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NUCLEAR
New nuke plant for Cape Town approved
Blowing the N-whistle
US, South Korea agree on transferring missions
Russian nuclear forces, 2003
Navajo coalition opposed to uranium mining
Report: Managers Blocked Probe of Lab
Answer First, Question Later
House Passes Intelligence Bill
For the Record
The Doctor Is (Officially) In
Powell Hails Man Who Cited Pressure on Iraq Data
MILITARY
Afghan Insurgents Attack U.S. Troops
Briefly - Afghanistan / US
G.I. Killed in Afghanistan
Peace Force Discussed for Warring Liberia
Powell urges ending African corruption
Zimbabwean Urges U.S. to Act Cautiously Against Mugabe
France would send troops to Liberia
India will not militarily intervene in Sri Lanka: Analyst
British Minister Defends Assessment of Risks From Hussein
U.S. Official Cool to 'Buy American' Legislation
Iran negotiating Al Qaeda leaders' extradition: envoys
Iranian group hardly democratic
Children's health in crisis, Iraqi doctors say
Occupation Forces Halt Elections Throughout Iraq
Timeline of attacks on coalition forces in Iraq
Iraqi Saboteurs' Goal: Disrupt the Occupation
Desert sheikhs feast on hate for detested American 'invaders'
Army pardoned for burying woman alive
IDF officer jailed for refusing order during outpost removal
Passive resistance a difficult tactic
Palestinian factions to announce truce deal Sunday
IDF pullout in Gaza could begin Monday
Security Shift In Gaza Is Test For Peace Bid
Accord Reported on Israeli Pullout From Gaza Areas
Security Shift In Gaza Is Test For Peace Bid
Truce Said to Follow Israeli-Palestinian Deal
Christians Help Israelis in West Bank
Pentagon Delays Releasing 5 Syrians Hurt in U.S. Raid
Briefly - Pakistan / US
Pakistanis Protest Offer of Iraq Force
Chechen Rebels Kill 5 Soldiers, Policemen
Russian Senate OKs peacekeeping extension
Master of spin storms studio to become the story
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
US push for global police force
Court Won't Hear Antiabortion Activists' Appeal
Paintball Terrorist?
Group of Muslims Charged With Plotting Against India
ACTIVISTS
Streisand, others aim barbs at Bush
Rachel Corrie: Dignity and solidarity
Student leaders: Arrest of 4,000 protesters shows crisis
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- africa
New nuke plant for Cape Town approved
Fri, 27 Jun 2003
Sapa
http://iafrica.com/news/sa/248659.htm
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA - The environmental impact assessment of a planned nuclear reactor at Koeberg, near Cape Town, has been approved, the environmental affairs department said on Thursday.
The conditional approval also extended to the manufacturing and transportation of nuclear fuel between Pelindaba, west of Pretoria, and Koeberg, it said in a statement.
The decision was taken by the department's director-general, Crispian Olver, following a three-year investigation into an application by Eskom to construct a demonstration pebble bed modular reactor at Koeberg.
"Thorough environmental impact assessments were undertaken, and the outcome of these studies indicated that the environmental impact of the developments were acceptable."
Earlier this month, the Pretoria High Court struck from the roll an urgent application by environmental organisation Earthlife Africa to stall Olver's decision until it was given a chance to make further representations.
The court found the application was not urgent. The organisation indicated afterwards it would press ahead with its challenge, even though this could take months through the ordinary court process.
Departmental spokesperson Mava Scott said the court challenge should now fall away as a matter of course.
Earthlife Africa and any other concerned entity or individual had 30 days to appeal against Olver's decision to Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Valli Moosa.
The statement said Olver was satisfied with public participation in the process.
"Adequate provision has been made for the public to participate and to raise issues of concern. These have been thoroughly documented and addressed," it quoted him as saying.
The decision did not mean that construction of the reactor could go ahead.
A separate licensing process was underway by the National Nuclear Reactor, which deals with matters of nuclear safety.
Also, the minerals and energy department was dealing with policy issues regarding the use of nuclear power and the storage of nuclear waste - which emerged as the key areas of concern during the environmental assessment process.
That department was finalising a radio-active waste management policy and strategy.
"Adherence to and alignment with this policy is a condition of these approvals," Olver said.
-------- depleted uranium
Blowing the N-whistle
June 28 2003
The Age (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/27/1056683904035.html
A former US military researcher tells Gay Alcorn of his crusade to expose the health risks of depleted-uranium weapons used in the Gulf wars.
Doug Rokke sits on the edge of his chair in a beige, could-be-anywhere hotel room in Carlton. He stares at you with an almost embarrassing intensity and is close to tears.
"It's lonely," he says slowly. "It's very lonely. I made a decision. I was given a job. I did my job. I learned something. I gave them an answer they didn't want. I became persona non grata. And the better parts of my life ended."
What remains is an obsession with proving he is right about the dangers of depleted uranium (DU) weapons. A waste produced from the uranium enrichment process, depleted uranium has become increasingly contentious since American and British militaries first used it in the 1991 Gulf War and, since then, in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rokke, a health physicist who became the Pentagon's most senior DU expert during the first Gulf War, became convinced it had contaminated the battlefield and could be a factor in Gulf War Syndrome, the mysterious mix of illnesses that have afflicted returning soldiers. Rokke acknowledges DU's brilliance as a weapon - because it is an extremely dense metal that sharpens and burns as it hits its target, it is used on the ends of tank shells and missiles to penetrate steel and concrete much more easily than conventional weapons. But he also believes that he and the research team became contaminated. "Everybody is sick," he says. "We've all got rashes, respiratory and kidney problems. It's there; there are no two ways about it."
Rokke is a military veteran. He joined the US Air Force in 1967 and bombed Vietnam targets "before I could shave". Years later, with a master of science and expertise in environmental health, he was ordered to the Gulf to help protect American soldiers if chemical and biological weapons were used and, later, to oversee DU clean-up. He became convinced DU was causing illnesses such as cancer, and that the Pentagon was downplaying its dangers. When he went public with his views, he was sacked.
He is still campaigning, and this week urged the Australian Government, which doesn't allow weapons to be made with DU, to test returning troops for contamination and to campaign for it to be banned globally.
DU is only slightly radioactive - far less than uranium itself - but it is also chemically toxic, and scientists are divided about whether the combination poses a serious or remote health risk to soldiers and civilians who come in contact with it or inhale its dust. Little rigorous research has been done, and Rokke's theories remain unproven.
The official American position is that it is safe. In March, US Army Colonel James Naughton dismissed Iraqi claims that DU weapons caused cancers and leukaemia in children who played around bombed-out tanks and buildings during the first Gulf War. He claimed the real reason Iraq complained about DU weapons was because they were so effective. "Why do they (the then Iraqi government) want it to go away?" Naughton asked. "They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them. There is no doubt DU gave us a huge advantage over their tanks."
In the first Gulf War, most American deaths were from friendly-fire DU weapons. Rokke was ordered to decontaminate shot-up vehicles and tanks and to investigate health effects on troops. Dressed in protective gear and masks, he and his team crawled over tanks and other vehicles, sending some back to the US. Those considered too dangerous to move were buried in a giant hole in the ground.
In the mid-1990s, he was recalled from an academic job to head the Depleted Uranium Project in Nevada, which test-fired weapons into targets to analyse the health risks and to work out how to clean up safely.
Rokke, now 54, is convinced that he and other members of his team in Iraq were contaminated and that the tests he undertook showed that significant amounts of the DU vaporised on impact, making it extremely dangerous when inhaled. He pulls up his trouser leg to reveal the red rash he says appeared within hours of his contact with DU. He holds up his hand and moves fingers clumsily to show that his fine motor skills have gone. He has respiratory problems and cataracts and has medical reports showing that the amount of uranium in his urine is way above acceptable limits.
He has become a campaigner, not just for better clean-up and treatment, but for the weapons to be banned. "After everything I've seen, everything I've done, it became very clear to me that you just can't take radioactive wastes from one nation and just throw it into another nation. It's wrong. It's simply wrong."
Depleted uranium is so cheap and effective - 350 tonnes was used in weapons in the first Gulf War and possibly 500 tonnes in this year's Iraq conflict - that Rokke says the US is reluctant to do proper studies of veterans or Iraqi civilians. "It's the arrogance. Once they acknowledge that there are actual health effects of depleted uranium munitions, then they can't use them any more; the house of cards falls apart."
Rokke, brought to Melbourne by the Victorian Peace Network, has the single-mindedness of a whistleblower. He says he has lost friends, had his house ransacked, had his taxes audited and been publicly vilified for his outspokenness.
Concerns about DU have found some political acceptance - the British Government has announced it will test returning troops for DU contamination. But neither it, nor Washington, plan decontamination in Iraq. In the Australian Senate this week, Democrat Lynn Allison urged the Government to campaign internationally against DU in the same way it does against cluster bombs. Defence Minister Robert Hill said Australian troops in Iraq were not in areas where DU was used, and "there is no conclusive evidence to indicate that ammunition containing depleted uranium poses a significant adverse health risk to (Australian) personnel operating in Iraq".
The scientific evidence is cloudy because there has been so little research. It is broadly accepted that DU does little harm outside the body. But it may cause serious damage if it is inhaled. That means that people near where it is used could be contaminated, and it is possible it could seep into water tables.
Professor Brian Spratt, chairman of the British Royal Society's DU working group, this week told Radio National he welcomed the testing of British troops, because it meant the government "was at least taking the issue seriously, which is a very different attitude to the American military, who seem not to be interested in having any tests for their soldiers".
Spratt acknowledged that the issue was deeply political: the military have reasons for downplaying DU's health effects, and the anti-nuclear lobby have an interest in inflating them.
Rokke has faith he is doing what is right, and he clings to the belief that he is still doing the job the Pentagon ordered him to do. "I didn't ask for this job," he says. "I was given the job, and I'm going to finish the job."
Gay Alcorn is a senior writer and former Washington correspondent for The Age.
-------- korea
US, South Korea agree on transferring missions
Saturday June 28
AFP
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/030628/afp/030628021651int.html
WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-Kil have agreed to transfer certain missions to South Korean forces as part of a plan to pull back US ground forces away from demilitarized zones.
In a joint statement, the two defense ministers reaffirmed agreements reached earlier this month on a plan to move the US garrison out of Seoul at the earliest possible date and deploy US forces south of the Han River.
"The secretary and the minister agreed to move forward with the transfer of selected missions from US to the ROK (Republic of Korea) forces in conjunction with the development of enhanced combined ROK-US capabilities," the statement said.
The statement did not say what missions would be affected but said they agreed that South Korea's "growing national strength provides an opportunity to expand the role of the ROK armed forces in defending the Korean peninsula."
US defense officials said one of the most important missions that could go to the South Koreans is countering North Korean special operations forces.
US officials believe that in a war North Korean stragegy calls for the infiltration of special operations forces in small boats and through tunnels to attack frontline forces from the rear.
The mission of stopping them now falls largely to US forces who hunt for infiltrators with AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, defense officials said.
Other missions that could go to the South Koreans is weather forecasting and counter-battery fire, the officials said. South Korea is reported to have some 12,000 artillery pieces near the DMZ, many of which range Seoul, making their destruction a key task at the outset of a conflict.
More generally, the Pentagon would like the South Koreans to take over ground missions now performed by US forces.
However, South Korean forces are not as mobile as their American counterparts, a weakeness that will require South Korean investment in more helicopters, armored personnel carriers and networked communications and intelligence, the officials said.
US officials are urging the South Koreans to consider acquiring the army's new Stryker medium weight armored vehicles. They could then operate with US Army's Stryker brigades, which have been earmarked for deployment in South Korea.
The United States has 37,000 troops in South Korea, including the 15,000 from the 2nd Infantry Division arrayed in camps near the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea.
US ground forces have been in the country since the end of the 1950-53 war to serve as a "trip wire" intended to deter invasion by North Korea.
Washington now believes that it can deter North Korea more effectively with long distance precision firepower and at the same time lighten a ground presence that has been the source of political controversy in the south.
The US military presence in South Korea was thrust again into the spotlight last year by massive anti-US protests following the deaths of two girls in a road accident involving a US military vehicle.
North Korea has seen the military moves as an attempt to position US forces for pre-emptive military action.
The US plan calls for a redeployment of frontline US forces south of the Han River in two phases.
"The first phase would involve an initial consolidation of US forces on a smaller number of bases prior to their final stationing in the area around Osan air base and Camp Humphreys," the statement said.
"The second phase will be pursued through close consultations between ROK and the US," he said.
Cho and Rumsfeld also called on North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in a prompt, irreversible and verifiable fashion, the statement said.
"Both noted with serious concern North Korea's statements about reprocessing, possession of nuclear weapons, and its threat to demonstrate or transfer these weapons," it said.
Cho also met with Secretary of State Colin Powell for about an hour at the State Department.
"The Secretary made clear our commitment to the alliance with the Republic of Korea and to continue to work with the republic to create a strength in that alliance," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
-------- russia
Russian nuclear forces, 2003
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
July/August 2003
Vol. 59, No.4, pp. 70-72
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/nukenotes/ja03nukenote.html
As of mid-2003, Russia has approximately 8,250 operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal. This includes about 4,850 strategic warheads, representing a slight decrease from last year's level due to the removal of some MIRVed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Our estimate of Russia's operational non-strategic nuclear weapons-3,400-remains unchanged from last year (see the July/August 2002 Bulletin).
Estimating the size, composition, and status of the Russian nuclear stockpile has always been difficult. At the end of the Cold War in 1991, the Soviet Union may have had as many as 35,000 nuclear weapons-though not all of them were fielded.
The number of warheads in the Soviet arsenal peaked in the 1980s, after which the Soviets began to dismantle them on a substantial scale. Estimates of the dismantlement rate vary widely, from hundreds to 1,000-2,000 per year. U.S. Defense Department and CIA estimates suggest that Russia dismantled slightly more than 1,000 warheads per year throughout the 1990s. A few oblique Russian statements have hinted at a faster rate. It has been impossible to learn the pace of dismantlement, whether it has been steady or intermittent, or the size of the arsenal when the effort began. Based on the best available information, we estimate that the total current arsenal of intact warheads is around 18,000. Of those, some 8,250 are considered active and operational; the rest occupy an indeterminate status. Some may be officially retired and awaiting disassembly; others may be in short- or long-term storage, similar to the American categories of "responsive force" and "inactive reserve."
One important recent development was the demise of the START II Treaty, precipitated in part by the Bush administration's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and its signing of the Moscow Treaty. The U.S. Senate ratified the Moscow Treaty on March 6, 2003, by a vote of 95-0; the Russian Duma ratified it on May 14, 2003, by a vote of 294-134. Though the START II Treaty never entered into force, both Russia and the United States had been following its terms to structure their forces. One of its significant requirements was a ban on MIRVed (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) ICBMs; now, after START's collapse, Russia has reversed course and plans to retain its multi-warhead SS-18s and SS-19s as the core of its strategic nuclear arsenal until at least 2016. Russia's Foreign Ministry announced in June, "The Russian Federation notes the absence of any preconditions for START II to come into force and no longer considers itself committed to the international legal obligations" of the treaty.
In his State of the Nation Address on May 16, President Vladimir Putin spoke of strengthening and modernizing Russia's nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, including those for strategic forces, that will "ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term."
Intercontinental ballistic missiles. With START II a dead letter, Russia has stopped withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed missiles. A total of 138 SS-18s remain in service: 52 at Dombarovski, 40 at Kartaly, and 46 at Uzhur. A fourth division at Aleysk was disbanded in 2001, and the last of 30 silos were destroyed on January 31, 2002. Under START II, the full phase-out of the missiles was to be completed in 2007. Now, two of the three remaining divisions, or perhaps all three, will be retained until 2016. Some SS-18s may be retired by 2015 or earlier due to aging. Two variants of the SS-18 are currently deployed: the RS-20B and the newer RS-20V. Although START counted all SS-18s as carrying 10 warheads, the RS-20B can carry a single warhead, and a few of these may be deployed. The missile system will be reconfigured to extend its service life. A fully loaded SS-18 has a range of 11,000 kilometers; the single warhead can reach 15,000 kilometers.
Nine rail-based SS-24 M1s are deployed at Bershet and 15 at Kostroma. The 12 SS-24s at the third division at Krasnoyarsk were reportedly taken off alert duty on March 14, 2002, and disbanded, although the unit is still listed in the January 2003 START Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Russia's MIRVed SS-24s were slated to be scrapped under START II, but the head of Strategic Missile Forces, Col. Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, announced in August 2002 that one division would be retained, probably at Kostroma.
Production of the single-warhead SS-27 (called the Topol-M in Russia) continues and is a priority item in the 2003 Russian military budget. Because it is retaining MIRVed missiles, Russia feels less urgency to steadily produce and deploy the SS-27/Topol-M. Deployments have been slow. In 1998 the Strategic Rocket Forces planned deployment of 20-30 per year over three years and 30-40 per year for the next three years for a force of 160-220. In fact, deployment in 2003 includes only 30 missiles, with a future force of 50-60 by the end of 2005. Russia may eventually decide to equip some of the missiles with multiple warheads. The SS-27s are housed in former SS-19 and SS-24 silos at Tatishchevo.
Recent ICBM test launches include the firing of an SS-19 (RS-18) missile from the Baikonur Space Center on December 10. The missile's six dummy warheads impacted on the Kura test range on the Kamchatka peninsula. An SS-25 was launched from Plesetsk on October 12, 2002. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced on March 18, 2002 that it would resume test launches of the SS-27 and a Topol-M was launched on June 6, 2002.
Ballistic missile submarines. Russia maintains 14 operational nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs): two Typhoons, six Delta IVs, and six Delta IIIs. This is a dramatic reduction from 1990, when 62 subs were reported operational. The subs carry three types of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs): 40 SS-N-20s, 96 SS-N-23s, and 96 SS-N-18 M1s, respectively. All Yankee, Delta I, and Delta II SSBNs have been withdrawn from operational service. Of the original 14 Delta IIIs, seven have been removed from service, and one has been converted to a deep submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV) carrier. Of the original seven Delta IVs, one has been removed from service. Operational SSBNs in the Northern Fleet are based on the Kola Peninsula (at Nerpichya and Yagelnaya) and in the Pacific Fleet (at Rybachi, 15 kilometers southwest of Petropavlovsk) on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The future of the last two (of six) Typhoon submarines in the Northern Fleet has long been in question. In March 2001, the Russian Navy announced its intent to overhaul and keep in service three Typhoon subs. The Arkhangelsk was reported to have left dry dock and returned to its base at Zapadnaya Litsa on November 9, 2002. The Dimitri Donskoi completed a 10-year conversion in June 2002 as a trial platform for the future SS-N-27 Bulava, an SLBM version of the Topol-M ICBM.
This summer, the Delta IV sub Yekaterinburg will rejoin the Northern Fleet after having completed scheduled repairs at the Zvyozdochka shipyard at Severodvinsk. Two other submarines of this class, the Tula and the Bryansko, are under repair at the shipyard.
Interfax reported on April 21, 2002, that the first unit of the new Borey-class SSBN, the Yuri Dolgoruki, had left dry dock at the Severodvinsk shipyard. Its keel was laid in November 1996, but construction has been intermittent and was suspended altogether in 1998 while the submarine was being redesigned to accommodate a new SLBM. The Russian Navy hopes to commission the first boat in 2005.
Production of SS-N-23s resumed in 1999 to support the remaining Delta IVs, along with a service life extension program. There are reports of an SS-N-23 SLBM variant under consideration that would carry 10 warheads instead of four. The CIA concluded in 1988 that the SS-N-23 Mod-2 (RSM-54) SLBM provided Russia with, "an emerging sea-based capability to destroy hardened targets."
SLBM combat training launches were conducted on October 12, 2002 from the Pacific Fleet and Northern Fleet in conjunction with exercises involving ICBM, cruise missile, and ABM tests.
Economic problems, a shrinking SSBN fleet, and safety concerns after the sinking of the Kursk in August 2000, have led to dramatic decreases in the number of annual SSBN patrols, from 37 in 1991 to zero in 2002, according to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. Patrols of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) and cruise missile submarines (SSGNs) also declined from 18 patrols in 1991 to only three in 2002.
Strategic aviation. Russian strategic bombers include 79 aircraft of three types: 15 Tu-160 Blackjacks, 34 Tu-95 MS6 Bear H6s, and 30 Tu-95 MS16 Bear H16s. Strategic bombers are part of the Russian Air Force's 37th Air Army. According to the January 31, 2003 START I Treaty MOU, Bear bombers are deployed at the following airbases: 14 H16s at Ukrainka in Siberia (79th Heavy Guard Bomber Regiment), 13 at Engels (121st Heavy Bomber Regiment), and three at Ryazan; 26 H-6s at Ukrainka, five at Engels, and three at Ryazan.
