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NUCLEAR
Britons in the dark on missile defence
Nuke Fears on India - Pakistan Tension
U.S. Warns on India, Pakistan
U.S. and Russian Cooperation on Missile Defense
Pakistan trading nuke secrets with Saudis?
Russia Plans Nuclear Dump for Soviet Test Site
U.S. Border Security Targets Nukes
Nev. Senator Caught Between a Rock And a Waste Dump
MILITARY
World Court to Review Congo Killings
US may permit sale of defence spares, choppers to Pak
Embargo could threaten weapons trade to India
Global defense elite to gather in Singapore
British Troops in New Hunt for Rebels in Afghanistan
China Called a Potential Threat
UN considers Colombia role
India Calls a Speech by Pakistan's President 'Dangerous'
Taliban, al-Qaeda linked to Kashmir
Iran: No Negotiations Under Duress
White House plan would create Palestinian state
UK equipment being used in Israeli attacks
Report: Israeli Troops Enter Hebron
Some observers questioning NATO's mission
U.S. Looks Eastward in New NATO
NATO Formally Embraces Russia as a Junior Partner
Russia becomes NATO ally
Musharraf calls on old comrades for support
Pakistani Intelligence Officials See Qaeda Peril in Their Cities
US military helicopters clash with Abu Sayyaf rebels in Philippines
U.N. Prosecutors Giving Terrorism Evidence to U.S.
U.S. buildup on Uzbek base signals long-term campaign
Osprey To Resume Test Flights For Safety
Patriot Missile Test Has Mixed Results in Pacific
POLICE / PRISONERS
EU Law Turns ISPs Into Spies?
F.B.I. Director, Facing Criticism, Plans New Focus on Terror Fight
FBI to Announce Reorganization Plans
Terror evidence lost with bureau's Web-snooping glitch
After Criticism of F.B.I., Agency Will Turn Focus to Terror
Justice to Lift FBI Restrictions
Recorded Conversations Reveal Predictions of Attacks
US Mulls Development of Counter - Terror Technologies
ENERGY AND OTHER
Danish wise men say wind power now profitable
Nuclear power plant tries solar approach
ExxonMobil Shareholders Power Up Renewables Drive
Energy security overlooked in "Earth Summit 2" - IEA
Potential oil supply refill?
Amnesty International sees pervasive violations
ACTIVISTS
Activist Arrested After Blockading Forest Service Office
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- britain
Britons in the dark on missile defence
Story by Tom Miles
REUTERS UK:
May 29, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16177/story.htm
FYLINGDALES MOOR - In the middle of a British national park, amid the forest and the heather of the dales, sits a 120-foot (40-metre) black pyramid.
The structure's three faces each contain more than 2,500 transmitters which watch for incoming missiles and keep an eye on the satellites that keep an eye on Britain.
As well as angering environmentalists and tracking spy satellites, this radar station at the Royal Air Force base at Fylingdales is at the heart of the debate about a missile shield which U.S. President George W. Bush plans to install over the United States.
Although the Pentagon has not yet announced its preferred design for the proposed missile shield, Britain's Foreign Office says it is likely that Fylingdales would be called on to spot and track any ballistic missiles launched towards North America from the Middle East.
Together with the radar station at Thule in Greenland, Fylingdales would be a target for anyone hoping to disrupt U.S. missile defence but would not necessarily be under the anti-missile umbrella itself, critics say.
"It appears that the U.S. would expect those nations coming under the protective screen to contribute to the costs of the system," said Sir Tim Garden, former assistant chief of Britain's Defence Staff.
PANDORA'S BOX
The plan displaces the Cold War theory of "mutually assured destruction", which supporters said kept the peace because neither superpower dared to risk provoking a nuclear war.
But critics say it reopens the Pandora's box of nuclear weapons because the shield will never match the certainty of "mutually assured destruction" as a nuclear deterrent.
Like its predecessor, the "Star Wars" plan of the 1980s, the missile shield would never guarantee protection against ballistic missiles, they say, nor would it protect against non-missile threats such as the September 11 attacks on the United States.
"The original wasted billions of dollars and then came to nothing. This will do the same," Garden said.
The missile defence plan involves tearing up a 1972 treaty which prevented Washington and Moscow from building a national missile shield.
"This is a funny form of arms control," said Garden, adding that a successor treaty, which Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed on May 24, would be "completely meaningless" in practice.
The end of the Cold War-era nuclear deterrent would make the world a more dangerous place, he suggested.
"If the question is: 'What does this do for the security of Britain?', the answer is: 'It reduces it,'" he said.
The British government says it will not declare its hand on Fylingdales until a formal request has been received from the United States.
"The position is that there's nothing on the table," said Lawrie Quinn, a local member of parliament who has taken up local people's concerns with ministers from the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence (MOD).
"The government won't want to open that can of worms until it really has to," said Garden, adding that a significant part of the ruling Labour party and many non-governmental organisations were uneasy about missile defence.
But if Washington does request the use of Fylingdales, Britain is expected to agree.
"It's practical politics," Garden said, adding that a British refusal would simply force U.S. planners to budget for a ship-based radar or find another foreign base.
"The reality of the politics is that the British government is not going to risk a major fracture by making it more expensive for the Americans," he said.
A DOUBLE STANDARD
Anni Rainbow from the Campaign for Accountability of American Bases said the government had been sitting on the fence for far too long and would stall the issue for as long as possible.
"The idea that they don't know is just not on. It's highly unlikely that they will say no."
The policy of not talking about the use of the base was highly irresponsible, she said. A decision was close enough to be discussed properly and not presented as a fait accompli.
Quinn said the government would have to discuss any plans before progressing, but there was currently an information vacuum.
"My bottom line is that there's got to be an input from and dialogue with the local community," he said. Constituents who came to see him were unanimous in their opposition, he said.
"I can't think of anyone who's come to me to put the case for missile defence," he added.
Fylingdales's location in the North York Moors National Park means that any changes to the external appearance of the site are subject to planning permission from the local authority, but campaigners expect the government to ride roughshod over objections to an expansion of the base or an upgrade in security.
"It depends whether the MOD is moved by any of the arguments," said Rainbow. "And I don't think they will be."
"It's somewhat ironic that the U.S. military establishment is not allowed to build any facilities in their national parks," said Quinn. "It's a double standard."
Rainbow said her campaign was preparing a legal case on the matter. "It's something we see as unlawful," she said, but declined to give further details.
The Ministry of Defence was not available for comment.
-------- india / pakistan
Nuke Fears on India - Pakistan Tension
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Pakistan-Nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A war between India and Pakistan could easily go nuclear.
If India, fed up with terror attacks, moved against its smaller and weaker neighbor, Pakistan might view a nuclear missile launch as its only option in response.
India might retaliate with nuclear weapons of its own in a scenario that could kill 8 million to 12 million people and bring radiation fallout to millions more, including thousands of U.S. soldiers in the region.
Even if the two nations' leaders do not want war, ``There is a danger that as tensions escalate, the leaders could find themselves in a situation in which irresponsible elements can spark a conflict,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Wednesday.
Of course, a nuclear exchange, or even a conventional war, is not inevitable. The Bush administration and European officials are pressuring b both sides to back down from their standoff over Kashmir, the disputed province that has been the source of two of the three India-Pakistan wars since 1947.
But if India launched a military strike with conventional weapons, even against a small target such as a Kashmiri militant camp, Pakistan probably would feel compelled to strike back, said Teresita Schaffer, a South Asia expert in Washington.
Pakistan might use conventional weapons at first.
The risk is that fighting would escalate, with attacks back and forth, ``until one side or another -- probably Pakistan -- says, 'This last attack has put our country in severe danger. We have no choice but to use nuclear weapons,''' Schaffer said.
Pakistan, knowing it would lose even a nuclear engagement, might then gamble on a ``demonstration'' nuclear strike, perhaps on an unpopulated area to try to warn India off, said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst in Washington.
Even that would create a ``a huge risk of confusion and misunderstanding'' and probably cause India to fire nuclear weapons, Cordesman said.
Both countries are thought to have nuclear weapons numbering in the low dozens, said a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity, with each weapon roughly equivalent in destructive power to the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
Both Pakistan and India can deliver nuclear weapons with either ballistic missiles or small fighter-bomber airplanes.
Eight million to 12 million people could die in the short term, if the two countries engaged in a full-scale exchange with both sides successfully using most of their weapons and aiming them at populated areas, according to an analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
That estimate does not include long-term deaths caused by radiation fallout, said the U.S. official. Among those at risk: The 7,000 U.S. troops in nearby Afghanistan, plus U.S. troops in Pakistan and aboard ships in the northern Arabian Sea.
The two countries have had 1 million troops at full alert along their border in Kashmir since India blamed Pakistan for a militant attack on its Parliament in December. Pakistan denies arming or giving money to the militants.
India has said it would not use a nuclear weapon first.
Pakistan might consider using nuclear weapons if India seized a chunk of its land, attacked a major city, or tried to cut Pakistan in two by seizing rail lines and roads, Schaffer believes.
A pre-emptive Indian strike against Pakistan's military or nuclear sites also might prompt such retaliation.
One big risk is that India might believe -- wrongly, most U.S. analysts feel -- that it can attack Pakistan because the United States will prevent Pakistan from retaliating with nuclear weapons.
But Pakistan almost certainly is moving its missiles around the country in a ``shell game'' to prevent both the United States and India from knowing exactly what it has, and thus to stop any pre-emptive strikes, said Cordesman.
``Pakistan has every reason to make sure its capabilities are covert,'' Cordesman said. ``We simply can't physically prevent it, if they go to war.''
Because of its superior spy satellites, the United States would, however, probably spot any missile launch by either side, before the other side did.
``But what exactly would 17 minutes (of warning) mean, in terms of diplomatic intervention?'' Cordesman asks. ``Especially if that missile was armed with nukes?''
--------
U.S. Warns on India, Pakistan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-India-Pakistan.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration warned on Wednesday that ``irresponsible elements'' in India and Pakistan could touch off a ``conflagration'' against the wishes of the countries' leaders.
The comments by State Department spokesman Richard Boucher were the strongest by the administration since an Islamic militant terrorist attack two weeks ago in Indian-controlled Kashmir led to a sharp increase in friction.
``The climate is very charged and a serious conflagration could ensue if events spiral out of control,'' Boucher said.
He said the administration is looking for Indian and Pakistani leaders responsible for the safety and welfare of their people to do their utmost to reduce violence and to exercise restraint.
``There is a danger that as tensions escalate the leaders could find themselves in a situation in which irresponsible elements can spark a conflict,'' he said.
Another administration official said Boucher's remarks were directed mostly at Pakistani militants who appear to be eager to provoke a confrontation with India.
He expressed concern that a new attack will only heighten tensions further, requiring the leadership in both countries to contemplate use of force in response to public demands.
Boucher also disclosed that the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, Nancy Powell, will temporarily take charge of the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan.
Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin left Pakistan on Wednesday after just nine months on the job so that she could rejoin her teen-age daughters in the United States.
Pakistan was considered to be too dangerous for the girls to remain there.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has engaged in frequent telephone diplomacy in recent days, encouraging restraint. He will dispatch his top aide, Richard Armitage, to Pakistan and India next week.
A senior administration official said President Bush is considering sending Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the region to try to defuse the conflict.
The current phase of the crisis began two weeks ago when suspected Islamic militants attacked an Indian army base in Kashmir, leaving more than 30 dead, including 10 children.
Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said Wednesday that if Pakistan wants peace, it must act urgently to stop Islamic militants bent on infiltrating Indian territory to carry out terror attacks.
