his independence from Washington.

"I am blamed for seeking Iraq's membership of the CWC (Chemical Weapons Convention), even though this effort is in full accordance with the decision of the U.N Security Council and with the mandate issued to me by you all," Bustani said.

Under the convention, member states must provide data on their chemical weapons programs and are subject to challenges and inspections from other members.

Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed earlier this month to tackle Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein over the threat they say he poses with weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq was subjected to U.N. arms inspections after the 1991 Gulf War over its invasion of Kuwait, but the inspectors left in 1998. The United States and its allies say Baghdad has since pursued chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

The OPCW special session was the first in the body's five-year history and representatives from member nations would continue meeting behind closed doors, an official said.

Bustani, 59, told a Brazilian newspaper on April 9 it was "very probable" he would not survive the April meeting given U.S. influence, but was determined not to resign.

After intense U.S. lobbying, a U.S. scientist who advocates action against global warming was ousted on Friday as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Robert Watson was replaced by Rajendra Pachauri of India.

Watson is a strong supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce most industrial nations' net emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Washington has refused to join the pact opposed by major oil companies.

----

Venezuela coup linked to Bush team
Specialists in the 'dirty wars' of the Eighties encouraged the plotters who tried to topple President Chavez

Observer Worldview
Ed Vulliamy in New York
Sunday April 21, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,688071,00.html

The failed coup in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials in the US government, The Observer has established. They have long histories in the 'dirty wars' of the 1980s, and links to death squads working in Central America at that time.

Washington's involvement in the turbulent events that briefly removed left-wing leader Hugo Chavez from power last weekend resurrects fears about US ambitions in the hemisphere.

It also also deepens doubts about policy in the region being made by appointees to the Bush administration, all of whom owe their careers to serving in the dirty wars under President Reagan.

One of them, Elliot Abrams, who gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup, has a conviction for misleading Congress over the infamous Iran-Contra affair.

The Bush administration has tried to distance itself from the coup. It immediately endorsed the new government under businessman Pedro Carmona. But the coup was sent dramatically into reverse after 48 hours.

Now officials at the Organisation of American States and other diplomatic sources, talking to The Observer, assert that the US administration was not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it, presuming it to be destined for success.

The visits by Venezuelans plotting a coup, including Carmona himself, began, say sources, 'several months ago', and continued until weeks before the putsch last weekend. The visitors were received at the White House by the man President George Bush tasked to be his key policy-maker for Latin America, Otto Reich.

Reich is a right-wing Cuban-American who, under Reagan, ran the Office for Public Diplomacy. It reported in theory to the State Department, but Reich was shown by congressional investigations to report directly to Reagan's National Security Aide, Colonel Oliver North, in the White House.

North was convicted and shamed for his role in Iran-Contra, whereby arms bought by busting US sanctions on Iran were sold to the Contra guerrillas and death squads, in revolt against the Marxist government in Nicaragua.

Reich also has close ties to Venezuela, having been made ambassador to Caracas in 1986. His appointment was contested both by Democrats in Washington and political leaders in the Latin American country. The objections were overridden as Venezuela sought access to the US oil market.

Reich is said by OAS sources to have had 'a number of meetings with Carmona and other leaders of the coup' over several months. The coup was discussed in some detail, right down to its timing and chances of success, which were deemed to be excellent.

On the day Carmona claimed power, Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office. He said the removal of Chavez was not a rupture of democra tic rule, as he had resigned and was 'responsible for his fate'. He said the US would support the Carmona government.

But the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams, who operates in the White House as senior director of the National Security Council for 'democracy, human rights and international opera tions'. He was a leading theoretician of the school known as 'Hemispherism', which put a priority on combating Marxism in the Americas.

It led to the coup in Chile in 1973, and the sponsorship of regimes and death squads that followed it in Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and elsewhere. During the Contras' rampage in Nicaragua, he worked directly to North.

Congressional investigations found Abrams had harvested illegal funding for the rebellion. Convicted for withholding information from the inquiry, he was pardoned by George Bush senior.

A third member of the Latin American triangle in US policy-making is John Negroponte, now ambassador to the United Nations. He was Reagan's ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 when a US-trained death squad, Battalion 3-16, tortured and murdered scores of activists. A diplomatic source said Negroponte had been 'informed that there might be some movement in Venezuela on Chavez' at the beginning of the year.

More than 100 people died in events before and after the coup. In Caracas on Friday a military judge confined five high-ranking officers to indefinite house arrest pending formal charges of rebellion.

Chavez's chief ideologue - Guillermo Garcia Ponce, director of the Revolutionary Political Command - said dissident generals, local media and anti-Chavez groups in the US had plotted the president's removal.

'The most reactionary sectors in the United States were also implicated in the conspiracy,' he said.

----

Democracy and U.S. Credibility

New York Times
April 21, 2002
By PETER HAKIM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/weekinreview/21HAKI.html

WASHINGTON - FOR nearly 20 years, successive American governments have worked hard to persuade Latin Americans that Washington cares about democracy in the region and is prepared to use its power to support and defend democratic governments. But those two decades of effort might well have been undercut in a single day - April 12 - when the Bush administration's comments appeared to welcome the overthrow of Venezuela's elected president, Hugo Chávez, and to deny that what happened in Venezuela was a military coup. This contrasted sharply with the reaction across Latin America. The region's heads of state, who were meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, immediately condemned the coup. Presidents Vincente Fox of Mexico and Eduardo Duhalde of Argentina, among others, said they would not recognize the new government.

Though the White House, the next day, endorsed a resolution by the Organization of American States that condemned the violation of Venezuela's constitutional order, the damage was done. Latin America confidence in Washington's commitment to democracy had been severely shaken. According to former Brazilian Foreign Minister Luiz Felipe Lampreia, "There is anxiety in Brazil and the rest of Latin America because the U.S. no longer seems so committed to democratic principles." The former Salvadoran guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos said Washington demonstrated an "ambiguity about democracy," though he added this was "a relatively minor transgression compared to past U.S. offenses."

Washington, it seemed to so many in Latin America, was again prepared to turn a blind eye to violations of the democratic process - as it had done in Chile, Brazil and Argentina - in order to get results that conformed to its perceptions of American interests. Newspaper editorials across Latin America expressed outrage and alarm. Whatever the reality, many commentators were sure Washington had a major hand in Mr. Chávez's ouster - though Mr. Chávez himself said the coup was organized in Venezuela. John Biehl, the former Chilean ambassador to the United States, explained, "Latin Americans don't give much weight to U.S. denials, because Washington has never admitted its participation in any coup - not in Chile or anywhere else."

What seemed to have most distressed various Latin American governments was Washington's readiness to overlook the active leadership of Venezuela's armed forces in removing President Chávez and designating his successor. This was seen in many quarters as a dangerous throwback to a darker period in the region's history that most Latin Americans want to believe is over. Even now, civilian governments in many countries continue to keep a wary eye on their armies as they struggle to reduce the military's influence in politics. They say they want sustained American help in this.

Washington did not consult with any of the region's governments before framing its response to the events in Venezuela. One call to the San Jose meeting of the Latin American presidents was all that would have been necessary. Collective action, after all, is the cornerstone of the hemisphere's new Democratic Charter, approved on Sept. 11 of last year. This seemed to confirm President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil's view of the Bush administration. He had said it "is still in its apprentice stage" with regard to Latin America.

But for many in Latin America, this harkened back to a time when American policy was largely indifferent to whether a government was democratic or authoritarian - as long as it wasn't Marxist or threatening to head that way. Washington showed few qualms about supporting military strongmen like Augusto Pinochet in Chile or dictators like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Sometimes it even helped get rid of democratic leaders it decided would interfere with American interests - as in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic - or prevented them from taking office - as in Chile.

It was midway through the Reagan presidency when a bipartisan consensus began to emerge in Washington calling for America to promote democracy as a foreign policy objective. Not surprisingly, Latin Americans - and many Americans - were at first skeptical about Washington's sincerity, even as the Reagan administration began publicly to chastise the Pinochet regime and press for elections in Chile. Their skepticism was reinforced by the continuing American military involvement in Central America, which was also justified as support of democracy.

AMERICA'S democracy policy gained credibility when the first Bush administration, soon after taking office in 1989, took the advice it was getting from Latin American governments and started promoting negotiations to ends the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, making clear it would allow all sides a fair shake in elections. Confidence in American policy grew throughout the 1990's, as Washington joined with other hemispheric governments to oppose efforts by elected leaders like Alberto K. Fujimori in Peru and Jorge Serrano in Guatemala to assume dictatorial powers, and to halt more traditional military takeovers in Paraguay and Ecuador. Washington also bolstered its democratic credentials when - under United Nations auspices - it used military force to restore the leftist president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office in Haiti. Most important for the Latin American governments, Washington had stopped acting alone in these situations.

Some Latin Americans are worried that America's reaction to the Venezuela upheaval may do real damage to the prospects for democratic progress in the hemisphere. Ambassador Biehl, for one, asserted, "The U.S. has lost credibility to help Latin American nations confront the multiple and growing threats to their democracies." He also expressed concern that Washington had ignored the hemisphere's seven-month-old Democratic Charter, which calls for collective action to remedy interruptions of democratic process.

At an O.A.S. meeting of foreign ministers last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, just back from the Middle East, was the first senior American official to state that a coup had taken place in Venezuela and to unequivocally condemn it. He said, "defending democracy by undemocratic means destroys democracy."

The challenge for Venezuela was set forth by César Gaviria, the secretary general of the O.A.S., when, on a visit to Caracas last week, he warned Venezuelans that "they had learn to live with each other or face continuing instability as a nation." On his return to power, President Chávez announced he was ready to "bury the hatchet" and has called for a national dialogue. His political opponents, however, are far from convinced that he is ready to moderate his confrontational style and govern more democratically - showing regard for representative institutions and accepting the need for open discussion on national issues.

As it did two years ago in Peru, the O.A.S. might be the logical choice for taking the lead in brokering reconciliation between Venezuela's bitterly opposed groups. The Latin American states have gained credibility with Mr. Chávez because they quickly condemned his ouster and and helped restore him to power. But given Washington's enormous influence in hemispheric affairs, America's support could be vital for the success of any dialogue among Venezuelans and, more broadly, for safeguarding democracy in the region.

--------

The Selling of an Energy Policy

New York Times
April 21, 2002
By AL GORE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/opinion/21GORE.html

NASHVILLE - Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the environmental and energy policies of our government are completely dominated by a group of current and former oil and chemical company executives who are trying to dismantle America's ability to force them to reduce the extremely dangerous levels of pollution in the earth's atmosphere.

The first step was to withdraw from the agreement reached in Kyoto to begin limiting worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases. Then the administration cancelled an agreement requiring automobile companies to make the leap to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Other acts of sabotage are taking place behind the scenes. Just as Enron executives were allowed to interview candidates for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission - and to veto those they didn't think would approve of Enron's agenda - ExxonMobil has been allowed to veto the United States government's selection of who will head the prestigious scientific panel that monitors global warming. Dr. Robert Watson, the highly respected leader of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, was blackballed in a memo to the White House from the nation's largest oil company. The memo had its effect last Friday, when Dr. Watson lost his bid for re-election after the administration threw its weight behind the "let's drag our feet" candidate, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri of New Delhi, who is known for his virulent anti-American statements.

Why is this happening?

Because the largest polluters know their only hope for escaping restrictions lies in promoting confusion about global warming.

Just as Enron needed auditors who wouldn't blow the whistle when the company lied about the magnitude of its future liabilities, the administration needs scientific reviews that won't sound the alarm on the destruction of the earth's climate balance.

How long they get away with it depends on how long they can sow confusion and doubt. But with folks wearing bikinis in Boston in the middle of April and with the massive melting of ice at both poles and in nearly every mountain glacier on earth, public awareness and concern are growing rapidly.

At a time when the world needs enduring leadership from the United States to rally all nations to join in a concerted effort to stop global warming, the administration is working overtime to block any progress whatsoever.

So tomorrow, on this Earth Day, more than ever before, we need real, forward-thinking leadership and a renewed focus on the environment. True leadership means ensuring that we take the necessary steps to leave a cleaner environment for generations to come - and that means strengthening environmental protections.

Instead, this administration's so-called Clean Skies initiative actually increases air pollution levels by allowing more toxic mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur emissions than does current law. Put simply, on the environment, this administration has consistently sold out America's future in return for short-term political gains.

True leadership means guaranteeing our national security and role as a world leader - and one of the best ways to do this is by decreasing our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, so that America cannot be held hostage to oil imports and tinhorn tyrants like Saddam Hussein. But instead this administration is now investing less in energy innovation and conservation and more in corporate subsidies for oil exploration and extraction and nuclear power.

True leadership means assuring an economy that rewards innovation and productivity. We can do so by leading the world in investments in technological innovations that will result in environment-friendly products like more efficient cars and renewable energy sources. Such investments would open up the door for new economic growth. But this administration is taking only those steps that increase our addiction to fossil fuels and outdated and inefficient technologies.

On all these fronts, this administration has walked away from the tough choices and has instead chosen to subsidize the solutions of the past. Instead of leading, it has attempted to mislead. Instead of sharing a vision with the people, the administration has given access to special interests.

We can return to the path of progress, on which we value economic growth that rewards innovation and productivity and meets the needs of our families and of national security. We can return to the days of record growth coupled with record improvement in the air we breathe. We can return to true leadership on the environment.

We ought to look at the environment as a critical piece of the nation we will be. I urge Americans to re-engage in a forward-looking discussion of how to secure our nation's energy needs while pursuing environmental policies that will make us safer, more efficient and more respectful stewards of our planet and our nation's great potential.

Al Gore, vice president from 1993 to 2001, is a professor at Fisk University and Middle Tennessee State University.


-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

UK report: 'IRA buys new arms from Russia'

By Al Webb
United Press International
From the International Desk
4/21/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=21042002-095910-7707r

LONDON -- The Irish Republican Army, which has announced it is "decommissioning" at least part of its armory, is secretly rearming itself with new weapons, including rapid-fire Russia assault rifles, a London-based newspaper reported Sunday.

The Sunday Telegraph said it had learned from British intelligence officials that the IRA sent its agents to Moscow in late 2001 to purchase at least 20 of Russia's new AN94 rifles, which can fire 1,800 body armor-piercing bullets a minute.

The report said the high-velocity rifles, which firearms experts say could be used as a traditional machine gun or as a weapon for assassinations, were bought from a renegade band of Russian special forces officers to enable the IRA to "continue to be a well-oiled machine," as one UK intelligence officer described it.

An IRA spokesman declined to discuss details of the report, but he insisted in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. that it posed "no threat" to the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland.

The deal, detected initially by Russian security services who passed the information along to Britain, allegedly was made some time between the IRA's two announcements -- last October and again a few weeks ago -- that it was destroying what it described as "a substantial amount" of guns, ammunition and explosives.

The disclosure was termed by one Northern Ireland analyst as "the most damning evidence to date" that the IRA was continuing to build a "huge arsenal" for its battle against Britain despite the "decommissioning" of largely antiquated weaponry.

The Russian arms report immediately resulted in renewed pressure for the removal of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, from government office in Northern Ireland. Senior Ulster Unionist parliamentarian Jeffrey Donaldson said he had been briefed about the weapons deal and that he considered Sinn Fein's position in the power-sharing Northern Ireland executive as "untenable."

Donaldson said such a deal was "in clear breach of the Good Friday agreement" aimed at ending the violence between Irish republicans and British unionists and restoring peace to the troubled province.

The report came only days after police in Belfast seized what they said was an IRA "hit list" that included the addresses of leading members of Britain's opposition Conservative Party, prompting fears that the republican paramilitaries were planning more attacks -- a move that could scupper the Northern Ireland peace process for good.

Police said the list of Tories included former Prime Minister John Major, ex-chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont and the present leader of the Conservative Party, former British army officer Iain Duncan Smith.

"This is an issue we are taking very seriously," said Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble. "The list includes information about army bases as well as politicians. (It) has information about the restaurants" that politicians frequent.

The documents were discovered in a house in north Belfast that police were searching in connection with a recent break-in at the top-security police Special Branch office in the Castlereagh area of the city.

The Castlereagh papers included alphabetical lists of Special Branch detectives and the code name of police informants were grabbed. That crime still has not been solved, and authorities believe the documents have been taken across the border into the Irish Republic by a female relative of a senior leader in the IRA.

The Sunday Times newspaper quoted police as saying the "hit list" of top Tories had been largely drawn up from the autobiographies written by Major and Lamont, but police said the information had been updated to include present-day Conservatives that the IRA considers "dangerous."

Fred Cobain, a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, told reporters that "if there is evidence that the Provisional IRA is targeting people, then that has serious repercussions. We cannot go on pretending that things are all right when one of the parties to the peace process may be undermining it."

Senior Northern Ireland police officers told authorities in the Irish Republic earlier this month that the IRA was still buying weapons and was still compiling lists of potential victims for assassination.

---

IRA 'stocking up on guns in secret while disarming'

By David Bamber in London
April 22 2002
The Telegraph, London
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/04/21/1019233294355.html

The IRA has been secretly re-arming while pretending to be decommissioning, in a deal detected by Russian security services, British intelligence officials say.

In what would be a breach of the Good Friday ceasefire agreement, senior IRA commanders are said to have bought a consignment of powerful new Russian special forces assault rifles in Moscow late last year.

They are said to have bought at least 20 AN-94s, which can fire 1800 bullets a minute and pierce body armour. The weapons can be used as a traditional machine-gun or in sniper mode as a high-velocity rifle for assassinations.

The Russians are said to have passed details to British military intelligence in London, and cabinet ministers and senior Northern Ireland politicians were briefed.

However, details remained secret until military intelligence officers disclosed them in London last week. Coming days after the alleged discovery of an updated "hit list" containing the addresses of Conservative MPs, this will fuel fears that the IRA is preparing for a resumption of violence that will further threaten the political process.

The Conservative Party's spokesman on Northern Ireland, Quentin Davies, said: "The Good Friday agreement is a sham if the IRA are handing in weapons with one hand and buying them again with the other.

"This, coupled with the list targeting politicians, the Colombia affair and the killings that continue in Northern Ireland, means that Sinn Fein/IRA must now be called to account."

Critics said it was further evidence of the IRA continuing to build up an arsenal, despite twice handing over a small quantity of largely antiquated arms to a decommissioning body.

Last northern summer three IRA men were held in Colombia after trying to build a new type of mortar bomb. Despite this, the Northern Ireland Secretary, John Reid, said two weeks ago that he was delighted at the latest IRA act of decommissioning.

"This is very welcome news which shows IRA decommissioning was not an isolated event."

Ian Paisley jnr, a Democratic Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, said: "The security forces told me the IRA tried to bring these weapons in on two occasions. I know they failed the first time, but it appears they succeeded on the second. This is more clear evidence that the IRA is not on ceasefire and Sinn Fein should not be in government."

Military intelligence officers said an IRA team was dispatched to Moscow late last year to buy the weapons from a renegade group of Russian special forces officers. One said the weapons had been bought so the IRA could "continue to be a well-oiled machine".

Siobhan Browne, who was jailed for buying guns for the IRA in Florida in 1998, said last year that it was "gearing up for a bloodbath, an ethnic cleansing". She said the Good Friday agreement was a sham and that "the IRA will never give up their guns".

-------- asia

Well before `evil axis' label, North Korean spies, drug-runners have worried Japan

Sun Apr 21, 2002
By MARI YAMAGUCHI,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020422/ap_wo_en_ge/fea_japan_trouble_afloat_2

ABOARD THE PATROL BOAT AMAKAZE - Junior navigator Satoshi Nakamura checks a flickering green dot on the radar screen, then picks up his binoculars to get a better look at what's approaching.