Russian strategic aircraft carry AS-15A/B air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs), AS-16 short-range attack missiles (SRAMs), and/or nuclear bombs. Combined, the 79 aircraft are assigned an estimated 864 cruise missiles and bombs. Each Blackjack can carry as many as 12 AS-15B ALCMs or AS-16 SRAMs and bombs. The Bear H16 carries as many as 16 AS-15A ALCMs and bombs, while the Bear H6 can carry as many as six AS-15A ALCMs and bombs. For more than a decade, Russia has been developing a nuclear variant of a new cruise missile, similar to the U.S. advanced cruise missile, but with a prop engine, for Blackjack and Bear bombers. In January 2002, the missile was reported to be in final stages of development. Russia may convert some ALCMs to non-nuclear missiles, as the United States has done. Flight tests of converted ALCMs have taken place.
Fifteen Blackjacks are based at Engels airbase. Eight were transferred to Russia from Ukraine in late 1999 and early 2000 in exchange for partial payment of Ukrainian natural gas debts. These bombers' operational status has been unclear due to needed repairs. In March 2002, air force commander in chief Vladimir Mikhailov announced that all 15 Tu-160s would undergo modernization of avionics, communication equipment, and weapon systems. The modernization will extend their service lives and allow them to carry "new types of missiles with conventional and nuclear warheads." In addition, three partially built Blackjacks were scheduled to be completed by 2003 and added to the force.
In April 2002, strategic bombers participated in a large-scale exercise with aircraft operating out of Engels, Ukrainka, and Ryazan air bases, as well as from several forward operating bases. The strategic aircraft included Tu-95 MS Bears and also tactical Tu-22 M3 Backfire bombers. As many as 20 aircraft were reported to be in the air simultaneously in what was described as the largest exercise in 10 years. Operations took place over the entire Russian territory, the Arctic, and the Sea of Japan. Japanese fighters intercepted bombers over the Sea of Japan, and two Bear bombers flew within 37 miles of U.S. airspace, where U.S. fighters intercepted them. Similar operations took place in February 2001.
Two other exercises were held in February 2002. One, in Russia's southwestern region, included two Tu-95 MS Bear bombers conducting simulated cruise missile and bomb strikes on targets in Astrakhan oblast and the Leningrad district. The other, in the Caspian Sea region, involved strategic Tu-160 Blackjacks, Tu-95 MS Bears, and tactical Tu-22 M3 Backfire aircraft conducting simulated missile launches on the Ashuluk and Vladimirovka ranges.
Strategic forces
Type
Name
Launchers
Year deployed
Warheads
x yield (kiloton)
Total warheads
ICBMs
SS-18
Satan
138
1979
10
x 550/750 (MIRV)
1,380
SS-19
Stiletto
134
1980
6
x 550/750 (MIRV)
804
SS-24
M1 Scalpel
36
1987
10
x 550 (MIRV)
360
SS-25
Sickle
342
1985
1
x 550
342
SS-27
n.a.
30
1997
1
x 550
30
Total
680
2,916
SLBMs
SS-N-18
M1 Stingray
96
1978
3
x 200 (MIRV)
288
SS-N-20
Sturgeon
40
1983
10
x 100 (MIRV)
400
SS-N-23
Skiff
96
1986
4
x 100 (MIRV)
384
Total
232
1,072
Bomber/weapons
Tu-95
MS6 Bear H6
34
1984
6 AS-15A ALCMs or bombs
204
Tu-95
MS16 Bear H16
30
1984
16 AS-15A ALCMs or bombs
480
Tu-160
Blackjack
15
1987
12 AS-15B ALCMs, AS-16 SRAMs, or bombs
180
Total
79
864
Grand total
991
~4,850
ALCM-air-launched cruise missile; AS-air-to-surface missile; ICBM-intercontinental ballistic missile, range greater than 5,500 kilometers;
MIRV-multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles; SLBM-submarine-launched ballistic missile; SRAM-short-range attack missile
Nuclear Notebook is prepared by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Inquiries should be directed to NRDC, 1200 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 400, Washington, D.C., 20005; 202-289-6868.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
Navajo coalition opposed to uranium mining
By Jim Snyder
The Daily Times
Sat, 28 Jun 2003
http://www.daily-times.com/Stories/0,1413,129%257E6572%257E1479030,00.html?search=filter
SHIPROCK It is a secret everybody seems to know but nobody talks about: The ground in Shiprock is contaminated with radiation.
The adverse affects of uranium mining throughout the Four Corners region are felt to this day, Norman Brown, a Navajo Din Bidzill Coalition leader, said Wednesday.
The Din Nationalists grassroots organization is hosting an uranium conference July 19 in Shiprock to voice its opposition to current efforts by companies and the U.S. government to extract more uranium from the Navajo reservation.
"Our communities have sacrificed for too long," Brown said. "Sixty years is too long. It's time to stop the (potential) uranium mining industry on Navajo ... we live on the most environmental damaged piece of real estate in the world."
He added the threat of companies wanting to mine uranium in the 21st century on the Navajo reservation was "very real."
Will history repeat itself?
Uranium contamination is widespread
Uranium ore mined in nearby Cove and Red Valley, Ariz., and other locations in the 1940s through the 1960s was transported to an uranium mill behind the Shiprock Fairgrounds where it was processed. The mill is now gone, but the uranium ore tailings and its accompanying radiation remain behind. Resembling a land fill, the tailings form a small mountain sandwiched between the fairgrounds and the San Juan River.
Windstorms once blew those tailings into the river, Brown said. Downstream farmers relied on the contaminated river to irrigate crops which people ate and to water their livestock.
Today, the only thing holding back the radiation there is a level of gravel poured on top of the mountain site. This, after 40 years, is the extent of the clean up by the federal government, which relied on Navajo labor to extract uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War without telling them of its dangers.
Uranium contamination has also been found in other areas of Shiprock.
An Albuquerque developer currently excavating land behind the Shiprock Police station for new homes must first remove 4 feet of top soil because it is contaminated by uranium. The location is on the opposite side of the river from the former uranium mill.
Shiprock Chapter Vice President Charley P. Joe said last year a proposed site for the new Shiprock Fairgrounds location at U.S. 491 and Navajo 36, south of the mill site, was contaminated by uranium and would have to be cleaned up before the new site could be developed. The site was once a staging area for trucks carrying uranium ore from Cove and Red Valley.
Shiprock is also contaminated with neglect by the federal government since it has failed to clean up the mess, said Brown.
The ground is not the only thing that is contaminated.
There are so many former Navajo uranium miners now in their 70s and 80s who have uranium-related cancer that the Navajo Nation has a permanent office in Shiprock to take applications for those who qualify under Congress' Radiation Compensation Exposure Act.
Congress passed the act in 1990 because the U.S.government failed to tell the miners decades before that the "yellow cake" could eventually kill them. Those who qualify by having certain cancers are paid $100,000, to make up for a life time of radiation exposure.
Navajo Nation says no' to uranium mining
Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. said this spring he would oppose any form of uranium mining anywhere on the 27,000 square-mile reservation. Brown warned Shirley and Vice President Frank Dayish Jr., however, that talk is cheap. We want to see some action, he said.
"We're talking soaring health costs and lack of environmental standards on Navajo. This is a good step in exercising our sovereignty. In order to be sovereign we must act sovereign. This is a sovereign act to say no,'" Brown said.
The Eastern Navajo Din Against Uranium Mining is currently fighting an effort by HRI, a private company, which wants to introduce leach uranium mining in the Crownpoint and Church Rock areas.
"The Crownpoint community is preparing to go before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and ask them not to give permission to mine," Brown said.
"We have an inherent right, a God-given right, a legislative right, to say no. We don't have to ask Congress," he added. "This devastation to our land and culture, our people, has gone on too long. We have to stop this legacy. We don't want our children and grandchildren to go through what thousands of individuals have gone through."
Numerous guests have been lined up for the July 19 conference, including New Mexico state Reps. Ray Begaye, Leonard Tsosie and Sen. John Pinto, and Arizona state Reps. Jack Jackson Sr., Jack Jackson Jr. and Sylvia Laughter.
Other guests include Coconino County Commissioner Louise Yellowhorse, Perry Charley, an uranium educator at Din College,Phil Harrison, who helps workers get RECA benefits, Gilbert Bedoni, who wants RECA benefits extended to family members, Milton Yazzie, a grassroots organizer and uranium educator, Chee Smith Jr., an uranium educator and Mitchell Capitan, founder of ENDAUM.
Also included are Winona Laduke, Ralph Nader's presidential running mate in 2000, and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who is running on the Democratic primary presidential ticket.
Jim Snyder: jims@daily-times.com
----
Report: Managers Blocked Probe of Lab
June 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Security.html
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Managers at one of the nation's nuclear weapons labs obstructed the work of two internal investigators who pointed out security troubles, but did not retaliate against them, a summary report shows.
The report on Sandia National Laboratories was commissioned in August by the lab after whistleblowers Pat O'Neill and Mark Ludwig went to upper management with criticism of lab security. The pair also alleged that they were retaliated against by direct supervisors for pressing investigations.
In March, lab President C. Paul Robinson went public with some of the security concerns, which included a set of lab master keys that disappeared for several days.
The report released Friday is a summary of a longer 221-page review, which the lab does not plan to release, citing personnel reasons.
The summary questions the lab management's handling of several security investigations, including incidents involving Sandia's guard force. It also cites obstruction during the probe of a lab employee who improperly obtained salary information on a female colleague.
But it also said lab managers did not retaliate against the two investigators, and noted that Sandia officials had taken steps to resolve shortcomings.
``Did the report uncover any mistakes or problems? Yes,'' said former New Mexico U.S. Attorney Norman Bay, one of the report's authors. ``But Sandia is taking vigorous steps to correct any problems.''
He added: ``Is the sky falling? Absolutely not. To the extent there are problems, Sandia management is extraordinarily committed to doing the right thing and to providing a level of security that is second to none.''
Previous reviews by the lab and the National Nuclear Security Administration found management problems in the security program, including instances when supervisors failed to follow up on tips from investigators.
On Tuesday, Dave Nokes, vice president for national security and arms control, announced his retirement. Robinson said the move was prompted by findings that Nokes' office impeded an internal security investigation.
In the case involving the employee obtaining his colleague's salary information, the report concluded lab investigators were obstructed. Among the problems, two witnesses were told not to volunteer information and one department's destruction of a computer hard drive days after it had been assigned to the investigation.
The summary report also cited three incidents involving security officers that ``amounted to an obvious red flag'' that the guard force needed ``strong, corrective management action.''
-- In May 2000, a set of master keys went temporarily missing. Sandia managers recently announced that they are replacing locks in the affected area.
-- In the spring of 2001, 13 security officers were caught on tape watching television, reading, talking on the telephone and, in the case of two guards, sleeping in a conference room.
-- Also in 2001, a security officer was caught on surveillance video taking a bag out of a room where ``bait'' computer equipment had been placed by investigators to catch would-be robbers. The equipment was gone after the officer left the room.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, last week called the report a whitewash, saying it failed to consider some troubling issues.
Bay dismissed Grassley's criticisms, saying the report's authors were not commissioned to do a comprehensive investigation of security at Sandia.
-------- us politics
Answer First, Question Later
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43473-2003Jun27?language=printer
If I read the June 25 editorial "Keep Looking" correctly, the rationale for the Iraq war has now become the answer to the question: "Why deny access if you are not hiding something?"
Just a guess: Maybe Iraq resisted presumptive guilt and ceding arbitrary powers of search and seizure to an occupying foreign power for the same reasons the citizens of Massachusetts did some 228 years ago.
The U.S. government doesn't release the design and location of all its nuclear weapons. Does this give, say, Uzbekistan the right to inspect, unannounced, any nuclear facility, private home or chicken coop in the United States, something U.S. troops do daily in Iraq? Does it give Poland, a supporter of our war effort, the right to attack us and topple our government?
The war in Iraq was morally bankrupt from the outset. It was a conclusion in search of a rationale. This only becomes clearer as time goes on and the apologists for the war seek the ever more elusive justification for the rapidly unfolding tragedy in that occupied zone.
FRED PERKINS
McLean
----
House Passes Intelligence Bill
WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Washington Post; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43506-2003Jun27?language=printer
The House passed legislation early yesterday that seeks to fix intelligence problems that became apparent with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and recent FBI spy scandals.
The bill authorizing intelligence programs for fiscal 2004 would boost information sharing among federal, state and local officials, and strengthen language and analytical skills at intelligence agencies.
It also calls for new steps to protect the United States from spies, including the creation of an FBI counterintelligence office to investigate spying within the bureau.
Passed by a 410 to 9 vote, the House measure has to be reconciled with a bill awaiting action in the Senate. Most of the bill remains classified, including its cost, estimated around $40 billion. Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the intelligence committee, said it would meet President Bush's funding request.
The bill calls for the CIA director to submit a report on how intelligence was handled during the Iraq war. Senate Democrats Plan Iraq Inquiry
Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday announced plans to stage their own inquiry on the credibility of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its links to al Qaeda.
The announcement by Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the panel's top Democrat, marked an unusual split with Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), on an issue with strong political overtones ahead of next year's elections.
House and Senate Democrats are seeking widened examinations of prewar intelligence beyond reviews underway by both chambers' intelligence committees.
Levin said he has directed Democratic staff to examine the objectivity and credibility of the intelligence and its effect on Defense Department policy decisions, military planning and operations in Iraq.
He said Warner refused his request to begin such an inquiry. In a letter released by Levin, Warner said the committee should wait until the Senate intelligence committee has completed its review, then decide how to move ahead.
The prewar intelligence has been called into question both nationally and abroad because of the military's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Also, some evidence cited by the Bush administration has been discredited, including documents on supposed approaches to obtain uranium in Africa, which turned out to be forgeries.
----
For the Record
WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43506-2003Jun27?language=printer
The Senate confirmed Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid to replace Gen. Tommy R. Franks as head of U.S. Central Command, a position that includes responsibility for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abizaid is now the number two official at Central Command. Franks announced last month he would retire this summer.
----
The Doctor Is (Officially) In
Saturday, June 28, 2003; Page A24
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43459-2003Jun27?language=printer
HOWARD DEAN officially announced his candidacy for president this week, and while we neglected to take proper notice, our lapse was somewhat understandable given that the former governor of Vermont has been running flat out for a full year now. During that time, the acerbic 54-year-old physician has emerged as the wild card of the field. "I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" is his signature rallying cry, and Mr. Dean appears to have almost as much ability to excite the party's liberal activists as he does to needle his Democratic rivals.
That he ought to be taken seriously is clear both from the polls -- he's running second in New Hampshire, third in Iowa -- and from the reaction to him in other quarters of the party. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council inveighed last month against Mr. Dean as representing the party's "McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home." Mr. Dean has tapped into the power of the Internet; he raised a credible $2.6 million in the first three months of the year, a good chunk of it online, and in MoveOn.org's virtual primary results yesterday, he led the field with 44 percent (which is still not enough to garner the group's endorsement).
It wasn't obvious that Mr. Dean would occupy the credible liberal niche in the race. During his 12 years as governor, he was seen as a rather centrist Democrat. He supported abortion rights, extended health care to all children in the state and signed legislation providing civil unions for gay couples. But he also earned an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association -- he favored residents' right to carry concealed weapons -- switched his position on capital punishment from against to for, with qualifications, and backed a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. His initial presidential pitch was based on the twin pillars of universal health care and fiscal discipline.
But Mr. Dean really caught fire when he -- unwisely in our view -- became the most visible Democratic candidate to oppose the war in Iraq. His most unfortunate statement came after the war, when he said, "We've gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and I suppose that's a good thing." He later generated a more appropriate level of enthusiasm, but as recently as last Sunday, on NBC's "Meet the Press," he had circled back. While acknowledging that Saddam Hussein was a "mass murderer," he added, "We don't know whether in the long run the Iraqi people are better off. And the most important thing is that we don't know whether we are better off." Strikingly, Mr. Dean's announcement speech the next day featured not a single mention of Iraq; instead, he struck a Perotesque, Washington outsider tone.
Mr. Dean's "Meet the Press" performance was, to put it charitably, less than impressive. For a candidate whose appeal is based on a straight-talker image, his answers were at times waffling and evasive. "You know, I go back and forth on that," he said of his position on a balanced budget amendment. Pressed on how much taxpayers would have to pay if he were to succeed in his call to repeal President Bush's tax cuts, he tried to dodge by saying the numbers were provided by "the Republican Treasury Department, which I think has very little credibility in this matter." Mr. Dean rejected as "silly" a question about the number of troops on active duty, and he had a point, but his generally cavalier attitude -- "I will have the kinds of people around me who can tell me these things," he said -- isn't apt to inspire confidence in voters who, particularly after 9/11, want a president with national security expertise. Such events may matter little to most voters so far ahead of voting season. But they do offer an early sense of a candidate's ability to perform under sustained questioning.
And so, Mr. Dean: Welcome to the race -- we suppose.
--------
INTELLIGENCE
Powell Hails Man Who Cited Pressure on Iraq Data
June 28, 2003
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/worldspecial/28WEAP.html
WASHINGTON, June 27 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has offered public support for the department expert who told Congress that he felt pressured to make his intelligence reports on Iraq and other matters conform to administration policy.
Mr. Powell told reporters on Thursday night that he had sent word to the expert, Christian Westermann, a specialist on chemical and biological weapons, that he was "pleased" that Mr. Westermann had "honestly answered" when asked in closed-door hearings whether he had perceived such influence.
"He should not feel that he is either under any pressure or any threat for having done what he was morally required to do as a member of the department," Mr. Powell said of Mr. Westermann's decision to express his concern to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. According to intelligence officials, Mr. Westermann told members of the committee staff that his concerns had to do with John Bolton, an under secretary of state, on matters most directly related to Cuba but that also extended to issues related to Iraq.
"There are always debates about intelligence subjects," Mr. Powell said. "You get information in, and there are debates. And Mr. Westermann was in a debate with other members of the department on some of the intelligence information. And when he was asked about it, he said that he felt that he was under pressure at that time.
"I think what's important to note, though, is that he didn't find that there was any need to yield to that pressure, and he didn't change any of his opinions or any of his assessments," Mr. Powell said. The secretary was not asked about Mr. Bolton, but his spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, has said Mr. Powell has "full confidence" in that official, who is in charge of arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Democrats on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee said late today thet they would begin their own inquiry into the credibility of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its links to the terror network Al Qaeda.
Mr. Powell also offered praise for the State Department's intelligence bureau, which sent him a classified memorandum on June 2 that expressed doubt about a C.I.A. conclusion in late May that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for biological weapons. That view had immediately been embraced by President Bush and Mr. Powell as evidence of Iraq having a biological weapons program.
"I appreciated the fact that the experts in my department were expressing their opinion to me," Mr. Powell said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Insurgents Attack U.S. Troops
By TODD PITMAN
The Associated Press
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44800-2003Jun28?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan - Insurgents attacked U.S. troops in southeastern Afghanistan, sparking a gunbattle in which American helicopters were called in for strikes, the military said Saturday.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Army soldier died Saturday when his vehicle flipped over elsewhere in the southeast of the country, the military said. An investigation was under way to determine the cause of the accident, which occurred near a U.S. base in Orgun in Paktika province.
The gunbattle erupted Friday elsewhere in Paktika province - near a U.S. base in Shkin, a volatile town near the Pakistan border, U.S. military spokesman Col. Rodney Davis said in a statement.
An American patrol near the base came under attack from about 10 insurgents. The troops called in support from helicopter gunships, and the attackers scattered.
The gunbattle was the latest in a series of stepped-up attacks by rebels in Afghanistan over the last several months. The insurgents are believed to be a mix of holdouts from the former Taliban regime, members of the al-Qaida terrorist network and loyalists of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister.
On Wednesday, three U.S. special forces soldiers were shot - one later died from his wounds - by attackers near Gardez, another eastern town.
About 11,500 coalition troops, most of them Americans, are in Afghanistan carrying out operations against the guerrillas. The Taliban government was toppled in a U.S.-led war in 2001.
----
Briefly - Afghanistan / US
June 28, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/briefly.htm
... Maj. Mohammad Farid Ahamdi will become the first officer from the nascent Afghan national army to attend the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., U.S. Army spokesman Col. Rodney Davis told reporters at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Maj. Ahmadi, 30, is an instructor at the Kabul Military Training Center where officers, noncommissioned officers and enlisted soldiers are trained.
--------
G.I. Killed in Afghanistan
June 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/asia/28AFGH.html
BAGRAM, Afghanistan, June 26 - An American Special Forces soldier was killed and two were wounded in a firefight with suspected rebels on Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan, the United States military said.
The clash occurred near Gardez, the military said in a statement from its headquarters at Bagram Air Base. The names of the dead and wounded soldiers are being withheld until their families can be notified. Advertisement
About 11,500 foreign troops, most of them Americans, are in Afghanistan to hunt down remnants of the former Taliban government and their allies. In the north and east, the troops routinely conduct patrols and operations in search of rebels and weapons caches.
-------- africa
Peace Force Discussed for Warring Liberia
By JONATHAN PAYE LAYLEH
Associated Press Writer
Jun 28, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LIBERIA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) -- West Africa promised an at least 5,000-strong peace force for Liberia if warring sides halt fighting, and France suggested Saturday it was open to contributing troops - stepping in where the United States, Liberia's colonial-era founder, so far has declined to go.
After a four-day battle between government and rebel forces for the Liberian capital, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the Security Council on Saturday to authorize sending a multinational force to Liberia to enforce a cease-fire that fell apart soon after it was signed last week.