Boucher echoed the sentiment, adding that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf must take concrete steps to fulfill his promise to prevent such infiltration.
Musharraf has been a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism and American officials have praised his past efforts to deal with Islamic radicals.
But a newly published essay by a former top National Security Council official, Bruce Riedel, presents an unflattering portrait of the Pakistani leader.
During a 1999 crisis between India and Pakistan, Musharraf was serving as Pakistan's military chief under then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. As Riedel describes it, Sharif was eager for an accommodation with India but was opposed by Musharraf, ``a man some feared was determined to humble India once and for all.''
Riedel wrote that Musharraf ``was a refugee from New Delhi, one of the millions sent into exile in the 1947 catastrophe that split British India and the subcontinent. He was said to be a hard-liner on Kashmir.''
Sharif took steps to end the 1999 crisis with India but was overthrown in a military coup in October that was led by Musharraf.
-------- missile defense
U.S. and Russian Cooperation on Missile Defense: How likely?
The Troubling Story of the Russian American Observation Satellite (RAMOS) Program
May 29, 2002
http://www.cdi.org/missile-defense/ramos-pr.cfm
When President Reagan unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative during the early 1980s, he spoke repeatedly about his intent to share missile defense technology with the Soviet Union as a means that could ultimately lead to the elimination of offensive strategic ballistic missiles. President Bush has reiterated that position leading up to the St. Petersburg summit. What few may know is that during the past decade, the U.S. and Russian governments have quietly undertaken a joint effort that could ultimately enable the Reagan-Bush vision to become a reality. In 1992, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization [BMDO-recently redesignated to be the Missile Defense Agency (MDA)] began discussions with Russian officials about the possibility for a joint technology demonstration program that could assist both nations in developing effective early warning and missile defense technologies. During the next several years, US and Russian officials negotiated details of the proposal, leading to an agreement in 1997 between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin to proceed with the Russian American Observation Satellite (RAMOS) program.
During the past decade, RAMOS has withstood repeated challenges from a variety of sources within the executive and legislative branches of the US government. This year the program is once again in danger of being terminated. Currently, the MDA is withholding funds authorized and appropriated by the Congress for FY 2002 pending the signing of a new government-to-government agreement between the U.S. and Russia. In the interest of promoting cooperation in meeting important mutual security concerns, the Bush administration and the Congress should take steps to ensure that funding is provided to keep this unique joint program alive and moving forward.
Program Objectives-Cooperation and Building Trust
In May 2001, BMDO officials briefed congressional staffers that a primary policy objective underlying the RAMOS program was to "develop with Russia, mutually beneficial space technologies for defense and civilian applications." BMDO officials further stated their intent that RAMOS would "increase trust between the U.S. and Russia", and would "establish groundwork for future cooperative efforts with the Russian Federation." Early successful scientific joint experiments in space-based observations suggested that such objectives were realistic. During the early phase of the program, the U.S. and Russia conducted the first joint space surveillance experiment in which observation data were exchanged between the two participants. Later, Russians flew an imaging radiometer on a U.S. satellite. The history of the program since 1998, however, belies the goal of cooperation. Mistrust has become rife on both sides and prospects for further cooperation, even during the current post-September 11th period of cooperation, are growing dim.
One important factor underlying the growing mistrust between US and Russian program officials lies in the instability which characterizes the weapons acquisition process. For decades, DoD officials have decried the "instability" which plagues the development and purchase of major weapon systems. Program plans and schedules are constantly revised; funding levels are continually adjusted both within DoD and by the Congress; and program schedules are frequently delayed to reflect those changes. Often, political interests in the Congress serve as the source of instability. RAMOS has a history similar to many other DoD programs in those respects. The important factor distinguishing RAMOS from other defense programs, however, is that RAMOS was conceived as an international "partnership"between former antagonists undertaken in large part to build trust between them.
Since its inception, the US RAMOS program and policy administrators have repeatedly directed significant changes to RAMOS plans, funds, and schedules with little input from their Russian counterparts. As a result, Russian officials and scientists increasingly question the validity of the "partnership" despite their government's repeated official statements supporting the RAMOS program. A brief summary of changes to program plans and objectives illustrates why.
A Summary of RAMOS Program History
The original RAMOS concept called for each country to develop its own observation satellite, both of which would be launched aboard Russian rockets into low earth orbit. The satellites, using short-, mid-, and long-wave infrared sensors, would observe and analyze various military and civilian scientific test objectives, including the firing of short-range test missiles such as SCUD missiles. Technological objectives included whether the polarization of solar glint could be used to mitigate short-wave infrared clutter for use by early warning satellites; whether missile emissions could be observed effectively against the earth's own background radiation; and whether infrared tracking could adequately observe a missile's flight pattern from below to above the horizon. The initial RAMOS plan also called for tests to observe and measure industrial effluents, volcanic plumes, and cyclonic storm activity. Under the original scheme, each nation would be responsible for constructing its own instrumentation and ground control station.
In 1998, BMDO conducted a Concept Design Review of the RAMOS program and determined that the original two-satellite demonstration program did not provide the United States with sufficient additional missile defense technical benefits to warrant moving forward with the original program plan. BMDO concluded that the political benefit of cooperating with Russia in missile defense could be achieved through other, unspecified cooperative programs. In short, without consulting with their Russian partners, DoD unilaterally backed away from the original agreement and shifted the priority of the program from "cooperation" to "operational benefit" for US space assets. Given that the technical objectives of the program are basic elements of effective missile defense not yet fully solved by MDA, the shift in priorities suggests that DoD changed its position on RAMOS for political, not technical, reasons.
The Department of Defense did not, however, abandon the program at that point. Instead, BMDO proposed to restructure it. After examining a broad range of alternatives, the DoD developed two alternative program plans on its own to discuss with the Russian RAMOS team. The first alternative proposed using infrared sensors mounted on either an American or Russian aircraft to measure and simulate mid- and long-wave infrared against atmospheric clutter against the earth's background. The second alternative was simply to provide funding to the Russians to design and test new sensors on their own. Representatives of DoD met with Russian officials in March 1999 to discuss the matter. Although the Russians did not reject those options as additions to the program, they reiterated their support for the initial two-satellite program plan to which, in their view, both Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton had agreed. When Prime Minister Primakov met with Vice President Gore in New York in March 1999, he reiterated Russian support for the two-satellite program.
In July 2000, the Department of Defense proposed a revised plan to the Russians that returned to the two-satellite format of the initial program plan, but contained some important differences. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Jacques Gansler, proposed to the Russians that they be responsible for the design, construction and launch of both satellites and supporting ground station equipment. The US, he offered, would only be responsible for providing the basic sensors, the performance of sensor calibrations, and the integration of the sensors on to Russian satellites. The Russians have not formally accepted Dr. Gansler's proposal for the restructured program, a process that has doubtless been affected by Russian reactions to President Bush's announced intent for the U.S. to withdraw from the Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.
The Current Situation: RAMOS Funding Being Withheld
In his letter of July 14, 2000 to his Russian counterpart, Dr. Mikhailov, State-Secretary, First Minister of Defense, Dr. Gansler stated the need to "underpin this (revised) program with a government-to-government agreement to underscore the commitment of both our governments to the program and outline our specific roles." BMDO officials have interpreted Dr. Gansler's words to mean that a new government-to-government agreement is required before the program could resume at full throttle. Consequently, BMDO officials determined that the release of Congressionally-authorized and appropriated funding for RAMOS should be withheld pending a new agreement. Of $30 million appropriated to fund Russian participation in the program for FY 2002, MDA has released only $2 million thus far this year.
While BMDO withholds critical funding for the program, the Russian side wrestles with the nature and the form of a new government-to-government agreement. During meetings in Moscow between members of the Russian RAMOS team and representatives of the Center for Defense Information (CDI), Russian scientists and officials in the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs stated their view that the government-to-government agreement reached between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin for the initial two-satellite RAMOS program still pertained despite the adjustments proposed by Gansler in July 2000. BMDO officials, however, have taken the view that those adjustments are sufficiently significant that a new agreement is warranted.
Given the disparity in viewpoints on this crucial issue, it is likely to take a significant amount of time for US and Russian officials to negotiate detailed terms of a new government-to-government agreement. Meantime, MDA could effectively kill the program by withholding funds the program needs to continue. During CDI's recent meetings with US and Russian program contract personnel, both sides indicated that the technical teams that have been working side by side on the program for a number of years will soon be dissolved if funding is not made available in coming weeks. The cooperation and trust built among Russian and American technical personnel could soon be lost if the teams are disassembled. Aside from the issue of funding availability, Congressional staff familiar with the program have indicated to CDI that MDA intends to formally discontinue the program this summer if a new government-to-government agreement is not signed in the near future.
Conclusion: RAMOS Is Too Important To Cancel
The RAMOS program represents some very important national security objectives for the United States. First, it is in our interest that Russia's early warning system perform capably, reliably, and accurately. False information from Russia's anti-ballistic missile early warning system could cause an ill-advised decision or automatic response to launch retaliatory strategic missiles armed with nuclear weapons. The RAMOS program is intended, in part, to assist the Russians in meeting this very important objective which serves both nations' security interests. Second, the RAMOS program may be particularly useful in developing technologies that are also useful in detecting, tracking, and targeting short-range tactical missiles. The dismal US performance regarding SCUD missiles during the Persian Gulf War points to the importance of this high priority goal. Finally, RAMOS provides the U.S. with an important opportunity to build trust and confidence with the nation President Bush refers to as "no longer our enemy." To the extent that the United States government will seek Russian cooperation on a broad menu of foreign policy matters, it could be very useful to point to successful joint programs such as RAMOS as evidence that both countries can work together well to achieve goals of mutual security concern.
It may well be that the troubled history of RAMOS in recent years is more than simply a manifestation of the instabilities generated by defense program management and our annual budgeting system. Despite President Bush's observation that the Cold War is over, there are many involved in the RAMOS program who appear unwilling to cooperate in the spirit of trust intended as a cornerstone to this program. Consequently, bureaucratic actions in recent years which have posed obstacles to the program may in fact reflect a more profound opposition to cooperating with our former enemy. Nevertheless, the program has managed to muddle through despite opposition. The current circumstance, however, may represent a final moment of truth unless immediate actions are taken.
There are a variety of ways to sustain RAMOS in the face of incipient cancellation. First, the Russian government could agree to sign the new agreement drafted by US officials. Russian officials, however, adamantly opposed this solution during meetings with CDI personnel. Alternatively, the Russian government could sign its own version of such an agreement and proceed to negotiate the details. In that event, in order to sustain the program, the US would have to agree to provide sufficient funding on an interim basis. CDI supports the latter as a means to overcome the current hurdle and has encouraged both Russian and American officials and elected personnel to support such an approach. If that approach is adopted, the Congress will be on much firmer footing as it considers funding for RAMOS for FY 2003 during the summer. Beyond FY 2003, however, RAMOS needs to find new procedures to ensure that the program becomes and remains "cooperative".
Dr. G. Wayne Glass CDI Senior Advisor gwglass@cdi.org
-------- pakistan
Pakistan trading nuke secrets with Saudis?
U.S. intelligence sources believe each using the other to develop WMD
May 29, 2002
WorldNetDaily
GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT INTELLIGENCE BRIEF
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27777
U.S. intelligence sources are convinced that Pakistan is trading nuclear secrets with Saudi Arabia in exchange for cash to maintain and expand its missile programs.