This time, there is no trouble. The three rusty cargo ships flying the North Korean flag have permission to be in Japanese waters, and they quietly pass by his small, virtually unarmed patrol boat, eventually disappearing over the horizon.

Long before President Bush singled out North Korea (news - web sites) as part of a terrorist "axis of evil," its ships and boats have been suspected of plying the waters around Japan on missions involving spying, drug running and fish poaching.

A trickle of legal maritime trade continues despite the lack of formal relations between Japan and North Korea, but a firefight in late December has racheted up tensions.

Japan's Coast Guard has significantly increased surveillance of North Korean vessels since Dec. 22, when a suspected spy ship refused to respond to orders to stop and fled. After both sides exchanged gunfire, the vessel exploded and sank, with all 15 crewmen believed on board killed.

It was the first fatal shootout involving the Japanese Coast Guard, but many people worry that more incidents are unavoidable.

"North Korean trading boats are here all the time," said Akira Nakamura, the regional coast guard and rescue chief who was on the Amakaze for a recent patrol off the central coast, which is not far from the Korean Peninsula.

He said Japanese officials check the vessels against lists of authorized ships.

"If we don't know the reason why they are here, we must consider them suspicious," he said. "We must suspect smuggling, fish poaching or something illegal."

North Korea, which denies the ship that sank in December was spying, has long been a wildcard in the region.

Fears that its isolationist, hardline communist regime was growing more strident and dangerous reached a peak in 1998, when there were widespread worries it was trying to develop nuclear weapons and also test fired a ballistic missile that crossed over Japan.

There have been no further missile tests, and international criticism of the North's nuclear ambitions has eased as years of drought and famine have shriveled the North Korean economy. But alleged spy incidents off Japan and concerns that North Korean ships are smuggling methamphetamines ashore continue unabated.

Until the December shootout, the most serious clash at sea occurred three years ago, when the Coast Guard fired warning shots but couldn't catch two suspicious fishing trawlers. The high-speed boats were tracked by radar to a North Korean port.

The incident set off a national debate in Japan over coastal defenses, prompting deployment of high-speed, better armed patrol boats and closer coordination with the Japanese military.

Japan presents many potential objectives for North Korean spies.

Along with a large military of its own, Japan is host to about 50,000 U.S. military personnel, making it the largest American military outpost in Asia. Fighter jets based on the southern island of Okinawa can be over North Korea in an hour or so, and thousands of Marines can easily be mobilized.

"North Korean agents use our country as a base to spy on South Korea. They gather information on the U.S. military in Japan and our Self-Defense Forces as well," Mitsuo Uehara, a National Police Agency official, told a parliamentary committee in January.

But more attractive may be Japan's wealth.

Early this year, the Coast Guard arrested seven Chinese off the island of Kyushu for allegedly smuggling 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of drugs, which they claimed to have bought from North Koreans.

Methamphetamine is the most commonly abused illicit drug in Japan, and the trade is a major source of income for Japanese gangsters. Nearly a third of methamphetamine confiscated in 1999 originated in North Korea, the National Police Agency says.

Heightened fears of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States have increased worries along Japan's coast.

After the attacks, Parliament enacted a law allowing the Coast Guard to fire at intruders inside the country's territorial waters.

Previously, Coast Guard vessels could fire only warning shots at suspicious vessels. Outside territorial waters, the Coast Guard still may only fire if attacked first, which is what officials say happened Dec. 22.

While the Coast Guard has gotten some new weapons, the intruders in that incident had rocket launchers and other heavy arms, alarming Japanese officials.

"It's frightening that heavily armed fishing-type boats like that are prowling about our waters," Land and Transportation Minister Chikage Ogi told Parliament recently.

Of the 440 Coast Guard patrol boats, only 10 have 20-millimeter machine guns. Crewmen's pistols are the only weapons on the smaller boats.

On the Net:
Japan Coast Guard:
http://www.kaiho.mlit.go.jp/e/index(underscore)e.htm

----

Taiwan's president consolidates his power

Sun Apr 21, 2002
By Benjamin Kang Lim
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020421/wl_asia_nm/asia_101233_1

TAIPEI - Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian's imminent takeover of the leadership of his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) gives him a chance to put his house in order, but also sets him up for criticism for another policy flip-flop.

A DPP convention revised the party charter on Saturday to allow a DPP president to automatically wear a second hat as party chairman, consolidating Chen's power ahead of the next presidential elections in 2004.

The reforms will quiet the home front as Chen battles the island's worst economic slump and tries to break the ice with China, which maintains a longstanding vow to attack if the democratic island of 23 million declares independence.

"He'll be in tighter control of the party, the government and the military. The Chen Shui-bian era is about to begin," said Philip Yang, a political scientist at National Taiwan University.

Taking over the DPP reins will give Chen a chance to bring a tangle of factions into line and moderate his party's pro-independence view.

The party previously shunned the idea of the president serving as party chairman for fear that it could spawn corruption.

Even Vice President Annette Lu admonished that Chen doubling as party chairman would be an "injustice" and "regressive".

Chen tried to allay those fears on Saturday, saying the DPP will not be led by a single individual and that national interests will take precedence over the party.

WASHING DIRTY LINEN

"It'll prevent party officials from attacking government policy in future," DPP legislator Chen Chi-mai said, referring to DPP politicians repeatedly embarrassing the administration by washing dirty linen in public.

Many DPP politicians are disgruntled at being left out in the cold after President Chen tapped officials from the previous Nationalist administration to assume key cabinet portfolios, due to a dearth of able technocrats in the DPP.

Chen's first year in office was mostly messy, marred by a string of political gaffes and policy flip-flops. Often, the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. The reforms aim to change that.

"The president has the broadest support of any DPP member. If he leads the party, it'll be conducive to party policy conforming with government policy," said DPP lawmaker Chen Zau-nan. The deputies are not related to the president.

After a bumpy start in which he came close to being recalled over a controversial decision to stop building a nuclear power plant, President Chen has recovered from a popularity slump.

He is riding high after the DPP became the biggest party in parliament in elections last December, although he has yet to dispel doubts he can govern.

But Chen has come under fire from both the opposition and some party comrades for reneging on a campaign pledge not to become involved in party affairs.

Chen pledged during campaigning to be a non-partisan and impartial "president of all the people" as part of efforts to ease friction in the politically polarised island.

Taiwan has been bitterly divided between camps for reunification with, and independence from China, since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

"Chen Shui-bian could be attacked...for breaking his campaign promise unless he is able to transform the DPP," political scientist Emile Sheng said.

Chen's attempts to edge the party to the centre of the political spectrum to win moderate votes have been stymied by his most ardent supporters, who demand nothing short of independence.

-------- business

Venture Capital Firms Chase Defense Spending

April 21, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-defense-venturecapital.html

SAN FRANCISCO - Venture capitalists stung by the loss of millions from dot-coms and other companies making high-tech products for the consumer and business markets, are now turning their focus to the defense industry.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks that prompted the U.S. to seek large increases in military spending, defense is seen as the latest growth industry by a group of investors always looking for the next big thing.

Although much of the military spending will go to traditional defense contractors like Boeing Co (BA.N) and Raytheon Co (RTN.N), some smaller players with innovative technologies are also seeing opportunities as the defense industry seeks to build more advanced and intelligent weapons.

``I'm having a lot of companies come to me and ask, 'Can you help us do business with the government?' explained Christopher Michel, chief executive of Military Advantage, a San Francisco venture-backed company that operates the Military.com Web site. ''They see defense as a growth sector.''

While many VCs and start-ups are eager to do business with the Pentagon, they face numerous hurdles. For starters, the defense establishment's plodding business culture differs starkly from the informal dealmaking that characterizes VCs and tech start-ups, especially those in Silicon Valley.

``In Silicon Valley, a handshake means a lot,'' Michel said. ''In the government, contracts mean a lot.''

TANKS VS. HIGH-TECH

Additionally, officials, who allocate and spend defense dollars, may not be excited by all the latest information technology, typically the main focus of venture investing.

To meet the Defense Department's traditional needs some venture firms have also started putting their money into the companies that make more old-fashioned war equipment, like tanks.

The Carlyle Group, which includes former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci as an officer, recently took a big pre-IPO stake in United Defense Industries Inc. (UDI.N), which makes armored vehicles, naval guns and missile launchers.

Arlington, Va.-based United Defense most recently received a $58.4 million contract for 27 M88A2 Hercules recovery vehicles for the U.S. military and in February it landed a $1.8 billion contract to further develop the next-generation self-propelled Crusader, a 155 mm artillery system that critics say is too heavy -- 42 tons -- to fit into a transformed, mobile Army. The Army, however, plans to spend $11.1 billion to develop, buy and support 480 Crusaders.

Some Silicon Valley venture capitalists, anticipating a bumpy road ahead for tech start-ups seeking Pentagon dollars, are urging the Defense Department to follow the lead of the Central Intelligence Agency, which has its own venture firm.

In-Q-Tel was started by the CIA in the late 1990s after the agency concluded it could not otherwise keep up with technology trends and needed private industry to track those trends, especially in information technology.

``It's basically about finding the needle in the haystack, and knowing what haystacks are out there,'' Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel's chief executive, told Reuters. ``There has got to be a better way than government contracts.''

Since its launch, In-Q-Tel has invested in about 20 companies after screening 2,000 funding requests, Louie said, noting the CIA was ``smart enough to say they couldn't do it within their system.''

The CIA seems especially interested in companies that address its own shortcomings. For instance, In-Q-Tel helped fund Tacit Knowledge Systems, a Palo Alto, California-based company that makes software for organizations to link workers who share mutual interests, skills and knowledge.

A PENTAGON VENTURE FUND?

Tacit says its ``expertise automation'' software helps overcome compartmentalization within organizations. The goal is to offset the constant criticism of the CIA that critical information does not flow smoothly within the agency.

``They have the same problem as any big company of being self-aware at a granular level,'' said David Gilmour, Tacit's president. ``We're trying to discover needs for connections.''

Tacit also is trying to sell into the Pentagon and so far has had a warm welcome, said Elisa Cafferky, Tacit's manager for federal relations.

``An intelligence analyst gets it right away because they're in compartmented, secure environments, working in their little vaults and don't know who to call for help,'' Cafferky said.

Investments like Tacit are a positive sign to Jim Opfer, a former U.S. Air Force colonel and network architect for the National Reconnaissance Office who now heads the Silicon Valley venture firm LaunchPower.

But Opfer would prefer to see the Pentagon, like In-Q-Tel, tap tech start-ups rather than wait for them to come knocking. However, he would add a twist to the CIA's tie-up with In-Q-Tel.

While the CIA funds In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit firm, Opfer wants the Pentagon to hire a for-profit VC firm to run its portfolio and assume risks and rewards as an investor.

Opfer also suggests that military officers serve tours of duty with such a firm to build tech industry contacts, especially in Silicon Valley.

``People in the Pentagon don't know what is going on in Silicon Valley,'' Opfer said, adding that tech start-ups also ''need to get inside the Pentagon's thought process.''

-------- chemical weapons

World Arms Control Boss Defies U.S. Bid to Oust Him

April 21, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-chemical.html

THE HAGUE - The head of a global body policing a chemical weapons ban defiantly refused on Sunday to cave in to a U.S. campaign to oust him over his attempts to woo Iraq into joining the organization and accept inspections.

The U.S. bid to oust the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is the second such campaign since it succeeded last week in bringing about the replacement of the head of the U.N.'s climate advisory body.

The OPCW's director, Brazilian Jose Bustani, said he would not bow to U.S. pressure to resign during a three-day special session of the organization in the Hague which began on Sunday.

Bustani, who was unanimously re-elected for a second four-year term last May, survived a no-confidence vote last month after Washington accused him of mismanagement because of his overtures to Iraq -- branded by President Bush as part of an ``axis of evil'' with Iran and North Korea.

A second vote is due to take place behind closed doors on Tuesday at the OPCW's headquarters. Delegates from the 145 OPCW member states have been tight-lipped about how they will vote.

``The choices that you make during this session...will determine whether genuine multilateralism will survive or whether it will be replaced by unilateralism in a multilateral disguise,'' Bustani told delegates in a speech.

The U.S said Bustani's efforts on Iraq were no substitute for U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for Baghdad to allow free access for U.N. weapons inspectors. One third of its 145 member states backed the call for the latest OPCW meeting.

``It is time to set priorities as they are perceived by all of you and not just by a few so-called 'major players'. This is why I refuse to resign under pressure from a small handful of member states,'' Bustani said in a statement.

WEAPONS INSPECTIONS

Bustani has accused the White House of seeking to push him out because of his independence from Washington.

``I am blamed for seeking Iraq's membership of the CWC (Chemical Weapons Convention), even though this effort is in full accordance with the decision of the U.N Security Council and with the mandate issued to me by you all,'' Bustani said.

Under the convention, member states must provide data on their chemical weapons programs and are subject to challenges and inspections from other members.

Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed earlier this month to tackle Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein over the threat they say he poses with weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq was subjected to U.N. arms inspections after the 1991 Gulf War over its invasion of Kuwait, but the inspectors left in 1998. The United States and its allies say Baghdad has since pursued chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

The OPCW special session was the first in the body's five-year history and representatives from member nations would continue meeting behind closed doors, an official said.

Bustani, 59, told a Brazilian newspaper on April 9 it was ''very probable'' he would not survive the April meeting given U.S. influence, but was determined not to resign.

After intense U.S. lobbying, a U.S. scientist who advocates action against global warming was ousted on Friday as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Robert Watson was replaced by Rajendra Pachauri of India.

Watson is a strong supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce most industrial nations' net emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Washington has refused to join the pact opposed by major oil companies.

-------- drug war

Australian police fume over giant joint joke

Sunday April 21, 2002
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-101234.html

SYDNEY - Australian police arrested five people who defiantly puffed away in public on what they claimed was the country's biggest marijuana joint, but it turned out to be nothing more than tobacco and legal herbs.

The 90 centimetre (36-inch) so-called "community joint" -- rolled using brown paper as wrapping -- was part of a chaotic demonstration in Darwin on Saturday by the Network Against Prohibition (NAP) against a planned tightening of drug laws.

"We didn't want to come in with half a kilo of marijuana, it was a symbol," said NAP spokesman Scott White.

Police said some of those involved in the stunt would face charges of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, while one man could face a charge of actual possession.

The NAP wants the government to accept marijuana as an integral part of Northern Territory lifestyle but the tighter legislation against those suspected of dealing is due to come into force next month.

--------

Opportunity for pot-law debate

April 21, 2002
Washington Times
Clarence Page
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20020421-70271068.htm

My thanks go out to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for clearing away some of the smoke surrounding the marijuana debate.

It was not his idea. He was involuntarily drawn into it by a $500,000 print, broadcast and bus ad campaign by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Foundation.

As part of NORML's campaign against the city's policy of arresting and jailing public pot smokers, the ads feature a blown-up photo of Mr. Bloomberg next to a quote he gave last summer as a mayoral candidate.

A New York magazine writer asked whether Bloomberg had ever smoked pot and he responded cheerfully, "You bet I did. And I liked it."

NORML's ad praises Mr. Bloomberg's candor. "At last, an honest politician," it says.

With that, Mr. Bloomberg joins such other political notables as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and Bill Bradley who have admitted to partaking of the demon weed in their youth. Some others, like President Bush, have simply refused to answer questions about such possible youthful indiscretions.

Mr. Bloomberg did not back away from his now-famous pot quote, although he told reporters that he wishes he had not answered it in a way that has come back to bite him.

He says he's not going to sue over the use of his likeness. ("No. 1, I don't know that it would help," he says. "And No. 2, I think my ego probably would keep me from doing that.")

But he's not going to change the city's pot policy, either. Some 52,000 people were arrested and jailed for smoking marijuana in public last year, up from 720 in 1992.

Yes, a lot of seemingly knowledgeable folks will tell you, "Oh, nobody gets busted for pot anymore." But, quite a few people do.

Nationwide, the number of arrests and incarcerations has climbed from the hippie 1960s right through the eras of President Ronald Reagan who advised "Just Say No" and President Bill Clinton who "didn't inhale."

In 1970, when the marijuana legalization issue was just taking hold, there were 188,903 arrests, according to FBI Uniform Crime Reports. In 2000, the number climbed to a record 734,498, of which 88 percent were for simple possession, not sale or manufacture.

More than 59,000 inmates are in federal, state or local prison for marijuana offenses, including more than 15,000 for possession, not trafficking, according to Marijuana Policy Project estimates based on Bureau of Justice Statistics reports.

So, while late-night comedians have a high time at Mr. Bloomberg's expense, among those who are not laughing so hard are the thousands who have been busted for doing what the mayor and numerous other prominent oldsters can shrug off as a youthful indiscretion.

That's why I thank Mayor Bloomberg for exposing, if involuntarily, how our national hypocrisy over marijuana works. The same lawmakers who treat their own pot smoking lightly often turn amazingly self-righteous about enforcing pot laws on everyone else.

Even more sinister is the unequal way the laws are enforced. When the children of the big shots have a drug problem, there's a good chance that they will be sent to a clinic where their problem can be properly treated as the health problem that it is. When the children of the less fortunate have a drug problem, there's a better chance they will be sent to jail.

I'm not ready to join NORML in calling for elimination of laws regarding public marijuana smoking. There are many places where it simply does not belong any more than public drinking or public smoking of tobacco does. But I am hardly alone among Americans who would like to see the debate opened up so marijuana might be regulated as legal drugs are.

Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have enacted laws legalizing possession of marijuana for medicinal purposes. But the Clinton and Bush administrations have overruled them. Voters in the District of Columbia overwhelmingly passed a similar local measure, which was overruled by Congress, where the District's "delegate" does not have a floor vote.

Polls indicate that most Americans (73 percent in a 1999 Gallup Poll) favor legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes. But Washington's political leaders insist that their consciences should be our guides. I wonder what they've been smoking.

Clarence Page is a nationally syndicated columnist.

-------- iraq

Blair: No decision yet on Iraq

Sun Apr 21
AP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020421/ap_wo_en_ge/britain_blair_iraq_3

LONDON - The evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction is "simply vast," but Britain has not yet made a decision on whether to use military force to oust Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Tony Blair said Sunday.

"We have not taken any decisions on Iraq at all," Blair told the British Broadcasting Corp. "We've identified weapons of mass destruction as a crucial issue, and it is."

"The evidence of Saddam Hussein on weapons of mass destruction is simply vast," he said. "Saddam Hussein is a threat and the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein in power."

"But we will take no decisions until we have looked at all the options."

Blair said it was hard to know how soon Iraq might be able to develop nuclear weapons, but argued that the world should not wait for him to do so.

"What we know from our experience of Sept. 11 is that it's sensible to try to deal with these threats before they become fully operational rather than after," he argued.

Blair has been strongly supportive of U.S. President George W. Bush's tough stance against Iraq, but British participation in any attack on the Middle Eastern nation could face resistance at home.

Almost 150 lawmakers - including more than 120 of the 411 from Blair's own Labor Party - have signed a motion expressing "deep unease" about military action against Iraq.

Legislator George Galloway, a longtime critic of British and American policy toward Iraq, warned in an interview broadcast Sunday that an attack would divide Blair's Labor Party and possibly lead to his being toppled as prime minister.

"I think it would split the Labor Party down the middle and it could ... lead to the defeat of the Blair leadership," Galloway said on Scottish television.

"There's already a lot of unhappiness with Tony Blair on a whole range of things," he continued. "If he led us into such a disaster as this behind the generalship of George W. Bush, it could be the last straw."

Galloway has visited Iraq several times to publicize his call for an end to United Nations sanctions.

In November 1999, he drove from London to Baghdad in a classic British double-decker bus. He was given a hero's welcome in Baghdad, with tens of thousands greeting him in the streets.