"There are reports that several hundred innocent civilians have been killed in fighting in and around Monrovia and of wanton destruction of property and widespread looting," Annan said in a letter to the council.
He called for the deployment to Liberia of a force "to prevent a major humanitarian tragedy and to stabilize the situation in that country."
Liberia's capital counted its dead from this week's siege, the rebels' fiercest assault yet on Monrovia, a city of 1 million crowded with hundreds of thousands of refugees. Rebels pulled out of the city Friday after a 4-day siege by artillery and rockets, and after fighting that left an estimated 500 civilians dead. Advertisement
An international peace force for Liberia was called for in a June 17 cease-fire accord. The cease-fire collapsed last week, after Liberian warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor repudiated his past pledges he would yield power in the interest of peace. The rebels responded with the assault.
Monrovia awoke to calm Saturday for the first time in five days. Thousands of Liberians who had taken shelter around the city's U.S. Embassy, hoping for protection through proximity to the American Marines there, streamed home Saturday - only to find homes looted by government soldiers and others. "I went home this morning only to see that everything is gone," said one resident, 37-year-old Martin Weah.
Rebels had overrun western neighborhoods of the city as far as the port, heavily contested both for its well-stocked food warehouses and for its strategic value.
Liberian forces challenged rebels' claim that the insurgents had retreated under a unilateral cease-fire, saying rebels had left the city only because of an intense push by Taylor's forces.
"If you see their bodies on the road, you will tell whether they withdrew or were forced back," said Gen. Roland Duo, chief of staff of Liberia's navy.
In Ghana, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and Ghana President John Kufuor, current head of the West African leaders' bloc, urged both sides in Liberia toward a real cease-fire.
When that happened, Kufuor said, West Africa would lead an at least 5,000-member peace force to Liberia.
West African authorities spoke Saturday of the force deploying fairly quickly, with the aim of serving as a buffer between rebels and government.
Kufuor said de Villepin had offered both French troops and logistical support for such a force.
De Villepin did not confirm such an offer, but indicated French receptiveness. He cited Congo and the former French colony of Ivory Coast, where French troops have taken a lead role in trying to enforce cease-fires.
"It will not be difficult for us to do the same for any disposition force in Liberia," the French foreign minister said at Ghana's international airport in Accra, before leaving Saturday. "But the first thing that must be done is a cease-fire."
European and U.N. leaders have urged the United States to take a lead role in such a peace force, citing the effectiveness of Britain's and France's military deployments in their former colonies of Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.
The United States has shown no inclination to commit a similar force for Liberia, a key West African Cold War ally of the United States that still sees itself as having special ties through its founding by freed American slaves in the 19th century.
De Villepin, without mentioning President Bush, criticized the American leader when asked about Bush's call for Taylor to step down in the interest of peace.
"In such conflict resolution, outside dictatorship does not help anybody," the French foreign minister said. "Rather, neighboring countries should be encouraged to take charge while we lend our support, and not the other way around."
Taylor, trained by Libya as a guerrilla in the days when Liberia was the United States' Cold War base in West Africa, launched Liberia into conflict at the head of a tiny invasion force in 1989.
The seven-year civil war that followed killed an estimated 200,000 Liberians, and left the country in lasting ruin. Taylor emerged from the war as the strongest fighter, and won presidential elections the following year.
Taylor's forces battled with a Nigerian-led peace force when West African troops deployed during the civil war.
The United Nations has Taylor under sanctions for alleged gun- and diamond-running with West Africa's rebel movements. A U.N.-backed war crimes court in neighboring Sierra Leone announced Taylor's indictment June 4 for his backing of Sierra Leone's vicious rebels in their 10-year terror campaign in that country.
----
Powell urges ending African corruption
June 28, 2003
By Zachary A. Goldfarb
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030627-113131-8900r.htm
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday told African political and business leaders they must attack corruption head-on if their countries hope to prosper, warning that capital is "a coward" that shuns uncertainty and crime.
"You must end corruption, you must have transparency in your systems," Mr. Powell told the Corporate Council on Africa, a business group that promotes trade and investment, which has been meeting here this week.
"Capital is a coward. It flees war. It flees disease. It won't go near corruption," he added.
Mr. Powell spoke a day after President Bush told the group he would increase support for African economies. U.S. business leaders said U.S. efforts to date to boost African economic growth rates appear largely unsuccessful.
But African countries must continue to reform to receive U.S. support, the president added.
Congress heard Wednesday that all tariffs between the United States and Africa must end if a 3-year-old African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), designed to energize African economies, is to work.
Mr. Bush called on Congress to extend the law past its current deadline of 2008. He also announced that the World Bank would give $200 million in loans to support small business in 10 African countries over the next three years.
But he refrained from endorsing calls to end U.S. tariffs on key African exports.
"In Africa, the danger is that AGOA has created expectations that cannot be met," Stephen Hayes, president of the Corporate Council on Africa, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. "As an investment tool, AGOA has simply not worked."
Mr. Bush plans his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president next month. The July 7-12 tour will take the president to Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria.
A dozen African heads of state, key senators and major U.S. investors in Africa attended this week's sessions.
AGOA opens U.S. markets mostly to light-industry products like textiles from African countries that meet criteria such as curbing corruption. From 2001 to 2002, imports under the law were about $9 billion, about 1 percent of all U.S. imports.
Mr. Bush said Thursday that "AGOA is helping to reform old economies, creating new jobs, is attracting new investment; most importantly, is offering hope to millions of Africans."
Business leaders dealing with Africa described AGOA's effect more modestly, releasing a report Monday on how to boost trade and investment.
Mr. Hayes said in written testimony to the Senate: "Most African nations do not yet benefit significantly from AGOA because they lack a manufacturing base and an infrastructure adequate to ensure that products easily and quickly reach their destinations.
"African nations remain dependent on one or two products to carry their entire economy," he added. "AGOA, with its heavy emphasis on textiles and apparel, has done little to change this situation."
A report by the Commission on Capitol Flows to Africa offers a 10-year strategy, recommending a U.S.-African free-trade agreement, extending AGOA past 2008 and additional investments in African economies. It also calls for an end to U.S. agricultural tariffs.
----
Zimbabwean Urges U.S. to Act Cautiously Against Mugabe
June 28, 2003
The New York Times
By LYDIA POLGREEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/africa/28ZIMB.html
JOHANNESBURG, June 27 - Seizing on President Bush's call for a change in leadership in Zimbabwe, the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said today that his Movement for Democratic Change was developing a plan it hoped would lead to a peaceful transition of power in a country rocked by political and economic strife.
But Mr. Tsvangirai also said the United States should not overreach in southern Africa as it pressures President Robert Mugabe to step down. Rather, he said, "there must be a balance in how outside pressure can be applied in order to bring results," an apparent acknowledgment that Mr. Tsvangirai's party remains vulnerable to Mr. Mugabe's charge that it is simply a puppet of Britain and the United States.
"These are very delicate issues," Mr. Tsvangirai said in a telephone interview from his home in the suburbs of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. "We have specific suggestions on how outside pressure can help." He said the opposition's leadership planned to meet over the weekend to come up with a plan to end the crisis, one that will include a call for new elections, something Mr. Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party has rejected.
Mr. Tsvangirai's cautious embrace of Mr. Bush's call for change in Zimbabwe underscores just how difficult it will be to resolve the crisis there. It demonstrates why leaders in the region, including South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, have been reluctant to press Mr. Mugabe to step down despite general agreement that his departure from office after 23 years would be best for Zimbabwe and its neighbors.
"The real situation is far more intricate and complicated than people realize," said Chris Landsberg, a political analyst and lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand here. "I don't think it is as easy for South Africa to move on Zimbabwe as people make it out to be."
Mr. Mugabe has cast his struggle to retain power as a battle between African liberation and neo-colonial power, a strategy that has made it difficult for other African leaders to urge him publicly to step aside.
In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell urged Zimbabwe's neighbors - South Africa in particular - to take a more active role in defusing the crisis.
But experts here say Mr. Mbeki is reluctant to push Mr. Mugabe because bowing to Western pressure to shun him would cost Mr. Mbeki politically at home and diminish his standing among African leaders. Still, political analysts here expect that Mr. Bush will press Mr. Mbeki to act in Zimbabwe when the two meet in Pretoria next month.
Once an economic powerhouse in southern Africa, Zimbabwe has descended into political and economic turmoil since last year's presidential election, won by Mr. Mugabe. Marked by widespread fraud, the election was not recognized by the United States and Europe.
With his popularity waning, Mr. Mugabe has carried out an often violent program of land reform in which black squatters have taken land by force from white farmers. The country's agricultural output, once among the highest in Africa, has plummeted by 50 percent. Inflation is rampant at supermarkets in Harare, where cashiers weigh fat bundles of Zimbabwean dollars rather than count them because the currency's value has fallen so low.
Mr. Tsvangirai, who won more than a million votes in the election last year, has twice been charged with treason and was jailed for two weeks after a recent series of mass protests in Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second largest city.
Mr. Tsvangirai said that his party was ready for unconditional talks with the ruling Zanu-PF but that a new election was the only way out of the current morass. "The question is really the restoration of legitimacy of the government," he said. "It can only be restored by the free mandate of the people of Zimbabwe."
--------
France would send troops to Liberia
Annan urges U.N. to use force to halt fighting
By JONATHAN PAYE LAYLEH
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.dailybulletin.com/Stories/0,1413,203%7E26127%7E1483812,00.html
MONROVIA, Liberia - West Africa promised a peace force at least 5,000-strong for Liberia if warring sides halt fighting, and France suggested Saturday it was open to contributing troops stepping in where the United States, Liberia's colonial-era founder, so far has declined to go.
After a four-day battle between government and rebel forces for the Liberian capital, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the Security Council on Saturday to authorize sending a multinational force to Liberia to enforce a cease-fire that fell apart soon after it was signed last week.
"There are reports that several hundred innocent civilians have been killed in fighting in and around Monrovia and of wanton destruction of property and widespread looting," Annan said in a letter to the council.
He called for the deployment to Liberia of a force "to prevent a major humanitarian tragedy and to stabilize the situation in that country."
Liberia's capital counted its dead from this week's siege, the rebels' fiercest assault yet on Monrovia, a city of 1 million crowded with hundreds of thousands of refugees. Rebels pulled out of the city Friday after a four-day siege by artillery and rockets, and after fighting that left an estimated 500 civilians dead.
An international peace force for Liberia was called for in a June 17 cease-fire accord. The cease-fire collapsed last week, after Liberian warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor repudiated his past pledges he would yield power in the interest of peace. The rebels responded with the assault.
Monrovia awoke to calm Saturday for the first time in five days. Thousands of Liberians who had taken shelter around the city's U.S. Embassy, hoping for protection through proximity to the American Marines there, streamed home Saturday only to find homes looted by government soldiers and others.
"I went home this morning only to see that everything is gone," said one resident, 37-year-old Martin Weah.
Rebels had overrun western neighborhoods of the city as far as the port, heavily contested both for its well-stocked food warehouses and for its strategic value.
Liberian forces challenged rebels' claim that the insurgents had retreated under a unilateral cease-fire, saying rebels had left the city only because of an intense push by Taylor's forces.
"If you see their bodies on the road, you will tell whether they withdrew or were forced back," said Gen. Roland Duo, chief of staff of Liberia's navy.
In Ghana, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and Ghana President John Kufuor, current head of the West African leaders' bloc, urged both sides in Liberia toward a real cease-fire.
When that happened, Kufuor said, West Africa would lead an at least 5,000-member peace force to Liberia.
West African authorities spoke Saturday of the force deploying fairly quickly, with the aim of serving as a buffer between rebels and government.
Kufuor said de Villepin had offered both French troops and logistical support for such a force.
De Villepin did not confirm such an offer, but indicated French receptiveness. He cited Congo and the former French colony of Ivory Coast, where French troops have taken a lead role in trying to enforce cease-fires.
"It will not be difficult for us to do the same for any disposition force in Liberia," the French foreign minister said at Ghana's international airport in Accra, before leaving Saturday. "But the first thing that must be done is a cease-fire."
European and U.N. leaders have urged the United States to take a lead role in such a peace force, citing the effectiveness of Britain's and France's military deployments in their former colonies of Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.
The United States has shown no inclination to commit a similar force for Liberia, a key West African Cold War ally of the United States that still sees itself as having special ties through its founding by freed American slaves in the 19th century.
De Villepin, without mentioning President Bush, criticized the American leader when asked about Bush's call for Taylor to step down in the interest of peace.
"In such conflict resolution, outside dictatorship does not help anybody," the French foreign minister said. "Rather, neighboring countries should be encouraged to take charge while we lend our support, and not the other way around."
Taylor, trained by Libya as a guerrilla in the days when Liberia was the United States' Cold War base in West Africa, launched Liberia into conflict at the head of a tiny invasion force in 1989.
The seven-year civil war that followed killed an estimated 200,000 Liberians, and left the country in lasting ruin. Taylor emerged from the war as the strongest fighter, and won presidential elections the following year.
Taylor's forces battled with a Nigerian-led peace force when West African troops deployed during the civil war.
The United Nations has Taylor under sanctions for alleged gun- and diamond-running with West Africa's rebel movements. A U.N.-backed war crimes court in neighboring Sierra Leone announced Taylor's indictment June 4 for his backing of Sierra Leone's vicious rebels in their 10-year terror campaign in that country.
-------- asia
India will not militarily intervene in Sri Lanka: Analyst
PK Balachanddran Colombo,
June 28, 2003
Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_293160,00050002.htm
A Tamil political analyst has said that the Sri Lankan government is "day dreaming" if it thinks that either India or the US will militarily intervene to defend the country in case the peace process collapses and war with the LTTE resumes.
In his column in the Tamil daily "Thinakural" on June 24, commentator Thillaikoothan said that both India and the US would have good reasons not to intervene militarily in Sri Lanka.
Taking the case of India first, he says that the present Indian government is well aware of what happened when New Delhi intervened in July 1987 under the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. According to Thillaikoothan, Prime Minister Vajpayee, knows that the Sinhala-majority has been "ungrateful" for the military help rendered to subdue the Tigers. Vajpayee also appreciates the commitment shown and the sacrifices made, by the Tamils, for their cause. This is why, the author adds, Vajpayee turned a deaf ear to the Sri Lankan government's plea for military assistance in 2000, when the LTTE was on the verge of capturing Jaffna.
According to Thillaikoothan, the Indians are aware that the casualties suffered by the Indian Peace Keeping force (IPKF) between 1987 and 1990 ( 1150 dead and thousands wounded) were higher than those suffered in the Indo-Pakistan wars.
He quotes a study done by an UK-based international institute to say that to tackle a guerilla force, a conventional army will have to have 22 men for every guerilla. And in the case of an efficient group like the LTTE, the ratio will have to be 1:44. If there are 20,000 LTTE fighters, a conventional army opposing it will have to have 850,000 men. Thillaikoothan goes on to say that if India were to come to the aid of the "Sinhala majority" again and take on the LTTE, it will have to lose 50,000 to 75,000 men, Thillaikoothan says.
The strength of the LTTE, he says, has increased seven fold since the days of the India -Sri Lanka Accord. Given the required army-guerilla manpower ratio, the Indians will have to deploy a force of 900,000 men in Sri Lanka - a far cry from the 125,000 men deployed between 1987 and 1990. Such huge deployment is not a feasible proposition in view of the fact that the entire Indian army is only one million strong, Thillaikoothan says .
He also gives a political dimension to the Indian reluctance to military intervene in Sri Lanka. According to him, the V.P.Singh government withdrew the IPKF because there were strong protests in Tamil Nadu state against the IPKF which, he says, had killed 6500 innocent Tamil and Muslim civilians in the process of fighting the LTTE. The point that Thillaikoothan is driving home here is that New Delhi will not want to alienate Tamil Nadu in a similar way again.
As regards, the United States, he says that it is already facing opposition to its military action in Iraq. Every day there are reports of the US forces suffering casualties in Iraq. The US Senate is to inquire if the war in Iraq could be justified at all. If the US does intervene militarily in Sri Lanka against the Tamils, there is "no doubt" that India will raise "strong objections", Thillaikoothan feels. India, which is readying for parliamentary elections in the coming year, will not also tolerate the US, Japan or any other extra-regional power, gaining too great a political, economic or military influence in Sri Lanka, he adds.
Furthermore, the US and its allies know very well that the LTTE has never indulged in any kind of violence in the US or in any allied country. There will, therefore, be no reason for the US to intervene in Sri Lanka against the LTTE, he argues. If the US is interested in Trincomalee harbour, it knows that the best way to get it will be to negotiate a deal with the LTTE, rather than confront the LTTE militarily.
The US is also aware that the leftist opposition in Sri Lanka, led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), will oppose US intervention. Western commentators have also noted that the Sri Lankan government has not given the Tamils a fair deal so far. Thillaikoothan has do doubt that the US will act only in its interest, and not in the interest of Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and his close aides, GL Peiris and Milinda Moragoda.
-------- britain
British Minister Defends Assessment of Risks From Hussein
June 28, 2003
The New York Times
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/worldspecial/28BLAI.html
LONDON, June 27 - Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said today that he stood by the accuracy of government intelligence on Iraqi weapons, but a new poll indicated that public disenchantment over the matter had cost the Labor Party its lead over the Conservatives.
Mr. Straw told the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs that a disputed claim in an intelligence dossier that Saddam Hussein could unleash an unconventional attack within 45 minutes had come from a "credible" source.
He also denied allegations that it had been added to the document to embellish the findings and support Prime Minister Tony Blair's argument that Iraq represented an immediate threat.
The committee is investigating charges that the government manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the menace that Iraq posed and to justify military action. At issue are two assessments put out in September and February.
The 45-minute claim, the highlight of the September document, has come under scrutiny since the BBC reported that a senior British intelligence official said it had been inserted into the September dossier at the last minute on orders from 10 Downing Street to "sex up" the findings.
Mr. Blair's communications director, Alastair Campbell, who supervised the compiling of the dossiers, testified on Wednesday that the BBC report was false, and he demanded an apology. "It is a lie, it was a lie, it's a lie that's continually repeated, and until we get an apology for it, I will continue making sure people know it's a lie," Mr. Campbell said during a combative session with the committee.
Intensifying the battle with the network today, Mr. Campbell sent off a letter demanding that the BBC respond within 24 hours to 10 questions about its reporting standards and its reliance on anonymous sources.
Clashes between British governments and the state broadcaster are traditional in British politics, but the BBC's director of news, Richard Sambrook, said he felt that this time around, Downing Street was applying "an unprecedented level of pressure." He accused Mr. Campbell of waging a diversionary "vendetta."
Mr. Campbell, a former tabloid journalist, is the most outspoken figure in Mr. Blair's government and has focused on the dispute over the 45-minute claim because of the apparent harm it has done to the government's credibility.
That damage became apparent today in a YouGov Ltd. poll published in The Daily Telegraph that found Tory support rising to 37 percent of the electorate, an increase of one point since the end of May, and Labor support falling two points, to 35 percent. The figures, which showed the third party, the Liberal Democrats, with 21 percent, were based on a sample of 2,288 electors across Britain interviewed online between Tuesday and Thursday.
Apart from a momentary shift in the two parties' fortunes after a rash of fuel-tax protests in September 2000, Labor, which came to power in 1997, has led the Conservatives in the polls since the fall of 1992, when John Major was still prime minister.
The failure to locate any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq has politically hurt Mr. Blair, America's principal ally, more than it has President Bush. The British public was less supportive of the war than Americans were, and Mr. Blair based his argument for the need for immediate action almost solely on the danger of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons.
Mr. Blair has found the trust earned in his first term ebbing in his second, and his problems over weapons have been compounded by domestic political disputes over taxes, school financing, the state of public services and badly handled proposals for constitutional changes affecting the judicial system.
The most frequent general complaint from critics, many of them in the Labor Party as well as the opposition, is that Mr. Campbell and his information apparatus have manipulated the public by distorting the news. The public misgivings over the way the government puts out its information have undermined faith in the government's credibility.
Measuring what it called "the trust factor," the YouGov poll said only 25 percent of respondents thought the government was "honest and trustworthy," while 66 percent thought it was not. Those numbers had been 56 and 30 the other way at the time of Labor's second landslide election victory, in June 2001.
Mr. Blair has maintained the highest popularity ratings of any British prime minister and was considered unassailable until his advocacy of the war and his unswerving allegiance to the Bush administration.
At the same time, today's findings did not firmly suggest a Conservative victory in the next election, expected in 2004. Asked which man would make the better prime minister, 34 percent chose Mr. Blair while only 21 named the Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Charles Kennedy of the Liberal Democrats was the choice of 18 percent.
Today was Mr. Straw's second appearance before the committee this week. While on Tuesday he had criticized as an "embarrassment" the February dossier compiled by Mr. Campbell - one now known as the dodgy dossier for its mingling of a plagiarized scholarly article with real intelligence - today he came to the communications director's defense over the first dossier. "Nobody sexed up, exaggerated, that September dossier, no one at all, and that includes Mr. Campbell," he said.