While Pakistan has acquired the expertise and the material to make nuclear bombs, it doesn't have the money for the infrastructure or the development of intermediate-range missiles to deliver the weapons.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia does not want to get caught as the only major power in the Persian Gulf without nuclear weapons and missiles.
So, the sources said, Riyadh has been pumping hundreds of millions of dollars for Islamabad's missile and nuclear programs.
The Saudi money is meant for the development of the Ghauri intermediate-range missile. The missile has a Pakistani name but actually is a close derivative of the North Korean No-Dong missile. Pakistan has developed several versions of the Ghauri.
Over the weekend, Islamabad announced the first such Ghauri test since 1999. This missile, also known as Hatf-V, has a range of 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) and is capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
But Pakistan requires Saudi money for a much longer range missile. This would be able to reach a distance of 3,500 kilometers (2,170 miles) and enable Pakistan to strike virtually every major Indian city with nuclear warheads.
What do the Saudis want in return? Riyadh wants Pakistan to send the kingdom turn-key systems and help in developing a nuclear infrastructure to quickly assemble nuclear bombs.
-------- russia
Russia Plans Nuclear Dump for Soviet Test Site
May 29, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2002/2002-05-29-04.asp
MOSCOW, Russia, Russia has chosen the former Soviet nuclear test site Novaya Zemlya in the far north as a disposal site for high-level nuclear waste.
The Russian Ministry of Atomic Power (Minatom) and Governor of Arkhangelsk region Anatoly Efremov have announced the construction of a dump site for radioactive waste on former Soviet nuclear test site Novaya Zemlya. Minatom says the project on the strait between two Arctic islands will cost about US$70 million and is scheduled for completion within three years.
Novaya Zemlya is the northern extension of the Ural Mountains which divide the European and Asian continents.
On May 21, Minatom and Efremov said low and medium level radioactive waste will be moved to Novaya Zemlya from the regional storage site at Severodvinsk, a small city and nuclear submarine base on the site called Mironova Mountain.
Map showing location of Novaya Zemlya (Map courtesy Sam Clayton)
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs denies that the recent activity at Novaya Zemlya signifies preparation for resuming nuclear tests. "Russia, which has ratified all the international agreements on real reductions of nuclear weapons, as well as the CTBT, strictly adheres to the obligations it has assumed, including the obligation not to carry out a nuclear weapons test explosion or any other nuclear explosion," the ministry stated May 17.
On May 12, in advance of U.S.-Russia meetings earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov also denied that the recent activity at Novaya Zemlya had anything to do with nuclear weapons testing, calling such suspicions "ungrounded."
Russia has been moving in the direction of importing high-level nuclear waste. Last year the country changed its laws to permit import of radioactive waste including spent nuclear fuel from power plants. Government officials estimate that over the next 10 years the project could earn the country about US$21 billion.
Anti-nuclear activists say that figure is enormously inflated to justify the program. Activists from EcoDefense and other groups across Russia have been protesting Russian import of nuclear waste for years.
"There are no regions across Russia where people would accept radioactive waste dumping. For the past 50 years nuclear industry was unable to create technology for waste disposal that would be safe for people and the environment," said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair for Ecodefense, environmental group campaigning against unsafe disposal of radioactive waste.
"Hundreds of protest actions against possible radwaste disposal took place all over Russia in last three years. But nobody lives on Novaya Zemlya, so nuclear industry hopes nobody would bother them there with protests," Slivyak said.
Novaya Zemlya (Photo credit unknown)
The activists object that no monitoring or public control will be allowed over the nuclear waste dump. They fear it will first be established for low-level waste and then will accept highly radioactive materials as well.
"The nuclear industry just wants to build a cheap facility for low-level radioactive waste first and then dump there everything it has to get rid of, mainly spent fuel", said Alisa Nikulina, anti-nuclear campaigner for Socio-Ecological Union, an umbrella for nearly 300 environmental groups across the Russian Federation.
"Construction of a dumping site for low-level waste costs much smaller then repository for spent fuel," said Nikulina. "One can not build site to dispose all kinds of radioactive waste for 70 million people, unless you ignore all kinds of safety systems."
Anti-nuclear activists say that Novaya Zemlya is far from cities or villages where people may organize effective public control over operations of nuclear industry. "That gives Minatom the ability to violate all kinds of law and regulation, as it did many times in the past, and nobody would speak a word about it," Nikulina said.
Slivyak said, "Ecodefense greatly concerned over the possibility of radiation leaks to the environment if the dumping site on Novaya Zemlya is constructed, even if the plan looks safe on paper."
"The Russian nuclear industry is famous for its inability to construct safe nuclear facilities. Industry cannot be trusted and, in case of Novaya Zemlya project, it would be very hard to monitor what's going on there," he warned.
Ecodefense and the Socio-Ecological Union urge that radioactive wastes be stored at sites which produce them. They say the nuclear industry must increase the safety of nuclear waste storage technology.
A history of nuclear explosions on Novaya Zemlya (http://www.bellona.org/imaker?sub=1&id=7568) is reported by the Norwegian Bellona Foundation.
Bellona has produced a report (http://www.bellona.org/en/international/russia/7566.html) on dumping of radioactive waste in the Russian Far North.
-------- terrorism
U.S. Border Security Targets Nukes
May 29, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Nuclear.html http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020530/ap_on_go_ot/attacks_nuclear_2
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Every Customs inspector will be equipped by January with a pocket-sized radiation detector, but ``there are no guarantees'' that increased border security will stop a terrorist from smuggling in a nuclear weapon, the Customs commissioner said Wednesday.
Fears of a terrorist nuclear assault on the United States have risen since the Sept. 11 jetliner attacks in New York and Washington. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner said in an interview with The Associated Press he knows of no terrorist group trying to smuggle a nuclear device into the country.
``The question is, `Should we be concerned about it?''' he said. ``This is one of those areas where I don't want to wait and see what happens.''
Since Sept. 11, the Customs Service, the nation's oldest law enforcement agency, founded in 1789, has shifted its primary mission from detecting smuggled narcotics to stopping terrorists, possibly with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, from getting into the country.
Specifically, Customs has increased security and provided better training for its inspectors and agents at seaports, airports and border crossings on land. Customs oversees roughly 300 points of entry into the United States.
The agency also is working with other countries to screen cargo containers before their shipment into the United States. Under a recent agreement with Canada, U.S. Customs has put inspectors in Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver to prescreen cargo headed for the United States. Canadian Customs officials have inspectors at some U.S. seaports.
Bonner hopes to have similar arrangements worked out with other countries in the next couple of months, possibly including Singapore, France and the Netherlands.
With roughly 6 million cargo containers entering U.S. seaports each year, Bonner said it is critically important to ensure that terrorists don't use them to smuggle themselves or their weapons into this country.
Still, ``there are no guarantees,'' Bonner said in the interview. ``No system is foolproof.''
Bonner, a former federal judge and chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1990s, was sworn in as Customs commissioner on Sept. 24, after the deadliest terror attacks on U.S. soil.
U.S. intelligence, Bonner said, believes Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network is ``determined to strike the United States again. ... That much is clear.''
``We don't know if al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations have a nuclear device,'' he said.
``What we do know is that for at least the last five or more years they've attempted to get ... radiological materials to build a nuclear device. They consulted with a Pakistani scientist or engineer who was involved in the Pakistani nuclear development,'' Bonner said. ``Certainly there's been an attempt to get a device.''
Although bin Laden claimed on a videotape to have a nuclear device, Bonner said, ``I don't believe him.''
About half of Customs' inspectors -- 4,000 of them -- are now equipped with pocket-sized radiation detecters. They are in scattered locations around the country. By January, the other 4,500 Customs inspectors will get the devices, Bonner said.
Customs also is looking to use more sophisticated scanning and detection technology at seaports and land crossings.
Even with the shift in its mission, fighting terrorism isn't new to Customs. The agency was credited with thwarting a terrorist attack before the millennium celebration.
Customs inspectors stopped an Algerian man at the border at Port Angeles, Wash., in December 1999 and found more than 100 pounds of explosives in the trunk of his car. The man had trained in terror camps run by bin Laden.
On the Net:
Customs: http://www.customs.gov
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Nev. Senator Caught Between a Rock And a Waste Dump
Ensign Bucks Party Line on Unpopular Project
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 29, 2002; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23812-2002May28?language=printer
Normally, freshman senators have a year or two to adjust to their new jobs before they face career-threatening challenges like a nuclear waste dump in their own back yard. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) has not had that luxury.
According to polls and every other available indicator, the people of Nevada are solidly against the long-pending plan, recently embraced by President Bush, to locate a huge repository for storing nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. As a result, it is a political imperative of the highest order that Nevada's politicians of both parties fight to the point of exhaustion to stop the project.
But for Ensign, who is halfway into his second year in the Senate, the job of defending his home state on the issue is considerably more complicated than it is for Democrats from Nevada, including Sen. Harry M. Reid, the Senate majority whip, a leader for years in the fight against the repository.
While a majority of Democrats oppose the project, Ensign finds himself at odds on the issue with his president and his party's leaders from both houses of Congress, along with a majority of his new Senate GOP colleagues.
Moreover, he won his Senate seat after arguing that Nevada would benefit from having a Republican voice at the table. Now Ensign has to demonstrate that he was right.
Serious and earnest in demeanor, the 44-year-old lawmaker -- a conservative and party loyalist on most issues -- shrugs off the notion that he's in a political pickle. Everyone understands his situation and knows he's doing his best, he says.
"It's not awkward because they know from experience where I'm coming from . . . and that I won't back down," Ensign said in a recent interview.
The issue is not a partisan one in Nevada, he said. "As long as we get to 51 votes, I don't care how many Harry [Reid] gets and how many I get. The bottom line is winning."
But he faces formidable odds and a difficult summer. The House overwhelmingly votedearlier this month to override the veto of the project by Nevada's Republican governor, Kenny Guinn. A vote by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee may come as early as next week, and under a procedure stipulated by law, the full Senate will vote sometime this summer and it will take only a majority vote -- not the 60 votes usually required on controversial issues -- to remove the last major obstacle to final approval of the project.
Democrats say they expect to have between 30 and 35 votes to sustain the Nevada veto, leaving Ensign to come up with 15 to 20 votes on the Republican side of the aisle. So far there are only two Republicans who are publicly committed against the project: Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Ensign.
A recent survey of Senate offices by the Las Vegas Review-Journal showed at least 44 senators willing to go on record in support of the project, including more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats, putting its proponents within striking range of winning. Twenty senators were against the project. The rest, including 15 Republicans, were uncommitted or failed to respond.
To win over these and other Republicans, Ensign settled into an unusual routine while the Senate was in session: For weeks, sometimes several times a day, Ensign and a senior aide, Pam Thiessen, trudged off to the offices of Republican colleagues for half-hour tutorials on the dangers and costs of the project. Ensign brought with him an inch-thick binder packed with information about the plan, including a projected tally of rail and truck shipments through the colleague's state and a map of the likely routes.
He argues that moving the waste across country is dangerous and that it can be safely stored on site for up to 100 years, at a fraction of the cost, while new technologies to reprocess the waste are developed. The administration contends that the project is safe and essential to national security and the future of nuclear power in the country.
Ensign has had sit-down talks with 34 of the 49 Republicans so far, not including more casual chats during Senate business, according to aides. He refuses to give his own vote count but contends "we've had good success moving people to the undecided category and at least remaining open on the issue."
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who met with Ensign recently, had voted earlier to support the Yucca Mountain site and may do so again but told Ensign he'd look at the facts he presented and ask the nuclear power industry about them. "He presented a good case, very factual," said Brownback, whose state includes a nuclear plant.