-------- israel / palestine

Jenin survivors describe Israeli operation

By Mike Gallagher
From the UPI International Desk
4/21/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=21042002-070701-6984r

JENIN, West Bank -- Palestinian eyewitnesses have given United Press International detailed accounts of the Israeli military's incursion into Jenin, describing firefights in the tight alleyways that make up much of the refugee camp, and a pattern of house demolition and the use of heavy munitions by Israeli soldiers that appears to have killed many civilians, and left survivors at risk from hunger and disease.

Israeli soldiers would demolish any building they took fire from by using tanks and armored bulldozers, inhabitants of the camp told UPI.

If they saw any movement inside the house, they would open up on it with heavy-caliber weapons, pause to see if anyone would come out and then flatten it. On other occasions, they blew the doors off with explosives and charged in firing automatic weapons, residents say.

Sometimes, they pushed civilians in ahead of them.

Residents say these tactics were adopted after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in one day by a combination of suicide bombs, snipers and booby traps. Israel has defended its operation, saying its purpose was to root out terrorists in the camp.

"I was standing by my window, watching this tank coming down the street, when suddenly one of the soldiers saw me and fired in my direction," Maryam Ayasi -- apparently still in a state of shock -- told UPI.

She was horribly scratched and bruised and was limping painfully on two swollen ankles. Her clothes were full of small bloodstains and covered in dust and grime from her miraculous escape.

"The next thing I knew," she went on, "a machine gun was cutting holes in the walls and I tried to run downstairs to get away. I was halfway down when the building was rocked by a huge explosion and I was thrown off my feet and I fell down the stairs.

"The machine guns didn't stop. I wanted to go out and tell them there was no one inside, but I was afraid that they would kill me so I managed to get out the back door. The shell had blown some of my furniture from the room where I was standing, through two walls and out onto the backyard. Lumps of concrete were still falling down when I staggered outside."

She continued: "I had decided to stay and take care of our home. My husband left when he heard that the Israelis were coming. He said that he didn't believe that he would get any mercy from them and although he is only a carpenter and was never interested in the intifada (Palestinian uprising), he thought he would be rounded up and tortured until he named everyone he knew.

"He used to do a lot of work on construction sites in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but when the blockade started he couldn't get a travel permit so instead he did bits of work fixing the homes of those who lived in the refugee camp. I don't think he knew any of the suicide bombers or any of their colleagues, but I don't think the army cares. I don't know where he has gone, if he has been arrested or what. He refused to tell me where he was going in case the Israelis tortured me."

"Thank God, we have no children," she concluded. "Worrying about them is more than I could bear. I have enough on my hands with my nephews and nieces."

Israeli officials have defended their operation, saying Jenin was a nest of suicide bombers and other Palestinian extremists, and that the army did its best to limit civilian casualties.

"It is difficult to find an army in the entire world that would fight a war in such a moral way," one Israeli Cabinet official told reporters Sunday.

The Israeli military says it only targeted buildings from which Palestinian militants had been firing at them and that ground troops had aided in pinpointing those targets. The Israelis insist that they did not use fighter jets such as F-16s, nor artillery that would cause extensive damage and hit innocent people as well. This policy cost Israeli lives, they added.

Ayasi took UPI to where she used to live. The small apartment block had been cut in half by the shelling. The entire front section had collapsed in on itself. She pointed out where she had lived. The outer wall was gone, and her description of the blast was accurate. The inner wall was scorched, and a large hole led out onto the backyard.

As we approached the building, an elderly resident came up to us and warned us not to enter the area.

Hussam Abu Attalah said he was a 69-year-old refugee of the Israeli war of independence that brought him here in 1948.

"A young boy was hurt by an explosion there yesterday," he said. "I think the army has left booby traps in the rubble. We thought that someone might be alive inside, but we are afraid to go near it.

"I think," he said -- pausing as tears welled up in his eyes -- "that you can tell by the smell there may be no one inside worth saving."

As we walked back toward the center of town, a small boy with a good grasp of English came up to me and asked where I'd been. When I told him, he shook his head like a war veteran.

"We tried to make them go down there," the boy said. "We had a lot of very good snipers, and we were going to make them come out of the tanks and shoot them one by one."

When I asked him how they planned to do that, he looked at me like someone who had to have everything explained to him in children's terms and his tone of voice was like that of an old man telling stories to a little boy. He said he was just over 8 years old.

"The streets are too narrow. They cannot drive the tanks through them quickly. They get stuck and one or two always come out and wave at it until it is free," he said, imitating the hand signals he saw them using. "Then we shoot them."

He jumped and clapped his hands delightedly.

When I asked him what his name was, his eyes narrowed and his voice lowered cautiously. He was suspicious about the possibility that Israeli soldiers were walking around camouflaged as journalists.

"To you I am ... Issa,' he said at last.

By way of praising his courage, this reporter told him: "No. To me you are David, and I admire your bravery against the tanks and soldiers that are like Goliath."

But he replied: "David is a Jewish name. I am a Palestinian. To you I am Issa."

Ayasi wept quietly as she walked away from "Issa" and back toward the center of the ruined city.

"You cannot defeat a spirit like that," she said. "He embodies the spirit of the Palestinians."

Residents were doing whatever they could to dig their way through the smashed buildings. Most had little more than steel bars, shovels and bloody bare hands, scratched and bruised from moving the heavy, sharp lumps of masonry.

UPI saw several groups at work, with at least one person kneeling, carefully listening for any sounds down below. Everyone watched him closely. If he suddenly raised his hands in the air, the digging came to an abrupt stop and yells for silence would go around.

The listener strained to hear the slightest sound, pushing one ear close to the hole with a hand held over the other and eyes closed in concentration. Then he would shake his head in disappointment, and the work would continue.

"I think we're wasting our time," said Adnan Dasouki a 32-year-old market trader.

"We should be using our noses to find our families, not our ears. It's gone way past the point where any sane person would think there was still hope for those who are buried alive. But what use is there for sanity out here?

"Sanity was buried alive with human rights and hope when the tanks came here."

Dasouki told UPI he was briefly arrested and then released by Israeli soldiers. He showed me his wrists where the handcuffs had cut into them.

"They seemed to know who they were looking for, and thankfully, it wasn't me. But I don't know why I wasn't taken away. I saw some other men who I know had no connections with Hamas or any other groups. I almost felt guilty about being the only one who was freed."

When asked about the risk of unexploded ordnance lying around, he said that was the least of his worries.

"If we find some of their bombs and bullets, then maybe we can give it back to them in the same way they gave them to us. By force."

A Palestinian nurse -- who asked that UPI not publish his name -- described how the Israeli bulldozers tore up roads, sewers and water pipes, cut off electricity supplies and pulled down telephone lines.

"If we're not careful, then we could end up as victims of the second part of the Israeli assault --disease," he said. "It could end up killing more than the soldiers and the tanks did. It's a kind of biological warfare."

With reporting by Joshua Brilliant in Tel Aviv, Israel

----

US deplores "human tragedy" in Jenin, Israel accepts UN probe

Sunday April 21, 2002
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020420/1/2objw.html

The United States described the situation in Jenin as a "human tragedy," as Israel promised to cooperate with a fact-finding mission approved by the UN Security Council to examine its invasion of the Palestinian camp.

US Undersecretary of State for the Middle East William Burns, who visited the camp Saturday, described it in a statement as a "human tragedy for thousands of innocent Palestinian people."

Asked earlier if he believed Palestinian accusations of a massacre in the camp, the aide said: "There is no way of knowing that."

The UN Security Council adopted a US-sponsored resolution Friday late on Friday calling for a fact-finding team to be chosen by Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's spokesman, Raanan Gissin, said Israel would cooperate with the team "because we have nothing to hide."

He added, however, that Israel "considered it regrettable that the UN and the international community had not decided to inquire into the direct responsibility of Yasser Arafat."

But the Palestinian leader himself set up a special 10-member committee to look into Israeli "war crimes" in Palestinian towns and villages since the army launched its deadly sweep in the West Bank on March 29.

In Jenin, Palestinians say Israeli forces carried out a massacre of hundreds of people during the nine-day battle that ended there on April 12, but Israel says the dead numbered only in the dozens, mostly fighters.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat welcomed the UN Security Council resolution, pledging cooperation with whomever is sent but doubting that Israel would be as forthcoming.

"We hope the international community will allow this team to come with the necessary tools to remove the destroyed houses in Jenin and in Nablus and to find the mass graves in which Israel hid a number of bodies in different areas," he told AFP.

Resolution 1405 also expressed concern at the "dire humanitarian situation of the Palestinian civilian population" and emphasised the urgency of allowing medical and relief workers access to them.

Gissin cast aside Palestinian charges of a massacre, saying Israeli forces clashed with militants in a community Israel has dubbed 'the city of suicide bombers'.

"According to our estimates there would be about 50 Palestinians killed," he said, adding that 10 bodies "had been booby-trapped to explode when Israeli soldiers went to evacuate them".

For his part, Russian Middle East envoy Andrei Vdovin said he was shocked by "the extent of the destruction" he saw in a visit to the Jenin refugee camp Saturday.

An Arab-Israeli doctor had a foot blown off in an explosion as he stepped inside a booby-trapped house in the Jenin refugee camp, relief workers said.

According to Israeli radio, six other aid workers were wounded in similar circumstances Saturday, and three Palestinians were reported injured on Friday.

Meanwhile, aid workers stopped their digging for bodies amid the camp's flattened buildings on Saturday to preserve evidence of any Israeli attrocities for the coming UN enquiry.

"We decided to be extremely careful in not destroying evidence by digging the area with bulldozers ... loads of crucial evidence was already lost," UN Agency for Relief and Work Agency (UNWRA) regional deputy director Guy Siri told AFP.

A limited number of relief workers were first let in by the army on April 15, three days after the army said it had crushed Palestinian fighters during the heavy fighting, which Israel blocked reporters from covering.

Aid workers said their immediate focus would now be on caring for survivors, as a lack of sanitary facilities raised fears of a disease epidemic.

Palestinian medical officials said 41 bodies had been recovered from the camp, and 91 people were wounded mainly from shrapnel and bullets.

Although aid teams were no longer searching for bodies, camp residents continued digging through the rubble on Saturday looking for possessions.

Mahmud al-Farraj, 54, was using a mechanical digger at one site. He was looking for his "wife's gold not for bodies, it's over," he said.

Against the backdrop of international outrage, Israeli troops started a withdrawal Saturday night from Ramallah, with the notable exception of Arafat's besieged headquarters, Israeli military sources said.

The troops were moving back to the outskirts of the city, the sources added.

Elsewhere, a Palestinian attacker killed an Israeli borderguard at the Erez crossing point between Israel and the northern Gaza Strip, before being shot dead himself, the army said.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat's Fatah, claimed the attack.

Near the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, a suspected Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up when soldiers asked him to stop, the army said, adding he was heading to the nearby Israeli town of Kfar Saba.

Palestinian officials also charged on Saturday Israeli soldiers with killing at least 75 Palestinians in their week-long battle this month in the West Bank town of Nablus.

Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said Friday that after its withdrawal from Jenin the army would also be out of Nablus by Sunday, followed by most of Ramallah.

But Israel says it will keep its tight blockade on Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters and on the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where Palestinian gunmen are holed up.

The more than 200 people trapped in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity have run out of food and water, a Palestinian negotiator involved in trying the settle the crisis said Saturday.

The Israelis say Arafat is sheltering the killers of tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi, assassinated in October, and they want them handed over.

The White House suggested a compromise to hasten the end of the siege on Arafat, whereby the five suspected killers of Zeevi would be brought to justice -- but not necessarily turned over to Israel.

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched on Washington, in what was the biggest Palestinian rally ever held in the United States, with marchers railing against a perceived pro-Israel bias by Washington in its Middle East policy.

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In Rubble of a Refugee Camp, Bitter Lessons for 2 Enemies

New York Times
April 21, 2002
By JAMES BENNET and DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/international/middleeast/21JENI.html?pagewanted=all&position=bottom

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank - In a drizzle early on Wednesday, April 3, as Cobra helicopters thumped the air overhead, Israeli infantry troops accompanied by armored bulldozers and tanks approached the fringes of this camp, which was still, braced.

The army had swiftly taken control of the city of Jenin, and now it was turning its attention to the refugee camp, which Israel called the very heart of Palestinian militancy in the West Bank, the origin, it said, of 23 suicide bombers.

Each side thought it knew what to expect from its enemy. The Israelis planned to wrap up their drive in just 48 hours.

Over the next 10 days, in the most ferocious fighting of Israel's biggest ground offensive in 20 years, each side would prove the other wrong - disastrously so for civilians who became part of the battlefield, a dense cityscape of roughly 500 yards by 600 yards.

Today, William J. Burns, the State Department's assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, toured the refugee camp and said, "It's obvious that what happened in Jenin camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians."

The battle here is already gathering force as an enduring lesson and inspiration, another sorrowful chapter in the contested narrative about the struggle over this land. Each side's version is already settling into a concrete sturdier than the stuff scattered throughout this camp, across a bulldozed area bigger than a football field.

What precisely happened will not be known at least until the debris is sifted and the residents - many of them now twice refugees - return home. Some clarity may result from a United Nations inquiry, which Israel agreed to on Friday.

But dozens of interviews with residents of the camp, hospital officials, Israeli soldiers and officials, and Palestinian fighters produced no solid evidence of large-scale, deliberate killing of civilians in the camp. Palestinian claims of hundreds of dead appear to be exaggerated.

The interviews also left little doubt that Israeli soldiers killed civilians - Israel said accidentally - with gunfire, missile fire from helicopters, and armored D-9 bulldozers sent crashing into homes. During the offensive, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed.

In the beginning, Palestinian fighters thought that the Israeli troops would do little more than push into one area and then depart, as they had done twice before this year. Israeli soldiers, most of them reservists abruptly summoned from civilian life and given three days' training, thought the Palestinian fighters would fight for a while, then do the sensible thing and surrender.

But the Palestinians chose to make a stand, and this time the Israelis meant business.

The first soldier to die here fell around noon that first day, as the Israeli forces found themselves pinned down by unexpectedly precise sniper fire in the camp's alleyways, many of them too narrow to admit tanks.

Maj. Moshe Gerstner, a 29-year-old officer in the reserves, was shot dead as he prepared to move from one house to another in the hunt for militants, and two other soldiers were wounded. In an early sign of daring, Palestinian fighters made off with the soldiers' M-16 semiautomatic rifles.

Ziad Zbaidi, a Palestinian fighter and leader of Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction, was also shot dead that day. From her rooftop, Hamda Masharqa, 60, watched a young man trying to retrieve the body, despite Israeli sniper fire. "He got a bullet in the leg," she said. "When he managed to stand on his feet, he was shot by another."

Later, she said, she learned that the young man she had watched die was her own son, Imad.

Palestinians have charged that the attack was a massacre of civilians. Israelis have strongly denied the accusation. The army fanned suspicions by blocking access to the camp to the Red Cross and other international organizations and announcing that it was removing and burying some bodies, then insisting it had not done so.

The Israeli Army has revised its estimate of the dead downward, to 48, from as many as 200. Palestinians have said that Israeli soldiers may have killed hundreds. Thirty-seven bodies are accounted for so far, though an unknown number are rotting under the jumble of concrete and lost belongings.

After 13 Israeli soldiers were ambushed and shot dead by Palestinian gunmen on one day, in a grisly scene transmitted live by an army drone circling overhead, the army responded in force, sending bulldozers into the center of the camp to level an entire neighborhood, one where Israelis and Palestinians said that fighters were concentrated.

The bulldozers also created wide lanes throughout the camp and knocked down whole blocks of homes belonging to noncombatants, according to Palestinians.

Palestinians provided detailed accounts of the deaths of at least 10 civilians, including a man said to have been shot as he was surrendering, as well as four women, two 13-year-old boys, and three men over 50. A disabled man was buried alive in a demolished house, his relatives said, but his body has not yet been excavated.

Palestinians said they were forced into use as human shields as soldiers searched from house to house, and one soldier acknowledged the practice.

The furor over a possible massacre has obscured other troubling questions about the violence: whether Israeli soldiers used excessive force in the presence of civilians; whether Palestinian fighters deliberately endangered civilians by hiding among them; whether the operation, in the end, achieved its stated objectives, of eliminating terrorism and making Israelis more secure.

Though the dead have seized the world's attention, the living - those dispossessed and those detained and released by Israel - are just starting to contend with their losses and humiliations. Instead of condemning the 23 suicide bombers that Israel says came from the camp and motivated its attack, Palestinians are vowing to send even more.

A Camp Rallies to Fight

The refugee camp was a haphazard warren of two- and three-story cinder-block homes, shot through with cramped alleyways and backed against a hillside on the western side of Jenin city. About 13,000 people were thought to be living there when the Israelis attacked, and many stayed as the fighting intensified.

At least 1,000 Israeli soldiers joined in the attack, mostly reservists, supported by specialized units. Israeli officials and Palestinians in the camp estimated that the soldiers were battling about 200 Palestinian gunmen, representing all Palestinian factions. Members of the Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad fought alongside members of the Palestinian security forces, with whom they had sometimes clashed in the past.

The camp rallied around its fighters, and many residents reported volunteering to guide them, hide them and feed them. The morning the fighting started, Fadwa al-Jammal, 27, from Tulkarm, was here visiting her sister, Rufaida. Fadwa, a nurse wearing a white head scarf and lab coat, stepped outside with Rufaida to ask where the Palestinian field hospital was, so she could offer her services, her sister said.

The two women were talking to a group of fighters when Rufaida was shot in the leg. As Fadwa ran to help her, she was shot and collapsed over her sister's legs. "She breathed three breaths and was dead," Rufaida said.

Hani Abu Ramaileh, a 20-year-old fighter, tried to come to the women's assistance and was shot in the chest and stomach.

A 13-year-old boy was also shot dead that day, hit in the head and stomach, bringing to five the total number of Palestinians known to have died at the start of the fighting. Their bodies were taken to Jenin hospital, where they were eventually buried in a mass, temporary grave.

The mismatch in force of arms was stark. The Israeli Army used Vulcan antiaircraft guns, able to shoot 3,000 rounds a minute, inside the camp. It used Cobra helicopters with thermal detection capability to fire TOW missiles - intended for use against tanks on open battlefields - through the walls of houses, some with noncombatants inside. It deployed scores of Merkava tanks and armored vehicles equipped with machine guns. It used bulldozers to raze civilian homes, crushing more and more of them - but with less and less warning, Palestinians said.

Buzzing drones and balloons carrying cameras monitored the fighting from above, and from a hilltop encampment just outside Jenin, officers coordinated the combat, using detailed maps and sophisticated communications.

The Palestinians were armed with Kalashnikov rifles and crude explosives, generally made from fertilizer. Israeli soldiers said they kept finding the bombs in unlikely places - in garbage bags, or discarded refrigerators or sewers. Some bombs, Israelis said, were hidden in holes drilled right into the street. Soda cans were strung in the alleys, soldiers said, giving away the patrols' positions when they bumped into them.

"We didn't expect them to use such military force against the camp," admitted one Palestinian fighter, who was badly wounded two days into the battle. Similarly, Israeli soldiers said they did not anticipate such fierce resistance. "The Palestinians were really prepared," said Sgt. Dov Rifken, 20, who manned an antiaircraft gun here.

Many soldiers insisted that they took enormous risks to avoid killing civilians. One reservist, Or Raveh, 22, who fought from an armored vehicle, pointed out that the United States bombed Afghanistan from the air and said that Israel could have used the same tactic. "Here, you go in and you risk your life to find the actual people who are shooting at you," he said.

Tightening the Net

On Day 2 of the fighting in the refugee camp - April 4, a Thursday - President Bush declared in Washington, "I ask Israel to halt incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas and begin the withdrawal from those cities it has recently occupied." But the fighting intensified here, as Israeli forces inched forward, tightening their net around the Palestinians.