-------- business
U.S. Official Cool to 'Buy American' Legislation
Undersecretary Says Nation Could Be Isolated
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43086-2003Jun27?language=printer
A top Pentagon official discounted the need for legislation to protect U.S. defense contractors yesterday, but he pledged to study the battered machine-tool industry, which would be among the companies sheltered by the "Buy American" proposals.
The proposed legislation could have unintended consequences for the United States as it seeks support from its allies in the war against terrorism, said Michael W. Wynne, acting undersecretary of defense for acquisition.
"This would seem to isolate the United States at a time when we're reaching out to our allies," he said. "It's not a good time for us to cloak ourselves" in protectionist legislation.
The House version of the 2004 defense authorization bill would strengthen laws that already restrict what the Pentagon can buy from overseas suppliers. Under the legislation, for example, 65 percent of components in items purchased by the Defense Department would have to be American made, up from 50 percent under current regulations.
The U.S. defense industry has become too dependent on foreign suppliers, which could turn into a national security issue during a war, supporters of the legislation say.
But the Pentagon and defense industry have complained that the provisions, which still must gain Senate approval, would raise costs and disrupt programs, such as the Joint Strike Fighter, that depend on international cooperation. "I would tell you this has a devastating effect on our ability to provide war fighting equipment on any kind of economic basis," Wynne said. "Our industrial base is not unhealthy. We don't need protectionist legislation to help us with that."
The provisions also require that weapon systems be made with American machine tools, the large pieces of equipment that cut and bend metal into vehicles and airplanes.
The industry has struggled in recent years, and some in Congress are concerned that during a large-scale war it could be difficult to ramp up construction of needed weapons if machine-tool companies are weak. So far this year, the industry's revenue has plunged nearly 17 percent to $584 million from $702 million, according to the Association for Manufacturing Technology.
"America is losing our ability to manufacture within," Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said. "Depending on foreign suppliers should never be an alternative."
The Pentagon will take a look at the industry's health, but any response would likely be limited since defense products comprise only a small part of the manufacturing market, Wynne said. About 40 percent of machine tools used on U.S. weapons systems come from foreign suppliers and replacing them would raise prices 20 percent to 40 percent, he said. "I am not sure we could restrict our market to the U.S. machine tool industry," he said.
The Association for Manufacturing Technology is calling for a scaling back of provisions affecting machine tools. Under the proposal, suppliers would be required to choose American products only when they buy new machine tools and would not be forced to replace the current stockpile of foreign-made equipment. The definition of a U.S. machine tool would include equipment with up to 30 percent foreign content, said Paul Freedenberg, vice president of government relations for the association.
The current version is "perhaps too stringent. What it would do is compel the defense contractors to get rid of machine tools that aren't American and we don't think that's necessary," he said.
-------- iran
Iran negotiating Al Qaeda leaders' extradition: envoys
Hi Pakistan,
June 28, 2003
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en30491&F_catID=&f_type=source
TEHRAN: Iran has been locked in highly secretive and complex extradition talks with Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia over detainees it holds who are widely believed to be top members of the Al Qaeda network, diplomatic sources said.
According to the well-placed sources, Tehran could deal the biggest blow to the network since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan by handing over some of Osama bin Laden's closest aides.
But government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said on Saturday many of the detainees were still being identified, adding that is was unlikely their names would ever be officially released.
"We have not been able to identify all Al Qaeda members, and even if we did there is no reason for us to give their names to the press. This is a security issue, and this is how security apparatuses work," he said.
Iran has also pointed to its extradition of some 500 fugitives from Afghanistan in the wake of the US ouster of the Taliban, a figure that has been independently confirmed by a variety of well-placed sources.
But diplomats here said they have strong reason to believe that three top Al Qaeda fugitives have been detained in Iran.
One is Egyptian-born Saif al-Adel, thought to have taken over as Al Qaeda's number three from military operations chief Mohammad Atef, who was believed killed in Afghanistan in late 2001.
The second is Saad bin Laden, one of Osama's eldest sons. In his early 20s, he is thought to have taken a senior position in the running of the network.
The third believed to be in Iranian custody is Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti-born Al Qaeda spokesman.
"There is firm reason to believe that Iran is holding some senior Al Qaeda (militants)," a Tehran-based diplomat said. "But the negotiations to hand them over are very delicate, so for the moment there has been no official word on who they are."
Diplomats said negotiations to extradite the detainees have been running for several weeks but were hitting snags, given that Iran has only low-level diplomatic ties with Egypt.
Furthermore, diplomats point out that Osama bin Laden's son has been stripped of his Saudi nationality, while Abu Ghaith has been stripped of his Kuwaiti nationality.
Those problems were believed to have dominated discussions during recent flying visits by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal and Kuwaiti Interior Minister Sheikh Mohammad Khaled al Sabah, although it remains unclear if any extradition deal has yet been worked out.-AFP
----
Iranian group hardly democratic
Letters to the Editor,
June 28, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030627-092421-7807r.htm
As a democracy-loving Iranian in exile, I object in the strongest terms to Arnold Beichman's Wednesday column ("Iran's new French connection," Commentary). I am so dumbstruck by this column that I would like to question Mr. Beichman's motives for writing such a piece. The organization he praises, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has been responsible for orchestrating terrorist campaigns against Americans in Iran in the past, murdering innocent Americans.
This group remains a terrorist organization. How else do you explain its total lack of regard for the sanctity of life when it sanctions self-immolation by its members? It is another terror tactic.
In the column, Mr. Beichman said that NCRI President Maryam Rajavi "leads a democratic resistance movement seeking overthrow of the theocratic tyranny that now dominates the Iranian people." It is incredible to suggest that either Mrs. Rajavi or the organization she leads is democratic.
Here is a brief history of Mrs. Rajavi and the NCRI, as reported in mainstream media.
The NCRI was founded in 1965 after a split in a Marxist-Leninist movement that had waged a guerrilla action in northern Iran. Its ideology emerged as a mix of Islam and Marx, with ingredients from the Iranian religious sociologist Ali Shariati, who advocated an "Islam without a clergy." The NCRI, with KGB help, engaged in a campaign against the Iranian shah and sent cadres to Cuba, East Germany, South Yemen and Palestinian camps in Lebanon to train as guerrillas.
Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB head in Tehran, reveals in his memoirs that the NCRI became a major source of information on Iran for Moscow. It also helped Moscow in its efforts to thwart U.S. influence in Iran. In 1970 and 1971, the NCRI murdered five American military technicians working with the Iranian army. An NCRI team tried to kidnap U.S. Ambassador Douglas MacArthur III in Tehran. The attempt failed, and the team's leader, Mrs. Rajavi, was handed a death sentence, later commuted thanks to a plea to the shah from Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny.
During Iran's 1978-79 turmoil, the NCRI played an active role in helping Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Its squads burned cinemas, restaurants, hotels and bookshops and murdered policemen. After the ayatollah seized the reins, the group did all it could to radicalize the regime, supporting the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Yet within a year, the NCRI, now led by Mrs. Rajavi who had been released from prison during the revolution, decided that the Khomeini regime was not revolutionary. It had to be toppled, so there ensued a terrorist operation against the regime, which still continues.
Support for the NCRI remained a bipartisan policy of France until this week. Mrs. Rajavi fled Tehran for Paris in 1981 by hijacking an Iranian aircraft. Among those with her was Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, who had just broken with Ayatollah Khomeini. Instead of arresting Mrs. Rajavi and Mr. Bani-Sadr as hijackers, the French rolled out the red carpet. Claude Cheysson, then foreign minister, persuaded them to work with Iraq - then at war against Iran - to topple the ayatollah. At a meeting arranged by Mr. Cheysson, Mrs. Rajavi and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz signed a deal in which the NCRI would receive cash and backing from Baghdad in exchange for help in the war against Iran.
Between 1982 and 1985, Mrs. Rajavi visited Baghdad six times and formed a relationship with Saddam Hussein, who helped her organization set up camps in Iraq to train Iranians for sabotage. In 1988, Iran and Iraq agreed to a cease-fire, but Mrs. Rajavi received the nod from Saddam to continue a low-intensity war against Iran from Iraqi territory.
In 1987, Jacques Chirac, then prime minister, signed an accord with the NCRI granting it protection in exchange for a promise not to kill Iranian officials on French soil. Over the years, the NCRI organized an asylum seekers' racket: 40,000 Iranians to Europe on bogus claims in exchange for "voluntary contributions" of up to $10,000 each.
Now a personality cult built around blind devotion to Mrs. Rajavi, the group has recruited its adepts mainly from relatives of people executed by the Khomeinist regime. Individuals are brainwashed and not allowed to develop normal relationships outside the organization. They refuse to send their children to school, insisting that they be educated at home.
By 1988, the NCRI had created a 10,000-strong fighting force in Iraq, which helped Saddam in his genocidal campaign against the Kurds, and also to crush the Iraqi Shi'ites in the south in 1991. Many Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites want NCRI leaders tried for crimes against humanity.
But the group has support in Congress. More than 300 U.S. legislators from both parties have at one time or another signed petitions in support of the group, and NCRI spokesmen say they have offered the sect's services to the United States in case of war with Iran. Diligent Iranians in exile have written to Congress on every occasion pointing out their folly.
TAJI AAZAR
London
-------- iraq
Children's health in crisis, Iraqi doctors say
Dirty water, disease and malnutrition result in rising postwar death rate
By MARK MacKINNON,
Toronto Globe & Mail
Saturday, Jun. 28, 2003
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030628/UKIDSN/TPHealth/
BAGHDAD -- Three-year-old Ibrahim Issam is clearly in pain. Clad in an orange jumpsuit, sitting on his father's knee in the Central Teaching Hospital's waiting room, he screams incessantly, unable to express where it hurts. In the already sweltering June heat, his forehead is even hotter to the touch.
His parents think he's got gastroenteritis, a stomach disease that dehydrates children rapidly and that has plagued this country since the United Nations imposed sanctions here 12 years ago, a trading embargo that left Iraq without chlorine to treat its water. His sister Aisha, 18 months old, dozes on the hospital bed behind Ibrahim. She has the same symptoms.
The sanctions are gone now, but children like Ibrahim and Aisha still suffer. The situation, many say, is worse now. Even in big cities like Baghdad, the water remains undrinkable, and in the summer heat, many families have taken to drawing water directly from the polluted Tigris River.
"They have problems in their stomachs, diarrhea and vomiting. They're sick because the drinking water is dirty," the children's father, Issam Khalil, says. "Things are not better now than during the sanctions."
Doctors here agree. In interviews this week, three of Iraq's top pediatricians said that although no statistics are available, they believe the rate of child mortality -- among the highest in the world during the past 12 years -- has risen even higher since Saddam Hussein's regime fell and the United States took over governing the country.
With the medical system depleted by postwar looting and the slow restoration of basic services, the doctors feel underequipped to deal with what they expect will be a growing flood of cases like Ibrahim's and Aisha's. And in the early summer heat, which often peaks above 45 in the afternoon, infections are spreading like fire.
"There's no government since the end of the war, and the crisis is getting worse and worse," said Emad al-Hadithy, chief resident at the Central Teaching Hospital. "When we compare this period with the period of the embargo, the embargo was better."
Dr. al-Hadithy said that since the war in Iraq ended two months ago, he has seen a sharp rise not only in cases of gastroenteritis but in the so-called black fever, a disease spread by the sand flies which have been multiplying in Baghdad as piles of uncollected litter grow on the streets of the capital.
He also fears another rise in childhood leukemia, like the one after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, which many doctors here believe was caused by the depleted-uranium shells that U.S. forces used.
Before the latest war, the children's health crisis in Iraq was already staggering. A pair of Canadian doctors, Eric Hoskins and Samantha Nutt, who visited the country in January, estimated that 500,000 of Iraq's 13 million children were malnourished.
The United Nations Children's Fund says 70 per cent of all deaths among Iraqi children are caused by diarrhea-related diseases, and rates of such illnesses are "much higher than this time last year."
A recent Unicef survey in Baghdad found 7.7 per cent of children under the age of 5 were suffering acute malnutrition, up from 4 per cent before the war.
Complicating matters is the unpredictable security situation in Baghdad and other cities. Many parents, especially those who live in rural areas, are afraid to drive the sometimes dangerous roads into larger cities for hospital care.
Ibrahim and Aisha's parents hope they haven't waited too long. Mr. Khalil said they watched Ibrahim suffer for two days, afraid to go to the hospital, hoping he'd get better, before finally making the drive into Baghdad.
Yet the hospitals are not sure they can cope. Though international aid organizations have been pitching in to help since the war ended, little can be done until the overall situation in the county improves.
"Medicine is coming in now, but we don't have good security; we don't have electricity; we don't have a clean water supply," said Nazar al-Anbalai, director of the al-Mansur children's hospital, who said doctors often have to work by candlelight and consciously skimp on the amount of water they use.
"If this doesn't change soon, there will be even more of an increase in the number of children's deaths."
In the hallways of his hospital, parents watching over their sick children are despondent.
"He's not eating anything," whimpered Bayan Jihad Abdul Razak, hugging her pallid-looking son, Mustafa, against her. The 20-month-old boy suffers from gastroenteritis as well as anemia.
"The situation here is not good. He's always sick, since he was born," Ms. Abdul Razak said. "He doesn't eat anything. I wish I could send him out of Iraq."
----
Occupation Forces Halt Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42905-2003Jun27?language=printer
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
The most recent order to stop planning for elections was made by Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which controls the northern half of Iraq. It follows similar decisions by the 3rd Infantry Division in central Iraq and those of British commanders in the south.
In the capital, Baghdad, U.S. officials never scheduled elections for a city government, but have said they are forming neighborhood councils that at some point will play a role in the selection of a municipal government.
L. Paul Bremer, the civil administrator of Iraq, said in an interview that there is "no blanket prohibition" against self-rule. "I'm not opposed to it, but I want to do it a way that takes care of our concerns. . . . Elections that are held too early can be destructive. It's got to be done very carefully."
Iraqi critics of the policy shift say the American and British forces are primarily hurting themselves by smothering aspiring leaders who would benefit from the chance to work more closely with Westerners. In addition, they say the occupation authorities are fostering a dependent, passive mindset among Iraqis and leaving no one but themselves to blame for the crime, faltering electricity and general misrule Iraqis see in their daily lives.
Sattar, the would-be candidate in Samarra, said: "The new mayors do not have to be perfect. But I think that by allowing us to establish our own governments, many of the problems today would be solved. If you ask most Iraqis today if they have a government, they will tell you, no, what we have is an occupation, and that is a dangerous thing for the people to think."
Occupation authorities initially envisioned the creation of local assemblies, composed of several hundred delegates who would represent a city or town's tribes, clergy, middle class, women and ethnic groups. Those delegates would select a mayor and city council.
That process was employed successfully in the northern city of Kirkuk, but U.S. civilian and military occupation officials now say postwar chaos has left Iraq unprepared to stage popular elections in most cities.
"In a postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections, the people who are rejectionists tend to win," Bremer said. "It's often the best-organized who win, and the best-organized right now are the former Baathists and to some extent the Islamists." Bremer was referring to members of Hussein's Baath Party and religiously oriented political leaders.
Bremer and other U.S. officials are fearful that Islamic leaders such as Moqtada Sadr, a young Shiite Muslim cleric popular on the streets of Baghdad, and Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, leader of the Iranian-supported Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, would be best positioned to field winning candidates.
Bremer promises that as soon as an Iraqi constitution is written and a national census is taken, local and national elections will follow. But that process could take months.
Ten weeks into the occupation, the cities and towns outside of Baghdad are largely administered by former Iraqi military and police officers and people who had close ties to the Baath Party. Iraqi generals and police colonels, for example, are now mayors of a dozen cities, including Samarra, Najaf, Tikrit, Balad and Baqubah.
The U.S. military contends that these people have been vetted and were not in leadership positions under the old government or associated with crimes it committed.
In Najaf last week, several hundred demonstrators took to the streets to demand elections and the removal of Mayor Abdul Munim Abud, a former artillery colonel. The protesters' banners read: "Canceled elections are evidence of bad intentions" and "O America, where are promises of freedom, elections, and democracy?"
At Friday prayers in Najaf, Sadr told the faithful at the shrine of Imam Ali, "I call for free elections that will represent all Iraqi opinion, far away from the influence of those who have intervened."
In Samarra, a two-hour drive north of Baghdad, the selection of a new mayor and city council by delegates was postponed twice, and finally canceled late last week. "There will be no elections for the foreseeable future," said Sgt. Jeff Butler of the U.S. Army's 418th Civil Affairs Battalion from Kansas City, Mo., which is charged with running Samarra.
Butler said the city had been planning a caucus to pick a mayor when the order came down from Maj. Gen. Odierno. "He said, basically, stop," Butler said.
A timetable for elections in Samarra, Butler said, "is six months at least, but I'm just guessing."
Butler said he sympathized with Iraqis who are upset over the cancellation of the elections. "We would like to see some kind of democratic system, too," he said. But for now, he said, the Iraqis need to be satisfied with "baby steps."
Like almost all of the Army civil affairs soldiers in Iraq, Butler and his six-man team do not speak Arabic, and are confronted with a bewildering environment in Samarra that includes seven major and 14 minor tribal sheiks -- plus Muslim clergy and a more secular middle class that is trying to steer clear of rule by either the religious leaders or the tribes.
The current mayor of Samarra is Shakir Mahmud Mohammad, a retired general in the Iraqi army, who came into power here in April as U.S. forces arrived in the city. Mohammad was selected by a council representing the seven major tribes in and around Samarra, and by most accounts did an admirable job keeping order in the city in the postwar weeks.
Mohammad, whose brother was executed by Hussein, now runs the city with the help of another brother and another former army commander, who serve as his deputies. Butler described Mohammad as "a very personable guy, with a decent amount of legitimacy, and he is basically somebody we thought we can work with."
But many citizens in Samarra, which has a large middle class and a large drug manufacturing plant, and is unusually prosperous for an Iraqi town, have complained about Mohammad.
In Hussein's home town of Tikrit, the American in charge is Army Lt. Col. Steve Russell, whose mission is not to establish democracy in the region, but to hunt down remnants of the former government and others who are attacking U.S. troops.
That is understandable, said Nabel Darwish Mohamed, the mayor of nearby Balad, who is a former colonel in the Iraqi police corps. "But the American soldiers must understand that security comes also from giving the people their own leaders, their own powers. That will calm things down, I think."
Mohammad added, "Fine, we embrace the Americans, we want to see the security. But we want them to move aside and let us have our own voices. We have waited a long time for this and we are growing tired of the waiting, okay?"
Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad.
----
Timeline of attacks on coalition forces in Iraq
Saturday, 28-Jun-2003
Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/di/Qiraq-us-britain-chrono.Rkcl_DuR.html
BAGHDAD, June 28 (AFP) - The discovery on Saturday of the bodies of two US soldiers missing in Iraq and the death of another soldier in an ambush brings the total of American dead in hostile fire incidents since the end of the war to 23.
A further 40 US soldiers have died in other incidents since May 1, the date President George W. Bush announced as the end of the war.
In the same period, 10 British soldiers have died, six of them in combat.
Following is a list of the main attacks on coalition forces since May 1:
May 1: seven American soldiers are wounded in an attack on Fallujah, 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Baghdad, where US soldiers opened fire on demonstrators in late April, killing at least 16 and sparking almost daily attacks on coalition forces in the city.
8: a soldier from 3rd infantry division is killed by a lone gunman in Baghdad.
26: an American soldier is killed in an explosives attack near Baghdad and another dies in the ambush of a military convoy near Haditah, 190km north-west of the capital.
27: two US soldiers are killed and nine more injured in a rocket-launcher attack in Fallujah.
29: an American soldier is killed by Iraqi gunfire on a road north of Baghdad.
June 3: a US soldier dies after a grenade attack on a roadblock at Balad, north of Baghdad.
5: one American soldier dies and five others are injured in a grenade attack in Fallujah.
7: one Americans dies and four are hurt in an attack by grenade and small arms fire near Tikrit, north of the capital.
8: in Al-Qaim, in the west of the country, a US soldier is killed by a group of armed Iraqis who pretend to be in need of urgent medical help.
10: a US soldier is killed and another seriously injured at an arms collection point south-west of Baghdad.
16: an American solider injured by a sniper attack on a patrol in Baghdad, dies of his injuries the following day.
18: one dead and another injured in a drive-by shooting incident at a Baghdad service station.
19: an American soldier is killed and two others injured in a rocket attack south of Baghdad.
22: a US soldier is killed in a grenade attack south of Baghdad.
24: six British soldiers die in a shoot-out with local residents angered at the use of dog patrols in the Shiite town of Al-Majar Al-Kabir, some 160km noroth of Basra, the first British fatalities from enemy fire since the end of the war.
the same day, eight British troops are injured, three of them seriously, in separate fighting in the same town.
26: an American soldier dies and eight others are injured by "enemy fire" in south-west of Baghdad.
another soldier is killed in an Iraqi attack on a patrol at Kafuh, near the holy city of Najaf, 130km (80 miles) south of Baghdad.
27: a US soldier dies and four of his colleagues are injured in a grenade attack on their convoy in Baghdad.