Ensign is also working closely with Reid, whom he nearly unseated in 1998 before winning an open seat in 2000. Putting aside any grievances from their campaign clash, they have become friends who work well together on Nevada issues, while disagreeing on many national issues with partisan implications.
"He's opposing the president he likes; the pressure is really on him," Reid said about Ensign. "I think he's doing very well."
While some analysts have suggested Ensign could be hurt in Nevada by his party's stand on the waste dump site, others are not so sure. "He's got four years [before his next election] to mend fences, although this is not something people are likely to forget," said Ted G. Jelen, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
"The average Nevadan figures the [Senate] vote will go against Nevada but thinks its representatives are putting up a good fight," said Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the university's Reno campus.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
World Court to Review Congo Killings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-World-Court-Congo-Rwanda.html
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- The World Court will hold emergency hearings in June on Congo's accusations that Rwanda-backed rebels murdered millions of Congolese since the outbreak of civil war in 1998.
Congo filed the case Tuesday against Rwanda, accusing it of ``massive, serious and flagrant violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law.''
The court, which deals only with disputes between nations, will hear arguments from both sides on June 13, a spokesman said.
Congo accused Rwandan troops of killing more than 3.5 million Congolese.
Since the outbreak of the civil war in August 1998, Congo says, Rwandan troops raped Congolese women, kidnapped and assassinated politicians and looted property.
Rwandan authorities say they need to station troops in Congo to stop attacks on their territory by Congo-based rebels.
Congo asks for the withdrawal of armed forces from its territory and compensation from Rwanda for damages. It filed similar cases against Uganda and Burundi two years ago, but neither of those cases has been settled.
-------- arms sales
US may permit sale of defence spares, choppers to Pak
PTI
WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=11365209
ISLAMABAD: The United States has indicated permitting supply of spare parts for Pakistan's existing US-origin defence equipment and provide helicopters capable of reaching its Afghan borders where US and Pakistani troops are conducting operations against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.
"The Foreign Military Financing (FMF) will facilitate continued military support for Operation Enduring Freedom by allowing the supply of spare parts for Pakistan's existing US-origin equipment as well as by providing C-130 support and helicopters to improve transport and access to border areas," an official US government report said.
The US document said that Pakistan's continued support for Operation Enduring Freedom helped in detaining and handing over fleeing al-Qaeda and Taliban and in cracking down on extremism, which has inturn proved critical to US success in the international war on terrorism.
The report detailed US support for Pakistan during the fiscal year 2003 and projected an overall $305 million assistance in addition to the $921 million provided during the fiscal year 2002 to fight terrorism in Afghanistan, The News said on Wednesday.
The US monetary assistance included $600 million economic and budgetary support apart from $220 million payments under the logistical support agreement, it said.
A supplementary appropriation bill placed in the Senate on May 22 had also mentioned some additional funds for Pakistan.
The fiscal year 2003 security assistance request for Pakistan includes International Military and Education Training (IMET) to increase professionalism and to promote respect for human rights and for a functional role for the military under democratic civilian rule, it said.
According to the report, US support for Pakistan was key to meeting American regional goals of achieving the success of Operation Enduring Freedom, containing Islamic extremism, fostering and maintaining stability apart from strengthening democracy in South Asia and in Pakistan.
Though the US has lifted sanctions against Pakistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Washington so far has not approved an major defence sales to Islamabad.
US was also extending basic education assistance to Pakistan, the report said.
"President Musharraf is making a concerted effort to reform Pakistan's education sector as a way to combat Islamic extremism and the spread of terrorism," it said, adding the US Development Assistance (DA) will support this priority objective by helping the government's policy reform, teacher training, curriculum development, community and private partnerships and girls' education initiatives.
----
Embargo could threaten weapons trade to India
By Richard Beeston and Michael Evans
May 29, 2002
UK Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-310602,00.html
BRITAIN could jeopardise its chances of landing lucrative arms contracts with India unless it makes clear that it will not impose an embargo on the sale of weapons to Delhi, a senior Indian official said yesterday.
Reacting to the debate over the potential sale of Hawk jet trainers and Sea Harriers to India, the official said that any talk of an arms embargo could wreck the chances of a deal.
The official said: "The discussion under way will inevitably raise questions about Britain's reliability as an arms supplier.
"You cannot sell a gun and then have second thoughts about selling the bullets when the situation becomes tense. This is precisely when we need to use the gun.
"This is an internal debate for Britain, but it must decide whether it wants to compete in the market or not."
India is looking for a partner with whom it can co-operate on military equipment in the long term. It has signed large arms deals with Britain, but over the past decade India has relied principally on Russia and increasingly on Israel to supply its needs.
"Reliability is a crucial factor. We are not interested in signing any deals with any country that could have second thoughts later on," the official said, adding that this was why Delhi had never signed any substantial arms deals with the United States.
"Whatever the British offer us, there are viable competing options from other countries," he said, citing the Russians, French and Israelis as more reliable sources of sophisticated weaponry.
India and Pakistan have a long shopping list of weaponry, including advanced submarines. There is concern among Western Intelligence agencies that India's plan to develop an indigenous nuclear-powered submarine includes a long-term proposal to arm the new boats with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
Paul Burton, editor of Jane's Sentinel, said that India was progressing with the development of a nuclear-powered submarine, known as the advanced technology vessel, which received the official go-ahead from the Indian Government in mid-1999.
He said: "The project has yet to be given an official designation and little is known about it, but its existence was officially acknowledged by the former Chief of the Naval Staff, who was reportedly dismissed for revealing details of the project."
He said that there was speculation that India had received help from the Russians with nuclear reactor technology and the development of a submarine-launched cruise missile, called the Sagrike.
Pakistan signed a deal with France in 1994 to buy Agosta B submarines. In December 1999 it was reported that the first submarine, the Khalid, had been delivered and two more were due for delivery this year. However, the death of 11 French submarine engineers in the suicide bomb attack on their coach in Karachi two weeks ago has set back the French-Pakistani programme.
-------- asia
Global defense elite to gather in Singapore for a wide-ranging discussion of security issues
Wed May 29,
By EDWARD HARRIS,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020530/ap_wo_en_po/singapore_defense_conference_2
SINGAPORE - About 150 of the world's top defense officials and experts will be attending a conference here this weekend to explore issues at the core of world security, among them terrorism, arms proliferation and China's growing role on the global stage.
The symposium, hosted by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, will give the U.S. delegation - led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - a chance to push the Bush administration's anti-terror agenda to Asian defense officials.
It's also expected to be a forum for the region's security agencies to coordinate efforts and possibly discuss military hardware. North Korea (news - web sites)'s nuclear program is likely to be raised, given that U.S. President George W. Bush (news - web sites) has labeled Pyongyang part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran. South Korea (news - web sites) will send a delegation to the conference; North Korea will not.
"It's not the event that's important," said Robert Karniol, Asia editor for the respected defense industry publication Jane's Defense Weekly. "It's the people."
Zhan Maohai, China's director general of foreign affairs, and British Secretary of State for Defense Geoffrey Hoon will also attend. Top defense officials are also expected from Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines.
Scheduled presentations include one on U.S. defense strategy in the Asia Pacific region by Wolfowitz and two members of the U.S. Senate - Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. China's Zhan will speak on his country's security policy, while ministers from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will present their views on managing the threat of terrorism in Southeast Asia.
Malaysia and Singapore have arrested dozens of people suspected of having links to the al-Qaida terror network and plotting to blow up Western targets in the region. The United States has sent military observers to help train Philippine troops to fight Muslim extremists in that country.
Organizers of the conference are leaving plenty of time for meetings between ministers on the sidelines, where the most important business is often conducted at such international conferences.
One potential subject of such informal meetings is the threat of war between India and Pakistan, which comes as U.S. officials are pushing Pakistan to persist in helping to destroy the terrorist al-Qaida network. Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes has said he would come, but Pakistani officials are not expected to attend.
The meeting, which runs from Friday to Sunday, will be kicked off by Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew. The elder statesman recently sparked a diplomatic tiff between his country and Indonesia when he said that Muslim terrorists are finding a haven in the neighboring country.
Indonesia's Defense Minister Matori Abdul Djalil is expected to attend.
------- britain
British Troops in New Hunt for Rebels in Afghanistan
By REUTERS
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-operations.html
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan (Reuters) - British Marines have launched a new operation in the turbulent eastern part of Afghanistan as the conflict-ridden nation prepares to choose a new transitional administration next month, a military spokesman said Wednesday.
Some 300 men have been deployed for Operation Buzzard, which will run south of the mountainous Khost region, down to the largely unpatrolled border with Pakistan.
``The operation is part of overall aim to deny the al Qaeda, Taliban freedom of movement, resupply in Khost region,'' Lieutenant-Colonel Ben Curry said.
The Marines, trained for mountain warfare have carried out three operations since they arrived in Afghanistan in April, but have not found any al Qaeda, or Taliban.
``There isn't a quick fix, this going to be a more sustained operation running into weeks,'' Curry said at the allied headquarters in Bagram.
-------- china
China Called a Potential Threat
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Wednesday it is unclear whether an increasingly strong China will emerge as a force for peace in East Asia or as a ``threatening power.''
``China's future is very much to be shaped,'' said Wolfowitz, speaking to reporters in advance of a trip to Singapore and the Philippines.
At present, he said, China cannot be categorized. ``You can't put it in a box.''
He said it was extremely important for ``Chinese and non-Chinese'' to ensure that China evolves as a force for peace.
``It seems almost certain that China is going to be more powerful. That's certainly the trajectory that it's on,'' Wolfowitz said.
On another subject, Wolfowitz said he favors a resumption of U.S. military ties with Indonesia. He added that that promotion of reform should be part of any such initiative.
U.S. ties with the Indonesian military were severed in response to abuses in East Timor in 1999.
Wolfowitz plans to speak at a regional security conference in Singapore on Saturday sponsored by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He will stop in Manila the next day to meet with some of the U.S. troops there as well as Philippine officials.
About 1,000 American troops are in the Philippines to help train and support Philippine forces targeting Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group with links to al-Qaida that operates on the southern island of Basilan.
-------- colombia
UN considers Colombia role
Wednesday, 29 May, 2002
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_2013000/2013748.stm
The United Nations is to consider a request by the new president-elect of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, to mediate in efforts to end the country's long-running civil war.
UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York on Tuesday: "The United Nations has been supporting peace efforts in Colombia, and will examine with care and interest president-elect Alvaro Uribe's proposals regarding a future role for the organisation in new peace efforts."
Mr Uribe, a 49 year-old lawyer, won Colombia's presidential elections outright in the first round of voting on Sunday.
During his campaign, he promised voters he would adopt a tough policy to try to bring left-wing rebel groups and rightwing paramilitaries to the negotiating table.
Calls for help
After his electoral victory, Mr Uribe called on the United States to help fight drug traffickers and block arms shipments to the illegal armed groups.
He also urged the United Nations to help mediate with the left-wing rebels in an attempt to end almost four decades of violence, which has seen more than 200,000 Colombians killed.
The incumbent President, Andres Pastrana, devoted much of his four years in office to trying to bring the main guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to the negotiating table.
Talks were finally broken off in February this year, after last minute attempts by a special UN envoy failed to bring any agreement between the two sides.
It was mediation by the United Nations which helped end years of civil war in the Central American countries of El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1990s.
But local analysts say both the left-wing groups and the paramilitaries have used the Pastrana presidency to build up recruits and weaponry.
Financed increasingly by the drug traffickers and by money from kidnappings, they see little reason to talk to the new government.