Atiyyeh Abu Ramaileh, 44, was looking out the window of his house when he was shot dead by a sniper, said his neighbor, Thaer Fayad. Mr. Abu Ramaileh was the father of Hani, who died the day before trying to help the mortally wounded nurse, Mr. Fayad said. Mr. Abu Ramaileh's wife began screaming "God is great. Someone help me." The family eventually spent eight days in the house with the body.

Three more Israeli soldiers were killed that day, as troops went house to house in a search for militants.

Israeli officials have been caught between conflicting mandates: to communicate to Israeli citizens a decisive army victory over terrorism, and to communicate to the world that Israelis are suffering. A similar tension existed in the orders of the soldiers here: to wipe out all gunmen, but not harm civilians.

If the Israeli Army is correct, and around 48 Palestinians died in the fighting, that would mean that Israel lost almost one soldier for every two Palestinians killed, despite the army's overwhelming advantages of manpower, munitions and machinery. In addition to the 23 Israelis killed here, 75 were wounded.

The toll taken by the Palestinian resistance suggests disturbing lessons for Israel.

The soldiers "were told to do it within 48 hours," Col. Miri Eisen, an intelligence officer, said. "But the amount of resistance they encountered was greater than expected. We didn't really plan correctly."

Rather than emphasizing their role as victims, Palestinians could have presented this fight as a brave but losing struggle. The Israelis worried about both outcomes, that the Palestinians could display their corpses to the world to claim a massacre, and that they could energize their fighters by claiming a victory. Those fears helped shape the combat and its aftermath.

"It doesn't matter how much time is needed, we have to complete the victory in the camp so as not to allow the Palestinians to turn this place into a myth of bravery," Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the defense minister, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot late in the campaign.

But many residents were not looking to die a hero's death. Jammal Issa Sabagh's family believes that it was on the third day of fighting, Friday, that he died. Mr. Sabagh, 35, a diabetic, left the house to surrender with a group of men, according to his sister-in-law, Abeer Ghazawi. He took a bag of clothes with him, she said, and the soldiers evidently mistook the bag for explosives. Soldiers who fought here said that on at least two instances fighters hid themselves in groups of civilians and then attacked.

Mr. Sabagh was shot dead, and his body was left in the road. Tanks ran over it, Palestinians said. Jellied remains amid tattered clothes still lay in the dirt days later.

Late Friday night, Yusra Abu Khurj, 60, was alone on the fourth floor of her house, said her brother, Muhammad Abu Khurj, 75. A TOW missile fired by a helicopter tore through one wall and exploded in the room, spraying shrapnel and killing Ms. Abu Khurj, whom her family described as mentally ill.

Days later, a dried puddle of blood still lay beneath the hole gaping in the wall. Her body had been wrapped in a carpet and shoved into a corner of the room, where maggots invaded it. Her brother said Israeli soldiers had forced him to leave the house and abandon her body, and that they had placed it in the corner. Ms. Abu Kurj's body was eventually identified and interred in the temporary grave behind Jenin hospital.

As Israeli forces pursued militants, civilians continued getting in the way and dying as a result. On Saturday, two wounded fighters took refuge in a house, where three civilians began to care for them in the living room, said Nijneh Amouri, 23. She was hiding with her husband and her 5-year-old son in a back room, when a helicopter attacked.

After the firing subsided, Mrs. Amouri went to the living room. "I saw two were dead, and the other three were bleeding," she said. "They were begging me to call ambulances. I said, `Wait, wait for me. I'll go get them.' But of course, there were no ambulances." Within two hours, the three had died, she said. A week later, the floor of the room was caked with blood.

Red Cross officials and witnesses said that Israeli soldiers, fearing booby traps, used hooks attached to cables to drag the bodies outside. Cables and surgical gloves were seen outside the house, near two long smears of blood. "Muhammad Mahmoud!" cried a woman, searching for her only son as she rushed up to the house.

Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulances were not able to move through the camp during at least eight days of the fighting. Palestinians said that the Israeli Army blocked the ambulances, but the army said that it did not interfere with them, except to insist on checking them for hidden fighters or weapons.

In the early days, Palestinian fighters from inside the camp were blaring amplified messages, some in Hebrew. They warned the Israelis to stay away or face death, soldiers recalled. Other messages, in Arabic, were meant to keep up the spirits of the surrounded fighters.

The Israeli Army had begun broadcasting messages in Arabic urging civilians to leave the area. "As the activity intensified so did the danger that we would hurt civilians," Mr. Ben-Harush said. "It was unpleasant for us. Children and adults, it was preferable that they go."

The Israeli Army said that it began issuing the warnings at the start of the operation, but Palestinians said that they did not hear them until the fifth day, Sunday, April 7.

One paratrooper explained that the house was surrounded by soldiers and armored vehicles, and the occupants were warned to come out or the house would be destroyed. "After people know what's going to happen, if they stay, it's at their own risk," this soldier said. "There's not a civilian who doesn't know what's going on."

The army had also begun using bulldozers to demolish some houses being used by Palestinian fighters, soldiers said. Generally, a bulldozer would hit a house, then pause to give the occupants another chance to escape, they said.

As they found groups of civilians hiding in houses or even in caves, the soldiers were separating men from women. Palestinians gave consistent accounts of the treatment: Men were forced to strip to demonstrate that they were not carrying explosives. They were then permitted to put their pants back on, the men said, or they were asked to put on Israeli-issued pants. They were then forced to lie on their stomachs while their hands were bound with plastic handcuffs.

The men were bused to a nearby military base, where they were held for one to three days. Many men showed burns or scabs on their wrists left by the handcuffs, which they said they wore for their entire detention. Most said they were asked only cursory questions, such as their names and those of their relatives. Some said they were beaten and denied food, water and bathrooms. The Israeli Army denied mistreating prisoners.

According to the Palestinians' account, when they were released, the soldiers told them not to go home to the camp - "They told me, `You have no house,' " said Izzat Muhammad, 28 - but instead to go to a nearby village, Rummaneh. There, they added their names to a lengthening list of released detainees at the mosque, and began searching for their families.

After the first days of the operation, the Israeli press began reporting that the Palestinian resistance was on the verge of collapse. But on Tuesday, April 9, the Israeli Army received the biggest shock of its West Bank operation.

Four soldiers walked into a courtyard near the center of the camp, and straight into an ambush. Four or five Palestinian gunmen opened fire and killed them all. When other Israelis rushed to the scene, they were also surprised, and nine more were cut down.

The official said that a military review of the scene, recorded by the drone, suggested that the soldiers, who were reservists, had erred in entering the courtyard in a group.

Elsewhere in the camp at about the same time, a booby trap detonated a string of explosives, bringing down three buildings. The army decided it was time to switch tactics, officials said.

"We're like, `O.K., we understand what this is, and we can't continue like this,' " said Colonel Eisen, the intelligence officer. More bulldozers began burrowing toward the center of Jenin camp.

A Weakening Resistance

The next day, a suicide bomber struck near the coastal city of Haifa, killing himself and eight passengers, four of them soldiers. The bomber came from Jenin refugee camp, but Israeli officials claimed he had been hiding in another city as he prepared his attack.

As the bulldozers did their work, resistance began collapsing. Early on Thursday, the 11th, three dozen fighters surrendered, the Israeli Army said. One young man who said he worked as a guide and assistant to gunmen, and who was wounded in the leg, said that fighters began moving out of the central area for fear they were endangering civilians. "This started to weaken the resistance," he said.

Some fighters managed to dodge the dragnet and leave the camp, Israeli officials acknowledged.

By the 10th day, Israeli armored vehicles were moving freely through the camp. Though they occasionally fired blasts from their machine guns and maintained a total curfew, the fighting was over.

The Israeli Army continued blocking access to the camp for at least three more days to humanitarian workers, United Nations officials, and journalists. The army said that fighting could still break out, and that booby traps, even some on corpses, made the area too perilous.

But journalists who gained access to the camp during that period saw no live explosives, and residents said that they feared only Israeli sniper fire. International Red Cross officials and local hospital officials said they had seen no booby-trapped bodies. Eight people have been injured in the camp in the last three days in unexplained explosions or building collapses.

One Palestinian woman, Umm Mutasem, said that she had seen Israeli soldiers loading five bodies into a refrigerated truck. Another woman reported seeing five bodies lined up on the street with sheets on them as she surrendered to Israeli soldiers. Other Palestinians reported seeing Israeli soldiers bury 10 bodies in two separate locations. The Israeli Army denied burying any bodies.

Israeli officials have said that they had search and rescue teams working in the camp, but journalists have not seen any.

When Israeli forces declared their mission accomplished and departed the camp last Thursday night, they left desolation behind. In a stench of decay, people began digging for the bodies of loved ones. Boys roamed through the new wasteland at the camp's core, carrying the charred foot and ankle of a child wrapped in a black cloth.

Other families dug for their belongings. "This is the civilization of the 21st century," said an accountant who gave his name as Abu Ala, 36, as he conducted a tour of his father's house.

On Thursday, in one of the camp's new boulevards of dirt and concrete shards, Hassan Hourani, 12 years old, stood watching strangers gaze at a poster celebrating the bomber who blew himself up outside Haifa on April 10. "He's excellent," the child said, adding that he had one relative buried in the rubble.

Hassan said that he wanted to be either a medic or a fighter when he grew up. "You should understand," he said, "if there were no fighters, they could enter anywhere and kill people."

Asked if, should he become a medic, he would help an Israeli Jew who was injured, he replied, "If he's a Jew who supports peace, I will help him."

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Sharon Says 'This Stage' Is Over as Israel Leaves Two Cities

April 21, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Israeli tanks rumbled out of two West Bank cities Sunday after a crushing three-week occupation but kept up sieges of Yasser Arafat's headquarters and a Bethlehem church where gunmen are holed up.

``We have finished this stage of the operation called Defensive Shield,'' Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told reporters in Jerusalem.

Amid continued international outcry in some quarters over Israel's policy, the army said it had left Ramallah, apart from the Palestinian president's compound, and pulled out of Nablus.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat slammed Israeli pullbacks as a ``big deception,'' saying Israel still had security control of all Palestinian-ruled parts of the West Bank.

Sharon launched a rolling reoccupation of West Bank towns and refugee camps on March 29 after a series of suicide bombings that killed scores of Israelis.

Dazed Palestinians now free of Israeli curfew emerged from their homes to piles of garbage, smashed shops and streets chewed up by tank tracks.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, who failed to win a truce during a Middle East mission that ended Wednesday, said he would ultimately like to see Israeli units that have been redeployed around Palestinian cities back in their garrisons.

``And I would like to see the cities opened up, so that we can start to see normal life resume and so that there are no restrictions with respect to the provision of humanitarian aid,'' Powell added on CBS television's ``Face the Nation.''

Powell also repeated his call for Arafat to lead his people to a negotiated settlement.

HEAVY TOLL

Palestinian leaders said the offensive caused hundreds of casualties, wiped out Arafat's security services and wrecked many of the nascent institutions of his Palestinian Authority.

Sharon said the campaign achieved significant results, pledging that Israel's ``struggle against terrorism'' would go on.

``However this time, it will work according to a different method,'' he said.

Sharon was apparently referring to buffer zones which he wants to establish inside the West Bank to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israel.

In Bethlehem, troops remained locked in a stalemate with wanted Palestinian militants trapped with more than 200 policemen, clerics and civilians inside the Church of the Nativity revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus.

With tanks still encircling Arafat in his battered headquarters in once-thriving Ramallah, and nearby residential streets blocked off by Israeli barriers of earth and wrecked cars, people in the city had little to smile about.

``They left from the door and they will come back through the window,'' 85-year-old shopkeeper Hassan Abu Darwish said.

The scale of devastation, especially in the Jenin refugee camp, has provoked ferocious criticism from abroad and an exchange of accusations between Israel and the Palestinians.

The European Union's External Relations Commissioner, Chris Patten, accused Israel of ``hijacking'' the U.S.-led war on terror and said in a BBC interview that its crushing use of force against Palestinians would prove counter-productive.

Political sources said Israel was considering blackballing U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen for what it sees as his pro-Palestinian bias over events in Jenin, described by the Israeli army as a terrorist bastion.

Thursday, Larsen accused the army of using ``morally repugnant'' means in its assault on the camp.Larsen, a Norwegian who helped broker Israeli-Palestinian interim peace deals, later said his comments did not mean he was accusing Israel of committing a massacre, as Palestinian officials have alleged.

Israel promised Saturday to cooperate with a U.N. Security Council mission to discover what happened in the Jenin camp, scene of the fiercest battles of the offensive. Israel denies its troops committed a massacre.

THOUSANDS MADE HOMELESS

The head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees told Reuters that 800 dwellings had been destroyed and many more damaged in the Jenin camp, making 4,000 to 5,000 people homeless.

``Certainly there is evidence of overwhelming and apparently disproportionate use of force, even if a battle was going on in Jenin camp,'' UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen said.

Mohammed Abu Ghali, director of Jenin hospital, said the body count from the camp had risen to 45. He stood by his earlier estimate that the final toll might be 300 to 400.

Israeli officials say a few dozen people, mostly militants, were killed in Jenin, along with 23 Israeli soldiers.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Israeli forces would stay outside Arafat's compound until three men accused of killing an Israeli cabinet minister last year were turned over.

Israel also wants the handover of Arafat's chief financial officer, Fuad Shubaki, whom it suspects of trying to smuggle arms from Iran into the Palestinian territories.

Palestinians say they have signed no extradition pact with Israel. Arafat has offered to put Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi's suspected assassins on trial in a Palestinian court.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine killed Zeevi in revenge for Israel's killing of its leader.

At least 1,292 Palestinians, including a man shot dead on Sunday at an Israeli roadblock near the West Bank city of Tulkarm, and 453 Israelis have been killed during the 18-month-old Palestinian uprising.

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U.S. Official at Jenin Sees 'Terrible Human Tragedy'

New York Times
April 21, 2002
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/international/21MIDE.html

JERUSALEM - A senior American official visited the devastated Jenin refugee camp on Saturday and described what he saw as a "terrible human tragedy."

The official, William J. Burns, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, was the first high-ranking American official to visit the camp, whose extensive destruction by Israeli forces has become the focus of severe international criticism. He said he had visited the camp at the request of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "to see firsthand the situation there and to convey the deep concern of the United States."

"What happened in Jenin camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians," Mr. Burns said as heavy rain soaked the rubble of the camp. "Food, shelter, medicine and unexploded ordnance remain serious problems for camp residents."

Mr. Burns did not criticize Israel, but he also made no reference to Israel's argument that the destruction in Jenin was the result of a fierce battle in which 23 Israeli soldiers were killed.

Danny Ayalon, a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said of Mr. Burns's remarks, "We share his sentiments."

But referring to Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, he added, "The responsibility for the tragedy is on Arafat and the Palestinian leadership, who made the refugee camp a center of terror and suicide attacks."

Mr. Burns made his visit the day after Israel agreed to let the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, send a fact-finding team to Jenin, a decision that was unanimously endorsed by the Security Council.

A senior Israeli official, however, said Israel had advised the American envoy to the United Nations, John Negroponte, that three senior United Nations officials would not be acceptable as fact-finders: Terje Roed-Larsen, the special coordinator for the Middle East; Mary Robinson, the high commissioner for human rights; and Peter Hansen, the commissioner of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians Refugees in the Near East, the agency responsible for the refugee camps.

A United Nations official said the organization would not in any case propose using people involved in the region on a fact-finding mission. Mr. Roed-Larsen has come under sharp criticism from the Israeli government since he visited Jenin on Thursday and publicly criticized Israel, saying, "Combating terrorism does not give a blank check to kill civilians."

Israeli officials said they were also angered that Mr. Roed-Larsen invited foreign ambassadors to a briefing about what he found in Jenin.

The legal adviser to Israel's Foreign Ministry, Alan Baker, said Mr. Roed-Larsen's action was "something the Foreign Ministry should consider so serious that we have to consider serious measures."

A spokesman for Mr. Roed-Larsen, Bruce D. Jones, said Mr. Roed-Larsen routinely met foreign ambassadors and senior members of the Israel government at the United Nations headquarters in Jerusalem.

Mrs. Robinson has been trying to come to Israel to investigate the plight of the Palestinians, but Israel has not granted her a visa.

The decision on sending a team to Israel was taken after Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Mr. Annan that Israel would welcome a representative "to clarify the facts" of what happened in Jenin. The invitation pre-empted a Security Council vote to order its own investigation, which Israel opposed.

In the Jenin camp, returning residents continued digging through the rubble for bodies and possessions, using backhoes and picks. The Israeli Army says 48 Palestinians were killed in the camp, but the stench of rotting corpses suggested that more bodies might lie under the debris.

The Israeli Army withdrew from the camp on Tuesday, but continued to encircle Jenin, as it has other West Bank cities where it conducted heavy military raids over the last three weeks.

Israeli forces were also reported leaving Nablus, the largest West Bank city, this morning. "The withdrawal from Nablus will be completed in the next day or so," a senior Israeli political source told Reuters today.

The highest tensions were around Mr. Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, where Israel has refused to relax its cordon until several men it wants are surrendered. Although witnesses there said Israeli tanks appeared to be withdrawing parts of the city, they were staying put around the compound, where Mr. Arafat has been trapped for weeks in an Israeli move to isolate him.

"We are starting with the northern neighborhoods of Ramallah," the Israeli source said. "We will redeploy around the city. That will be finished in the next day or so, according to our commitment to the U.S. to do so by the end of the week."

Israeli officials said a senior American official had warned Mr. Peres, who is in Washington, that Israel should not use force to break the siege. Any harm to Mr. Arafat, he was told, "could cause a catastrophe of unimaginable size."

But officials also said Mr. Sharon had promised Secretary Powell last week, while the secretary of state was in Israel, only that the headquarters would not be raided while he was in the area.

American officials understood from that that Mr. Sharon had not ruled out storming the headquarters, where Mr. Arafat remains with about 100 other people.

The men wanted by Israel include the assassins of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. On Friday, Mr. Arafat proposed putting them on trial in a Palestinian court. Israel rejected the proposal.

The Israeli Army said that in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, a Palestinian gunman had shot an Israeli border policeman dead at the Erez junction, and was killed by return fire.

--------

Sharon said to want half of West Bank land

Washington Times
April 21, 2002
From combined dispatches
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020421-106750.htm

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants to annex up to half of the West Bank under an unpublished plan for the Palestinian territories that he is drawing up with close advisers, a senior minister in his government has said.

"As far as I know, the strategy is to annex 50 percent of the West Bank [for Israel], and this is incompatible with a two-state solution. It is not realistic," Transport Minister Ephraim Sneh told the London Sunday Telegraph.

Mr. Sneh, a Labor member in Mr. Sharon's coalition government, spoke at the end of a week in which Israel began winding up its largest military operation in the West Bank in more than 30 years.

Israeli tanks and armored vehicles yesterday began pulling out of Nablus, the largest West Bank city, and parts of Ramallah. But in a resurgence of violence, a Palestinian gunman and an Israeli policeman died in a clash at a Gaza border crossing and another Palestinian blew himself up near a border checkpoint.

The London newspaper reported that Mr. Sneh's remarks were a strong indication that the Israeli prime minister prefers to see a divided, weakened Palestinian entity with far less land than envisioned under previous peace plans.

Asked about the comments, Danny Ayalon, a senior Sharon aide, said the prime minister would wait for a regional peace conference - which he has called for - to discuss his proposals for Palestinian territory.

Israel also promised yesterday to cooperate with a United Nations mission to probe its crushing assault on the Jenin refugee camp, saying it had nothing to hide in the face of Palestinian accusations of a massacre.

Palestinians said they hoped the U.N. Security Council's unanimous decision Friday to send a "fact-finding" team to the camp could lead to an international criminal trial of Mr. Sharon and others.