28: the bodies of two American soldiers abducted on June 25 at a rocket-demolition site near Balad are discovered in a strongly Sunni Muslim zone 35 kilometres (20 miles) north-west of Baghdad.
----
DISPATCHES
Iraqi Saboteurs' Goal: Disrupt the Occupation
June 28, 2003
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/worldspecial/28STRA.html
CAMP DOHA, Kuwait, June 27 - Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency devised a plan to challenge the allied occupation of Iraq: sabotage its own country.
The targets have included oil pipelines, the Baghdad electrical system, a liquid natural gas plant and other crucial installations. With each attack, life for Iraq's roughly 24 million people has become more onerous and the mission of allied forces more complex.
It is difficult to say how much of the economic sabotage is coordinated. But there are new indications that at least some of it may have been planned before allied forces crossed into Iraq.
Allied officials say they recently obtained a document prepared by the Iraqi Intelligence Service calling for a sabotage campaign in case of Mr. Hussein's ouster. Marked "secret" and dated Jan. 23, the document was found in the southern Iraqi city of Basra but is marked for distribution to intelligence officers throughout the country.
The "emergency plan" in the document outlines 11 steps, including looting and burning government offices, sabotaging power plants, cutting communication lines and attacking water purification plants, a familiar list to anybody who followed events in Iraq over the last two months.
The measures are described in the plan, which was prepared by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, as "steps necessary after the fall of the Iraqi leadership by the American-British-Zionist allies, God forbid."
The document has been cited by The Washington Times and The Herald of Glasgow in Scotland. This reporter recently reviewed a copy and an English translation, which are circulating among allied commanders who say they believe that the document is authentic.
The allied goals are not just to kill and capture remnants of Mr. Hussein's government and the Iraqi and foreign fighters who support them, but also to win over Iraqis by persuading them that the new Iraq offers a better future.
The two goals are intertwined: the allied forces need the cooperation of Iraqis to ferret out their attackers and want to prevent guerrilla attacks from developing into a popularly supported insurgency.
It is difficult to determine how much of the damage to Iraq's infrastructure might be the result of the intelligence service plan. One thing, though, seems clear to allied administrators and military commanders: a substantial amount of the damage to Iraq's essential services is not the result of impoverished looters, but of more organized elements out to undermine allied administration of Iraq.
This month L. Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator for the allies, visited a liquefied petroleum gas plant in Basra that was attacked on April 28 in what was originally thought to be the work of looters.
"As I looked around the plant," Mr. Bremer said, "it was very clear that what had happened was professional saboteurs had gone into the control room and had taken the racks of computers out, cut the cables, thrown the computer material and electronics on the floor.
"There was no looting going on. There was nothing they were trying to steal. It was a pure act of political sabotage, almost certainly by elements of Baathists who want to show that the coalition is unable to run this country. We still face this kind of activity, and we need to defeat it."
It is not easy to distinguish between looting and sabotage. The weather station at Baghdad's international airport was stripped of its scientific instruments. Its records - the weather history of modern Iraq - were burned. Was that the work of looters looking for scrap metal and trying to cover their traces, or Hussein supporters trying to frustrate civilian airport operations?
During a recent trip to the Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq with Task Force Rio, experts on Iraqi oil discussed what damage resulted from looting and what from sabotage. Task Force Rio, which includes civilians and contractors as well as military officials and was established before the war to restore Iraqi oil production after the war, tried to determine whether damage had resulted from looting or sabotage.
Driving through the oil field, Brig. Gen. Robert Crear the commander of Task Force Rio, who comes from from the Army Corps of Engineers, discussed an episode in which a crucial piece was removed from a pipeline that carried crude oil near the town of Zubayr. No one observed the attack, but like some other attacks in the area, it caused destruction that seemed too carefully chosen to be a random act of looting.
"It was assessed as sabotage," General Crear said. "It could be Baathists. It could be any organization that wants chaos and does not want the coalition to be successful. Our No.1 priority is to secure these areas."
During the push to Baghdad, American forces sought to limit the damage to Iraq's infrastructure. Conscious that they would have to rebuild and administer the country until a new Iraqi government was established, the Americans refrained from targeting electrical generators and limited their strikes on other important installations, like bridges.
The American forces were also quick to seize and secure the Rumaila oil fields. The American calculation is that Iraq's oil exports can pay for reconstruction, and during the war the fields were protected by allied troops and even a Patriot antimissile defense.
But stopping sabotage is harder than intercepting an Iraqi missile. Oil pipelines, for example, are long and vulnerable. They can be blown up with a pack of explosives, or even a few well-placed bullets.
Allied military forces can mount patrols to catch saboteurs and train Iraqi guards to help protect crucial sites. But to reduce the sabotage the Americans will almost certainly need to convince Iraqis that the attacks undermine local interests as much as or more than America's strategic designs, and thus develop intelligence on who, precisely, is behind the attacks.
Sabotage was not the only strategy advocated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service plan. The intelligence document also suggested recruiting exiled Iraqis who return from abroad; infiltrating new political parties and Islamic groups, particularly in Najaf, a Shiite religious center; buying stolen weapons; and assassinating Shiite anti-Baathist leaders.
----
Desert sheikhs feast on hate for detested American 'invaders'
28/06/2003
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$3OWU1LEA3KAQDQFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2003/06/28/wirq28.xml/
Peter Foster finds the Bedouin in north-west Iraq are increasingly irritated with their occupiers
The Iraqi desert is a lawless place. On the advice of a British diplomat we travel armed, although not with a Kalashnikov. Our safety is to be guaranteed by a letter written by Sheikh Fahran al-Sadeed. He is the head of Iraq's Shamir tribe and, we are told, a very powerful man.
We meet and drink Turkish coffee for about three hours. The sheikh, fresh from a meeting with Paul Bremer, the US administrator, spends most of the time enthusiastically denouncing "ignorant Americans" and foreigners in general.
We also get our first lesson in the complexities of local Iraqi politics. He explains that not all sheikhs are "real" sheikhs.
After 1990 Saddam created hundreds of "pet sheikhs" and kept them loyal by paying them large sums of money. The last payment of three million Iraqi dinar was made only a month before the war. In Iraq these are disparagingly known as "Sheikh 90s".
Sheikh Fahran says the "fake" sheikhs are queuing up outside Bremer's office daily for a slice of the reconstruction pie. He laughs wildly at Bremer's gullibility, predicting Iraq will be in flames if the Americans don't start creating jobs and stability soon.
He doesn't much like foreigners. Our letter of safe passage is written in Arabic in his own florid hand. I hope it says the right thing.
In Baiji, a provincial oil-town 160 miles north of Baghdad, we knock on the door of a large house. Whatever the letter says, it has an almost magical effect. The guard on the gate is a narrowed-eyed Bedouin with a loaded gun. He looks at us suspiciously until the letter is produced, with Sheikh Fahran's personal card attached. Suddenly those eyes are wide open.
Inside we submit to the obligatory three hours of tea and chat. Forty or more local sheikhs sit against the walls, all traditionally dressed in white tunics and head-dresses. Everyone is complaining about the Americans.
In the garden outside the charred stump of a date palm - victim of a night-time grenade attack - is testament to the lack of security. Renegade Ba'athists are to blame.
It is not clear what, if anything, the meeting is meant to achieve. The sheikhs complain that the Americans don't listen to them. This is not entirely surprising as there seems to be little consensus even on simple things, like what is the most serious problem facing the town - security, salaries, or sewage? If nothing else, cursing the American invader has a cathartic effect.
Another sheikh, Abu Fayed, joins the party. Everyone stands. We are introduced. He nods. "Tonight," he says, "we shall go to the desert."
Our romantic notions of the desert and its nomadic Bedouin people are soon disabused. There is not a sand dune in sight. After driving 30 miles due west into the scrub towards Syria we reach the first Bedouin settlement.
There are no tents, but single-room, mud-brick houses. Since the 1970s the camel has been replaced as chief mode of transport by the Toyota pick-up. The families sleep outside on iron bedsteads that look like cast-offs from an English prison or public school.
We ask the headman about the war. Had he seen any American soldiers out here? He says he heard the jets in the sky every night. Then he saw tanks - at least seven of them - rolling through the night. The children all cried. And the Americans nearly killed his donkey, which became frightened and bolted. Since that night, nothing.
What does he feel now? Is he happy to see the back of Saddam? "Of course," he says, adding in the same breath that he hates the American "invader". The Coalition ceased to be "liberators" after the first day.
Is life better since the war? No, he says, it's worse. Before the war, the ministry gave them food every month. Contrary to all the assurances given by Mr Bremer at his Baghdad press conferences, the headman says the American-led authority gives them nothing. The food is not getting through.
These are the rural poor of Iraq. No one in the village is starving, but none of the children is going to school either. While the village poor scrape together an evening meal of bread and yoghurt, we are invited to a feast. Word had been sent ahead of our arrival, a sheep has been killed in our honour. The crowd of guests grows with the setting of the sun, and soon we have a hillside full of parked Toyotas.
There is not an American soldier in sight, but at no time during the last five weeks have we been more secure. The only risk is from the stray dogs which are wolf-sized and crazy. After eating, the discussion turns once again to the American invasion.
Everyone has a story to tell, apocryphal or otherwise. The most senior man, Saba al-Dhaib - whose name means "the wolf" - tells how his two sons found an arms cache and, ignoring his advice, helped themselves to "just a couple" of machineguns.
The men of the family were all arrested by the Americans and taken by helicopter to Nasiriya. As a parting shot, he says, the Americans opened up with the helicopter's heavy machinegun and destroyed his vehicle. The story is unverifiable but typical of those told all over Iraq. True or not, they have same effect - feeding resentment against the Coalition.
Another sheikh wants to know why a country can put satellites into space - literally translated from the Arabic as "artificial moons" - but can't fix the sewers in Baiji. After all, it was coalition bombs that broke them.
Another tells how the Americans have sacked 4,000 workers from the Baiji oil refinery and now intend to bring in foreign workers.
There is no alcohol but the party does not seem to flag. Tired of Coalition-bashing the talk turns to farming and women. The men sitting around the table can muster more than 4,000 sheep between them. That makes them very rich.
Like farmers the world over, however, they protest that they are all as poor as minaret mice.
The Americans are not paying enough for the grain - prices have almost halved since the war. Sheep prices are also down to US$60 (£36) each - a sum that would delight most English farmers.
All night, the women have been nowhere to be seen. They are busy cooking, washing and looking after a child that can be heard bawling behind a closed door.
Camels and sheep seem as important as wives. I can't help thinking of Baghdad and Mr Bremer's assurances that women will have an equal station in the new Iraq.
The last guest leaves after 1.00am. We sleep outside on the same raised earthen platform where we ate dinner.
The "wolf", grandiloquent as ever, has the final word. "If the Americans stay as our guests, they can stay 100 years.
"If they stay as our invaders, they will not last two. I will fight, my people will fight too."
-------- israel / palestine
Army pardoned for burying woman alive
June 28 2003
Associated Press
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/27/1056683906544.html
A military prosecutor has exonerated Israeli soldiers of the death in March of an American peace activist, the army said on Thursday, refuting witness claims that the woman was in the line of sight of a bulldozer driver who buried her alive in the Gaza Strip.
Rachel Corrie, 23, of Washington, was crushed to death on March 16 while trying to block the demolition of a doctor's house in the Rafah refugee camp by standing in front of the army bulldozer. The army said the home was being destroyed in an effort to block arms smuggling.
According to the army, military police investigating the Corrie case found the soldiers operating the bulldozer were unaware of her presence in the area and had no intention of harming her.
The International Solidarity Movement said it was not surprised by the army's findings. "Their only concern is to protect their people and not arrive at the truth," it said.
----
IDF officer jailed for refusing order during outpost removal
By Amos Harel,
Haaretz Correspondent
28/06/2003
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/312341.html
An IDF officer who refused to participate in the evacuation of an illegal outpost was sentenced by a military court Friday to a month in a military prison.
Military sources said he would most likely face a military discharge following his prison term.
The officer, a platoon commander in the paratrooper brigade, was ordered to transport water Thursday to forces who were evacuating the Adei Ad North
outpost, near the settlement of Shvut Rachel, north of Ramallah.
The officer, a yeshiva graduate who has two brothers living in the territories, refused to obey the order on ideological grounds.
The sentence was handed by the officer's division commander, Brigadier General Tal Russo.
Hundreds of police and soldiers arrived at the site Thursday to remove seven mobile structures that had been placed recently next to the "red house," a building north of Adei Ad used as a school for troubled youth. Families are living in three of the structures and a group of young men in the fourth. The others are unoccupied.
The arrival of the army took the settlers by surprise, because Adei Ad North is not on the list of settlements scheduled for removal that the defense ministry gave the Yesha Council a few weeks ago. But after the Yesha Council spread the word of the army's presence to surrounding communities, hundreds of settlers and yeshiva students began to stream toward the outpost.
The IDF declared the area a closed military zone and arrested 26 settlers for trespassing. There were clashes throughout the day between settlers and security forces, and a number of police officers and settlers were injured.
Binyamin local council chairman Pinhas Wallerstein was detained briefly by security forces, together with Yesha Council spokesperson Yehoshua Mor-Yosef.
The removal was halted when the High Court issued a temporary restraining order against the evacuation, pending a hearing Sunday in which lawyers for the settler organization Amana will argue against its removal.
At the end of the day, the Yesha Council issued a statement "saluting the hundreds of citizens who arrived at Adei Ad to conduct a determined and non-violent struggle without breaking the law."
----
Passive resistance a difficult tactic as settlers clash with Israeli police
June 28, 2003
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030627-113134-9369r.htm
JERUSALEM - It was the ultimate amen corner. At the behest of settler leaders, hundreds of Israeli Orthodox rabbis filled a Jerusalem hotel banquet hall for an "emergency meeting" Monday evening, listening to sermons railing against the U.S.- sponsored "road map" peace initiative.
"The land of Israel is for the people of Israel from the time of our ancestor Abraham," said Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, a former chief Israeli Sephardic rabbi. "Our borders are ... borders of holiness."
The bottom line of the Jewish legal rulings adopted by the convention of right-wing rabbis was unmistakable: The road map is irreconcilable with the Torah and resisting implementation - like the dismantling of dozens of hilltop outposts erected in the last two years - means saving lives of Jews.
But there was a caveat: resistance against soldiers and security officers must be nonviolent.
Just outside of the proceedings, though, Shimon, 26, was showing off a mini-exhibition of photographs from the clashes last Thursday at the West Bank outpost of Mitzpeh Yitzhar, the first populated outpost to be evacuated by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The protest was meant to be an exercise in passive resistance, but Shimon's album seemed obsessed with the force used against the settlers, with image after image showing a group of soldiers and police dragging off the protesters.
"The rabbis are saying, 'You need to use passive resistance because the police might have weapons,' " said the bearded yeshiva student, who called the police officers at the demonstration "wicked." "But they're not expecting some guy who gets kicked in the head to be quiet. The violence will only get worse."
The remarks of the young photographer, who gave only his first name, underscored how difficult it will be for settler leaders to harmonize two of their tactics. While enlisting rabbis to rally the faithful by fanning the embers of religious and moral fervor for the land of Israel, the settler leaders have to ensure that the demonstrations don't spiral out of control.
Mr. Sharon's call for a Palestinian state along with his willingness to dismantle the outposts in the West Bank has forced the settler leadership into a delicate balancing act. They fear setting a precedent that one day may lead to the dismantling of larger communities in the territories, but need to avoid alienating a public that overwhelmingly supports the adoption of the road map plan.
"It's an unprecedented dilemma. In the last three years, they've won points for being on the front line of the war and showing on the whole admirable restraint," said Yossi Klein Halevi, an authority on the settler movement.
"They've succeeded in convincing the Israeli public they were right about [the] Oslo [Accords], and yet none of that was enough to convince the Israeli public to stand with the settlers politically in their most desperate time. That's the tragedy of the settlement movement. It's not the tragedy of rejection, it's the tragedy of, 'Yes, but ... .' "
At the helm of the settler leaders are religious pragmatists who are politically savvy and want to make sure that the outpost protests don't isolate the 220,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from mainstream Israel.
The memory of the public vilification that followed the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has not faded. Many Israelis blamed the settler leaders and Orthodox rabbis for calling Mr. Rabin a "traitor" and for fanning the violent protests that culminated in his assassination.
At the same time, they must grapple with a group of influential rabbis whose followers are more strident and less committed to Israel's version of liberal democratic government, Mr. Halevi said.
The pragmatists believe the key to defeating the road map lies in convincing the Likud parliamentarians to stop Mr. Sharon, rather than urging the far-right National Union Party and National Religious Party to withdraw from the coalition. They say they must be selective about when and where they call for massive resistance to the outpost evacuation.
"It's very easy to create a situation of 'Us and Them.' " said Pinchas Wallerstein, a former chairman of the Council of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, an alliance of settler leaders. "There is a fear that we'll make so many actions that the people of Israel will say 'Enough, I'm sick of this. We don't want the settlers.' "
Last week's struggle on the Mitzpeh Yitzhar hilltop marked a major victory for the settlers, Mr. Wallerstein said. Even though the army ultimately dismantled the tent and makeshift structure that housed 10 settlers, the protest effort succeeded on two fronts, he explained.
The evacuation took the better part of a day and proved to be a psychological burden on the soldiers - signaling to Israel that dismantling larger settlements would prove to be a national ordeal. At the same time, newspaper headlines of "Brother Against Brother" the following day was proof that the settlers' image hadn't suffered in the scuffle.
In the days since the dismantling of Mitzpeh Yitzhar, several new outposts have been established.
"What they have done is scratching the surface. The serious outpost infrastructure hasn't been touched. It's all nothing more than spin," said Dror Etkes, who has documented the growth of the outposts for Peace Now.
But criticism of the tactics isn't only coming from the left. Debates over Israeli security and outpost evacuations shouldn't be the focus of rabbinical rulings, said Rabbi Shlomo Brin, who teaches in a yeshiva in the West Bank town of Alon Shvut.
"There's an internal contradiction when you say that this is anti-Zionist, immoral, illegal, and then you say resist without violence," he said. "Once you say there is no legitimacy, of course a wide public will say we can resist even with force. It's a dangerous explosive."
----
Palestinian factions to announce truce deal Sunday
By Arnon Regular, Aluf Benn and Nathan Guttman,
Haaretz Service and Agencies
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/311895.html
A cease-fire agreement reached by the Palestinian factions is to be announced Sunday at 11 A.M. in Gaza, Ramallah and Cairo, Al-Ayyam, the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper, reported Saturday.
According to the agreement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades will suspend military actions against Israeli occupation for a period of three months, the paper said.
The agreement includes conditions presented by the Palestinians to Israel, among them an end to assassinations, raids and arrests, the removal of closures in Palestinian cities and the release of all Palestinian prisoners.
A Palestinian source said that key to the truce agreement was a U.S. promise to pressure Israel to stop track-and-kill operations against militants.
Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad representatives gave Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas a draft of the agreement on Friday, Israel Radio reported. Hamas representative in Lebanon Ossama Hamdan passed on the agreement draft on Friday to Egyptian government officials in Cairo, the radio said.
The radio quoted Israeli government officials as saying that Israel will ignore the conditions presented by Hamas, because it is only committed to the agreement reached with Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas.
Hamas decides to suspend attacks on Israel The Palestinian militant group Hamas said Friday that after studying "all the developments," it had reached a decision to suspend attacks on Israel.
"Hamas has studied all the developments and has reached a decision to call a truce, or a suspension of fighting activities," Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told Reuters.
But a senior Israeli government source responded coolly to the announcement, saying any truce signed by the militant group "is not worth the paper it's written on."
Yassin said the cease-fire carried conditions and a timeframe, but declined to give details or indicate when a truce would be announced.
"We are still in contact with the rest of the factions in order to reach a joint formula to be signed by everybody," Yassin said, referring to groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, linked to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
Mohammed al-Hindi, a senior Islamic Jihad leader, said his group had also finalized its decision regarding a truce and it was "inclined towards calm."
"We are in a dialogue with other Palestinian factions and preparing a joint paper," he said. "In a few days, this joint paper will be finalized and also reflect our position."
In response to Yassin's announcement, the United States said any Hamas truce would be a useful first step toward peace, but it must be followed by the dismantling of militant organizations.
"We certainly would welcome that first step towards the end to violence and terror," U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "It would need to be followed by other steps to dismantle the capabilities but we certainly believe that that could be a useful step to see in the coming days."
"We see a comprehensive cessation of violence and terror as a welcome development but it's not an end in itself, it needs to be the first step," he told a daily briefing.
Boucher gave no indication of the timeframe Washington expects for the dismantlement but he linked it with the Palestinian Authority's efforts to establish itself as the sole armed authority in the Palestinian territories.
"The leadership of the Palestinian Authority... have made clear that their goal is to establish a Palestinian state. A state can have only a single armed authority and cannot have to compete with armed authority from other groups," he said.
"The point of the road map is that the Palestinian Authority exercises more and more responsibility for security as time goes on. We and others will help," he added.
The Israeli source also repeated Jerusalem's bedrock demand that Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas dismantle Hamas and other militant factions under the terms of the U.S.-backed road map.