Position of strength
Mr Uribe, who will succeed President Pastrana in August, has said he will increase spending on the armed forces and double the number of professional soldiers, in an attempt to force the rebels to the negotiating table.
But Colombian defence analyst Alfredo Rangel told Reuters news agency: "The two sides are very far apart. The guerrillas have been very touchy about an active international presence in the peace process.
"Maybe we shouldn't be too optimistic about their agreeing to international mediation to restart a process in the near future."
-------- india
India Calls a Speech by Pakistan's President 'Dangerous'
New York Times
May 29, 2002
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/international/asia/29INDI.html
NEW DELHI, May 28 - On a day when Pakistan test-fired a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, India said today that Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had delivered a "dangerous" speech Monday that offered no new steps to relax tensions between the countries.
India's external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, offering India's official reaction at a news conference today, accused Pakistan of continuing to support infiltration of terrorists into India's side of Kashmir, the mostly Muslim region both nations claim. Mr. Singh said India would only de-escalate after it saw that Pakistan had stopped the infiltration.
In his speech Monday, General Musharraf said repeatedly that Pakistan was not aiding any such infiltration and would never allow the export of terrorism from its territory, even as he said the country was ready for war if India attacked.
Alarmed at the possibility of a war that could go nuclear, Jack Straw, Britain's foreign minister, met with General Musharraf in Islamabad today and urged him to stop the infiltration. Mr. Straw arrived here tonight and will meet Wednesday with India's senior political leaders.
"I think that President Musharraf is under no doubt about the expectation of the international community for clear action to be taken in addition to that which has already been taken to clamp down effectively on cross-border terrorism," Mr. Straw said today at a news conference in Islamabad.
Western diplomats fear another attack could set off an armed conflict at a time when India and Pakistan have more than a million troops mobilized along their border. The military buildup began five months ago after five heavily armed men attacked India's Parliament in another incident India blamed on Pakistan. It was still unclear today whether an intense diplomatic campaign by the United States, Britain, France and Russia has persuaded the general to end Pakistan's financial and logistical support for an insurgency he called a liberation struggle against Indian oppression in Kashmir in his speech Monday.
However, Mr. Singh, the Indian minister, left no doubt that India was losing patience, not just with Pakistan, but with American and British efforts to get Pakistan to act against Islamic militants battling India in Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority state. India alleges that the militants are sneaking into Indian Kashmir from dozens of training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir.
After attacks in October, December and again this month on Indian targets, the United States pleaded with India to act with military restraint, even as it went to war in Afghanistan. "India cannot continue to be punished for its patience," Mr. Singh declared.
Mr. Singh's statements today offered clues to both the strategy and the psychology of India's leadership. He is one of a handful of officials who will influence Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's decision about whether India takes military action against Pakistan.
Above all, India is playing hardball with the United States, which can ill afford a war in the region when it is trying to hunt down Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Pakistan. India wants the United States to use its clout to get Pakistan to satisfy India's demands to stop infiltration.
Indian officials have in recent days repeatedly voiced the strong suspicion that the United States has let up on General Musharraf because it needs him so much.
Mr. Singh effectively reminded American officials today that India can also disrupt the United States' plans in Pakistan. Asked whether the presence of American forces in Pakistan would deter India from launching a strike against Pakistani forces, Mr. Singh said, "That is factored, but it is not an inhibiting factor in policy determinations."
India is also using President Bush's logic on terrorism to justify its own implicit threat to attack militant training camps in Pakistani territory - a stance the United States finds very difficult to challenge given Mr. Bush's declaration that countries harboring terrorists are as bad as terrorists.
Mr. Singh rejected the idea that India was irresponsibly risking a catastrophic war with Pakistan, saying a war is already raging - a proxy war initiated by Pakistan against India.
He scoffed at the idea that General Musharraf may not fully control anti-India militants operating in Kashmir or that India's evidence against Pakistan was insufficient. "Let the world recognize that today the epicenter of international terrorism is located in Pakistan," he said. "Terrorists targeting not just India but other countries, too, received support from state structures within Pakistan. The current war against terrorism will not be won decisively until their base camps inside Pakistan are closed permanently."
--------
Taliban, al-Qaeda linked to Kashmir
05/29/2002
By John Diamond,
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2002/05/29/taliban-kashmir.htm
WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda and Taliban members are helping organize a terror campaign in Kashmir to foment conflict between India and Pakistan, U.S. intelligence officials and foreign diplomats say.
The strategy of the terrorist network and its allies in the ousted Afghan government:
Relieve pressure on al-Qaeda members hiding in western Pakistan by forcing the Pakistani government to move troops searching for the terrorists to the eastern border with India. Destabilize the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf by raising tensions with India and pushing Musharraf to crack down on domestic Islamic militants who support al-Qaeda.
Pakistan and India, the world's newest nuclear powers, both claim all of Kashmir, the Himalayan region that straddles their border. They have fought three wars since 1947, two of them over Kashmir.
Al-Qaeda's ability to coordinate terrorist activities in Kashmir worries U.S. officials because it indicates the war in Afghanistan hasn't put the group out of business. The shift of Pakistani troops to the Indian border leaves U.S. operatives in western Pakistan without crucial allies to pursue al-Qaeda leaders that might include Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Pakistan's offensive against al-Qaeda in the west has fizzled as forces move to the tense Indian border, a top Pentagon official says.
Intelligence officials have yet to link al-Qaeda or the Taliban conclusively to specific acts, such as the attack on the Indian parliament Dec. 13, which touched off the latest crisis, or Tuesday's shooting of seven people in a Kashmiri village, apparently by Muslim guerrillas. Some Pentagon and CIA officials are not ready to ascribe al-Qaeda activities in Kashmir to a coordinated terrorist campaign.
But sources familiar with U.S. Intelligence analysis say al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives in the part of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan are helping terrorists they had trained in Afghanistan to infiltrate Indian-controlled territory.
Their goal, says one U.S. Intelligence official, is to "cause the biggest problem between India and Pakistan that they possibly can." The intelligence is coming from interrogations of al-Qaeda and Taliban members, as well as information supplied by intelligence organizations in Pakistan and India, the officials say.
Robert Oakley, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, says that if al-Qaeda "can do something to bring India and Pakistan to war, that's wonderful for them because it relieves pressure on them."
A link between al-Qaeda and Kashmiri militants would pose an awkward problem for the United States, which would have trouble carrying out its war against al-Qaeda and still remain neutral in the India-Pakistan dispute.
Musharraf's government, which fears the conflict could turn Pakistan's Muslims against his pro-U.S. regime, denied charges by India on Tuesday that Pakistan is harboring al-Qaeda terrorists in Kashmir.
-------- iran
Iran: No Negotiations Under Duress
May 29, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-US.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- President Mohammad Khatami said Wednesday that Iran would not talk to the United States, nor will it show flexibility as long as Washington continues to speak what he called ``the language of war and humiliation.''
``We seek peace, but, when a big power speaks in the language of war and humiliation with Iran, the Iranian nation won't hold negotiations with it, neither will it show flexibility,'' Khatami told parliament in remarks carried by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
The United States lists Iran among countries that sponsor terrorism. Washington also claims Tehran is seeking nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and President Bush lumped Iran together with Iraq and North Korean in what he termed an ``axis of evil.''
The reform-minded Khatami has endorsed low-level contacts with the United States, such as academic, cultural and sports exchanges, but has stopped short of encouraging diplomatic contacts.
Iran and the United States broke relations after the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was stormed in 1979 during the Islamic revolution; 52 Americans were held hostage for more than a year before their release.
Iranian hard-liners believe the only authority to decide on Iran-U.S. relations is the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled out talks with Washington. But some reformist lawmakers have suggested the issue should be decided in a referendum.
-------- israel / palestine
White House plan would create Palestinian state
By Laurence McQuillan,
USA TODAY
05/29/2002
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2002/05/30/mideast-usat.htm
WASHINGTON - The United States is working on a Middle East peace proposal that would include creating an independent Palestinian state, senior administration officials said Wednesday.
Such a plan would go a step further than the previous United States position, which was merely to endorse the idea.
Officials say they hope the U.S. proposal, which would offer guidelines for dealing with some of the most nagging problems that divide the two sides, would be unveiled by July. The administration has been trying to set up a Middle East conference that month to discuss peace efforts.
Administration officials said trips to the region this week by CIA Director George Tenet and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns are intended to get feedback from Arab leaders on possible guidelines for a peace plan.
Burns arrived in Egypt on Wednesday. Tenet departs to meet with Palestinian and Israeli officials and Arab leaders Friday night.
Both men are expected to return to Washington by late next week, in time to brief President Bush before a two-day summit at Camp David with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has been a dependable United States ally, is influential among the leaders of Arab countries and is trusted by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Senior administration officials said Bush will unveil broad guidelines on the disputes that divide the Israelis and Palestinians but expects the two sides to reach their own compromises on details.
What one official called "the American version of how to get out of this" will focus on key stumbling blocks that have thwarted previous attempts to find a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and will prescribe:
Establishing permanent borders for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza.
Establishing a security system in which both sides believe they are not threatened by the other. The main focus would be on creating a unified command for Palestinian security forces, which are fragmented and include militant anti-Israel factions.
Addressing the issue of more than a million Palestinians refugees, some of them living in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Many were forced to move when Israel was created in 1948, and they say they should be allowed to return. The Jewish state rejects the idea as a threat to its existence. Agreeing on control of Jerusalem, an ancient city that contains sacred religious sites for both sides. Israelis and Palestinians both want their political capitals located there.
Bush believes Arafat has failed to take steps to clamp down on suicide bombings in Israel. That discontent, however, will not prompt the United States to turn to other leaders or to promote Arafat's ouster, as some administrations officials have recommended, White House officials said.
Instead, intense efforts are underway behind the scenes to enlist the support of Arab leaders to pressure Arafat to rein in militants.
Administration officials say they hope that the U.S. proposal will start to take shape during the session with Mubarak, who has been a moderate voice among Arab leaders. The two-day session at Camp David begins June 7.
----
UK equipment being used in Israeli attacks
Richard Norton-Taylor,
The Guardian,
Wednesday May 29, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4423428,00.html
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, is demanding an explanation from Israel about the use of British equipment in Israeli tanks and attack helicopters, the two main weapons used against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the Guardian has learned.
Evidence that parts of the systems are made by British companies contradicts Israeli assurances that British arms would not be used in the territories.
Israeli Merkava tanks have been equipped with cooling systems made by the Airtechnology Group, the Surrey-based company confirmed yesterday. It said the equipment had not been supplied to Israel since 1996.
British equipment, including missile trigger systems, are also used in American Apache helicopters supplied to Israel.
They are made by Smiths Group, whose US subsidiaries supply a number of key parts for the helicopters, which have been repeatedly used in attacks on Palestinian areas.
In April, the government asked Israel to explain how the chassis from British Centurion tanks, exported between 1958 and 1970, came to be used in armoured personnel carriers in the Occupied Territories.
The Foreign Office said the modification contradicted a written pledge from Israel in November 2000 that "no UK-originated equipment ... are used as part of the defence force's activities in the territories".
Jack Straw revealed then that Israel had refused to give a pledge that the armoured cars would no longer be used in operations against Palestinians.
----
Report: Israeli Troops Enter Hebron
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Incursion.html
HEBRON, West Bank (AP) -- Israeli troops entered the West Bank city of Hebron from three directions before daybreak Thursday, Palestinian security officials said.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Israelis moved into the city in three tanks, about 20 armored personnel carriers and some 20 jeeps. They surrounded several houses.