"We have nothing to hide, and we will gladly cooperate with this U.N. inquiry," Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin said after the United States proposed the compromise U.N. resolution.

Mr. Sharon has played his cards close to his chest over his broader political strategy, saying only that he is prepared to make "painful concessions" to the Palestinians in the interests of long-term peace.

However, Mr. Sneh's comments will fuel speculation that the prime minister and the Israeli right are hoping to retain most of 150 Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Over the years, Mr. Sharon has pushed for annexation of up to 60 percent of the West Bank. When the deadline in the 1993 Oslo accords for creation of a Palestine state expired in May 1999, Mr. Sharon, then foreign minister in the Benjamin Netanyahu government, threatened to annex settlements if the Palestinians declared a state unilaterally.

Mr. Sneh, a rising figure in Labor ranks, plans to present alternative peace proposals to his party's conference in June, based on land swaps and Palestinian sovereignty over most of the West Bank.

Labor and the right-wing parties - of which Mr. Sharon's Likud is the largest - have maintained a united front in the anti-terror crackdown. However, Mr. Sneh indicated that rifts over a political settlement could cause the coalition to collapse.

Last week, Mr. Sharon called for an international peace conference, but demanded the exclusion of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Mr. Ayalon, one of the prime minister's closest advisers, said he would not be drawn into revealing details of any plans to offer the Palestinians a peace deal.

President Bush yesterday said Israel must press ahead with its withdrawal from Palestinian cities but did not repeat earlier demands for an immediate end to the offensive.

"All parties must realize that the only long-term solution is for two states - Israel and Palestine - to live side by side in security and peace. This will require hard choices and real leadership by Israelis and Palestinians, and their Arab neighbors," Mr. Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Asked about Mr. Sharon's reported annexation plan, a senior State Department official, requesting anonymity, told The Washington Times that "there may be all kinds of Israeli ideas," but no one should "get wedded to any one specific plan."

The official said the emphasis is on convincing Israel to "implement a complete withdrawal" from Palestinian towns and on convincing Palestinians to "take responsibility for getting the violence down and the political process going."

In Cairo, visiting Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji pressed Israel to withdraw immediately from Palestinian towns and called for a complete cease-fire.

Tanks and armored personnel carriers were seen heading out of Nablus and some Ramallah neighborhoods yesterday, but Mr. Gissin said troops would stay near Mr. Arafat's Ramallah headquarters. "Any place that we've finished we pull out," he said.

Israel has said it will maintain its siege at the shell-shattered compound where the Palestinian leader is confined until he turns over suspects in the October killing of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. Israel yesterday rejected Mr. Arafat's offer to try them in a Palestinian court.

Israeli forces were expected to stay in the heart of Bethlehem until the end of a standoff between soldiers and armed Palestinians holed up inside the Church of the Nativity since April 2. A Franciscan priest inside said yesterday that food supplies had run out.

In the Jenin refugee camp, fierce fighting ended more than a week ago, but 11 persons have been wounded over two days by stepping on unexploded ordnance or opening booby-trapped doors intended for Israeli troops, hospital officials said.

U.S. Middle East envoy William Burns, calling for humanitarian aid, described the camp yesterday as the scene of a "terrible human tragedy" and "enormous suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians."

The scale of death and destruction remains in bitter dispute. Israel says about 70 Palestinians were killed, most militants. Palestinian officials estimate the death toll in the hundreds. Twenty-three Israeli troops were killed. So far, 43 Palestinian bodies have been found, six of them women, children or elderly men, Palestinian sources said.

-------- nato

Foreign minister: New Russia-NATO relations crucial shift for European security

Sun Apr 21, 2002
AP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020421/ap_wo_en_ge/russia_nato_3

MOSCOW - A new deal on closer ties between Russia and NATO could be a crucial step toward a new European security structure, Russia's foreign minister said in an interview on state-run television Sunday.

Officials from Russia and NATO are working out details of an agreement expected to be signed in Rome next month under which Russia would sit alongside the 19 NATO member nations to cooperate in tackling terrorism and the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

"It's a qualitatively new level of cooperation," Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on state-run RTR television. "The new mechanism is a principally new stage in our relations, but not only in Russia-NATO relations."

"If this works - and we want it to work - it could become an important element in building a new European security architecture," he said.

He said there would be collective debates and decisions by consensus on a selection of "perhaps five or seven" issues of concern to all member countries.

Alliance officials have stressed, however, that the new mechanism will not give Moscow a right of veto over NATO actions.

Russia has opposed the alliance's eastward expansion to ex-Soviet bloc states, and has sought a greater role in NATO to ensure that the expansion doesn't threaten Russia. The creation of the new NATO-Russia council has partly been made possible by President Vladimir Putin's strong support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

-------- pakistan

Pakistan breaks up anti-referendum demonstration

Sunday April 21, 2002
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020421/1/2oc0v.html

Pakistan police broke up the first major demonstration against General Pervez Musharraf's referendum on extending his presidency, arresting a key Islamist leader, witnesses said.

Qazi Hussain Ahmad was placed under one-day house arrest as he left his Jamaat-i-Islami party's headquarters in the eastern city of Lahore to lead an outlawed procession of hundreds of supporters.

Ahmad, whose party is considered the most organised Islamic faction in the country, was able to deliver a short speech to the 500-strong crowd before being taken away.

"Our arrest is a defeat for Musharraf," he said.

"I appeal to you to please disperse peacefully because we are not in confrontation with the police, our struggle is against those who have usurped power."

Police earlier seized Jamaat's vice president Liaquat Baluch in an overnight raid on his Lahore home.

Ahmad had been due to lead a caravan of vehicles on a 275-kilometre (171-mile) trip from Lahore to central Rawalpindi to protest against the April 30 referendum on Musharraf's presidency.

Ahmad and several other Islamist party leaders were arrested last December for staging a campaign against Pakistan's support for the US-led military operation in neighbouring Afghanistan. They were released last month.

The latest arrests have been condemned by opposition parties as a violation of human rights.

The procession would have been the first major protest against the referendum which Musharraf announced earlier this month, saying he wanted an extra five years to finish a programme of politcal and economic reforms.

Musharraf has held a series of massive rallies to drum up support for his campaign but has permitted opposition groups only one public meeting three days before the vote.

Jamaat has vowed to press ahead with planned public rallies in the northwestern city of Peshawar on April 27 and the Punjab industrial city of Faisalabad on April 28.

A Supreme Court hearing is due to begin Monday after Jamaat filed a petition challenging the referendum as unconstitutional,but if the case goes ahead it is unlikely to conclude before the end of April.

A coalition of religious groups, including Jamaat, has called for a boycott of the vote, a move echoed by an alliance of main political parties.

Musharraf took power in a military coup in 1999, appointing himself president last June and vowing to hold general elections to restore democracy in October.

He has refused to say whether he would step down if he lost the referendum.

-------- philippines

Bombs Kill 14 and Injure Dozens in Philippines

April 21, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Philippines-Bombing.html

MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- Three explosions ripped through a major city in the southern Philippines on Sunday, killing at least 14 people and injuring 45 others after a radio-station caller warned of a wave of bombings.

The caller claimed to be from the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf, which has been holding an American missionary couple for nearly 11 months and is the target of a U.S.-backed military campaign as part of Washington's war on terrorism.

One bomb exploded outside a busy department store in downtown General Santos, killing at least 14 people -- four of them children -- in a hail of shrapnel and flying glass. Within 40 minutes, bombs went off near a radio station and a bus terminal in the largely Christian city of 800,000 in the Mindanao region, where Islamic militants have been fighting for an independent homeland.

The scene of blood, wreckage and shattered glass was reminiscent of five nearly simultaneous bombings in Manila 16 months ago that killed 22 people. An Indonesian man who has claimed he planned those blasts pleaded guilty Thursday in General Santos to explosives possession after leading police to a buried cache of more than a ton of TNT, detonating cords and M-16 rifles.

Police said it was too early to accuse any specific group of carrying out Sunday's bombings, blaming only ``terrorists.''

But a Radio Mindanao Network office in nearby Koronadal said it received a call an hour before the first blast from a man who earlier called to complain about police boasts that the city was safe from terrorists. The man asked whether the station wanted to cover bombings later in the day.

A separate warning circulated via cellphone text message -- a chief method of communications in the Philippines -- said 18 bombs had been planted around the city and would start exploding after lunch.

Police said they received an anonymous call with the same claim, but did not say what measures they took. Bomb threats are common in the Philippines.

Radio station manager Elmer Ubaldo said he decided not to air the warning because he did not want to cause panic. The caller identified himself as Abu Muslim al-Ghazie and said he represented al Harakatul al-Islamiyah, the formal name used by Abu Sayyaf. Other spokesmen for the group said they had no knowledge of Abu Sayyaf involvement.

The Abu Sayyaf, believed to have ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, and the fundamentalist Moro Islamic Liberation Front have been blamed for setting off bombs in General Santos in the past.

The city is about 130 miles from Basilan island, where the Abu Sayyaf has been holding Martin and Gracia Burnham of Wichita, Kan., and Filipino nurse Ediborah Yap for nearly 11 months. About 160 U.S. Special Forces troops are on the island on a six-month counterterrorism training mission aimed at helping the Philippine military crush the guerrillas, who have beheaded an American and other hostages.

The first bomb exploded in a three-wheel motorcycle taxi parked in front of the two-story Gensan Fitmart department store in the business district of General Santos, about 620 miles southeast of Manila. Most of the casualties appeared to be taxi drivers, shoppers and bystanders.

The second went off 34 minutes later near a radio station, apparently causing no injuries, followed several minutes later by the bus terminal blast, which wounded several people, the city's disaster operations center said.

Bartolome Baluyot, police chief for central Mindanao, said two unexploded bombs were discovered under a truck parked in front of the store. Most businesses closed and checkpoints were set up on major roads as part of a security clampdown amid fears of further explosions.

The blasts came three days after the State Department renewed a warning urging Americans to exercise caution in the Philippines. In March, several bombs without triggering devices were discovered in Manila, and the rebel group that claimed responsibility has threatened to plant more bombs. The statement also noted that the Abu Sayyaf has kidnapped Americans and may do so again.

-------- propaganda wars

Battle Over Media Controls Creates a Rift in Poland

New York Times
April 21, 2002
By IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/international/europe/21POLA.html

WARSAW - Adam Michnik was so angry that he apparently forgot his lungs were full of cigarette smoke. He sputtered in fury, something not unheard of for Poland's most famous editor and former dissident, and as the smoke blasted from his mouth and nose, he was, truly, a man breathing fire.

"Why haven't they, over the last 15 years, made a wonderful newspaper?" raged Mr. Michnik, 56. "No one was stopping them from doing the same thing. Our crime is that in our heads we have minds and not sawdust."

Mr. Michnik's ire was directed at a familiar target, Poland's government. But this time the fight of this former opponent of the cold-war era's Communist governments is more personal.

The nation's socialist government is pushing a law that places ownership restrictions on private media. Coincidence or not, the only ones affected by the most contentious provisions are Mr. Michnik's successful and outspoken newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and its prospering parent company, Agora.

Mr. Michnik is taking it as a direct assault on him for not being friendlier to the government. His allies, which include every other major media outlet in Poland, say the law would reduce the power of a critical private press while strengthening public media controlled by the government.

But government officials contend the bill is aimed at monopolies, not Mr. Michnik, and they point out that he has grown up from being a dissident symbol to heading Poland's most successful media company. Mr. Michnik's anger, they charge, is really about money.

"I hope you don't fall for the argument that freedom of speech is threatened in Poland," said Leszek Miller, Poland's prime minister, at a recent gathering of foreign correspondents.

As Parliament prepares to debate the bill, the fight shows signs of spreading. Poland's press has speculated about a growing rift - a nascent power struggle even - between Mr. Miller and the nation's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski. Mr. Kwasniewski happens to be a friend of Mr. Michnik's, and for the first time in his presidency, Mr. Kwasniewski has said he would veto a bill - this one - if it passed Parliament in its current form.

Mr. Michnik, who said he also had good relations with Mr. Miller until the bill was introduced, has not been shy about saying what each man now represents to him.

"There are two visions of the state that are now clashing," he said. "The president thinks that Poland should be a pluralistic democracy where all freedoms are preserved. But Prime Minister Leszek Miller is trying to make the state the property of his political faction."

The bill itself was born harmlessly enough early this year, largely as a set of rules that would govern the transition to digital television as the nation moves into the European Union, probably in 2004.

But by the time the government presented its 88-page draft to Parliament in early April, the bill also included several provisions that would prevent specific forms of media cross-ownership. The part that attracted most attention would forbid the owners of a national newspaper or magazine from purchasing a television or radio station that broadcast nationally.

Those restrictions, however, would not apply to media owned by the government. It would also expand the powers of public television by allowing it to open new thematic channels and giving it full ownership of the nation's television archives.

Mr. Michnik and other critics of the bill question what they say is a puzzling coincidence of timing. Last year, the parent company of Gazeta, which has become Poland's largest daily newspaper, announced that it would explore investing in Polsat, the country's largest independent television station - a transaction that would be clearly illegal under the proposed law.

They say the bill is aimed specifically at cutting down Agora because it is the only national publishing venture that has been considering the purchase of a television station.

In the 13 years since Communism collapsed, Agora has enjoyed tremendous growth, with a daily circulation of 470,000 at Gazeta (the next biggest daily is at 200,000), ownership of 20 radio stations and several magazines and stylish new $30 million headquarters in Warsaw.

Gazeta Wyborcza is, at minimum, a long way from its humble beginnings as an election newspaper. It was founded as Poland's Communists prepared for an election in 1989 and Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, asked Mr. Michnik and other supporters of the trade union movement that toppled Polish Communism to start a newspaper.

"The only guarantee of editorial independence is financial independence," said Wanda Rapaczynski, the president of Agora. "We have from Day 1 run this company for profit to ensure this voice will speak loudly and unabashed."

Mr. Miller's government seems aware it has taken on a powerful and loud opponent, though it is unclear if strategists realized the fight they would have on their hands. Michal Tober, the government spokesman, said he understood that some people viewed the bill - unfairly, he said - as an attack on the free press.

"Gazeta Wyborcza is a very strong symbol in this region," he said. "It is a symbol of freedom of speech - the first independent newspaper in the ex-Communist bloc. An excellent newspaper."

But he said that was not the issue. "Very honestly, it is not freedom of speech involved," he said. "It's a big bag of money."

So, he said, it seems that it is Agora's business plan that is at stake. Ms. Rapaczynski would not say how far the company was in its negotiations with Polsat.

Mr. Tober said that while the government had been occasionally irritated with Gazeta, it had also appreciated its support on a number of issues, particularly the hard fight for Poland's integration into the European Union.

The restrictions on cross-ownership, he said, were intended solely to prevent one source of information - and not Gazeta specifically - from exerting unchecked influence.

"We believe that every monopoly of the media is harmful," he said.

It is hard to find many government-watchers who accept this explanation entirely. But some say Mr. Michnik and Agora have become so big financially and so politically influential that they are inevitably seen as fair game.

"This illustrates the fine line that they've always had to walk," said Marek Matraszek, a lobbyist and writer who is director of CEC Government Relations in Warsaw. He said Gazeta unquestionably stood for freedom of expression in Poland.

"Yet behind this is a huge empire that has been built up," he said. "The lines have now been blurred with whether Gazeta Wyborcza is a guardian of liberal pluralism or whether it's a defender of its financial interests."

Many experts also say it is a fight that may further damage the image of Mr. Miller's government, which has faced accusations in recent months of rough dealings with businesses and some foreign investors. Mr. Michnik said the issue was not money, but lawmaking in Poland that was fair and above board.

"I have no idea if it is my dream to buy a TV station," Mr. Michnik said. "But I dream about living in a country where the law is transparent."


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

U.S. Weighing New Doctrine For Tribunals

New York Times
April 21, 2002
By NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/national/21TRIB.html

WASHINGTON - Uncertain about how they will be able to prosecute many of the nearly 300 prisoners detained at a naval base in Cuba, Bush administration officials are considering a new legal doctrine that would allow prisoners to be brought before military tribunals without specific evidence that they engaged in war crimes.

The new approach would make it an offense to have been a senior member or officer of a Qaeda unit that was involved in any of the regular crimes of war, like mistreatment of civilians.

One administration official said the effort came out of increasing uneasiness that the interrogations of the prisoners, who were taken from Afghanistan to the naval base at Guántanamo Bay, had not yielded enough information to charge very many with traditional war crimes.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the questioning was going slowly and the prisoners were largely uncooperative. No one, the official said, has confessed to any atrocity or violation of the laws of war. Nor, the official added, have the interrogators had much success in getting prisoners to provide information that could be used against other captives.

Another official said the new approach would allow military prosecutors to charge some captives even without evidence from witnesses or documents that they committed war crimes.

"It could be enough to show that they were part of a group and furthered its aims," this official said.

"They would be shown," the official said, "to be a part of a group that did things like killing civilians and noncombatants, attacked targets with no military value or took or killed hostages" - the traditional roster of war crimes. "Also engaging in torture," the official said.

Officials said the legal mechanism for charging someone with being a member of a Qaeda unit involved in crimes was not complete but would probably be detailed in a document to guide military prosecutors.

Administration lawyers have already begun work on the issue, officials said, and expect that their efforts will produce the document, which would be formally issued by the Defense Department.

Prof. Detlev Vagts of the Harvard Law School, an authority on the law of war, said the government appeared to be trying to build a military version of the civilian charge of conspiracy.

In the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the Allies declared the Nazi special police, the SS, a criminal organization. But Professor Vagts said that, in the end, no one was ever charged simply on the basis of membership in the SS.

People were usually prosecuted for war crimes on testimony by witnesses or, in the case of senior officials, on the extensive records the Nazi authorities kept. No equivalent documentation exists in Afghanistan.

The unease about what to do with the prisoners is occurring after the administration, notably the Defense Department, spent considerable effort drafting regulations for the military tribunals. A government lawyer said White House officials were becoming increasingly concerned that the tribunals, authorized despite great criticism, might not be put to much use.

That seems unlikely now, officials said, with the capture in Pakistan last month of Abu Zubaydah, believed to be the director of operations for Al Qaeda and thus the highest-ranking official of that organization in United States custody. Mr. Zubaydah, Justice Department officials have said, is a near-ideal candidate for a tribunal trial.

One official said the major unanswered question was whether the military would seek the death penalty for Mr. Zubaydah, an issue to be deferred until he is interrogated and his cooperation is evaluated.

Officials said the administration's new doctrine was being fashioned to create an offense different from what lawyers call a status crime. The Supreme Court has rejected status crimes, in which it is an offense merely to be a member of a group, like the Communist Party.

The new doctrine, lawyers said, is an effort to comply with rulings that require not only membership in a group but also some identifiable connection to its aims. In this case, the new guidance would probably require a finding that a prisoner was not only a member of Al Qaeda but also that he furthered its aims.

Although the Defense Department's regulations do not provide for review of tribunal verdicts by civilian courts, lawyers for people convicted by the tribunals are certain to ask federal courts to intervene. That is probably one reason the new guidance appears to consider Supreme Court precedents in similar cases.

After World War II, for example, the court upheld a conviction by a military tribunal of a Japanese commander whose troops committed atrocities in Manila while he was elsewhere in the Philippines.


-------- ENERGY AND OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Energy seekers look to ocean's power

By Lidia Wasowicz
UPI Senior Science Writer
From the Science & Technology Desk
4/20/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=19042002-034102-1049r

SAN FRANCISCO -- Surf's up for a research group seeking to catch the wave to a free, plentiful, Earth-friendly and never-ending source of power: the ocean.

In the next few weeks, experts from around the country will start beach-hopping along the California coast to study the feasibility of using sea swells as a potential source of renewable energy that is more constant than the wind and sun.