But the source indicated that Israel, which is negotiating a Gaza disengagement deal with the Palestinian Authority, could adopt a wait-and-see strategy in targeting Palestinian militants if a truce is declared.
"If we provide them [the Palestinian Authority] with information [about militants planning attacks] and they act on that information and take measures, fine," the source said. "But we will not tolerate bombs blowing up in our face."
"It is not worth the paper it's written on," the Israeli source said about the truce, and called on the PA "to take the necessary steps to eradicate terrorism, dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, collect illegal arms and end anti-Israeli incitement."
For its part, he said, Israel "will take whatever measures are necessary to defend our citizens when they are attacked."
Israel had already said that it would continue to act against Palestinian "ticking bombs," despite any cease-fire agreement reached between the PA and militant groups.
----
Israeli sources:
IDF pullout in Gaza could begin Monday
By Aluf Benn, Amos Harel, Nathan Guttman and Arnon Regular,
Haaretz Correspondents,
Haaretz Service and Agencies
28/06/2003
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/312276.html
Israel and the Palestinian Authority reached an agreement Friday for an IDF pullback in the Gaza Strip and a transferal of security control to the Palestinians, during a meeting between Palestinian Minister for Security Mohammed Dahlan and Israel's coordinator in the territories, Major General Amos Gilad.
No agreement was reached on a transfer of security control in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, but talks on the matter will take place in the coming week.
Officers in the field from both sides will meet Sunday to finalize details and the
pullout from Gaza is estimated to begin as soon as Monday, sources in Jerusalem said.
The meeting will focus on arrangements for the movement of vehicles on the main "Tancher" highway that bisects the northern and southern Strip; the sharing of intelligence to prevent attacks on Israeli targets; and the deployment of Palestinian security forces in areas evacuated by IDF troops.
According to Israeli sources, Dahlan said the PA would begin collecting illegal weapons from the various Palestinian factions, an issue which has hindered negotiations between the two sides, and whose resolution is seen as a major sign of progress.
The sources also said that the PA committed itself to work to end all attacks in areas that will be under its control, including the firing of Qassam rockets and mortars, to prevent arms smuggling, to stop terror attacks using intelligence provided by Israel, and cease incitement in the Palestinian media.
But the PA stopped short of committing to arrest Hamas activists.
Israel, for its part, has agreed to raise the quota of work permits it issues to Palestinians and ease travel restrictions at the Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, and the Allenby Bridge border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan. In addition, Palestinian vehicles will gradually be allowed to use the main highway.
The announcement that a deal had been reached was hailed by the White House, who earlier this month dispatched a delegation, headed by John Wolf, to monitor the implementation of the internationally-brokered road map to Middle East peace.
This is a very positive development. It reflects the kind of movement that the president and the other leaders called for," said Secretary of State Colin Powell.
He said the agreement would be extended "in due course" to Bethlehem.
"I would expect that in a couple of days security officials from both sides, commanders from both sides, would get down to the details of how it will be accomplished and how it will be monitored over time," he told reporters after talks with Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure.
"It is an early step. A lot more has to happen in the days ahead to make sure that this opportunity is not lost, and this is the beginning of a long process," he added.
"The agreement represents a first significant joint step toward implementation of commitments made by each party at the Aqaba summit," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, referring to the June 4 summit held by U.S. President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in Aqaba, Jordan.
Wolf also attended Friday's meeting between Dahlan and Gilad, their fourth round of talks in recent days.
Israel Television said Friday that the American delegation would oversee the troop withdrawal.
Dahlan and Gilad met Thursday night at the Herzilyah home of U.S. Ambassador Dan Kurtzer. Army Radio quoted Palestinian sources as saying that negotiators at the meeting reached an agreement on Israeli withdrawal from the northern Gaza Strip, including Beit Hanun and Beit Lahiyah, and on a significant easing of travel restrictions on Palestinians.
Israel is asking the United States for guarantees that the Palestinian Authority will dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in areas in which it assumes security authority - as it is obligated to do under the road map peace plan - rather than settling for an agreement with the terrorist organizations on a cessation of attacks.
The demand for U.S. guarantees will be at the center of Israeli officials' talks with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who arrives in Jerusalem on Saturday.
She will meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday night and with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz on Sunday. She will also meet with PA Finance Minister Salam Fayyad and Sharon's bureau chief, Dov Weisglass.
Shalom met with U.S. Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns early Friday afternoon to prepare for Rice's visit, Israel Radio reported.
Dahlan has refused to offer Israel such a pledge during his talks with Gilad, arguing that it would surely be leaked, impeding efforts to reach a truce with the terrorist groups. He said that the PA would act in its own way to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, and that its internal arrangements are no concern of Israel's.
"Dahlan's plan is a truce and nothing else," a senior security official said Thursday. "He told us explicitly that he has no intention of arresting activists or disarming the terrorist organizations."
Government sources in Jerusalem predicted Thursday that Washington would grant the requested guarantees, in light of President George Bush's remarks on Wednesday, in which he publicly urged the PA to disarm Hamas rather than settling for a cease-fire. American sources said that Rice planned to stress this issue in her talks with Abbas.
----
Security Shift In Gaza Is Test For Peace Bid
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43031-2003Jun27?language=printer
Israel's agreement to withdraw forces from the Gaza Strip and turn over security to the Palestinian Authority, made after intense U.S. pressure on the eve of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's trip to the region, is an enormous gamble that could backfire and leave the new peace effort in tatters, diplomats involved in the effort said.
Officials close to the talks said they are unsure whether the Palestinian Authority has the will, inclination or capacity to confront and eventually dismantle anti-Israeli militant organizations responsible for suicide attacks, as demanded by Israel and the United States. If the Palestinian Authority fails to take action -- or if a massive suicide bombing takes place under Palestinian watch -- then Israel likely will say it has no choice but to move its forces back into Gaza, dooming the U.S.-backed peace plan.
"That is the $64,000 question," an Israeli official said. "What happens if it all falls apart?"
But U.S. officials are eager to bolster the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, believing an easing of Israeli control will give Abbas legitimacy among Palestinians. U.S. officials, who say they are under no illusions about the difficult tasks ahead, also want to demonstrate there is momentum to the process launched by President Bush at summits earlier this month.
So U.S. officials pressed both sides for an early agreement, under the theory that if they waited until they were certain the Palestinians were ready, the moment for action would have passed. "We're optimistic but not naive," one official said.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell earlier this week said a withdrawal of Israeli forces "will give the people of Gaza hope that their situation is improving." He acknowledged there is "a level of risk" in an agreement, but added, "If Palestinians are prepared to and have the capacity to take over security in Gaza, they have tools that they can bring to it."
U.S. officials have agreed to monitor the transfer of responsibilities. Israeli officials said they will give the Palestinians a "grace period" in which to consolidate their forces and prepare for a confrontation with terrorist organizations. In areas vacated by Israeli Defense Forces, Israelis say they are also prepared to pass information on suspected terrorist activities to the Palestinians so they can take action themselves to thwart attacks.
"Nobody expects 100 percent results," an Israeli official said. But the grace period will last "weeks, not months."
"It is an early step," Powell cautioned reporters yesterday. "A lot more has to happen in the days ahead to make sure that this opportunity is not lost."
The ingredients for a deal on Gaza were largely available a week ago, when Powell was in the region. But in a measure of how much both sides want to curry favor with Bush, both Israelis and Palestinians suggested that they delayed completing an agreement until Rice arrived. At the summits, Bush named Rice as his personal representative on the peace plan, giving her instant clout in the region.
The Israelis have always had a direct line into the Bush White House and have largely ignored the State Department. But the Palestinians view Bush's open support of Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, as key to his success in negotiating with the Israelis, and so they also have a reason to build their own White House connection.
The delay in a deal slightly threw off the U.S. agenda, under which a Gaza agreement would have been announced when Powell was in Israel, and then Rice would have arrived a week later to discuss the next steps both sides could take, U.S. officials said. American officials have privately sketched out a series of actions they hope both sides will undertake in the summer and fall, assuming the experiment in Gaza bears fruit.
One senior U.S. official said that there is also an understanding that as long as the Palestinians confronted militants in a verifiable way, then the Israelis will continue to "do something on settlements," such as take visible steps to dismantle settlement outposts. Some outposts have been dismantled since the summits, but many have already been rebuilt, according to the Israeli group Peace Now, which monitors settlements.
The U.S.-backed peace plan, known as the road map, calls for a freeze on settlement activity. Israeli officials said they believe they have reached a quiet understanding with White House officials under which a freeze would be defined as no new settlements, no outward expansion and no confiscation of land, but would allow for additional building and population growth within existing settlements.
U.S. officials say there is no explicit agreement, but they also suggest there are hints and nods from the Israeli side that some outlying settlements might be abandoned on the grounds they cannot be easily defended, though in reality the move would be to provide contiguous borders for a provisional Palestinian state. "It is enough to keep people hopeful but not enough to say we have a deal," another U.S. official said.
----
Accord Reported on Israeli Pullout From Gaza Areas
June 28, 2003
The New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/middleeast/28MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, June 2 - Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached agreement tonight for Israeli forces to begin withdrawing from areas of the Gaza Strip and returning security control to Palestinian officers, officials familiar with the negotiations said.
The withdrawal, which could begin Sunday, would be the first joint step forward, beyond oratory, under a new international peace plan known as the road map.
Palestinian security officials committed themselves to capturing what Israel calls "ticking bombs" - attackers on their way to strike - while Israel promised to permit Palestinians to travel more freely, to ease its military choke points on Gaza's main north-south road, and to draw back forces in northern Gaza, officials said.
After 33 months of alienating conflict, the adversaries agreed to resume joint patrols of Israeli and Palestinian officers in new "security zones" along the road, officials on both sides said.
The agreement came as Palestinian officials said they tentatively planned a joint announcement by the leading militant factions on Sunday of a three-month suspension of violence against Israelis.
The abrupt progress occurred despite another burst of violence, as armored Israeli forces stormed a Gaza hamlet before dawn and killed four militants, at least three of them armed, in what the army said was a successful hunt for a Hamas bombmaker preparing an attack. One Israeli soldier was killed and another was wounded in the raid.
Officials on both sides said the arrival Saturday of Condoleezza Rice, the American national security adviser, had prompted Israelis and Palestinians to set the fighting to one side and bear down on an agreement in order to demonstrate good faith to the Bush administration, which has taken up the peace plan as its own cause.
Referring, perhaps with a touch of self-interest, more to the Palestinians' motivation than to Israel's, a senior Israeli official said of President Bush, "The president has staked so much on this - his personal reputation, his personal commitment - that you can't say no."
American pressure and guarantees were crucial to the progress, and they are certain to ensure a deep American involvement in brokering future disagreements. For example, if the Palestinians fail to act against "ticking bombs," Israel reserves the right to do so. But it must now first inform American monitors, which may put them in the position of refereeing violence between the sides.
"The U.S. will monitor and be the arbiter," the senior Israeli official said.
The peace plan has as its goals not just an end to the conflict but a resolution of the disputes that have divided the two peoples for generations. It envisions a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace and a Palestinian state alongside Israel in three years. The Gaza withdrawal, which was negotiated with the participation of Bush administration officials, is seen by all parties as a small first step, one that could easily be reversed by a surge of violence.
The two sides have also been discussing a withdrawal from the West Bank city of Bethlehem, but the details of that exchange were not worked out tonight. That means Palestinians in the West Bank are unlikely to feel tangible benefits from this agreement for some time, which may pose a political problem for the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.
Two negotiating tracks of Mr. Abbas converged today as negotiations accelerated both with Israel and with the major Islamist factions, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mr. Abbas sought a temporary halt to violence from those groups as the key to assuming policing responsibility from Israeli forces for what by previous agreement are supposed to be Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
While praising as productive their own negotiations with Palestinian leaders, Israeli officials rejected a Palestinian cease-fire as a ruse intended to blunt Israel's military offensives and give militants time to rearm. "Any cease-fire agreement between the terror organizations and the Palestinian Authority is a trap for Israel," said Gideon Meir, the deputy director general of the Foreign Ministry.
Mr. Bush has also called a cease-fire insufficient, saying Hamas must be "dismantled." That demand is diplomatic shorthand for the collection of illegal weapons, arrest of dangerous militants and other steps called for by the peace plan.
Mr. Abbas has argued that he needs to extract concessions from Israel, like an easing of checkpoints that restrict or prevent Palestinian movement between cities, before he will be politically strong enough to confront Hamas, which opposes any negotiated agreement that does not erase the Jewish state. He is hoping the cease-fire will buy him time to gather strength.
Hamas officials made conflicting comments today about halting violence, but top leaders acknowledged that they were finalizing their agreement. Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the movement's spiritual leader, told the Reuters news agency that Hamas "has reached a decision to call a truce, or a suspension of fighting activities."
Palestinian officials said simultaneous announcements were planned for Sunday in Cairo, Gaza City and the West Bank city of Ramallah. Egypt has been a central player for months in the quest for a cease-fire.
But Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator who has been involved in negotiations with Hamas, cautioned that the deal was "tentative." Nabil Aburdeineh, the top aide to the pre-eminent Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, said Palestinian officials were still seeking assurances from the Bush administration that it would press Israel to stop its assassinations of terrorism suspects. "We are in need of American guarantees they are going to stop the assassinations," he said.
Some Hamas leaders reacted with fury to today's raid, however. "I do expect that the coming period of time will be a bitter conflict," Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a top political leader in the Gaza Strip, said today, speaking before Sheik Yassin said Hamas had accepted the cease-fire. "There will be blood, and the fight will be long."
The families who lost sons in today's raid, in the village of Al Mughraka, reacted with fury to talk of a cease-fire. "Peace for who?" asked Suheir al-Ghoul, whose son Amran, 22, was shot dead in the raid. She answered her own question. "Peace for traitors," she said, as she prepared to view Amran's body, bound in a bloody sheet in the mortuary chill of the Aksa Martyrs Hospital morgue. Each of the four swathed bodies, one with staring eyes, lay on a steel tray as grim-faced men jostled for a look.
Near his mother, Ibrahim al-Ghoul, a brother of Amran, held the M-16 he said he had used against the Israelis this morning. He is 15 years old, with just the first wisp of sideburns. "If Hamas accepts the cease-fire," he said, "they are no good."
Standing in the crowd outside the Aksa Martyrs Hospital morgue, Yasir Abu Anas, 23, an English teacher, said one of the slain militants, Muhammad al-Ghoul, was his student until he dropped his studies a year ago, saying he wanted to be like his father, a master bombmaker for Hamas whose whereabouts are unknown.
Mr. Anas said he did not object. "We have to fight," he said in English. "I can't use weapons - I don't do that - but I can exhort people to fight."
Asked if he had exhorted his students to do so, he said: "Of course, it's not a shame to say that. All the time, I tell my students to fight."
He was scornful of talks about a cease-fire among Palestinians or peace with Israel. "This is a conflict of existence, not a conflict of borders," he said. "This won't end until the end of life."
----
Security Shift In Gaza Is Test For Peace Bid
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43031-2003Jun27?language=printer
Israel's agreement to withdraw forces from the Gaza Strip and turn over security to the Palestinian Authority, made after intense U.S. pressure on the eve of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's trip to the region, is an enormous gamble that could backfire and leave the new peace effort in tatters, diplomats involved in the effort said.
Officials close to the talks said they are unsure whether the Palestinian Authority has the will, inclination or capacity to confront and eventually dismantle anti-Israeli militant organizations responsible for suicide attacks, as demanded by Israel and the United States. If the Palestinian Authority fails to take action -- or if a massive suicide bombing takes place under Palestinian watch -- then Israel likely will say it has no choice but to move its forces back into Gaza, dooming the U.S.-backed peace plan.
"That is the $64,000 question," an Israeli official said. "What happens if it all falls apart?"
But U.S. officials are eager to bolster the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, believing an easing of Israeli control will give Abbas legitimacy among Palestinians. U.S. officials, who say they are under no illusions about the difficult tasks ahead, also want to demonstrate there is momentum to the process launched by President Bush at summits earlier this month.
So U.S. officials pressed both sides for an early agreement, under the theory that if they waited until they were certain the Palestinians were ready, the moment for action would have passed. "We're optimistic but not naive," one official said.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell earlier this week said a withdrawal of Israeli forces "will give the people of Gaza hope that their situation is improving." He acknowledged there is "a level of risk" in an agreement, but added, "If Palestinians are prepared to and have the capacity to take over security in Gaza, they have tools that they can bring to it."
U.S. officials have agreed to monitor the transfer of responsibilities. Israeli officials said they will give the Palestinians a "grace period" in which to consolidate their forces and prepare for a confrontation with terrorist organizations. In areas vacated by Israeli Defense Forces, Israelis say they are also prepared to pass information on suspected terrorist activities to the Palestinians so they can take action themselves to thwart attacks.
"Nobody expects 100 percent results," an Israeli official said. But the grace period will last "weeks, not months."
"It is an early step," Powell cautioned reporters yesterday. "A lot more has to happen in the days ahead to make sure that this opportunity is not lost."
The ingredients for a deal on Gaza were largely available a week ago, when Powell was in the region. But in a measure of how much both sides want to curry favor with Bush, both Israelis and Palestinians suggested that they delayed completing an agreement until Rice arrived. At the summits, Bush named Rice as his personal representative on the peace plan, giving her instant clout in the region.
The Israelis have always had a direct line into the Bush White House and have largely ignored the State Department. But the Palestinians view Bush's open support of Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, as key to his success in negotiating with the Israelis, and so they also have a reason to build their own White House connection.
The delay in a deal slightly threw off the U.S. agenda, under which a Gaza agreement would have been announced when Powell was in Israel, and then Rice would have arrived a week later to discuss the next steps both sides could take, U.S. officials said. American officials have privately sketched out a series of actions they hope both sides will undertake in the summer and fall, assuming the experiment in Gaza bears fruit.
One senior U.S. official said that there is also an understanding that as long as the Palestinians confronted militants in a verifiable way, then the Israelis will continue to "do something on settlements," such as take visible steps to dismantle settlement outposts. Some outposts have been dismantled since the summits, but many have already been rebuilt, according to the Israeli group Peace Now, which monitors settlements.
The U.S.-backed peace plan, known as the road map, calls for a freeze on settlement activity. Israeli officials said they believe they have reached a quiet understanding with White House officials under which a freeze would be defined as no new settlements, no outward expansion and no confiscation of land, but would allow for additional building and population growth within existing settlements.
U.S. officials say there is no explicit agreement, but they also suggest there are hints and nods from the Israeli side that some outlying settlements might be abandoned on the grounds they cannot be easily defended, though in reality the move would be to provide contiguous borders for a provisional Palestinian state. "It is enough to keep people hopeful but not enough to say we have a deal," another U.S. official said.
----
Truce Said to Follow Israeli-Palestinian Deal
June 28, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice meets Israeli leaders Sunday to push forward a Middle East peace plan, which could be propelled by a truce by Palestinian militants and an Israeli army withdrawal.
U.S. President George Bush designated Rice and Secretary of State Collin Powell, who was in the region earlier this month, as key representatives to help get both sides behind the plan, which has been battered by an upsurge in violence.
Bush launched the ``road map'' plan at a June 4 summit he held in Jordan with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
Rice is due to have talks with Sharon and other ministers after meeting Abbas Saturday in Jericho in the West Bank.
Her visit puts the weight of U.S. pressure on Palestinians to enforce a truce by militants, and on Israelis to carry out a troop withdrawal in the Gaza Strip and Bethlehem.
In the past few days, Palestinian militant groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas said they had agreed in principle to a conditional, three-month halt to attacks.
Islamic Jihad leader Mohammad al-Hindi, speaking just before Rice arrived in the region, said Saturday he expected the truce to be announced formally within 24 hours. Hamas said on Friday it had decided to suspend attacks.
But the groups, behind scores of bombings against Israelis in a 33-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation, have said they will only stick to the truce if Israel ends track-and-kill raids against militants and meets other terms.
Israel says it did not negotiate the truce and is only bound to agreements with the Abbas government. Israel agreed in principle with the Palestinian Authority Friday to withdraw troops from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
PALESTINIANS URGE U.S. TO BACK TRUCE
Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told Reuters after the talks with Rice that she said the U.S. administration welcomed the truce. ``It should be backed by the Americans or it stands fragile. We urged her to support it.''
Abed Rabbo said he told Rice the Israeli withdrawal agreement needed to be followed by other redeployments.
Details of the move are to be discussed Sunday and must include assurances that the Palestinian security forces will fill in the security gap left by Israeli troops, Israeli senior Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir said.
``To the best of my knowledge, a meeting will be held between commanders on the ground to talk about how the withdrawal will take place. But we need to make sure that Palestinians are really taking over security responsibility.''
Meir said talks with Rice Sunday would cover Israeli demands that Palestinians dismantle militant organizations.
``I assume we will discuss the whole issue of implementing the road map -- the security agreement with the Palestinians, the fact that the (Palestinian) war against the infrastructure of terror is a must,'' Meir told Reuters.
A senior Israeli political source has said soldiers would start withdrawing Monday in the Gaza Strip and open its major roads to ease Palestinian movement in return for Palestinian forces ensuring militants did not attack Israeli targets.