The officials said the Israeli operation appeared aimed at making arrests, and did not look like an attempt to gain control of the whole city.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
Since the end of a full-scale Israeli incursion into the West Bank that ended earlier this month, Israeli forces have been conducting almost nightly raids into Palestinian towns and villages, arresting suspected militants and searching for weapons and explosives.
However, in a longer-lasting operation, Israeli forces remained in Bethlehem for a fifth day Thursday. The town, 25 kilometers north of Hebron, has been under almost constant military curfew since Sunday. A military commander said his soldiers would remain until their anti-terrorist mission was completed.
Hebron is a constant source of tension because it is divided into Israeli and Palestinian-controlled zones. Israeli soldiers control about 20 percent of the city, guarding three enclaves where Jewish settlers, including many militants, live. Clashes between the settlers and Palestinians are common.
-------- nato
Some observers questioning NATO's mission
By Bill Nichols,
USA TODAY
05/29/2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002/05/29/nato-mission.htm
President Bush and 18 other NATO leaders boasted Tuesday that they had formally ended Russia's 53-year status as the alliance's principal foe by welcoming Moscow as a junior NATO partner.
Some NATO observers and European analysts say, however, that the agreement signed in Rome raises a major question about the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: If the enemy that led to the alliance's creation in 1949 is now an affiliate, is NATO destined to change from a strategic defense group to a political organization, a European United Nations?
No, say Bush and his NATO colleagues. They say the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States make it imperative that NATO members stand together to meet the scourge of terrorism. The months since the attacks on Washington and New York, Bush said, "have made clear that by working together against these threats, we multiply our effectiveness."
Russian President Vladimir Putin echoed Bush's words. He cited a bomb blast this month in the Russian republic of Dagestan that killed 41 people. "We have come a long way from confrontation to dialogue, and from confrontation to cooperation," said Putin of the new NATO-Russia council.
Many influential foreign policy voices in the United States go even further. They say that if NATO is to avoid becoming a debating society for trans-Atlantic nations, the alliance must expand its mission to include military actions beyond the shores of Europe.
The war in Afghanistan and the recent crisis in the Middle East prove "that the greatest security challenges of our day no longer lie within Europe but outside of it," Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said in a speech this month. NATO, Lugar said, is "the most successful alliance ever created, but it is or seems to be marginal when it comes to dealing with the most urgent issues of the day."
NATO's future and how the alliance may be retooled is set to be a major topic at a summit in the Czech Republic in November, when as many as seven new members are expected to be named.
Analysts say it will be difficult for NATO to transform itself, even if the alliance generates the political will to change its half-century-old mission of defending Europe. Some key reasons why:
The U.S. military has become so technologically superior to the forces of other NATO members that Washington no longer needs or wants military aid. Many NATO leaders have publicly complained that Bush rejected all offers of European help in the Afghan conflict except for Britain. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., Said Washington has created the impression that "in future conflicts, the United States will do the war fighting ... and the Europeans will be expected to clean up after the parade." Some nations that do not belong to NATO would oppose efforts to project the alliance's influence outside Europe. Chinese diplomats have stressed that they believe NATO lacks jurisdiction outside Europe and certainly has no role to play in Asia. For NATO to take on a new mission, Russia would first have to be integrated into the alliance. That's no certainty. The NATO-Russia council is similar to one set up during the Clinton administration that failed because it got bogged down in bureaucratic infighting, U.S. and Russian officials say.
The new council allows Russia to discuss certain issues - crisis management, peacekeeping and joint military exercises - with NATO members. But Russia would be excluded from more contentious debates, such as a military attack by the alliance, and it wouldn't have a vote on NATO actions.
Also, the council won't end NATO-Russia disputes. Even as the treaty was signed in Rome, Russia's Foreign Ministry restated its opposition to NATO expansion to former Soviet republics in the Baltics.
Analysts say that for now, alliance officials are unlikely to forge a new mandate.
"They'll have impressive meetings from time to time and say a lot of nice things," says Ted Galen Carpenter, who's a foreign policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. "But if anyone can figure out what they have done of substance, they should let the rest of us know."
----
U.S. Looks Eastward in New NATO
Closer Ties With Ex-Soviet Bloc Nations Help Pentagon's Training Efforts
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 28, 2002; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18751-2002May27?language=printer
KECSKEMET, Hungary -- It was midnight, and the C-130 transport planes descended over the former Soviet air base in central Hungary. The planes' doors opened, and 460 U.S. Army paratroopers leaped into the darkness and drifted to the tarmac.
The mock assault earlier this month opened a major training exercise with Hungary, which granted the Americans unrestricted use of its air corridors and permitted live-fire exercises for the practice. It's the kind of access denied to the Americans at their bases back in Italy and Germany, where environmental and social restrictions increasingly fetter the U.S. military's ability to train realistically.
Hungary's officers were so eager to work with the United States that they even blasted a huge crater in the tarmac of the base so U.S. Army combat engineers could practice patching it with earth-moving equipment dropped from a C-141 Starlifter.
"Look at the access they've given us," said Army Maj. Gen. Robert W. Wagner, who jumped in with the troops and took command of the exercise. "They blew a hole for us to fix. I can't think of anywhere else you'd be given permission to do that sort of thing."
Indeed, as U.S. military relations with old-line NATO allies grow more distant and attenuated, the Pentagon is benefiting from closer ties with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, the alliance's three newest members, and other NATO aspirants in Eastern Europe.
"It's the Eastern European countries that are desperate to have a relationship with the United States," said retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the former supreme allied commander in Europe. "They understand how difficult it is for the [Western] Europeans to do anything. They know it is the Americans that make things happen. They trust us."
As recently as a year ago, Russia viewed these closer ties to former Soviet bloc nations with alarm and strongly opposed the additional expansion of NATO eastward. But with President Bush and other NATO leaders in Rome today to formally adopt a new agreement for tighter working relations between NATO and Russia, Moscow no longer seems threatened by what is being called NATO's "big bang" expansion into the Baltics and other parts of Eastern Europe later this year.
One senior U.S. official said that a majority of the nine NATO aspirants would most likely be admitted to the alliance at a summit meeting in Prague in November. Officials at NATO headquarters say the number could even be as high as seven -- Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. The two other applicants are Albania and Macedonia.
"We are developing relations with the Eastern European members of NATO and with the aspirants and with the Russians in a way that I think makes everybody involved comfortable that the sum total of all these relationships is going to be a more stable and secure Europe," said one senior Bush administration official.
The benefits for the U.S. military have already been striking, particularly in relations with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, which became NATO members in the first wave of expansion in 1999.
The United States has stationed troops in Western Europe since World War II and maintains numerous bases in Germany, Italy and other NATO countries. But over the past decade or so, the Pentagon has felt increasingly hamstrung by training restrictions placed on the U.S. forces by their European hosts.
This is particularly true in Germany, where the United States bases the bulk of the 115,000 American troops remaining in Europe. Germany has severely restricted U.S. forces' ability to fly helicopters at night, conduct live-fire exercises or move heavy, tracked vehicles over the countryside during war games. Although these restrictions are understandable given Germany's dense population and politically powerful environmental movement, they have forced the Pentagon to look elsewhere to train.
NATO's three newest members are proving to be willing hosts.
"We have then a golden opportunity to simultaneously meet our objectives and the objectives of the new countries," said a senior military officer familiar with Hungarian Response and other training exercises in Eastern Europe. "In many cases, they have vast training areas and their populations have not yet encroached upon the training areas to the degree they have on long-standing U.S. and NATO traditional military bases."
Hamstrung by flight restrictions in Germany, for example, the Army last fall conducted its second annual air assault training exercise in Poland. Called Victory Strike, the exercise featured large formations of Apache helicopter gunships firing salvos of Hellfire missiles in live-fire engagements.
The Army staged another Apache exercise in March called Talon Strike, this time in the Czech Republic, and followed that up in the Czech city of Hradiste earlier this month with Griffin Strike, an exercise involving 15 UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters and hundreds of troops.
But those exercises did not match the complexity of the one staged this month in Hungary, called Hungarian Response. Now in its second year, the exercise was built around a scenario of growing lawlessness in a fictitious Eastern European nation that required the evacuation of U.S. citizens scattered at five Hungarian bases.
The exercise began at Kecskemet on May 13 with the airborne assault by 460 soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade of the Army's Southern European Task Force, a rapid-reaction light infantry unit based in Vicenza, Italy. That was followed by the airlift of armored and mechanized infantry units of the 1st Armored Division, based in Weisbaden, Germany.
Thirty C-130 flights were required to move 79 vehicles and 320 soldiers from Germany in 48 hours, including Bradley armored vehicles and M-113 armored personnel carriers. On top of that, two giant C-5 Galaxies landed on successive days, disgorging long lines of troops and 70-ton M-1 Abrams tanks.
After all the American citizens -- roles played by U.S. soldiers in civilian clothes -- had been evacuated, the Bradleys and Abrams staged a live-fire armored assault against opposition forces played by Hungarians.
Capt. Istvan Cseklan, a commander in Hungary's 1st Light Infantry Regiment, could barely restrain his enthusiasm after a week of special forces training with the U.S. Army's 19th Special Forces Group. "We've been working on basic skill levels to bring them up to NATO levels," Cseklan said, explaining that Hungary is developing its first special forces unit with U.S. assistance.
Wagner was even more bullish about the value of engagement with Eastern Europe's militaries. "If they want to join and they're showing that much effort, you should think of what you can get out of it together -- and go for it," the general said. "We build the partnerships before the problems occur."
Wagner and other military officers cite Uzbekistan as a classic example of the value of military-to-military engagement through NATO's "Partnership for Peace" program of the early 1990s, intended to increase military contacts between East and West. Uzbekistan offered the Pentagon a critical air base near the Afghan border at the start of the war on terrorism last year, which served as a hub for cargo operations, Special Forces and AC-130 gunships.
Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic -- and a number of the NATO aspirant nations -- are capable of making military contributions that go far beyond basing rights, particularly when it comes to contributing troops to peacekeeping missions, military analysts said.
"The Poles have got a very strong military tradition," said Bob Hall, the Pentagon's NATO liaison during the Clinton administration. "One of the great values of having them in the alliance is they are forward-leaning on a lot of these operations, while the Western countries are less so. And the Hungarians are more like the Poles."
Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute Berlin, believes that further expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe will keep the alliance alive, despite what he called the "pathology" of many of its Western European members, which have refused to increase defense spending and close a "capabilities gap" with the United States.
"The odd situation is the Western Europeans have better guns, but their attitudes aren't so great," Gedmin said. "With the Eastern Europeans, it's just the opposite."
----
NATO Formally Embraces Russia as a Junior Partner
By DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/international/europe/29PREX.html
ROME, May 28 - NATO formally welcomed Russia today as a participant - but not a full-fledged member - in the organization created 53 years ago to contain Soviet power and expansion. The agreement signed here today at an extraordinary meeting of the leaders of NATO's 19 member nations marked what the Bush administration hopes is another major step in its effort to lock in Moscow's shift toward the West.
The accord, a capstone to President Bush's six-day tour of Europe and Russia, will for the first time give Moscow a role from the outset in NATO discussions about a fixed variety of topics, including nonproliferation, crisis management, missile defense and counterterrorism.
But in an indication that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's members are still not fully convinced that Russia has fully renounced aggression and cast its lot with Europe, Moscow will not be a member of the alliance or be bound by its collective defense pact, in which all members pledge to come to each other's defense if necessary.