The aim of the project, funded by a $120,000 grant from the California Energy Commission and expected to last approximately nine months, is to determine how much ocean-based electricity could be generated along the 1,100-mile coastline of the energy-beleaguered state, to project the likely costs of such production and to identify any environmental issues tied to developing wave-to-wire systems that could help keep the lights burning.

Initial assessments indicate a potential 23,000 megawatts of electricity -- enough to meet the needs of 23 million average homes -- churn in the swells off California's northern coast alone, an appealing alternative for an environmentally conscious state rattled by rolling blackouts and sky-high spikes in utility bills.

The state utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co., taking technological and environmental constraints into account, estimated in a 1991 report that 20 percent of that power could be harvested. Now investigators want to take a closer look at the true potential from the waves.

"The overall goals of this project are to assess the ability to use ocean-wave energy resources off the California coast to provide affordable, reliable, clean and safe electricity and identify the optimal locations for developing ocean-wave energy systems," team leader Asfaw Beyene, professor of mechanical engineering at San Diego State University, told United Press International.

"To date, only small portions of the California coast have been evaluated for their ocean-wave energy potential, and there has not been an ocean-wave energy assessment for California that takes into account the relevant technical, economic and environmental considerations," Bayene said. Such considerations include the impact of marine power stations on shipping lanes, commercial fishing, sea life, water sports and area aesthetics.

The scientists are charged with pinpointing the likelihood, benefits and effects of converting the kinetic energy that drives waves into electricity that powers homes and businesses before hard-to-come-by public and private funds are invested in such a venture.

The stakes could be significant, and not just for the Golden State whose fortunes lost much of their shine with the energy-turned-fiscal crisis that persisted from mid-2000 to the summer of 2001.

"Wave energy, like wind and solar energy -- and unlike biomass energy -- is effectively nonpolluting, so I believe it should be considered in the mix of renewable energy sources to be used in California and other coastal states," Mark. Jacobson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, told UPI.

"Wind, solar, plus wave energy could supply 20 to 35 percent of California and the U.S. power needs if the American public decides this is what it wants," Jacobson said.

The political climate appears warming toward alternative sources, with the U.S. Senate Energy Committee endorsing a "renewable portfolio standard" that would require utilities to generate 5 to 10 percent of their power from solar, wind, geothermal and other forms of renewable energy, which currently comprise 1 percent of the nation's electricity mix. In its traditional ahead-of-the-pack environmental position, California is already using such resources to meet 12 percent of its energy demands, and officials have vowed to boost the figure to 17 percent by 2006.

Riding the wave to success will be no small task for ocean energy proponents. For one thing, creating machinery that fits the job description presents researchers with a formidable challenge.

"The device must be capable of gathering useful energy from a relatively calm sea with wave heights of 3 or 4 feet. It must also be able to harvest from and survive heavy seas where wave heights can routinely exceed 60 feet," Beyene said. "As a result, simplicity becomes a leading design criterion."

The idea is to capture power from the ceaseless motion of the ocean waves, a sustainable resource created as wind blows over the water's surface and preserved until reaching the coastal shallows and beaches where the energy is released. The World Energy Council estimates that the equivalent of twice the global electricity production could be harvested from the world's oceans, which cover three-quarters of the planet's surface.

A key challenge is how to make the concept competitive economically with conventional sources of energy -- electricity produced by burning coal costs approximately 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, about a third of the price for power from wave generators installed in the United Kingdom.

"The predicted generating costs of wave energy have been historically high, but they have decreased significantly in recent years," Beyene said. "Wave energy is now predicted to be economic in niche markets, with potential for improved economics in the future."

Decades in the making, current wave-energy-to-electricity converters fall into three basic categories:

-float or buoy systems that rely on the soar and sink of swells to drive hydraulic pumps;

-fixed oscillating water column devices that employ the in-and-out motion of shore waves to turn air-driven turbines;

-tapered channel systems that propel waves squeezed into small reservoirs to gush through turbines, in a fashion reminiscent of hydroelectric dams.

While fixed devices, mounted to the seabed or shore, offer maintenance and other advantages over floating systems, they are suited to only a limited number of available areas.

Tapered channel systems, with very few moving parts, carry the benefits of low maintenance costs and high reliability as well as power on demand, since the reservoir can store the energy until needed. But they have stringent requirements that not all coastal areas can meet: consistent waves with sufficient energy, deep water near the shore and a prime location for a reservoir.

The team's mission includes evaluating the commercial potential of existing technologies that aim to catch the waves' power.

"The resource assessment will determine approximately how much energy is available from any location off the California coast at any particular time and will provide locations in which the conditions for the different available OWEC (ocean wave energy conversion) technologies are best suited," David Navarro of the state energy commission told UPI.

Several hundred patented devices designed to operate on the shoreline, near shore or offshore are in various stages of design and deployment around the globe. None yet appears made to order.

Shoreline devices may be easier to access and maintain and have no need for deep water moorings and long underwater electrical cables, but most have been saddled with prohibitively high installation costs.

Near-shore devices stick to shallow waters, typically 33 to 83 feet deep, avoiding the building and maintenance expenses of systems situated in deeper, more distant waters. Yet that is where powerful waves are more probable and environmental conflicts less likely, experts told UPI.

Offshore generators, geared toward depths of more than 132 feet, may carry not only a higher price tag but also the added complexity of connecting them to the power grid by long transmission cables strung along the sea floor.

"The task for (the researchers) is to determine how much potential energy lies in the waves off the coast of California at any given time. The task of the OWEC companies is to make their device(s) efficient enough to be competitive with existing electricity-generating technologies, fossil or renewable," Navarro said.

"The potential is large, but the engineering hurdles, plus the cables to shore, make this unlikely to become a very large-scale energy technology," said Daniel Kammen, professor in the Energy and Resources Group and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.

Kammen, who has testified as an expert before congressional hearings on energy policy, added, "But for some local applications, it can not only do well, but be an economic winner."

With uncertain cost and performance, wave energy technologies have attracted little capital in the United States since the initial surge in interest, and dollars, in the 1970s.

"A successful track record will be required prior to any substantial investment, particularly in view of the demanding environment in which these devices will operate," Beyene said.

A reversal in California's energy fortunes and a revival of interest in renewable energy sources may turn the tide in their favor, ocean energy advocates such as AquaEnergy Group Ltd. hope.

The Mercer Island, Wash., developer of wave energy converters plans to build a $2.5 million demonstration plant off Wa'atch Point in Neah Bay on Washington's northwest coast. The local utility has agreed to buy 1 megawatt of power from the project, which features one of the few offshore technologies.

In Berkeley, Calif., start-up Sea Power & Associates is trying to raise $1.2 million to install a prototype ocean wave generator driven by the rise and fall of ocean waves along the Northern California coast. The entrepreneurs got a jump-start last year when they took home the $10,000 grand prize at the Social Venture Competition sponsored by the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley for their patented Wave Rider technology. The series of lightweight concrete floats would sit 1 to 2 miles offshore and connect to a hydraulic pump extending 60 feet to the ocean floor.

On a larger scale, countries such as Norway, Scotland, Japan, Australia and Indonesia have been forging ahead with government-backed wave energy operations. The world's first commercial marine power station, an oscillating water column system operated by ocean energy pioneer WaveGen, based in Inverness, began supplying power to the small Scottish island of Islay in November 2000.

Several other OWC designs are getting their feet wet in various coastal corners of Europe, Asia and Australia. For example, Ocean Swell Powered Renewable Energy, is an ocean-bottom-mounted plant designed to operate in 50 feet of water within a half-mile or so of shore. It is capable of generating up to 2 megawatts of power. A commercial version, OSPREY 2000, is to be deployed this year in Ireland, which enjoys one of Europe's best wave climates yet imports more than 90 percent of its energy.

The Islay plant aside, most wave energy devices remain at the research and development stage and have yet to enter the market. A number of companies, however, are poised to unveil their first commercial schemes.

British Columbia's electric utility, BC Hydro, plans to build the first wave power facility in North America. The 3-to-4-megawatt device on Vancouver Island would use an oscillating water column system developed by Energetech Australia Pty Ltd. The venture is part of a 20-megawatt Vancouver Island Green Energy Demonstration project, which will include 10 megawatts of wind power and 6 to 8 megawatts of micro-hydroelectric power by 2004. To pursue such undertakings in North and South America, Energetech has established a U.S. subsidiary, Energetech America.

Proponents hope that once these generators start proving the ocean's power, marine energy plants will become the wave of the future.

-------- energy

Bush Policies Have Been Good to Energy Industry

New York Times
April 21, 2002
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and NEELA BANERJEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/politics/21ENER.html

WASHINGTON - By voting this week to block drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Senate dealt a setback to the petroleum industry and to President Bush, who had made oil exploration in the refuge a cornerstone of his national energy policy.

But the defeat was hardly total. The oil and gas industries - indeed, the entire energy industry - have won an abundance of appointments and regulatory decisions made by Mr. Bush and his 15-month-old administration. For example, in the House energy bill passed last year, and the Senate bill still being debated, the energy industry stands to gain billions of dollars of tax credits and subsidies.

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management has begun opening public lands for oil and gas exploration. Last year, four million new acres were added for oil, gas and coal mining, up from 2.6 million acres in 2000, agency data shows.

And environmental groups are complaining that the Environmental Protection Agency is considering changing water pollution rules to make it easier for coal companies to mine for coal by removing whole mountaintops. Currently, the earth carved from mountains is defined as waste and cannot be dumped into streams and rivers. The environmental agency is considering changing the definition in a way that would allow coal companies to discard the mountaintop refuse into the water, defining it as allowable "fill."

One day after the release of the White House's national energy report last May, President Bush visited a Pennsylvania hydropower plant and vowed that his administration would quickly carry out the plan.

"I can assure the American people that mine is an administration that's not interested in gathering dust," Mr. Bush said.

That same day, Mr. Bush signed two executive orders that had been recommended by influential trade groups, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Gas Association. The orders were intended to speed the construction of new energy projects. Environmentalists and some Congressional Democrats criticized the president for what they described as allowing the industry to "hold his pen."

An administration official estimated at the time that 85 of the 105 energy proposals in the national energy policy could take effect without Congressional action.

Already, the administration has moved repeatedly to increase oil and gas production and roll back regulations put in place or strengthened during the Clinton administration.

Critics of the administration's energy policies say the White House is rewarding its campaign supporters.

"We cannot dig, drill and destroy our way to true energy independence," said Sharon Buccino, a senior lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If the Bush administration truly had the good of us all in mind, they would get serious about fuel economy and efficiency.."

Scott McLellan, deputy White House press secretary, said the administration was determined to keep energy affordable and to protect the environment. "This is the first administration in decades to address the energy needs of every American in a comprehensive way with a comprehensive plan," he said.

Mr. Bush has named at least 30 former energy industry executives, lobbyists and lawyers to influential jobs in his administration. Some of them have helped the government carry out major parts of the energy policy without waiting for Congressional action.

Executives and lobbyists for the nation's energy industry have long argued that the Clinton administration had granted environmental groups far greater access when formulating energy policies. Now, they say, the pendulum has swung the other way, with the Bush administration developing a more balanced position that emphasizes increasing the output of oil, coal and power.

"The people running the United States government are from the energy industry," said Fredrick D. Palmer, executive vice president of external affairs for Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company. "They understand it and they believe in energy supply."

More than any other part of the energy business, the coal industry seems to have fared best under the Bush administration. The industry provided critical support for Mr. Bush in traditionally Democratic states during the last election, most notably in West Virginia.

More than 50 percent of the nation's electricity is generated by coal-burning plants.

"For eight years, we had an administration that was actively antagonistic to coal and oil," said Rob Long, vice president for governmental affairs for the National Mining Association. "To have an administration that is even agnostic on fossil fuels is an improvement."

The Bush administration and Congressional energy bills plan to give the coal industry $3.37 billion in financing and tax incentives over the next 10 years to develop expensive, experimental technologies to burn coal more cleanly.

Environmentalists argue that clean-coal research is wasteful, citing recent reports by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, that say the existing Clean Coal Technology Program was badly mismanaged.

And regardless of how coal is burned, the industry's critics object to mining practices like mountaintop mining, used mainly in West Virginia. Environmentalists say mountaintop removal has despoiled 1,000 miles of streams.

William B. Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, asserts that the state's water protection laws are the toughest in the country. But local environmentalists say the Bush administration, unlike the Clinton administration, has not rejected state regulations that weaken protection of the water system. Environmental groups are suing the Bush E.P.A. over the question.

The environmentalists say that the Bush E.P.A. is moving to change a rule in the Clean Water Act that would make it easier for coal companies to remove mountaintops. Currently, the earth carved from mountains is defined as waste and cannot be dumped into streams and rivers.

An agency spokesman, Joe Martyak, said no decisions had been made, so it was "premature" to judge the agency's actions.

A clear early victory for the fossil fuel industry came in March 2001, when President Bush decided not to impose new controls on emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas widely believed to cause global warming. He said he feared such limits would endanger economic growth.

The decision reversed his campaign pledge to set mandatory reduction targets for carbon dioxide. Energy lobbyists oppose mandatory regulation of carbon dioxide emissions.

The administration is now pushing ahead with its "Clear Skies" initiative aimed at reducing emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, which are already regulated as pollutants, as well as mercury, which is not. It will not address carbon dioxide emissions. A bill offered by Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, an independent whose defection from the Republican Party handed control of the Senate to the Democrats, would regulate all four pollutants.

"We like the approach that they have proposed on the three-pollutant strategy," Bill Brier, vice president of communications of the Edison Electric Institute, a power industry lobbying group, said of the White House's position on climate change. "We feel this approach would eliminate 75 percent of pollutants people claim lead to health ailments."

With Mr. Bush's roots in the Texas oil patch, many in the oil industry and the environmental community thought the business would thrive under this administration. The oil industry would certainly benefit from the White House's refusal to mandate reductions in carbon dioxide and its efforts to reshape clean air regulations.

But some goals specific to the industry have been thwarted, among them efforts to widen the acreage for natural gas drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Florida, and to have unilateral sanctions against Iran and Libya lifted.

The industry, however, may benefit from a sizable windfall, thanks to a decision by the Bush administration not to reauthorize taxes that feed the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program. Instead, most of the costs would be shifted from industry to taxpayers. The decision not to seek reauthorization has been challenged by Senate Democrats.

-------- environment

Senate Marks Earth Day with Global Warming Debate

Sun Apr 21, 2002
By Chris Baltimore
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020421/pl_nm/environment_senate_dc_1

WASHINGTON - The Democratic-led Senate, which soundly defeated a White House plan to drill in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, is set to mark Earth Day by pressing ahead with legislation to force U.S. companies to report global warming-linked emissions.

The environmental battle between Democrats and Republicans now moves to the rest of the energy bill, which includes a provision requiring firms that emit over 10,000 metric tons of carbon a year to register their output with the government.

The United States is the world's largest emitter of so-called greenhouse gases.

Carbon emissions from power plants and factories have been linked to global warming, which scientists warn could lead to massive flooding and rising ocean levels.

On Monday's Earth Day, President Bush will appear at a park in New York state to tout an initiative that encourages power plants to voluntarily reduce their emissions.

Energy and environment are political Siamese twins. Nearly 98 percent of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are energy-related, said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat who authored the provision that would require companies to report their annual emissions to the federal government.

"Because of this intimate connection, much of energy policy and much of climate change policy is interlinked," Bingaman said, introducing the Democrats' broad energy bill last month.

The Democrats' emissions reporting plan would lead Congress to issue an admission that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming and charge an unspecified department with monitoring emissions, starting a year after the bill passes.

VOLUNTARY VS MANDATORY

As with last week's battle over Bush's proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the greenhouse gas measure is expected to prompt various amendments seeking to weaken it.

Republican Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said they will try to make the emissions reporting voluntary.

Another amendment expected to be offered Monday by Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback would allow voluntary reporting for five years, then switch to mandatory reporting if the registry fails to capture at least 60 percent of U.S. emissions. An aide to Brownback said the compromise sought "to break the logjam" over the legislation.

"We're creating incentives for responsible behavior and rewarding those who take action," Brownback said last week.

The White House opposes mandatory reporting requirements, echoing the views of the utility and energy industry which says mandatory reporting would open the door to eventual limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

A year ago, Bush announced the United States would not participate in the Kyoto Treaty, an international attempt to limit greenhouse gases by industrial countries. Bush said the proposed reduction in U.S. emissions by about 5.2 percent of 1990 levels during 2008-2012 would be too costly to the American economy.

A better approach, Bush said earlier this year, is to encourage companies to voluntarily reduce harmful emissions.

The "Clear Skies" initiative calls for utilities to cut emissions of three major pollutants -- not including carbon dioxide -- by 70 percent by 2018 using a cap-and-trade system.

"Our global climate change initiative commits our nation to significantly reducing greenhouse gas intensity," Bush said at an event honoring youth environmental award winners last week.

ICE SHELF COLLAPSE ADDS URGENCY

Green groups, basking in the glow of an unexpectedly large victory in killing the Alaska drilling proposal, said the greenhouse gas reporting provision was another key issue.

The recent collapse of the so-called Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica -- which was the size of a small European country -- adds urgency to the global warming debate, they said.

The Republican-led House of Representatives did not include mandatory reporting in its energy bill, passed last summer. That means the Senate's eventual energy bill must be reconciled with the House version by negotiators from both chambers.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said he hoped to complete work on the energy bill early this week. The legislation includes incentives for increased production of U.S. oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power as well as an array of conservation and energy efficiency provisions.

"The U.S. under President Bush is presenting itself to the rest of the world as an unrepentant polluter," said Philip Clapp, director of the National Environmental Trust.

Former Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords, now an Independent from Vermont, agreed. "Unfortunately, it seems part of an active agenda in the White House to change the direction of environmental protection for the worse," Jeffords said on Friday. Jeffords plans to introduce a bill in the Senate next month to cut four major pollutants from power plants, including carbon dioxide.

Green groups also assailed the administration for ousting Robert Watson last week as the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Watson, who chaired the body since 1996, had warned that inaction could bring serious impacts.

----

Eco-coffee saves habitats, supports farms

By Koren Capozza
UPI Science News
From the Science & Technology Desk
4/21/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=19042002-011143-9317r

Coffee is, for many of us, a morning ritual that we look forward to and relish each day. But few of us probably realize that our java addiction is closely tied to the survival of biodiversity in Latin America and the livelihood of the region's small, family-owned coffee farmers.

A symposium at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., last Wednesday gathered several of the nation's coffee experts to examine how conservation coffee -- a term which encompasses shade-grown, bird-friendly, fair trade and organic coffees -- can support sustainability and community prosperity in Latin America.

Over the past several decades world coffee prices have plummeted and now are at a 30-year low. Latin America produces 60 percent of the world's coffee and the pitiful price the crop now commands on the international market has meant hardship and economic instability for most of the region's coffee-producing countries.

Pressures to reduce costs forces many growers to adopt unsustainable farming practices and to clear forest growth in order to maximize output. That trend is troubling to conservationists because coffee covers much of the region's middle elevations -- one of the richest ecological zones on the planet.

In the face of the current coffee crisis, farmers, buyers and development agencies alike are searching for ways to rescue small-scale coffee growers from economic disaster and in the process help preserve Latin America's remaining unique habitats.

Major American coffee retailers like Starbucks have recently tapped into consumers' desire for chemical-free, earth-friendly blends. The company launched a pilot program this year that will give suppliers "preferred status" if they meet a list of environmental and socially responsible criteria. Growers that meet these guidelines will be given purchase priority over all other coffee offers received during the Starbucks purchasing cycle.

"We would like to disengage from the commodity market and have long-term contracts with our (coffee) sources," said Sue Mecklenburg, vice president of business practices for Starbucks. Such relationships will guarantee a decent livelihood for coffee-growing communities while at the same time improving quality, said Mecklenburg.