The road map envisions reciprocal Israeli and Palestinian steps and the eventual creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
The Israeli army said late Saturday it arrested five militants from Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades who were planning to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel.
At least one radical group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said it would not abide by the truce.
----
Christians Help Israelis in West Bank
By JASON KEYSER
The Associated Press
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44866-2003Jun28?language=printer
ARIEL, West Bank - Digging into the West Bank soil, Christians from suburban Denver plant seedlings in a vineyard as a blessing for the 18,000 Jews who have built a town here on land the Palestinians claim for their state.
The two dozen visitors are from a congregation that gives around $100,000 each year - much of it raised from selling Christmas fruit baskets - to this settlement, believing the Old Testament obliges them to support the Jewish people's return to lands from which they were exiled 2,000 years ago.
Christians mainly belonging to America's evangelical Protestant churches are among the most outspoken opponents of a new U.S.-backed peace plan that would uproot many Jewish settlers and establish a Palestinian state.
Church leaders such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson have been criticizing President Bush's vision of Palestinian statehood.
Though not of one mind when it comes to Israel or the Middle East, evangelicals account for about a quarter of American voters, according to a University of Akron survey made after the 2000 election. If galvanized by a vocal leadership opposed to Bush's Mideast policy, large blocs of voters could threaten Bush's 2004 re-election bid.
Through rallies, Internet-based letter writing campaigns and visits to Bush and his staff, evangelical leaders have made it clear to the president, himself a Protestant Christian, that they oppose the "road map" plan, already off to a shaky start because of worsening violence since its June 4 launch.
Christian support for Israel has greatly increased during nearly three years of renewed fighting between Israelis and Palestinians.
Some Israelis don't want the support. They take offense at the theological scenario envisaged by some evangelicals of a final, apocalyptic battle between good and evil in which Jesus returns and Jews either accept him or perish.
Looking for allies, however, Israel settler leaders have welcomed Christian backing.
There's no estimate of how much money going to Jewish settlers comes from Christians because contributions don't filter through a central body. Instead, hundreds of churches offer regular donations to about 50 West Bank settlements to buy school equipment, playgrounds, medical supplies and bulletproof buses, said Sondra Oster-Baraz, a Jewish settler who is the local director of a group called Christian Friends of Israeli Communities.
Another group, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, raised $20 million from American Christians for Jewish immigration to Israel last year. This year it's giving $2.8 million to welfare programs in 80 communities in Israel, in some cases triple the amount of funding those cities get from Israel's Ministry of Social Affairs.
Now, some evangelical churches hope to halt the "road map" peace plan.
In May, an evangelical organization called the Jerusalem Prayer Team, led by 300 American church leaders, including Robertson and Falwell, set up an "Adopt a Settler" pledge drive. It aims to give $55 each to 14,000 settlers.
The group's Internet petition uses the slogan "the Bible is my road map" and claims 10,000 signatures from people urging Bush to save the settlements and reverse course on the peace plan.
About 220,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arab lands captured during the 1967 Mideast war.
Many evangelicals take literally God's biblical promise to Abraham to give the Jewish people the Holy Land. But many oppose the interpretation of modern Israel's rise as a harbinger of the Second Coming. And some Israelis worry that the so-called Christian Zionists could become an obstacle to peace efforts.
"They are motivated by a strong sense of solidarity with the idea of Jewish resettlement of ancestral Jewish homeland and are unconcerned with the political, demographic or other ramifications of their actions," said Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee.
Israel's government seems less concerned. "This does not in any way bind the hands of any Israeli government to make decisions," said Zalman Shoval, an adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Leading the trip to Ariel by 25 members of the Denver Faith Bible Chapel, from Arvada, Colo., was Cheryl Morrison, 58, wife of the congregation's pastor and head of the church's projects in Israel.
"Pressuring Israel to do something contrary to God's will is very dangerous," Morrison said, explaining why she thinks the new peace plan is risky.
The group prayed, then planted leafy seedlings into the thin soil on the edge of town.
It has become a yearly ritual, inspired by Jeremiah 31:5 - "Again you will plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria." Samaria is the biblical name of the northern West Bank.
Helen Strait, 60, a retired high school Spanish teacher, buried the roots of a plant with soil. "The Bible says when the Jews return to the land it will bloom like a rose," she said.
Seven years ago the church "adopted" Ariel, and through a massive sale of Christmas fruit baskets to retailers it raises up to $100,000 a year for welfare projects in Israel, most of it for Ariel.
The church's main project here is the funding of a center for about 150 children with learning disabilities.
During their annual tours of Israel, the visitors also perform Israeli pop songs in wobbly Hebrew and Israeli folk dances for audiences of settlers and soldiers.
"We're not anti-Palestinian," said Rod Ginn, 36, one of the singers. "They have to have a place too, just not here."
-------- mideast
Pentagon Delays Releasing 5 Syrians Hurt in U.S. Raid
June 28, 2003
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/worldspecial/28CONV.html
WASHINGTON, June 27 - The Defense Department has delayed the release of five Syrian border guards wounded last week in an American attack on an Iraqi convoy near the Syrian border, American officials said today.
This delay has come despite objections from Syria, the United States State Department and even American military officers on the ground, the officials said.
A State Department official said the Syrians could be freed as early as this weekend. But another administration official said that the State Department had wanted the Syrians handed over earlier this week, and that department officials believed the delay could harm relations with Syria.
Administration officials attributed the delay to civilians at the Pentagon who wanted the guards to be questioned more extensively. An official said the delay did not seem to be based on hard evidence that the Syrian guards had assisted the Iraqi convoy that was the target of the American attack.
According to Defense Department officials, the Pentagon has told the United States Central Command, which is in charge of American forces in Iraq, to avoid releasing the Syrian border guards until now. The Central Command has been ready to release the Syrians since Tuesday, the officials said. They said the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and his top aides wanted American forces on the ground to provide a detailed and convincing account of the attack that absolves Syria of any role in helping the convoy.
A Pentagon spokesman, Larry Di Rita, said in an interview tonight that the Defense Department had recently decided to free the Syrians. But he said bureaucratic delays at the Pentagon as well as the department's desire to sort out the facts of the attack from commanders in the field had held up their release.
"There may be people who are frustrated, but this was a complex operation with a lot of unusual aspects, and it has taken time to sort through it all," Mr. Di Rita said.
The Pentagon has yet to provide anything more than the sketchiest outline of the June 18 attack, in which helicopters, AC-130 gunships and ground troops, backed by Predator drones, struck a housing compound in a village not far from the Syrian border as well as the Iraqi convoy at a crossing point.
American officials have said the attack, carried out by Task Force 20, a Special Operations force, was based on information that the convoy was involved in an operation linked to fugitive Iraqi leaders. But they have not said whether they found anything to confirm their suspicions. A Defense Department official insisted the delay was not aimed at punishing the Syrian government, which the United States accused of allowing foreign fighters and weaponry to cross into Iraq during the war.
Mr. Di Rita told reporters that all five Syrians had been wounded in the American attack - three serious enough to be taken to a hospital in Baghdad - but that they were now together, recovering from their wounds. "It is our intention for them to go back to Syria," he said.
He declined to say how the Syrians had been wounded or whether American troops crossed into Syrian territory during the attack. Administration officials have said at least one vehicle destroyed in the raid was on the Syrian side of the border.
The Syrian protest was lodged by its foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, who met in Damascus on June 19 with Elizabeth Dibble, the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy there.
In Syria's first public comment on the matter, the official Syrian news agency reported Wednesday that Syria was demanding "an explanation from the U.S. government" as well as "the return of the wounded soldiers for treatment in Syria in order to avoid any misunderstanding that might lead to an escalation neither side wants."
Most of the estimated 20 Iraqis detained in the in the raid have been released, the American officials said. Mr. Di Rita said today that the American authorities had so far determined that one Iraqi was killed, but he said it was possible that other Iraqis had been killed as well.
Pentagon officials, who alluded to the secret culture of the Special Operations unit, whose members include commandos from the Army's Delta Force, said they were having a hard time getting detailed reports from field commanders about exactly what had happened. They said they still could not say exactly who had been in the convoy.
A senior Defense Department official said there had been indications that Iraqis in the convoy were heading toward Syria and were communicating with people on the Syrian side of the border. The convoy was detected by American intelligence on June 18 just as reports of the capture of a top lieutenant to Saddam Hussein were becoming public, the official said. American commanders ordered the raid, he said, out of concern that the convoys might be carrying Iraqi fugitives worried about being betrayed by the lieutenant, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti.
In a diplomatic communiqué that is to be issued at the time of the transfer, the United States will emphasize to Syria its obligation to adhere to its promises to interdict Iraqi fugitives, an administration official said. But the official said a draft version of the communiqué did not suggest that Syria did anything wrong in the convoy incident.
-------- pakistan / india
Briefly - Pakistan / US
June 28, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/briefly.htm
India's deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, obliquely criticized the United States Thursday for providing a $3 billion aid package to Pakistan, which New Delhi says sponsors militants in Kashmir. "You have declared yourself the leader of the global coalition against terrorism. Then, why do you give economic aid and arms to those who sponsor and abet terrorism?" Mr. Advani said, without mentioning either country.
--------
ISLAMABAD
Pakistanis Protest Offer of Iraq Force
June 28, 2003
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/international/worldspecial/28STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 27 - President Pervez Musharraf's suggestion this week that Pakistan might send troops to Iraq has set off a storm of protest here with opposition parties saying the president had no right to pledge such a force.
General Musharraf made the comment after meeting President Bush at Camp David on Tuesday and securing an economic assistance package of $3 billion. He said that if certain conditions were met, Pakistan could provide up to 10,000 troops.
One condition, General Musharraf said, is money to finance the expedition, because Pakistan cannot afford to send such a large force itself.
India is also considering an American request to provide troops for Iraq, but such action by Pakistan, a Muslim country where the American and British operation in Iraq is so unpopular, would be particularly significant.
"His undertaking is not likely to be welcomed in the country, where the majority of people view the Americans and the British as an occupation force in Iraq," an editorial in The News, a Pakistani daily, said today.
The paper said sending troops would be "tantamount to becoming part of an invasion force that subjugated a sovereign state."
Several politicians said the move would make the Pakistani Army nothing more than a mercenary force, and they voiced concern about the dangers the troops would face.
The outrage at General Musharraf's suggestion also reflects the growing opposition to his position as both president and military chief, which he has held since he seized power in a coup in October 1999. Lawmakers were gathered in the capital today ahead of a vote of no confidence in Parliament's speaker, a Musharraf loyalist, scheduled for Saturday.
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechen Rebels Kill 5 Soldiers, Policemen
World In Brief
Associated Press
Saturday, June 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43536-2003Jun27?language=printer
VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia -- Chechen rebels ambushed and killed five Russian troops and pro-Moscow policemen responding to an emergency call about the shooting of a village elder, officials said yesterday.
In a separate incident, two Russian servicemen were killed and two others wounded by a land mine in the Chechen capital, Grozny.
The ambushed troops and policemen were responding to an emergency call in Vashindaroi, where about 20 unidentified, camouflaged men dragged the chairman of the council of elders, Alavdi Alsabayev, from his house and killed him, said an official in the Moscow-backed administration.
In another development, the Chechen prosecutor's office said it had identified the woman who blew herself up at a religious ceremony in May, killing 16 people.
Larisa Musalayeva and another female suicide bomber are suspected of trying to kill Akhmad Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya's Moscow-backed administration, the Interfax news agency said.
----
Russian Senate OKs peacekeeping extension
Briefly
June 28, 2003
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/briefly.htm
MOSCOW - The Russian Senate approved at midweek an extension of the mandate of a Russian peacekeeping force in Georgia's troubled separatist region of Abkhazia.
The decision is a post-facto authorization of the role of the 3,000 Russian troops stationed in Georgia's breakaway western region on behalf of the 12-nation Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) for a six-month period ending Monday.
-------- propaganda wars
Master of spin storms studio to become the story
Nicholas Watt, political correspondent
Saturday June 28, 2003
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/story/0,12123,986917,00.html
With the cameras rolling and the news bulletin barely minutes old, the veteran Channel Four presenter Jon Snow heard an extraordinary piece of information on his earpiece.
"Alastair Campbell has entered the building," a producer told Mr Snow. Within two minutes, a stern-faced Mr Campbell was facing Snow across the studio for an unprecedented live interview which broke the first rule of spin doctoring: never become the story.
The decision of Downing Street's communications director to emerge from the shadows was taken at the last minute, after he erupted in fury at the BBC's decision to stand by its controversial story about the government's use of intelligence on Iraq.
An interview request from Channel 4 had been politely turned down earlier in the day, a point Mr Campbell reiterated in a telephone conversation with Snow at 6.45pm - just 15 minutes before the programme went on air.
"Then suddenly in my earpiece at 7.04pm I was told Alastair Campbell has entered the building," Snow said last night. "In two minutes he was sitting in front of me unannounced. He was angry."
Scowling and barely able to control his rage, Mr Campbell mixed up his syntax as he let rip.
"This is an attempt by the government to get the BBC to admit that a fundamental attack upon the integrity of the government, the prime minister, the intelligence agencies - let alone the evil spin doctors in the dark who do their dirty works in the minds of a lot of journalists - let them just accept for once they have got it wrong."
Mr Campbell tore up his own rulebook on spin-doctoring because he is determined to discredit the BBC as the Commons foreign affairs committee completes a report on the government's use of intelligence in the run-up to war.
The main focus of the committee's work is a recent BBC report that Downing Street "sexed up" last September's dossier on Iraq's banned weapons by inserting a claim that a chemical attack could be launched within 45 minutes.
Downing Street appeared to be winning round MPs on the select committee yesterday when Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, told them that the 45 minute claim was inserted by intelligence officials on their own initiative. But Mr Straw clarified the position only after Downing Street - where officials watched his faltering performance on television with alarm - contacted him through his private secretary.
Mr Straw's appearance did little to set Mr Campbell at ease as he awaited the BBC's response to his point-by-point rejection of its report. When the BBC made clear it would fight fire with fire, Mr Campbell decided to go on the offensive.
He initially decided to limit his response to a one-page statement in which he dismissed the BBC's letter as "sophistry and weasel words". Within an hour, however, he decided to abandon caution and marched into Channel Four's studios, where he embarked on his ill-tempered exchanges with Snow.
When Snow asked whether he should now resign, after becoming part of the story, Mr Campbell rolled his eyes and said: "For heaven's sake. The reason I am part of the story is that a BBC journalist made an allegation about me."
Despite his defence, Mr Campbell's many opponents will be wondering whether he has made the mistake of his arch-enemy, Charlie Whelan, who had to resign as Gordon Brown's spin doctor when he found himself in the limelight.
Mr Campbell has been supposed to remain in the shadows after his combative briefings with the press became something of a Westminster soap opera.
The Tories last night seized on Mr Campbell's appearance to claim that he had "completely lost the plot". Alan Duncan, the shadow foreign minister, said: "It was a breathtaking moment. Everyone could see him self-destruct on television.
"He has completely lost the plot, and is now in a vicious personal vendetta against the BBC which will severely hamper his ability to do his job. He is asking us to believe the unbelievable, and his credibility is well and truly shot."
Mr Campbell nearly left Downing Street after the last election when Tony Blair asked him to step back from his day-to-day briefings, and there has been speculation that he is thinking of moving on. He and his partner, Fiona Millar, Cherie Blair's media adviser, were badly bruised by the saga of Mrs Blair's style guru, Carole Caplin, feeling they had been misled.
But Mr Campbell's enemies may have some time to wait, because he retains the confidence of Mr Blair.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
US push for global police force
By Esther Schrader of the Los Angeles Times
and Tom Allard
June 28 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/27/1056683907322.html
The United States would train and lead an international police force, bypassing traditional peacekeeping bodies such as the United Nations and NATO, under a proposal by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
The plan, involving thousands of Americans permanently assigned to peacekeeping, would also be a major reversal by the Bush Administration, which has strongly opposed tying up its troops in such operations.
"I am interested in the idea of our leading, or contributing to in some way, a cadre of people in the world who would like to participate in peacekeeping or peacemaking," Mr Rumsfeld told defence industry leaders in Washington last week.
"I think that it would be a good thing if our country provided some leadership for training of other countries' citizens who would like to participate in peacekeeping ... so that we have a ready cadre of people who are trained and equipped and organised and have communications that they can work with each other."
One defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "It's something that is being discussed in a very serious way by some very serious people right now."
Mr Rumsfeld had not decided how many US troops would be needed, although some estimates put the number at about 10,000. The overall size of the force, or who would pay for it, have not been discussed, but the idea has been raised with countries in Europe and Latin America, officials said.
The proposal follows criticism of the Pentagon for being unprepared for the postwar violence in Iraq, and complaints by the US Army that its troops were not trained for the kind of police work needed there.
Mr Rumsfeld acknowledged that it would have been good to have had such a peacekeeping force before the Iraq war.
But the move would likely be opposed by the US Army, which has resisted efforts to draw its troops into peacekeeping, especially now that it is stretched thin with operations in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
As well, there are questions about how many nations would sign up if such a force were under the control of the US, whose willingness to collaborate with other countries is suspect in many parts of the world.
The retired general William Nash, a 1991 Gulf War commander and leader of NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia, said: "It seems to me that they have now decided that this is a great opportunity for multilateralism. Who knows, maybe somebody will buy it."
Charles Pena, of the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said: "We're not terribly good at peacekeeping, so I don't know why we would be training people to be peacekeepers."
However, a senior defence official said: "The way Secretary Rumsfeld envisions it, anyone with concerns about US peacekeeping should be assuaged, because the whole idea is for us to do less, rather than more, peacekeeping."
Although it would keep a small number of US forces in peacekeeping, it would aim to enlist other countries to contribute the vast majority of troops, with the promise that they would be trained and organised by the US.
Last night, a spokeswoman for the Defence Minister, Robert Hill, would neither confirm nor deny that the Australian military was aware of the Rumsfeld plan. Australia was prepared to join coalitions of the willing if this was in the national interest, she said.
A spokesman for the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, said: "We don't know anything about it. The concept hasn't been raised with us."
The proposal comes as Australia announced that it was ready to send 2000 troops, police and government officials to rebuild the Solomons.
It also coincides with a heated debate over the merits of the UN system, with Mr Downer saying that such bodies often produced "ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator".
-------- courts
Court Won't Hear Antiabortion Activists' Appeal
From News Services
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42886-2003Jun27?language=printer
The Supreme Court yesterday turned back an appeal from antiabortion protesters facing a multimillion-dollar judgment for targeting clinic doctors with "wanted" posters.
The court had been asked to give free-speech protection to the activists, but the Bush administration discouraged justices from taking the case.
Physicians sued the American Coalition of Life Activists and others, claiming they feared for their lives after being listed on a round of Old West-style wanted posters and seeing their personal information displayed on the Internet. Three doctors who had been featured on posters were killed.
The doctors sued under a racketeering law and the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which makes it illegal to incite violence and threaten abortion doctors.
The activists were ordered to pay $108 million in punitive damages and $12 million in compensatory damages. An appeals court told the judge to reduce punitive damages, and that matter is pending. The case divided the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled that protesters tried to intimidate doctors and clinic staff. Appeals court judges who disagreed said the posters were free speech.
The case is American Coalition of Life Activists v. Planned Parenthood, No. 02-563.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Paintball Terrorist?
Another American Citizen Arrested for Supporting Alleged 'Terrorists'
June 28, 2003
by Mike Ewens
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/royer.html
The official indictment is located here (pdf file).
Ismail Royer, an American citizen and a former official of CAIR, was arrested today with six other men, "charged as part of an ongoing probe into alleged jihad training and weapons violations," CNN reports. The report continues:
The men are believed to be linked to Lashkar-E-Taiba, a Kashmir separatist group that the United States designated a terrorist organization in 2001.
Update: The LA Times now reports that 11 men have been arrested, specifically charged with "being part of a Virginia-based cell of a militant Muslim organization called Lashkar-E-Taiba. "
Earlier this month, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported the FBI investigation revolved around twelve men - including Royer - from the Washington area. At the time, the investigation of some of the men's homes turned up supposed terrorist materials:
The items included what agents described as a "terrorist manual" and a "printout of the FBI headquarters building" in downtown Washington, as well as an array of paintball equipment. But one of the inventories listed a "grenade launcher" that a prosecutor said he thinks is a flare gun.
The warrant for Royer issued in March was based on the suspicion he provided material support to a group the State Department defined as a terrorist organization - Lashkar-E-Taiba .
The men's paintball activities also got the attention of the FBI, says Gordon Kromberg, the assistant U.S. attorney handling the case:
"'It's very easy to jump to conclusions on facts like these. You know the guys are playing paintball, they're playing soldiers,' said Kromberg, who said he has donned fatigues himself and played paintball. 'On the other hand, if they're doing more than that, maybe there's a problem.'"
The current "jihad training" and "weapons possession" allegations apparently stem from this popular activity the men engaged in.
However, the men involved understood the possible misconception of their paintball games, and stopped playing after 9/11:
After more than a year of regular outings to a woodsy plot of land in Spotsylvania, the men abruptly stopped the games, fearing what it would look like to a world reeling from 9-11.