Nor will Russia have a veto over NATO decisions or a vote in the expansion of its membership, including NATO's plans to invite in new nations - almost all of them once part of the Soviet bloc - at a meeting in Prague in November. As an indication of how far Moscow has traveled away from its past, it appears to have dropped objections to admitting even former Soviet Baltic republics.
Mr. Bush, attending the session at a NATO air base under extraordinary security before heading to the Vatican to meet the ailing Pope John Paul II, said today that "Two former foes are now joined as partners, overcoming 50 years of division and a decade of uncertainty."
Mr. Bush said today's formal agreement to create a NATO-Russia Council reflected the calculation that cooperation with the world's second largest nuclear power is "more likely to be achieved by welcoming Russia west."
The new council does not replace the North Atlantic Council, the body where NATO usually makes its decisions. If no consensus is reached in the new 20-nation council on the specific issues it is allowed to address, then NATO's 19 members reserve the right to withdraw the contentious topic from discussion.
Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, fresh from President Bush's three-day visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg, clearly reveled in the speed at which he had been able to negotiate both nuclear reductions and a position of respect in NATO's councils.
"The significance of this meeting is difficult to overestimate," said Mr. Putin, noting that a few years ago, the idea of Russia sitting at NATO councils "would have been, simply, unthinkable."
But Mr. Putin, who at his first meeting with Mr. Bush a year ago publicly raised the possibility of full Russian membership in NATO, also injected a note of caution.
"Being realists, we must remember that relations between Russia and the North Atlantic alliance have been historically far from straightforward," he said. Although Russia was not admitted as a full member - and may never be - Mr. Putin said that "we must understand this Rome Declaration represents only a beginning."
Some NATO officials have voiced concern that the new council is not substantive enough for Mr. Putin, and are now expressing relief that he has not only accepted it, but is also selling it hard to a still-skeptical Russian military and security apparatus. But the same NATO officials say that the more the alliance becomes a political talking shop instead of a military alliance, the better it could be for Moscow.
The new arrangement between Russia and the alliance replaces a 1997 accord, negotiated during the Clinton administration, that allowed Russia to participate in discussions with NATO only after all of the alliance's members had reached agreement on a common position.
Russia complained that the arrangement was a sham, because it made it appear that Moscow went along with policies it did not agree with and in fact had had no voice in shaping. The most contentious of these was the 1999 war with Yugoslavia over Kosovo, which prompted Russia to suspend its participation in discussions with NATO.
The 19 members of the organization concluded that the arrangement did too little to reflect both Russia's concerns and its influence.
Meeting with reporters this afternoon, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell agreed that while Russia and the United States were reducing their nuclear arsenals drastically, and cooperating in NATO, each country was maintaining "a hedge."
"We'll always have a hedge against uncertainty in the future, in our military forces in the nuclear weapons that the United States will continue to retain," he said. "It's a hedge against the future, because there are other nations that possess nuclear weapons or might come to possess nuclear weapons."
But Secretary Powell said that neither Russia nor NATO was now "looking for conflict."
"I don't think we're going to see a rerun of this movie," he said, referring to the cold war. "The movie didn't play well the first time, and I see no reason why any future Russian leader with a state that is only roughly 55 percent of the size of the old Soviet Union would find it in its interests in any way to try to act in an aggressive manner."
In fact, NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, was first among the parade of leaders to bury the cold war yet again, saying that "what's happening today turned completely on its head everything we've lived with up to now, because here is the Russian president as a equal."
Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor of Germany, said here today, "On the basis of our vast joint interests, we can conduct policies that guarantee security on the one hand and economic prosperity on the other."
That is clearly not the unanimous view in Moscow, where some of Mr. Putin's critics, mostly hard-liners, believe he is capitulating to the former enemy of the Warsaw Pact. They said as much in some conservative publications today, while the daily Kommersant gave voice to a view gaining some currency also in Washington that "Despite all of NATO's activity, the need for its existence prompts more and more doubt."
While Mr. Bush was in Russia, Mr. Putin made his calculations quite clear. The Russian leader does not want to talk endlessly about defense or nuclear weapons or arms control; he wants to talk about Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization, exporting Russian airplanes and making its broken, low-tech industries globally competitive.
"The president of Russia has to want to be a member of the W.T.O.," Mr. Putin said on Saturday when he and Mr. Bush fielded questions from students at St. Petersburg State University for an hour. But, catching himself with the recognition that opening up Russia's markets would put some Russians out of a job, he added, "on conditions acceptable to Russia."
Still, Mr. Putin has surprised many in Washington - including Secretary Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser - with his willingness to allow the West the kind of military latitude that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Putin allowed the United States to use military bases in former Soviet republics in Central Asia, and to train troops in Georgia to move against Chechen rebels based in the north of that former Soviet republic.
"This is a different Putin," Ms. Rice said the other day in a brief interview, after she had been invited along with the president to Mr. Putin's dinner at his home, and on a dinner cruise on the Neva River. "It's been very warm. This has not been your ordinary summit."
The new NATO-Russia Council was designed in part to allay Russian fears not only about alliance activities, but also its expansion.
"You can't surround the Russians with more and more NATO members and do nothing to ease the pain," one senior administration official said.
Secretary Powell said today that Russia would not be involved in "collective security arrangements," but that it would focus on "becoming a more active member of the Euro-Atlantic community." The arms control agreement signed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin on Friday in the Kremlin and today's accord should alleviate concerns in Moscow, Secretary Powell suggested.
Before he left the summit to see the pope this afternoon, Mr. Bush said: "I will tell him that I am concerned about the Catholic Church in America, I'm concerned about its standing. And I say that because the Catholic Church is an incredibly important institution in our country." Mr. Bush said he would also tell the pope that he appreciated his "leadership in trying to strengthen the Catholic Church in America."
Mr. Bush and the pope met for 20 minutes in private with no aides and no translators.
Later, Mr. Bush introduced the pope to several of his staff members, including Karl Rove, his political adviser; Ari Fleischer, his press secretary; Ms. Rice; and Secretary Powell. When Mr. Bush rose to leave, the pope said, "God bless America."
--------
Russia becomes NATO ally
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
May 29, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020529-76816404.htm
ROME - President Bush and the leaders of the other 18 NATO nations yesterday took the once-unthinkable step of making Russia a limited partner in the alliance that was forged more than a half-century ago to contain Soviet communism.
"Today marks an historic achievement for a great alliance and a great European nation," Mr. Bush said at the opening session of the NATO-Russia Council meeting. "Two former foes are now joined as partners, overcoming 50 years of division and a decade of uncertainty."
The leaders of the 19 NATO nations joined Russian President Vladimir Putin in signing an agreement that essentially made Russia an honorary member of the alliance.
Moscow now will have input on issues such as anti-terrorism and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, although it wields no veto over NATO decisions.
"The attacks of September the 11th made clear that the new dangers of our age threaten all nations, including Russia," Mr. Bush said at an air base on the outskirts of Rome. "The months since have made clear that by working together against these threats, we multiply our effectiveness."
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said the new partnership is revolutionary.
"What's happening today turns completely on its head everything we've lived with up to now because here is the Russian president as an equal, round this table today," he said. "The responsibility and the credit for today's meeting, which by any measure is historic, lies with the president of the United States.
"He took an opportunity, he took the unique cooperation that happened after the 11th of September, and made it into something that looks to the future, builds a base for future cooperation with what were the former adversaries."
Mr. Bush insisted Moscow's inclusion in certain NATO decisions would not diminish the alliance's effectiveness in defending its members against attack from outsiders.
"Nothing we do will subtract from NATO's core mission," he said. "The NATO-Russia Council offers Russia a path toward forming an alliance with the alliance."
He added: "It offers all our nations a way to strengthen our common security, and it offers the world a prospect of a more hopeful century."
The new agreement gave Russia more authority than it had under a less-formal arrangement set up three years ago to try to nudge Moscow closer to the West.
Granting Russia a seat at the NATO table was an extraordinary evolution for an alliance forged between the United States and Western Europe in 1949 to fight the Kremlin in the Cold War.
"We have come a long way from confrontation to dialogue, and from confrontation to cooperation," Mr. Putin said. He called the pact "only a beginning" and looked ahead to a greater role for Russia in NATO.
Asked how NATO would respond if Moscow again turned against the West, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell suggested that scenario was no longer realistic.
"I really don't expect that to happen," he told reporters here. "I don't think we're going to see a rerun of this movie.
"The movie didn't play well the first time, and I see no reason why any future Russian leader with a state that is only, oh, roughly 55 percent of the size of the old Soviet Union would find it in its interest in any way to try to act in an aggressive manner.
"And, in fact, the experience of the last 10 years is that slowly but surely Russia is coming to the realization that its future lies to the West, and the West is coming to the realization that its future lies also with Russia," he added.
Mr. Bush agreed.
"Europe whole and free, and at peace, is an important goal, and one that will be more likely to be achieved for years to come by welcoming Russia west," he said.
Yesterday's landmark agreement came at the end of the president's weeklong visit to Europe. Before flying back to Washington, he stopped at the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul II.
Mr. Bush views the NATO-Russia Council as a forum in which to further wear down Moscow's opposition to two strategic initiatives: the U.S. proposal for a missile-defense shield and NATO's plan for new members at a summit in Prague later this year.
The president's strong personal relationship with Mr. Putin and the September 11 attacks have served to mitigate Moscow's resistance.
Still, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement Monday reiterating its opposition to further NATO expansion.
"That does not surprise or shock me; it's been the Russian position for some time," Mr. Powell said. "Russia cannot have a veto over who becomes a member of NATO or not."
But he said Russia's opposition has been softened by a series of recent pacts between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin, including the Treaty of Moscow, which will slash both nations' nuclear stockpiles by two-thirds over the next decade.
"I think we have succeeded in making the enlargement of NATO once again less of a problem for the Russians, and less of an irritant in our relations," Mr. Powell said.
-------- pakistan
Musharraf calls on old comrades for support
From Zahid Hussain in Islamabad
May 29, 2002
UK Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-310603,00.html
PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF rallied former army commanders to his side yesterday in an attempt to shore up faltering support for him in the Pakistani Army.
The meeting came after his hardline speech on Monday, which was seen by most analysts as an effort to rally the support of officers who do not want him to abandon support for the Kashmiri militants, whom they see as "freedom fighters". So far he has managed to keep the military with him as he moved away first from Pakistan's long-standing policy of supporting the Taleban in Afghanistan and then swung behind the US-led coalition against terrorism. Now they have become concerned that he should not yield to India under threat of war.
"President Musharraf is walking a tightrope," Lieutenant-General (retired) Talat Masood said. "There is a strong feeling in the army that India is trying to humiliate them by dictating terms for peace."
If the President made a radical shift away from support for Islamic fighters in Kashmir it would jeopardise his support in the army. Army support is a key element of the delicate balancing act that must be performed by the Pakistani leader, as he faces pressure from all sides. While being pressed by India and the international community to take firmer action to stop cross-border infiltration by Islamic militants, he is being accused by hardliners at home of compromising Pakistan's interests.
His bold decision to crack down on Islamic militant groups, long backed by the military's main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has provoked a conservative backlash. Many observers believe that his decisions were not fully implemented and that the Islamic militants fighting against Indian forces continue to receive support.
"There is a limit to which the army can go with a policy of using force against those who are seen as fighting for Pakistan's interests in Kashmir," Lieutenant-General (retired) Hamid Gul, a former chief of the ISI, said.
A fiercely anti-American former commander, he accuses the President of "going too far in appeasing the West" and taking a "step back" on the Kashmir issue. "By calling those attacking the India forces terrorists, General Musharraf is only echoing the Indian position," he said.