The company is also partnering with Washington-D.C.-based non-profit, Conservation International, to protect the Il Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in Southern Mexico, a park which borders a buffer zone of shade-grown coffee farms.

By training Mexican coffee growers in shade-cultivation techniques the company is helping to preserve biodiversity in a region that contains one of the world's highest concentrations of unique species under extreme threat.

Shade-grown coffee saves biodiversity by leaving the forest canopy intact. Instead of clearing the forest, farmers plant the crop amid the various forest plants and species occupying the local ecosystem.

Coffee receiving the "Fair Trade" stamp of approval -- a certification showing that the coffee provides a living wage to the producers, supports sustainable farming and worker cooperatives -- commands the highest price from coffee buyers. For many small-scale family farmers in Latin America, a relationship with a Fair Trade buyer is an economic lifeline.

Fair Trade coffee is sold at a baseline price of $1.26 per pound with a 15-cent premium for organic varieties -- nearly double the current commodities market price.

"The farmers we're dealing with are small family farmers that have formed into co-ops," said Kimberly Easson, director of marketing for TransFair USA, a non-profit organization that certifies and promotes Fair Trade coffee. "Their land is shaded, they don't use chemicals -- mostly because they can't afford them -- and they tend to live in harmony with their land because they also live there."

The TransFair program sent back $9 million in 2001 to its farmer partners. "Fair trade is helping farmers survive this crisis with hope and dignity," said Easson.

It is clear there is more to selecting your coffee than just opting for cream or sugar.

Consumers need to be aware of the impact their buying choices have on coffee-growing communities, agreed the panelists at the Stanford meeting.

"In Africa, there's people who can't even think about have a cup of coffee in the morning. They can't afford it and they're the ones that produce it," said Jaime Azcarate, former-head of special projects at the Colombian Coffee Federation.

As consumers increasingly demand high-quality and socially- and environmentally-sound coffees, the economic imbalance between buyer and producer can begin to be rectified, said Christopher Bacon, academic liaison to the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

Because conservation coffee fetches a higher price, farmers have an incentive to produce environmentally-friendly crops.

"We need a movement of citizens, farmers and states to make markets reflect social values," said Bacon.

--------

Senate Marks Earth Day with Global Warming Debate

April 21, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-environment-senate.html

WASHINGTON - The Democratic-led Senate, which soundly defeated a White House plan to drill in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, is set to mark Earth Day by pressing ahead with legislation to force U.S. companies to report global warming-linked emissions.

The environmental battle between Democrats and Republicans now moves to the rest of the energy bill, which includes a provision requiring firms that emit over 10,000 metric tons of carbon a year to register their output with the government.

The United States is the world's largest emitter of so-called greenhouse gases.

Carbon emissions from power plants and factories have been linked to global warming, which scientists warn could lead to massive flooding and rising ocean levels.

On Monday's Earth Day, President Bush will appear at a park in New York state to tout an initiative that encourages power plants to voluntarily reduce their emissions.

Energy and environment are political Siamese twins. Nearly 98 percent of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are energy-related, said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat who authored the provision that would require companies to report their annual emissions to the federal government.

``Because of this intimate connection, much of energy policy and much of climate change policy is interlinked,'' Bingaman said, introducing the Democrats' broad energy bill last month.

The Democrats' emissions reporting plan would lead Congress to issue an admission that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming and charge an unspecified department with monitoring emissions, starting a year after the bill passes.

VOLUNTARY VS MANDATORY

As with last week's battle over Bush's proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the greenhouse gas measure is expected to prompt various amendments seeking to weaken it.

Republican Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said they will try to make the emissions reporting voluntary.

Another amendment expected to be offered Monday by Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback would allow voluntary reporting for five years, then switch to mandatory reporting if the registry fails to capture at least 60 percent of U.S. emissions. An aide to Brownback said the compromise sought ``to break the logjam'' over the legislation.

``We're creating incentives for responsible behavior and rewarding those who take action,'' Brownback said last week.

The White House opposes mandatory reporting requirements, echoing the views of the utility and energy industry which says mandatory reporting would open the door to eventual limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

A year ago, Bush announced the United States would not participate in the Kyoto Treaty, an international attempt to limit greenhouse gases by industrial countries. Bush said the proposed reduction in U.S. emissions by about 5.2 percent of 1990 levels during 2008-2012 would be too costly to the American economy.

A better approach, Bush said earlier this year, is to encourage companies to voluntarily reduce harmful emissions.

The ``Clear Skies'' initiative calls for utilities to cut emissions of three major pollutants -- not including carbon dioxide -- by 70 percent by 2018 using a cap-and-trade system.

``Our global climate change initiative commits our nation to significantly reducing greenhouse gas intensity,'' Bush said at an event honoring youth environmental award winners last week.

ICE SHELF COLLAPSE ADDS URGENCY

Green groups, basking in the glow of an unexpectedly large victory in killing the Alaska drilling proposal, said the greenhouse gas reporting provision was another key issue.

The recent collapse of the so-called Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica -- which was the size of a small European country -- adds urgency to the global warming debate, they said.

The Republican-led House of Representatives did not include mandatory reporting in its energy bill, passed last summer. That means the Senate's eventual energy bill must be reconciled with the House version by negotiators from both chambers.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said he hoped to complete work on the energy bill early this week. The legislation includes incentives for increased production of U.S. oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power as well as an array of conservation and energy efficiency provisions.

``The U.S. under President Bush is presenting itself to the rest of the world as an unrepentant polluter,'' said Philip Clapp, director of the National Environmental Trust.

Former Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords, now an Independent from Vermont, agreed. ``Unfortunately, it seems part of an active agenda in the White House to change the direction of environmental protection for the worse,'' Jeffords said on Friday. Jeffords plans to introduce a bill in the Senate next month to cut four major pollutants from power plants, including carbon dioxide.

Green groups also assailed the administration for ousting Robert Watson last week as the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Watson, who chaired the body since 1996, had warned that inaction could bring serious impacts.

-------- human rights

British Activist Seeks Kissinger Arrest

April 21, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-britain-kissinger.html

LONDON - A British human rights activist said he would apply to a London court on Monday for an arrest warrant to be issued against former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on war crimes charges.

The action comes days after a Spanish judge called for the Nobel peace prize winning statesman to be questioned by international police about crimes committed by South American military dictatorships in the 1970s and 80s.

Peter Tatchell, a political and gay rights activist, said he would seek a warrant at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court for Kissinger's arrest on charges of war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.

``British law states that violations of the Geneva Conventions are war crimes. There are no immunities from prosecution,'' Tatchell said in a statement.

Tatchell, a former Australian citizen, has used similar approaches before to draw attention to his causes. He has twice tried to perform citizen's arrests on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe who he accuses of flouting human rights. British police said they were unaware of Tatchell's court application.

Tatchell said Monday's warrant, if issued, would allege that Kissinger had ``commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia'' while he was President Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser from 1969 to 1973, and secretary of state from 1973-77 under the governments of Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford.

German-born Kissinger, due in London on Wednesday to address a meeting of Britain's Institute of Directors, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War.

Last week, Spanish High Court judge Balthazar Garzon asked Interpol to question Kissinger in London about whether he knew of human rights abuses by Latin American governments while he was serving in Washington.

The judge's order called for authorities to ask Kissinger if he knew of ``Operation Condor'' -- a plan by regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay to persecute opponents.

Kissinger's spokesman said he would cooperate with the Spanish judge's inquiry but stressed he was seen as a witness and not as accused.

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

World Bank pushes education; US absent

By Ian Campbell
UPI Chief Economics Correspondent
From the Business & Economics Desk
4/21/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=21042002-115615-1065r

WASHINGTON -- One hundred and twenty-five million children around the world never attend school. On Sunday, British, Dutch and Canadian ministers expressed their support for getting all children into school by 2015 but one panelist Phil Twyford, of the non-governmental organization Oxfam, criticized the absence of the United States.

One of the millennium goals established at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal was that by 2015 all the world's children should receive primary schooling. The World Bank believes now that 88 million children will remain without any education by 2015 unless more begins to be done. Early Sunday morning in Washington, UK Chancellor Gordon Brown, Dutch Education Minister Eveline Herfkens, Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin and Norwegian Development Minister Hilde Johnson all expressed their support for providing the $2.5 billion per year of external financing that will be required to make the plan possible.

Children need not just to get into school but also to learn something there, Herfkens said.

The children need a "complete education," school fees should be abolished, education should be linked to prevention of HIV/Aids and the "gender gap should be closed," for at present less girls receive education than boys. The Dutch government was "ready now to commit 135 million euros ($120 million) to the program," Herfkens said.

Brown applauded the education initiative and said "we will do more to substantially increase Britain's aid budget in volume terms."

Norway's Johnson said "despite Dakar ... not enough has happened." Norway, she said, would increase the share of its aid budget devoted to education from 8 percent to 15 percent, and Norway planned to increase its total aid budget to 1 percent of gross domestic product -- more than the 0.7 percent of GDP that the United Nations is currently asking developed countries to devote to aid.

Twyford of Oxfam -- praised by many for its work in promoting the education initiative -- introduced a critical note. It was crucial in the World Development Committee's meeting this morning to be precise about how funding would be supplied to the program. A billion dollars need to be provided now to support programs, such as Tanzania's, that are already in place.

Meanwhile Twyford said that the United States is "conspicuous by its absence here." Bush needed to show he was the "education president," Twyford said. His support for the plan would be a "litmus test of the promises President Bush made at [the United Nations funding for development conference] in Monterrey."

World Bank President James Wolfensohn added that the U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill had expressed privately his support for the education initiative.

----

G-7 Leaders Back Action Plan
More-Flexible Loans Among Proposals to Prevent Defaults

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 21, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22237-2002Apr20.html

Amid a deepening crisis in Argentina, the world's leading industrial nations yesterday endorsed new approaches for containing future crises, including a U.S.-backed plan to prod countries and their creditors to adopt more-flexible loan terms aimed at averting catastrophic defaults.

The action plan, which was issued after a meeting in Washington of top economic policymakers of the Group of Seven nations, was one of the most important statements by global leaders on handling financial crises such as those that have devastated nations including Indonesia and Russia.

The plan stopped well short of more radical approaches, favored by some economists and policymakers, to change global financial rules and avoid the much-criticized, multibillion-dollar rescues of the past. The plan stated, for example, that the G-7 was "prepared to limit" the size of future International Monetary Fund bailouts, but that was qualified by a giant escape clause, "except when circumstances justify an exception."

The plan's disclosure came as one of the IMF's most embarrassing failures, the Argentine crisis, appeared to be reaching a new impasse. Top Argentine officials, who late Friday issued an order closing banks indefinitely to stem an outflow of deposits, met yesterday with members of the IMF's policy-setting International Monetary and Financial Committee to press their case for new emergency loans. The committee later made it clear in a statement that before receiving aid, Buenos Aires must go further in adopting reforms, including deep budget cuts.

At a news conference yesterday, IMF Managing Director Horst Kohler said that in talks with Argentine Economy Minister Jorge Remes Lenicov: "I strongly reiterated that the IMF is committed to concluding [an agreement with Argentina], but that this conclusion needs to be built on a sustainable approach." An IMF mission is to return to Buenos Aires next month to resume negotiations, he said.

Kohler dismissed concerns that it may be politically impossible for Argentina to quickly resolve one of the main sticking points in the talks -- the need for spending cuts by the nation's provinces. "It is clear that one of the root causes" of Argentina' current mess is overspending by the provinces, he said.

Remes Lenicov was quoted in Argentine newspapers yesterday as saying that bank closures could end as early as Wedneday, after the nation's congress approves legislation protecting the banking system from a runs on deposits. Depositors have been winning lawsuits against the government's restrictions on bank withdrawals, and the government wants to force such claimants to accept their money in the form of bonds rather than cash.

The bank closures and the new law risk triggering a renewed backlash among Argentines, who are furious about the impact on the economy and the banking system of the government's default and currency devaluation in January.

The G-7 meeting was one of the main events of this weekend's gathering of officials from the 183 member nations of the IMF and World Bank, which began without incident as protesters against corporate globalization demonstrated near the World Bank's heavily guarded headquarters.

The G-7 also issued a communique hailing evidence that "economic recovery from [last year's] slowdown is underway." Finance ministers also announced their first joint freezing of assets held by a group and individuals identified as having affiliations with terrorists; previous freezes were undertaken by the United States and followed by other nations.

Of a dispute among G-7 members over a U.S. proposal for the World Bank to provide half of its aid to the world's poorest countries in the form of grants instead of loans, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill said, "We're not quite at a final conclusion point, but we're in agreement that certain categories of aid should be in the form of grants."

The G-7 action plan on future crises handed a victory to the U.S. Treasury, which has argued that the best way to address the problem is for countries and their creditors to change the terms of bond and loan contracts.

In many cases, overly indebted countries that run into financial trouble are unable to restructure their debts because such moves require the unanimous consent of their creditors -- a handful of which can block the restructuring, thereby forcing the country into default. Under the U.S. plan, countries would issue new bonds and negotiate new loans with provisions allowing a super-majority -- 75 percent, for example -- of creditors to approve a restructuring.

The G-7 also said it "supports further work" on a rival plan, advanced by the IMF, that would establish a sort of international bankruptcy system that would give financially strapped countries protection from their creditors.

Echoing the Treasury's official position, the G-7 said that since the IMF bankruptcy plan would take considerable time, it "should not delay the expeditious implementation" of the proposal to change bond contracts.


-------- ACTIVISTS

Tens of thousands gather in Washington for largest pro-Palestinian protest in US

Sunday April 21, 2002
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020420/1/2obel.html

In the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration ever in the United States, tens of thousands of protesters gathered here Saturday to condemn what they saw as the US administration's pro-Israeli bent in the Mideast conflict.

Waving signs equating Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and wearing the traditional Arab headdress, or keffiyah, crowds massed on the Ellipse in front of the White House to voice their disapproval of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and US Middle East policy.

Police estimated that around 50,000 people took part in the peaceful protest although organizers, a coalition pro-Palestinian pressure groups, put the figure at 100,000.

Saturday's pro-Palestinian demonstration was billed as an answer to a mass protest by a reported 100,000 supporters of Israel Monday at the US Capitol, where speakers linked the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians to the US-led war on terror.

The pro-Palestinian protesters came from across the United States, including chapters of Muslim American Societies from New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Virginia and Michigan, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic American Institute and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

While Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz spoke at Monday's pro-Israel rally, there was no representative of George W. Bush's administration at Saturday's pro-Palestinian protest.

Congresswoman Cynthya McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia, was due to address the crowd at the Capitol and the protesters heard a tape message of jailed former Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal in support of the Palestinian cause.

Iyad Hindi, 42, was in a group of some 400 who bussed in from Raleigh, North Carolina to participate in the event.

Hindi, who belongs to Raleigh's Muslim-American Society, said the crowd was in Washington "to tell the Israelis there should be no occupation" of Palestinian territories -- and "as long as there is (occupation) there will be resistance."

The group's "other message is to the United States government to stop the clear bias towards Israel," he said.

Behind Hindi stood a young man with a Palestinian flag printed on his t-shirt, who carried a sign saying "Jenin = Auschwitz," equating the Palestinian refugee camp, where scores of Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army, with the infamous Nazi concentration camp, where more than one million Jews were slaughtered between 1942-1945.

Signs equating the Jewish Star of David with the Nazi swastika were waved along with signs stating that "Sharon is a terrorist too," and that "Violence breeds violence."

Speakers took to the podium to decry the two billion dollars in military assistance the United States provides Israel annually.

Among the protesters were members of "Orthodox Jews against Zionism" who led chants of "Judaism: yes, Zionism: No".

Some families traveled from far to lend their support to the Palestinian cause and add their voices to the chorus for peace.

Jesmin Saikh, 15, came with a group of 200 from Gaithersburg, Maryland. She said she wears a head scarf at school, and "obviously disagree(s)" with her Jewish friends at school over events in the Middle East.

"But the thing that we share is that we know that both sides want peace," she said.

The demonstrators had to compete with a rival anti-globalization protest that also commandeered part of the National Mall that stretches from the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, although many attendees said the causes were complementary.

Ranks of police milled around the crowd, some on foot and others on horseback, to ensure that the demonstration remained peaceful.

----

Thousands to gather in Washington for new protests

Sunday April 21, 2002
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020421/1/2obu2.html

More protests were planned in the streets of downtown Washington, one day after tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators condemned what they view as the Bush administration's pro-Israel bias.

Protests were to take place Sunday in front of the Washington site where World Bank and International Monetary Fund leaders were to convene, while a march has also been planned against US policy in Colombia and condemning US backing for the controversial School of the Americas, where numerous Latin American leaders have received military and other training.

On Saturday tens of thousands of protesters, some brandishing signs equating the Jewish star with the Nazi swastika, thronged Washington streets in a massive demonstration against the US administration's Mideast policy.

The four-pronged demonstration, the largest in US history in support of the Palestinian cause, complemented anti-globalization rallies staged to protest the annual World Bank/International Monetary Fund meetings also in Washington this weekend.

All told, an estimated 75,000 people were in the streets, according to Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey, though organizers claimed upwards of 100,000 supporters.

"It was peaceful, and went very smoothly," police spokesman Tony O'Leary told AFP. "There were no arrests as far as we know."

The protest was billed as an answer to the reported 100,000-strong rally in support of Israel Monday at the US Capitol, where speakers linked the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians to the US-led war on terror.

But while that demonstration featured remarks from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a known pro-Israel hawk, the administration was absent from Saturday's demonstration.

"The American foreign policy stinks," said Egyptian-born Abdel Rahim Riyadh, who came from New Jersey accompanied by six of his American-born grandchildren.

"It is up to the Congress of the United States to take care of this, to tell President Bush to get both sides to stop the violence. But he will not, because he is in the pocket of the Zionist lobby."

A group of young men brandished the yellow flag of the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas at the Washington Hilton to protest the annual meeting there of the American/Israel Public Affairs Committee, while the bulk of the demonstrators took over the Ellipse across from the White House.

They listened to speakers condemn Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a terrorist and war criminal and issue demands that the United States withdraw all support, and all financial aid, from the Jewish state.

"If you want the bombing to stop, give the kids a reason to live," cried Jesmin Shaikh, a 15-year-old from nearby Gaithersburg, Maryland, who came to Washington as part of a group of 200 to show "solidarity with our brothers and sisters under occupation."

----

Protests are pleasantly peaceful

By Guy Taylor and Matthew Cell
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 21, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20020421-6676724.htm

More than 30,000 protesters who brought a variety of grievances to the District yesterday paid only brief homage to their demands before joining forces with a large group of peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators - leaving thousands of police officers with little to do but look surprised.

"They're all here exercising their First Amendment rights, and God bless them," D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said, using his baton as a walking stick as he moved among thousands of demonstrators at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

The demonstrators arrived for the spring meeting of the World Bank, always held in the District, which in recent years has attracted anti-globalization protesters and others angry about often-unrelated issues.

The big issue this year, as of yesterday, proved to be creation of a Palestinian state.

The protests were so peaceful Walt Disney might have written the script. But with more demonstrations planned today and tomorrow, when Israeli leaders of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee will congregate at the Washington Hilton, police aren't dropping their guard.

From noon until midnight tomorrow, police will close a stretch of Connecticut Avenue NW, just north of Dupont Circle, where anti-Israel demonstrations are planned outside the Washington Hilton. Chief Ramsey yesterday reiterated his concern about clashes between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

"What you've always got to be aware of is counterdemonstrators and making sure people don't let their emotions get carried away," the chief said.

Protesters also are expected to be back outside the downtown headquarters of the World Bank, where officials are concluding their spring meeting. And at 11 a.m. today a demonstration at the Washington Monument is aimed at changing U.S. policy toward Colombia.