One name that appears throughout these stories is a man named Ali Al-Timimi, a Islamic scholar who held lectures in northern Virginia, which Royer attended. The Post-Dispatch reported that Al-Timimi had suggested " that the men travel abroad to Muslim countries after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." This advice stemmed from his worry that a "war on Muslims" would begin after 9/11 and a Muslim male would best avoid America altogether. Royer heeded his advice; temporarily moving to Bosnia - where, in the 1990s, he had fought in the Bosnian army against Slobodan Milosevic.
The FBI believed that these trips were meant to send the men to train as terrorists in foreign lands. Royer maintains that he spent the seven months in Bosnia aiding refugees. The other men investigated also denied claims of "jihad training."
As mentioned, the FBI claims that the impetus for Royer's arrest was his supposed ties to a terrorist group in 2000 - Lashkar-E-Taiba - itself declared "terrorist" in December 2001. The Post Dispatch described Royer's past affiliation:
[Royer] went to Pakistan and helped write press releases and set up a worldwide e-mail list for Lashakar-E-Taiba in 2000. . . . the group's leaders assured him they had no ties to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. He said he gave al-Hamdi and Kwon a contact number for Lashkar-E-Taiba leaders when they traveled to Pakistan.
The full story has yet to surface, so please stay tuned to Antiwar.com for updated reports.
Update: 6:30 EDT, June 27, 2003
The L.A. Times reports that 11 suspects have now been arrested. The charges have also become more severe:
The suspects were described as being part of a Virginia-based cell of a militant Muslim organization called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations and is characterized as strongly anti-U.S.
Although this Kashmiri group has no connections to al-Qaeda, the FBI believes they are aiding extremist organizations:
US officials believe that Lashkar-e-Taiba has no official ties to such global terrorist organizations as Al Qaeda, but that it may be expanding its portfolio to help in Muslim conflicts elsewhere in the world, in part through recruiting, plotting and fund-raising in the United States.
Assistant. Atty. Gen. Christopher Wray claims that the meetings which Royer was a part of - lectures held by Al-Timimi and the paintball gatherings pre-9/11 - are instances of these men "meet[ing] in the shadows of our nation's capital to prepare for violent jihad."
This writer spoke to an unnamed friend of Mr. Royer who said that when Mr. Royer visited Pakistan in 2000, Lashakar-I-Taiba was not considered a terrorist organization and further, that this was his last contact with the organization.
----
Group of Muslims Charged With Plotting Against India
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
June 28, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/politics/28TERR.html
WASHINGTON, June 27 - Federal authorities today charged seven men in the Washington area and an eighth in Philadelphia with stockpiling weapons and conspiring to wage "jihad" against India in support of a terrorist group in Kashmir.
The F.B.I. arrested six of the suspects in morning raids in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania as part of an investigation into ties between American residents and the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is dedicated to the overthrow of Indian rule in Kashmir. Two other men who were also charged in the plot were taken into custody earlier this month, officials said, and three men are still wanted in Saudi Arabia.
Although the officials said there was no evidence of a plot against the United States, they charged that members of the group pledged support for pro-Muslim violence overseas, hoarded high-powered rifles and received military training in Pakistan.
Nine of the 11 defendants are American citizens, and three spent time in the United States military, the officials said. Justice Department officials called these details evidence that terrorist threats can be rooted in American society.
"Right here in this community, 10 miles from Capitol Hill, in the streets of northern Virginia, American citizens allegedly met, plotted and recruited for violent jihad," Paul J. McNulty, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, told reporters today at a press conference in Alexandria, Va.
All the defense lawyers and family members of the men who responded to phone calls today denied the charges and said the young men, all in their 20's and 30's, were being wrongly accused in part because they were Muslims. They said the F.B.I. harassed the defendants after some of them were spotted in rural Virginia playing "paint ball" - a game in which players use pressurized guns to shoot capsules of paint at each other.
"This is all just a falsification," said Ray Royer, a photographer in St. Louis whose son, Randall T. Royer, 30, of Virginia, was charged in the grand jury indictment. "There is no way in the world he did what they say he did."
"These allegations are untrue," said Salim Ali, defense lawyer for Ibrahim al-Hamdi, who is the son of a Yemeni diplomat. "These people were engaging in innocent and lawful activities."
Justice Department officials sketched a more sinister picture.
Seven members of the group traveled to Pakistan in the last several years, and some received military training in small arms, machine guns, grenade launchers and other weaponry at a camp in northeast Pakistan connected to Lashkar-e-Taiba, officials said.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, designated by the United States in 2001 as a terrorist group, opposes the continued Indian rule of the disputed province of Kashmir. It has been blamed for a series of high-profile terrorist attacks in the region, and law enforcement officials said that Iyman Faris - the Ohio truck driver from Kashmir implicated last week in a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge - may have had ties to the group.
The 41-count indictment unsealed today charges the 11 suspects with conspiracy, firearms violations and commencing an expedition against a friendly nation - in this case, India.
The indictment does not link the men to plans for any specific attack overseas, nor is there evidence the men were considering an attack within the United States or had ties to Al Qaeda. And officials were careful not to describe the group as a "sleeper cell" - a term used to characterize suspected terrorist supporters in Lackawanna, N.Y., Seattle and elsewhere.
But Justice Department officials said the indictment demonstrated the government's aggressive strategy since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to prevent rather than react to terrorism.
Officials charged that the men conspired to help Muslims abroad in violent jihad not only in India, but also in Chechnya, the Philippines and other countries. The men, authorities charged, obtained AK-47's and other high-powered weaponry and practiced small-unit military tactics in Virginia using their paint ball weapons to simulate combat.
The indictment relies partly on the testimony of an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator who was close to the group and appears to have given incriminating information about the others as part of an agreement with the government. The indictment charges that the men pledged their willingness to die as martyrs in support of the Muslim cause and gathered in private homes and at an Islamic center in suburban Washington to hear lectures "on the righteousness of jihad" in Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere. They also watched videotapes showing Muslim fighters engaged in jihad, the indictment said.
The informant advised the group in a message in February of this year, celebrating the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, that "the United States was the greatest enemy of Muslims," according to the indictment. It said Masoud Khan, a Maryland man who was indicted, had a document titled "The Terrorist's Handbook," with instructions on how to manufacture and use explosives and chemicals as weapons, as well as a photograph of F.B.I. headquarters in Washington.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Streisand, others aim barbs at Bush
June 28, 2003
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030628-122435-3339r.htm
They're still at it.
Barbra Streisand and film director Michael Moore have taken simultaneous potshots at President Bush, indicating that Hollywood's penchant for politics remains robust and persistent.
"Has this new era of secrecy, lies and deceit in the government and corporations started to infect our states, our cities, our communities, our core values and beliefs?" Miss Streisand said in a statement on her Web site (www.barbrastreisand.com.) posted yesterday.
She accused Mr. Bush of cutting funds to AmeriCorps and inner city schools. She also said the president invaded Iraq based on "faulty intelligence of exaggerated threats."
Miss Streisand continued: "The country sees their leader not telling the truth. These actions send a message that you don't have to mean what you say, that you don't have to care about other people, that you can do whatever you have to do or say whatever you have to say to get ahead."
Americans are not necessarily cowed, however, by Hollywood activists.
The town of Millinocket, Maine, is striking back at the Tinseltown elite who support the creation of a 3.2 million-acre Maine Woods National Park. Residents believe that the proposed logging and development restrictions will destroy the local economy.
They're holding a mock "film festival" today featuring their home movies, free "Moxie" soft drinks and pretzels to draw attention to their cause, and they have invited film actors who serve on the park's "advisory panel" to attend, including Jeff Bridges, Harrison Ford, Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Holly Hunter, Robert Redford, Ted Danson and Meryl Streep.
"We are putting a human face on this. This park would be an economic catastrophe for us," said town Manager Gene Conlogue yesterday. He had not yet received RSVPs from any of the stars.
"They're probably hiding in Hollywood, behind that big sign," he said.
Why do some stars get politically meddlesome?
"Well, some of these people have been politically active for one cause or another for years. Mike Farrell, for example, has been against the death penalty forever," said one Hollywood screenwriter familiar with West Coast politics, referring to the TV actor and antiwar activist.
"And some of them are just jerks," the writer continued. "They like how they look on camera when they're being all sincere. Michael Moore won an Oscar because he made a good movie. But he really needs to know when to shut up on the microphone."
Meanwhile, things got acrimonious indeed with film director Mr. Moore, who vented his rage yesterday in a letter to Mr. Bush addressed "Dear Lt. George Bush," also posted online (www.michaelmoore.com).
"It's not the lying and the doctoring of intelligence that has me all upset. It's that you've had control of Iraq for over two months now - and you couldn't even find the time to plant just a few nukes or vats of nerve gas and at least make it LOOK like you weren't lying to us.
"You see, by not faking some evidence of weapons of mass destruction, it shows that you thought no one would mind if it turned out you made everything up."
The lack of "fake evidence," Mr. Moore wrote, "is a slap in our collective American face. It's as if you are saying, 'These Americans are so damn apathetic and lazy, we won't have to produce any weapons to back up our claims.' "
In a postscript, Mr. Moore added, "anarchy still reigns" in Iraq, "and movie theaters showing 'immoral' Hollywood movies have been forced to shut down. And, hey, this isn't even west Texas."
Americans jab back at celebrities, who don't know when to hush, by boycotting films or recordings, as the Dixie Chicks found out after criticizing Mr. Bush on the eve of the war in Iraq. The country group was boycotted and reviled by fans, which in turn spawned a public debate with country singer Toby Keith, who supported the war with his tune, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue."
The spat was rigorous enough to inspire a new TV special, now airing on CMT, a country music channel.
----
Rachel Corrie: Dignity and solidarity
by Edward Said,
Al-Ahram weekly
June 28, 2003
Media Monitors Network
http://www.mediamonitors.net/edward65.html
In early May I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter's murder on 16 March in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter's body. They had immediately sought out their US senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn't materialise. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family.
But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern showed her by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government's insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her: "You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it."
What shines through all the letters she wrote home and which were subsequently published in London's Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same. We have heard so much recently about the roadmap and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the collective punishment meted out by the combined might of the US and Israel. It is that extraordinary fact which is the reason for the existence of a roadmap and all the numerous so-called peace plans before them, not at all because the US and Israel and the international community have been convinced for humanitarian reasons that the killing and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing, which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings and all its mistakes, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project, and so- called solutions have perennially been proposed that minimise, rather than solve, the problem. The official Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word "occupation" or not or whether or not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals nor ever to admit that their rights have been scandalously violated all along by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority of American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace.
Moreover, the roadmap says nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie's work in Gaza recognised, however, was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national community, and not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there, but is recognised the world over. In the past six months I have lectured on four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people which is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.
Whenever the facts are made known there is immediate recognition and an expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its behalf. It is an extraordinary thing that Palestine was a central issue this year during both the Porto Alegre anti-globalisation meetings as well as during the Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of the world-wide political spectrum. Because our fellow citizens in this country are fed an atrociously biased diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media -- the occupation is referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks while the apartheid wall 25 feet high, five feet thick, and 350 kilometres long that Israel is building is never even shown on CNN and the networks (or so much as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the roadmap) and the war crimes, gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming, house demolitions, agricultural destruction and death imposed on Palestinian civilians are never shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that they are -- one shouldn't be surprised that Americans in the main have a very low opinion of Arabs and Palestinians.
After all, please remember that all the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian. Look at the pusillanimity of the media during the buildup to an illegal and unjust war against Iraq, and look at how little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society done by the sanctions, and how relatively few accounts there were of the immense world-wide outpouring of opinion against the war. Hardly a single journalist except Helen Thomas has taken the administration to task for the outrageous lies and confected "facts" that were spun out about Iraq as an imminent military threat to the US before the war, just as now the same government propagandists, whose cynically invented and manipulated "facts" about WMD are now more or less forgotten or shrugged off as irrelevant, are let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable situation for the people of Iraq that the US has now single-handedly and irresponsibly created there. Whatever one thinks of Saddam Hussein, and he was a vicious tyrant, he provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place.
It is no wonder, then, with the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticising Israel for its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians or criticising the US government and being called "anti-American" for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation, that the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture, history and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, has cowed far too many of us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times, unmodernised and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilised to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda.
No one would deny that most Arab countries are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to ruthless forms of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as the New York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally controlled, and that there is no freedom of opinion, no civil institutions, no functioning social movements for and by the people. Press laws notwithstanding, you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a communist party newspaper as well as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies are given credit for; satellite channels are bursting with diverse opinions in a dizzying variety; civil institutions are, on many levels having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates, and research institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must be done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are on the way.
In Palestine alone there are over a thousand NGOs and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort made to vilify, stop or mutilate it on a daily basis. Under the worst possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor has it crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organisations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offence to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn't worked and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must help them to understand this, not by suicide bombs but by rational argument, mass civil disobedience, organised protest, here and everywhere.
The point I am trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in particular in more comparative and critical ways than superficial and dismissive books like Lewis's What Went Wrong and Paul Wolfowitz's ignorant statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world even begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a real society with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents that cannot be easily caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism. The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one expresses solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated, frustrating discouragement and crippling divisiveness. Remember the solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.
I want now to speak about dignity, which of course has a special place in every culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and humanists. I shall begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong Orientalist, and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans and Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy and understanding that are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures like those of Europe and America that had a Renaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Among many others, it is the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this rubbish, which has alas been picked up by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab intellectuals -- I don't need to mention any names here -- who have seen in the atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more diseased and more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism is a sign of a wider distortion that has occurred.
We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the US account for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the 20th century. Behind all that specious nonsense about wrong and right civilisations, is the grotesque shadow of the great false prophet Samuel Huntington who has led a lot of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct civilisations battling against each other forever. On the contrary, Huntington is wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilisation exists by itself; none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are completely exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of community, love, value for life and all the others. To suggest otherwise is the purest racism, of the same stripe as people who argue that Africans have naturally inferior brains, or that Asians are really born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race. This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today against Arab and Muslims, and we must be very firm in not even going through the motions of arguing against it. It is the purest drivel. On the other hand, there is the much more credible and serious stipulation that, like every other instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and dignity expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style. Such expressions needn't resemble or be a copy of one approved model suitable for everyone to follow.
The whole point about human diversity is that it is in the end a form of deep co-existence between very different styles of individuality and experience that can't all be reduced to one superior form: this is the spurious argument foisted on us by pundits who bewail the lack of development and knowledge in the Arab world. All one has to do is to look at the huge variety of literature, cinema, theatre, painting, music and popular culture produced by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that needs to be assessed as an indication of whether or not Arabs are developed, and not just how on any given day statistical tables of industrial production either indicate an appropriate level of development or show failure.
The more important point I want to make, though, is that there is a very wide discrepancy today between our cultures and societies and the small group of people who now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such power been so concentrated in so tiny a group as the various kings, generals, sultans, and presidents who preside over the Arabs. The worst thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they do not represent the best of their people. This is not just a matter of no democracy. It is that they seem to radically underestimate themselves and their people in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of change, frightened of opening up their societies to their people, terrified most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United States. Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler's power.
This is the real failure -- how, during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader had the dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine, it is an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein's appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the US to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the US to take over the Arab world, allegedly on behalf of its citizens, and bring it something called "democracy", especially at a time when the school system, the health system, and the whole economy in America are degenerating into their worst levels since the 1929 Depression. Why was the collective Arab voice not raised against the US's flagrantly illegal intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure of nerve, dignity, and self-solidarity.
With all the Bush administration's talk about guidance from the Almighty, doesn't one Arab leader have the courage just to say that, as a great people, we are guided by our own lights and traditions and religion? But nothing, not a word, as the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified that his country may be next. How unfortunate was the embrace of George Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by the combined leadership of the major Arab countries this month. Was there no one there who had the guts to remind George W what he has done to humiliate and bring more suffering to the Arab people than anyone before him, and must he always be greeted with hugs, smiles, kisses and low bows? Where is the diplomatic and political and economic support necessary to sustain an anti-occupation movement on the West Bank and Gaza? Instead, all one hears is that foreign ministers preach to the Palestinians to mind their ways, avoid violence, and keep at the peace negotiations, even though it has been obvious that Sharon's interest in peace is zero. There has been no concerted Arab response to the separation wall, or to the assassinations, or to collective punishment, only a bunch of tired clichés repeating the well-worn formulas authorised by the State Department.
The thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel, and the US precisely because he has no constituency, is not an orator or a great organiser, or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasser Arafat. They see in him a man who will do Israel's bidding. But how could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce words written for him, like a ventriloquist's puppet, by some State Department functionary, in which he commendably spoke about Jewish suffering but then amazingly said next to nothing about his own people's suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-dignity as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century just because the US and Israel have told him he must? And when Israel simply says that there will be a "provisional" Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer sadistic, systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian, man, woman, child, I must confess to a complete lack of understanding as to why a leader or representative of that long-suffering people doesn't so much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity? Has he forgotten that he is not just an individual but also the bearer of his people's fate at an especially crucial moment?
Is there anyone who was not bitterly disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and stand with dignity -- the dignity of his people's experience and cause -- and testify to it with pride, and without compromise, without ambiguity, without the half embarrassed, half apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white father?
But that has been the behaviour of Palestinian rulers since Oslo, and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth do they always think it absolutely necessary to read scripts written for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs in Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in America, is that we are our own people with a heritage, a history, a tradition and above all a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing our real aspirations, aspirations that derive from the experience of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian since 1948. Not one of our political spokespeople -- the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel-Nasser's time -- ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done and where we want to go.
Slowly, however, the situation is changing, and the old regime made up of the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars of this world is passing and will gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most promising are made up of the members of the National Palestinian Initiative; they are grass-roots activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a desk, nor juggling bank accounts, nor looking for journalists to pay attention to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working classes, and young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors, lawyers and working people who have kept society going while also fending off daily Israeli attacks. Second, these are people committed to the kind of democracy and popular participation undreamt of by the Authority, whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself. Lastly, they offer social services to the unemployed, health to the uninsured and the poor, proper secular education to a new generation of Palestinians who must be taught the realities of the modern world, not just the extraordinary worth of the old one. For such programmes, the NPI stipulates that getting rid of the occupation is the only way forward, and that in order to do that a representative national unified leadership be elected freely to replace the cronies, the outdated and the ineffectiveness that have plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century.
Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans, and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from ISM, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.
I conclude with one last irony. Isn't it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn't it time we caught up with our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere realise, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologise for or anything to be embarrassed about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done and proud to represent them.
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Student leaders: Arrest of 4,000 protesters shows crisis
6/28/2003
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-06-28-iran_x.htm
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Public opposition to Iran's ruling clerical establishment is deepening, a student leader said Saturday, as officials reported that more than 4,000 people were arrested during this month's pro-reform protests.
The count of arrests was dramatically higher than authorities' earlier reports, which had only 520 people - mostly "hooligans" - as a result of the June 10-14 protests against the hard-line clerics.
Among the 4,000 arrested were about 800 students and 30 key student leaders, Iran's prosecutor general, Abdolnabi Namazi, said, according to the state-run daily Iran.
Namazi said about half of those detained were almost immediately freed, while some 2,000 remained in jail, the paper reported Saturday.
"The confirmation of 4,000 arrests shows how insincere the rulers are and how the crisis has deepened in Iran," student leader Saeed Allahbadashti told The Associated Press.
The protests, which were the largest in months, began as students demonstrations against plans to privatize universities and snowballed into broader displays of opposition to Iran's hard-line clerical establishment, led by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The demonstrations largely ended after the deployment of hundreds of security forces and unleashing of pro-clergy thugs - armed with knives and batons - to attack protesters.
Allahbadashti, one of few student leaders not imprisoned during the protests, said the establishment has lost its legitimacy through its crackdown on the protests.
"The judicial authorities are openly lying to the nation. First, they said few hooligans been arrested. Now, they confirm the arrest of 800 students. They are buying only greater hatred from the people whose call for change has been ignored," he said.
Meanwhile, authorities are trying to prevent a new round of student protests to mark the fourth anniversary of a July 9, 1999 attacks on Tehran University dormitories by pro-clerical militants.
Those attacks killed one student, injured at least 20 others and triggered six days of nationwide anti-government protests, the worst since the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Authorities have banned any marches to remember the raid. "An incident took place a few years back and there is no necessity to mark the anniversary," the Iran quoted Namazi, the prosecutor, as saying.
Students have vowed to defy the ban and warned that their accumulated wrath was about to explode.
Protesters have long focussed their anger toward Iran's unelected hard-line clerics, while supporting President Mohammad Khatami, who was elected by a landslide on promises of delivering social, political and economic reforms.
But this month's student-led protests not only called for the conservative establishment's ouster but also denounced Khatami for failing to fulfill his promises.
Political analyst Mostafa Kavakebian said the government's iron-fisted approach to dealing with pro-reform students would make matters worse.
"History shows that use of force against civil protests only backfires. It's not logical for the establishment to get harsh with students," said Kavakebian, who also heads a reformist political party.
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