General Musharraf's position has become more tenuous because of a growing feeling against the United States in the military. Many officers believe that Western countries, particularly the US, have not come to Pakistan's support as it faces the threat of war from its nuclear rival.
The President has made changes to the army's high command three times since October last year to sideline conservative generals opposed to his policy of joining the US led anti-terrorist coalition. The successive purges have helped the President to put liberal officers into key positions but many of those who have fallen from grace are still in the military headquarters and can capitalise on the emergency.
Most military observers agree that the President has put at risk his own survival by deciding to curb Islamic militancy. Security around him has already been tightened. His movements are kept secret because of growing fears of his meeting the fate of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President assassinated by Islamic militants after he made peace with Israel.
--------
Pakistani Intelligence Officials See Qaeda Peril in Their Cities
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
New York Times
May 29, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/international/asia/29STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 29 - Senior Pakistani intelligence officials said today that recent terror attacks pointed to worrisome links between local extremists and fugitive Qaeda leaders who - far from being concentrated along the Afghan border as American officials contend - have filtered across the country into major cities.
Rather than Afghanistan, these officials warned in a rare interview, the battle at hand may be one for Pakistan itself, a nuclear-armed and traditionally unstable Muslim nation of 145 million people that has become a pivotal ally in America's campaign against terrorism.
"Broadly speaking there is an anti-West, anti-American movement now in Pakistan," said one senior official. "There could be danger to individuals. Terror strikes people. It could hit the president, or anyone."
These senior Pakistani intelligence officials, who would not allow their names to be published, dismissed the American view that Taliban and Qaeda leaders have regrouped in remote areas on the border after being driven out of Afghanistan by American-led forces.
"We have had several raids in the western border areas, but we have had no success with them," said a top official of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, a spy agency itself renowned for links to terrorist groups and Islamic extremists. President Pervez Musharraf shook up the agency's leadership after Sept. 11.
"We consider Al Qaeda a threat to us too," added the official, who dismissed the idea of lingering ties to Islamic extremists by rogue elements inside his agency. "But the reports of all these people out there are not true. They are highly exaggerated."
At the same time, the intelligence officers acknowledged that tensions with India had seriously impaired Pakistan's ability to station troops and operate patrols along the border with Afghanistan, where American officials appear to have focused most of their concern.
"We are very concerned about that region, but protecting the border with India must be our priority," one said. "India has a much larger army than we do, so we have left behind some troops and warned them they could be transferred at a moment's notice to the eastern border. If we didn't have this situation with India we could do much better."
Referring to the crisis with India over the disputed Kashmir region, the intelligence leader implicitly acknowledged that Pakistan had supported Muslim separatist insurgents into Indian-held territory in the past. He insisted, however, that the infiltration that has driven the two countries to the brink of war was halted months ago.
"Ask me about the present, not about the past," said the senior officer, who was appointed by President Musharraf in the agency shake-up. "I am certainly not allowing this to happen. On this, the world may rest assured."
The interview with a Western journalist, given at I.S.I. headquarters, took place after Pakistan was forced to make an sharp about-face in its policies after the Sept. 11 attacks. Foreign diplomats say that after the presidency itself, no part of the government has come under more intense pressure for change than the I.S.I., which had once provided vital support for the Taliban, and reportedly frustrated past American effort to capture members of Al Qaeda.
Last October, on the day the American bombings began in Afghanistan, President Musharraf replaced the former head of the spy agency, General Mehmood Ahmed who, according to diplomats and Pakistani intelligence experts, had grown so close to the Taliban government that he urged its chief, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to resist any demands to hand over Osama bin Laden.
By contrast, under the leadership of General Ahmed's replacement, Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq, Pakistan has won praise from the United States for its support in the war on terrorism, particularly in rounding up more than 300 Qaeda members in recent months.
"The idea of rogue elements is all nonsense," the senior I.S.I. official said. "It is unthinkable that there should be rogue elements here. Yes, we have problems, and we are restructuring in all the areas that any modern intelligence service should be good at especially fighting terrorism and doing things such as tracing money movements."
Still, with its long history of involvement with extremist groups, and sponsorship of the Kashmiri separatists, the agency, has continued to labor against an image of a state within a state, filled with members sympathetic to extreme Islamic causes and wedded to the ways of the past.
The question of whether there are agents ignoring new orders from the top has dogged I.S.I. throughout the current Kashmir crisis, as well as in several recent, high-profile terrorists acts.
These attacks range from the kidnapping and murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl to the incident in March when a man with a bomb walked into a service at a Protestant church in Islamabad, the capital, killing five worshipers, including an American Embassy employee and her daughter.
Most recently, in an attack this month that investigators said showed greater planning and sophistication, a car packed with explosives was driven up to a bus outside a hotel in Karachi and detonated, killing 14 people. Twelve of them were French citizens working on a submarine project for the Pakistani government.
The official said that important advances have been made in the investigations into all three cases, and said that signs point increasingly toward a Qaeda link.
He said the crimes showed worrisome signs of intensified collaboration between Al Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups, like the Sunni Muslim extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The threat from this partnership, according to I.S.I. officials, is concentrated in Pakistan's cities, and not on the border on Afghanistan, as the United States insists.
The Pakistani intelligence agency claims that unexpectedly strong cooperation from villagers has made it difficult for Qaeda members, particularly Arabs, to hide out. "Let me tell you that the Arabs are not very popular with these people," the commander said. "Whenever we have picked people up in the tribal areas it has been through the cooperation of the local people who have tipped us off."
In a discussion that often turned plaintive, the top official complained that Pakistan had gotten little recognition or help for its policy of opening up once and for all the lawless, so-called tribal areas in the northwest, which have been virtually off limits to the central government since colonial times.
"Our approach is much more comprehensive than the Americans'," he said. "We are determined to integrate these tribal areas into the nation so that they can never provide sanctuary to any kind of extremists. Even the British never had any ingress there."
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US military helicopters clash with Abu Sayyaf rebels in Philippines
Wednesday May 29, 2002
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020529/1/2qbcb.html
Two US Pave Hawk helicopters exchanged fire with a band of suspected Abu Sayyaf Muslim guerrillas in the southern Philippine island of Basilan, local military officials said.
There were no reports of any casualties on the side of the American soldiers who were flying supplies into Basilan when the incident occurred late Monday, local military commander Colonel Alexander Aleo said.
It was the first incident of direct combat between the US troops in Basilan and suspected members of the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim armed group believed linked to the al-Qaeda terror network of Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks in the United States.
Military reports said about 10 gunmen believed to be Abu Sayyaf members opened fire on the HH-60 helicopters as they were flying over the town of Tuburan, prompting the US troops aboard to return fire with the helicopters' machineguns.
The attackers scampered away after the helicopters shot back. Immediately afterwards, Philippine soldiers on the ground were sent in pursuit of the gunmen but it was not clear if they caught up with them, the military report said.
This was the first incident of direct combat between the US troops in Basilan and suspected members of the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim armed group believed linked to the al-Qaeda terror network of Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks in the United States.
The Abu Sayyaf, notorious for kidnappings, bombings and banditry, are still holding an American missionary couple Martin and Gracia Burnham, and a Filipina nurse Ediborah Yap, hostage in Basilan.
About a thousand US troops have been deployed in the southern Philippines to help local soldiers in their hunt for the Abu Sayyaf but the US role is limited to training, support and providing advice and assessment.
The Americans, whose deployement is scheduled to end in July, are not allowed to engage in combat unless fired upon.
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U.N. Prosecutors Giving Terrorism Evidence to U.S.
By Colum Lynch
The Washington Post
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23781-2002May28?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, May 28 -- U.N. war crimes prosecutors have been providing the United States with evidence of international terrorist activities they come across during their investigations, according to senior U.S. and U.N. officials.
Officials declined to characterize the nature or quality of the evidence. But the assistance underscores the deepening cooperation between U.N. agencies and the United States on anti-terrorism matters since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The assistance has alarmed some U.N. officials, who fear it may feed a perception that the United Nations is an instrument of U.S. military and foreign policy. They voiced concern that the assistance may compromise the United Nations' efforts to establish democracy in such places as Bosnia and endanger the lives of U.N. employees, particularly in the Middle East, where they would make an easy target for Islamic militants.
Carla Del Ponte, the United Nations' chief war crimes prosecutor for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, presented Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, with a folder of confidential documents in October on Bosnia-based Islamic extremists with suspected links to international terrorists, the officials said.
"During our investigation, obviously, we collect . . . information that can be used in the fight against terrorism," Del Ponte said. "We transmit all the information we have to the United States."
The United Nations suffered a blow to its reputation for impartiality in 1999. The Clinton administration acknowledged that U.S. officials serving in the U.N. weapons inspection team in Iraq had passed on intelligence on President Saddam Hussein's internal security arrangements to the U.S. government.
U.N. officials managing or serving in U.N. peacekeeping missions in the Middle East, Asia and the Balkans said they have struggled to strike a balance between passing on information that could be valuable in tracking down members of al Qaeda or other terrorist groups and avoiding the appearance of being tools of the United States.
U.N. human rights officials have charged that U.N. police monitors helped undermine the Bosnian judiciary in their pursuit of suspected terrorists. In a highly publicized case, U.N. police monitors participated in the transfer by Bosnian police of six Algerians to U.S. authorities in January.
Madeleine Rees, the Bosnia-based representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the U.N. police commissioner participated in the transfer of the Algerians despite a court order barring their removal from Bosnian soil because of a lack of evidence.
"The rule of law was clearly circumvented in this process," Rees said. "The need to combat terrorism in all its forms is necessary and legitimate. It must not, however, be done in such a manner that everything is held hostage to that necessity."
The U.N. police mission in Bosnia was established by the 1995 Dayton peace accord to help create a democratic, multiethnic national police force in Bosnia.
A U.N. spokesman in Bosnia, Stefo Lehmann, said the mission has no formal anti-terrorism role. But he said it has monitored Bosnian police counterterrorism efforts, including a March 19 raid on the offices and homes of members of the Benevolentia International Foundation, an Islamic charity.
Other U.N. sources suggest that the war on terrorism has diverted scarce resources from U.N. police operations in Bosnia, weakening their capacity to combat other criminal activities, including organized crime and the enslavement of women sold into prostitution.
"Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack, the [U.N.] mission was forced to give priority to activities, which are beyond its original mandate," said a confidential report by the United Nations' chief anti-corruption watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight. "The search for Muslim fundamentalist networks and alleged supporters of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda has reduced the attention given to human trafficking."
The United States and Britain are examining other ways to enlist the United Nations' global network of peacekeepers, police and development workers in the anti-terrorism war, according to U.S. and British officials. Britain heads a U.N. committee that is organizing an international response to terrorism.
Some senior U.N. officials say it is impossible to sit on the sidelines in the war on terrorism. They note that the U.N. Security Council has passed two counterterrorism resolutions since Sept. 11 ordering member states to tighten their borders, share intelligence and rewrite their laws to demonstrate that they are making a serious effort to pursue terrorist groups and crack down on their financing.
U.N. personnel, the officials said, have an obligation to honor the spirit of those resolutions, particularly in countries in which U.N. organizations exert enormous influence.
"While one has to be careful that the United Nations is not seen as a tool of U.S. security policy, the U.N. gains legitimacy by associating itself with the war on terrorism," said Edward Luck, a Columbia University professor who serves on a panel advising the United Nations on its role in the war on terrorism. "The goals of terrorists are so fundamentally in opposition to the basic principles of the U.N. charter a