D.C. police, U.S. Park Police, the Secret Service and U.S. Capitol Police - who geared up for more than 50,000 protesters through the weekend - say they're ready for the long haul.

A week of anti-IMF/World Bank demonstrations two years ago resulted in about 1,200 arrests. After yesterday's peaceful protests, D.C. police said they arrested 25 demonstrators for unlawfully entering an underground parking garage in the 1000 block of 13th Street NW and using it as a sleeping area. Friday evening, police arrested 40 protesters on bicycles for disrupting rush-hour traffic.

While many were able to avoid downtown for the weekend, those going to work tomorrow morning could face traffic snarls. Colombian activists say that despite the lack of a permit, they'll march from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol - starting at 7 a.m.

Yesterday morning, about 3,000 pro-Palestine demonstrators chanting "Hey-hey, ho-ho, Sharon must go" gathered in the 1800 block of Connecticut Avenue NW.

Dozens of men, eyes focused on the ground, walked circles around the crowd's center, holding open wooden coffins on their shoulders. Inside each lay a child. "This represents a funeral for the Palestinian children who have been killed by the Israelis," said Walid Abdul. In one coffin an 11-year-old boy, Sammi, smiled and waved at photographers rushing to snap shots of the procession.

Hundreds of others carried Palestinian flags and handmade signs decrying U.S. support of Israel and the Israeli army's search for terrorist suspects in Palestinian villages. The group was escorted south on Connecticut Avenue by more than 200 D.C. police officers riding motorcycles or on foot.

Police directed the demonstrators through the tunnel beneath Dupont Circle before heading south on 18th Street, where they converged with about 1,000 anti-globalization protesters gathered in Edward R. Murrow Park outside World Bank headquarters at 18th and H streets.

Robert Weissman, an organizer, closed the day's Mobilization for Global Justice rally with a boast: "We'll be back in the fall in numbers far greater than we are now."

To the surprise of police surrounding the park, the two groups merged smoothly and began marching east on H Street as one large parade en route to Freedom Plaza at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue - where they would converge with even more groups holding rallies on the National Mall.

Police from Arlington and Fairfax counties in "soft hats" guarded the lines of the march, with Maryland state troopers clustered behind. Park police in visored helmets and body armor guarded LaFayette Park. One Arlington police officer said managing the merger of different protest groups was "a piece of cake." By 2 p.m. dozens of groups, including members of the New Black Panther Party and a contingency from Greenpeace, were massed at Freedom Plaza.

Behind them flowed thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who had marched from a rally on the Ellipse that included speeches carried over a 10-foot-high television screen.

Across Constitution Avenue from the Palestinian demonstration, an alternative pro-Bush administration rally called "Patriots Rally for America" drew a modest crowd of about a hundred.

"Too often we take for granted our own liberties and the fact that America is the greatest force for good in the world," said Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, after his speech. "Our children need to know America is not an evil country."

As the afternoon wore on, the largest contingency of demonstrators, Arab and Muslim groups, swallowed all other groups as it marched toward the U.S. Capitol.

But one group that stood out was a New York-based contingent of Neturei Karta - Orthodox Jews who condemn Zionism. With their trademark beards, long curls and black hats, members of the contingent repeatedly held hands with leaders of the pro-Palestinian march, launching the chant: "Jewish people, yes. Zionism, no!"

Some tourists expressed frustration with the crowds. Eric Laughridge of Nashua, Iowa, said he and his wife didn't know anything about the protests before they arrived in the city last night. "It's something we would never do where I come from in Iowa, but it's interesting to see," he said.

• H.J. Brier contributed to this report.

----

Demonstrators Rally to Palestinian Cause
Arab Americans, Supporters Drown Out Other Issues

By Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 21, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22761-2002Apr21?language=printer

Tens of thousands converged on downtown Washington yesterday to demonstrate for a variety of causes, but it was the numbers and passion of busloads of Arab Americans and their supporters that dominated the streets.

Eager to make their presence felt and their voices heard in the nation's capital as never before, Arab and Muslim families marched and chanted for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel, overwhelming the messages of those with other causes in a peaceful day of downtown rallies and marches.

Young men wore the Palestinian flag around their necks like a cape. Arabic was heard nearly as often as English, and cardboard signs held by women and children denounced Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush. Protesters rallying against corporate wrongs and the global economy found themselves tweaking Vietnam War-era chants to the Palestinian cause, shouting, "One, two, three, four: We don't want no Mideast war!"

"The message here is we must support the Palestinian people against a military occupation and an apartheid state," said Randa Jamal, a graduate student at New York's Columbia University who joined thousands at a pro-Palestinian rally near the White House. She said her cousins were killed in Ramallah, in the West Bank, and her 16-year-old sister has been unable to attend school because of the Israeli occupation. "What they are going through," she said, "is crimes against humanity."

Palestinian rights was the theme of two of four permitted marches that merged on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in a loud and colorful procession to the Capitol. The host of other issues -- anti-corporate globalization, antiwar and anti-U.S. policies in several areas -- were boiled down to an essence visible on banners, placards and T-shirts. Banners read: "Drop debt, not bombs" and "Peace treaty in Korea now." Bumper stickers on T-shirts declared: "No blank check for endless war" and "We are all Palestinian."

It was possible to stand on the Washington Monument grounds and hear simultaneous speeches from three rallies nearby -- antiwar demonstrators, counter-demonstrators and pro-Palestinian activists -- in a mind-boggling surround-sound mix. Protesters came from the Anti-War Committee in Minneapolis, Middlebury College in Vermont and the D.C. chapter of the International Socialist Organization. There were teenage anti-capitalists with black bandannas over their faces marching alongside Muslim mothers wrapped in traditional headdress and pushing baby strollers.

Other demonstrations are planned today and tomorrow near the Washington Monument grounds and outside the Washington Hilton, the site of a pro-Israel lobbying group's annual conference.

District police said the crowds were larger than they had anticipated and put the number at about 75,000. Metro transit officials said ridership increased significantly yesterday, but estimates would not be available until today. Organizers of the Palestinian-rights rally at the Ellipse said the gathering was the largest demonstration for Palestine in U.S. history.

"We are here because we want to do something, to send a message," said Amal K. David, a Palestinian American who made a 12-hour trip in a 21-bus caravan from the Detroit area to join the rally organized by International Answer, an antiwar, anti-racism coalition that shifted the theme of its protest as violence in the Middle East escalated. In tears, David spoke of the destruction that U.S.-financed Israeli weapons and tanks have done to Palestinians, saying: "My beloved country is financing such death and destruction. I am so ashamed."

Many pro-Palestinian marchers said they learned of the march through their mosques. "All over the U.S., everybody got the word," said Issam Khalil of the Bronx, who traveled in a fleet of 50 buses from New York.

Several downtown blocks away, thousands of other pro-Palestinian activists took to the streets for another march to free Palestine. The group was made up mostly of Arab Americans with relatives in the occupied territories and U.S. Jews opposed to the occupation.

"The Palestinians here in the crowd look at us mistrustfully at first," said Rabbi Yisroel Weiss, 45, of New York. "But then they speak a few words with us, and they show us respect and friendship." Weiss traveled to Washington with several dozen Orthodox rabbis to join the march, which left the Washington Hilton, joined anti-globalization demonstrators outside the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and continued on the Capitol. He said his group favored dismantling Israel and returning it to the Palestinians.

Buses carried Jewish supporters from Boston, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, among other places.

Organizers at the march privately urged participants to strike swastikas from their posters, but few complied. It was a running debate among many participants, though several swastikas appeared on signs in reference to Sharon by day's end.

Walking down the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue near the Justice Department as thousands filled the street, D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey praised the decorum of the demonstrations. "The organizers did an outstanding job," said Ramsey, baton in hand. "If it stays this way, it will be the best one we've ever had. . . . This is really what protest ought to be."

By about 4 p.m., no major clashes had broken out between police and protesters. The events were a stark contrast to Washington demonstrations in April 2000, when protests against the World Bank and IMF led to a virtual shutdown of the downtown area and sparked clashes between police and demonstrators that ended in mass arrests.

D.C. emergency officials said only two people were transported for medical treatment, though neither case was serious. Both were falls, one involving a police officer and the other involving a civilian.

Ramsey said that in his view, yesterday's demonstrations went smoothly because organizers worked closely with police. At least three field marshals from the pro-Palestinian side negotiated with Ramsey, then barked instructions into their speaker-phones.

Hani Ahmed, 16, of the District was one of them, and he was marching with a pro-Palestinian group that swelled the ranks of the anti-globalization forces across from the World Bank and the IMF. "That kid, he was only 16, and he was working so well with us. That was one of the things that made it work so well," Ramsey said. At one point, the parade got to Dupont Circle, and marchers wanted to go around the circle rather than through the tunnel, where their permit instructed them to go.

Tashim Sallah, 45, of Buffalo told Ramsey and Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer that he was worried that people would suffocate in the tunnel. Gainer grabbed his hand and said, "We're going down with you. There's no danger."

The group followed Ramsey and Gainer into the tunnel and delighted in the cool shade and underground echo for their chants.

That cooperation was in marked contrast to the first day of demonstrations, when more than three dozen bike-riding protesters were arrested downtown during a Friday evening action at rush hour. All of the 41 people arrested were released, a D.C. Superior Court official said.

Yesterday, though, no incidents of that nature occurred. The only arrests came after most protesters had disbanded. Police arrested 24 adults and one juvenile who were found in a parking garage in the 1000 block of 13th Street NW. All were charged with unlawful entry, a misdemeanor, and police said they were scheduled to be arraigned tomorrow. Police said they collected backpacks, a riot helmet and a gas mask from the suspects, who were taken to the D.C. police academy in Southwest Washington.

Members of the group who were not detained said the demonstrators were not sleeping in the garage, as police first said, but had parked two cars there for the day's protests.

"They went back to the car to get food because they were tired," said Jacob, 23, who drove from Baltimore for the protests but would not give his last name. "We were going to leave to go home."

Earlier, the day was marked only by little dramas on street-corner stages among the tangle of protesters, tourists, police and counter-demonstrators clogging downtown on a humid, sticky afternoon. The atmosphere was mostly civil and occasionally comedic, with brief flashes of arguments or hostility.

About 1 p.m. at H and 16th streets NW, a small scuffle broke out between members of the New Black Panther Party and a man intent on disrupting them. A couple of dozen members of the party showed up at the anti-globalization rally wearing black masks and black military-style uniforms. They had swastikas and shouted anti-Jewish slogans. The scuffle amounted only to pushing and angry remarks before members of the crowd broke them up.

A short time later, the Patriots Rally for America -- a collection of counter-demonstrators that opposed the United We March antiwar protesters with whom they shared the Washington Monument grounds -- had heated up and was getting protection from 10 police officers on horseback and 13 more on foot.

At many points during the afternoon, D.C. police and federal authorities enveloped the marches and rallies with officers on foot and in cars, on horseback and on bicycles. But their presence was less dominating than in previous Washington demonstrations, and most officers were not outfitted in riot gear. More than a few were spotted at downtown intersections yawning or leaning on police gates.

"That's the way we like it," Ramsey said. "They ought to be low-key. People have a constitutional right to protest."

The effect of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators became evident when their smaller march joined anti-globalization forces outside the World Bank and IMF.

The emotion of the Mideast conflict appeared to overpower issues of economic fairness, and many of the signs and chants called for freedom for Palestinians and the end of U.S. sponsorship of Israel.

The Mobilization for Global Justice, which played a part in organizing the day's activities, acknowledged that the pro-Palestinian sentiment had overtaken its economic issues. "It seems more important to the safety of the world," said Mark Rickling, a Mobilization organizer. "But we're all united on the issues of oppression. I'm just floored by the amount of people here today."

By afternoon, the more militant forces of the pro-Palestinian movement dominated, with swastikas and anti-Sharon and anti-Bush slogans and banners.

Aside from handing out signs, organizers seemed to have taken care of nearly every need of protesters, in an ad-hoc way. One all-important telephone number -- 202-462-9627 -- was inked onto many arms; it's the number those arrested are to call.

Legal support was being provided at the number by a local law collective, the National Lawyers Guild, and D.C.-based Partnership for Civil Justice.

But yesterday, there were no confrontations or trouble during the marches. There was even day care, a service offered for many activist-parents by the Anti-Authoritarian Babysitters Club.

A gentle rain started about 2:30 p.m. as marchers walked along Pennsylvania toward the Capitol, but the sun broke through about 3:15.

By then, most marchers were at the east end of the Mall, and many had stopped to pray on the puddled ground.

Next came speeches and music and, as the light faded, the protesters began drifting away, with only 100 or so still on the Mall as a light rain began to fall at dusk.

----

Anti-globalization protesters rally outside World Bank, IMF meetings

Monday April 22, 2002
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020421/1/2oc29.html

Police on horseback, motorbikes, bicycles and on foot surrounded groups of protestors as demonstrators flashed placards and chanted slogans against globalization and other causes.

By mid-morning, several thousand had gathered on the capital's rectangular stretch of grass known as the Mall.

On the street, some groups marched shouting debt relief slogans while others, stolidly wearing all-black including black bandanas across their faces, carried banners denouncing "corporate rule".

Secret service joined with the police to keep control the demonstrators, and there were few scuffles.

Several hundred protesters, hemmed in by police, rallied outside the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, but they may have been outnumbered by police, who restricted the rally to a triangular park across from the headquarters of the World Bank and IMF, where policymakers were gathered.

"I've watched IMF and World Bank policies crush rural economies from the Rio Grande to the other end of Chile," said Cliff Bradley of Missoula, Montana.

"It has to be obvious to senior IMF and World Bank officials that these policies don't work."

Some of the demonstrators taunted police by rocking the metal barricades hemming them in, while chanting slogans.

But there were no serious incidents Sunday, following other demonstrations Saturday that were peaceful, focusing on the US-led antiterrorism campaign, the Middle East crisis and US antidrug policies in Colombia.

The Mobilization for Global Justice, one of the groups organizing the rally here, renewed its call to open all World Bank and IMF meetings to the media and the public; cancel all impoverished country debt to the two institutions; and halt what they called "socially and environmentally destructive projects" such as oil, gas, and mining activities, as well as dams that include forced relocation of people.

All police leave in Washington was cancelled for the weekend as they braced for thousands of demonstrators in various events around the city, including many expected to protest the financial gathering.

Washington police said they are working with the US Capitol Police, US Park Police, the uniformed division of the US Secret Service, and other federal agencies.

Terrance Gainer, the assistant police chief in the District of Columbia, estimated the number of protesters Saturday for several rallies at 35,000 to 50,000.

The protesters Sunday were to march later to a site near the Washington Monument, to join with another rally protesting US policies in Colombia.

----

Thousands march in S.F. protest
At least 20,000 decry Bush's Mideast policy, Israeli actions

Jim Herron Zamora,
Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 21, 2002
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/04/21/MN137395.DTL

In one of the largest Bay Area protests in recent years, at least 20, 000 people marched through San Francisco yesterday in opposition to U.S. policy in the Mideast, transforming 2 miles of city streets into a sea of red, green, black and white Palestinian flags.

The demonstration was billed as a march against "the real axis of evil: war,

racism, poverty," but one cause overwhelmed all others: support for the Palestinian cause.

The four-hour protest, which began at noon in the Mission District and ended at City Hall, caused widespread gridlock and prompted the Highway Patrol to close the Fell Street Central Freeway off-ramp for 45 minutes.

"It's one of the biggest protests in the past five years," San Francisco police Cmdr. Greg Suhr said. "It's not often that you see one where a crowd has formed in Civic Center but there are still people in Dolores Park who haven't started marching."

Busloads of marchers came from as far away as Los Angeles, Fresno and Yuba City in Sutter County. Organizers said demonstrators might have numbered 50, 000, but police estimated closer to 20,000. A similar march in Washington, D.C. , yesterday drew 35,000 to 50,000.

The San Francisco march included many Americans of Palestinian descent and immigrants from other Arab countries who became politically active after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Kais Menoufy said he arrived from Egypt 18 years ago, while Riad Morrar said he came from 27 years ago. Both are now citizens and own technology companies in the Sacramento area.

"There is nothing else I can do but tell President Bush: 'You are wrong. Stop killing my people,' " said Morrar, as he marched with his wife and four children.

"I spent 20 years avoiding the news, avoiding conflict. It is too depressing," Menoufy said. "I love America. But I'm embarrassed and angry that my country is supporting genocide."

A handful of counter-demonstrators carrying Israeli flags confronted the first arrivals at Civic Center Plaza. Marchers nearly surrounded the group until police intervened and took the pro-Israel group inside City Hall before dispersing them.

"It was for their own safety," police Capt. Alex Fagan said. "There are thousands of people here on the other side, and I couldn't guarantee their safety. So they made their point and then I asked them to leave."

MANY GENERATIONS IN MARCH

Perhaps the oldest marcher was Dave Smith, an 89-year-old member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an American group opposing nationalists in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-39.

"I am proud to fight fascism and oppression, whether it's in Spain, Nazi Germany or Israel," said Smith.

The youngest demonstrator might have been Hanif Amanullah, a 4-month-old from Oakland who slept in his father's arms.

"I'm marching for this little guy," said Shahed Amanullah. "I want him to grow up in a world without this kind of violence."

Osha Neumann, a longtime peace activist from Berkeley and veteran of protests since the 1960s, said that for decades the Palestinian cause divided many Bay Area Jewish liberals and leftists who did not want to oppose Israel.

"Twenty years ago I was with a group of Jews protesting at the Israeli Embassy, and it was lonely," said Neumann. "I am happy that Jews especially and the other progressives are no longer blind to oppression by the Israelis."

Many participants had T-shirts, buttons or signs saying, "Another Jew against the oppression of the Palestinian people."

That theme also hit home for Julie Lehman, whose boyfriend is a Moroccan immigrant.

"I feel that as someone Jewish, I need to speak out against the Israeli government when I see what they are doing is so wrong," said Lehman, of San Francisco. "I'm proud to be around so many other Jews today who agree with me. We have to be honest."

Many other causes were represented. Protesters denounced the World Bank, globalization and corporations that included the Gap, Enron and Microsoft. Signs advocated saving the Earth, saving the Arctic caribou and saving the redwoods -- as well as ending the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Placards called for U. S. troops to leave Colombia, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Marchers urged Americans to "stop killing" people from Afghans to Canadians to African Americans.

COLORFUL STREET THEATER

Street theater was everywhere, with mammoth puppets of Uncle Sam, Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. There were other creative demonstrators, too, including a Rottweiler festooned with the colors of the Palestinian flag and a pit bull with a sandwich board saying "Sharon: Stop Mauling Palestinians. "

Police generally kept a low profile and reported no arrests. At one point, a police captain confiscated lighter fluid from several demonstrators about to burn an Israeli flag.

"It's not a free speech issue -- it's a safety thing. I don't want you lighting this on fire with a crowd around here," said Fagan.

Minutes after Fagan stepped away, protesters still managed to burn an Israeli flag.

Most backers of Israel stayed away yesterday and did not stage a counter protest, although the conflict was not far from their minds.

Protests have their place, said Cantor David Bentley, religious-school director of Congregation B'nai Tikvah in Walnut Creek, who attended one in San Francisco last week. Overall, though, marching in the streets tends to polarize people rather than unite them, he said.

"We should be reaching out with humanitarian efforts toward people on both sides of the conflict," said Bentley, whose students have been sending postcards to keep up the morale of Israelis.

"We're Jews," he said. "Israel is our homeland. . . . Every sovereign nation has a right to defend itself. That's all Israel is doing."

Chronicle staff writers Tyche Hendricks and Jason B. Johnson contributed to this report. E-mail Jim Herron Zamora jzamora@sfchronicle.com



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