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NUCLEAR
Beware of Beijing opportunism
Cheney to Promote Nuke Reactors to China
Viequenses ask for depleted uranium tests
U.S. offered to supply India with nuclear weapons: PM
Japanese Opposition to forces in Iraq
North Korea says standoff with US at 'brink of nuclear war'
N.Y. Lab to Clean Radioactive Reactor
Nuke Site Workers Fear Health Problems
Clinton Expresses Doubts His Response To al-Qaeda Attacks
Kerry Assails Bush's Foreign Policy
Powell Calls U.S. Casualties 'Disquieting'
MILITARY
Warlord's Force Seizes a City In Afghanistan
Lamenting Sudan's War And Working for Peace
A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity
US drops ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Iraq
Philippines, Mongolia to join US-Thai Cobra Gold exercises
Malaysia to haul some 10,000 national service AWOL youths to court
Pentagon: Tanker Plan Needs Major Changes
Bulgaria will not pull troops out of Iraq: FM
General May Bolster Force in Iraq;
In Fallujah Marines Try to Quell 'a Hotbed of Resistance'
U.S. Declares Cease-Fire in Falluja, but Clashes Continue
Signs That Shiites and Sunnis Are Joining to Battle Americans
Iraq Council Demands Immediate Cease - Fire
Why Falluja Remains a Crossroads for Collision
The Phantom Sovereign
Putin Doubts Expanded NATO Meets New Threats
The Battle for Chechen Oil
Dark Matter
A Little Light Is Shed on Intelligence Digests
Governors ask Army to reconsider dumping byproducts of deadly nerve agent
War Funding Is Adequate For Year, Pentagon Says
Marshal Orders Tapes Of Scalia Talk Erased
Legal Experts Express Concern About Erasure of Scalia Tapes
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Going the Extra Mile
Rice Defends Pre-9/11 Anti-Terrorism Efforts
Zeroing In on One Classified Document
In Testimony to 9/11 Panel, Rice Sticks to the Script
White House Works to Declassify Al Qaeda Threat Memo
Kidnap: the new weapon of terror
ENERGY
Reliant Indicted for Manufacturing California Energy Crisis
Power Firm Charged in Calif. Energy Crisis
Reliant Goes to Court Over Energy Crisis
OTHER
Hong Kong-bound Chinese water heavily polluted, says Greenpeace
Indian River Lagoon Restoration Wins Florida Approval
Reliant Indicted for Manufacturing California Energy Crisis
Does the Great White North deserve its green reputation?
New Drug Law's Cost Impact Debated
Past Season's Flu Worst in 4 Years
ACTIVISTS
Peace trekkers set off for British nuclear arms facility
Protest of IMF Planned This Month
More Than 1,000 Protesters Held in Nepal
20,000 Armenian Protesters Demand President Quit
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
Beware of Beijing opportunism
04/09/2004
GIO Taiwan Commentary
By S.P. Seth
http://publish.gio.gov.tw/FCJ/current/04040962.html
The on-again, off-again Beijing-sponsored talks aimed at persuading Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear arms program are off again. Though a further meeting of the six participants--North and South Korea, the United States, Russia, China and Japan--will likely be held in a few months, for now the likelihood of a breakthrough is nowhere in sight.
At the recently concluded Beijing conference, Pyongyang offered a nuclear freeze in return for security guarantees, economic aid and diplomatic recognition. It wants the scope of the freeze to be limited to the terms outlined in the 1994 agreement. In other words, the freeze would apply only to its plutonium-based program, allowing it to continue the uranium-based program it claims is limited to peaceful applications; and the United States and its allies would be obliged to abide by their earlier promise to build two nuclear power plants without the capacity to produce weapons-grade fuel.
Washington is not buying into it because, as one U.S. delegate put it, "I'm not aware of any 'peaceful' nuclear program" in North Korea. According to James Kelly, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, "The U.S. seeks the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all nuclear programs, including plutonium and uranium-based weapons." Pyongyang denies having a uranium-enrichment program, although some time ago it apparently admitted its existence.
Though there has been no substantive progress toward a resolution, the United States and its allies at least appear to be relieved in the belief that Beijing is likewise unhappy with Pyongyang's nuclear program. They seem beholden to China for its intercession, feeling that without it, there probably would be no talks, bringing Northeast Asia to the brink of catastrophe.
This perception of Beijing's attitude seems questionable, however. It is known that China helped Pakistan with its atomic weapons program and that Pakistan's nuclear weapons program director Abdul Qadeer Khan and other highly placed Pakistani officials and military leaders sold Chinese nuclear know-how to North Korea, Libya and others. Referring to Libya's coming clean to International Atomic Energy Agency investigators, the Sydney Morning Herald commented editorially, "A tale emerged of an illicit global supply chain peddling nuclear secrets, to which Libya had turned. The trade went back at least two decades to China, which had aided Pakistan's chief scientist in developing his nation's illegal nuclear arsenal." It strains credibility to imagine that Beijing was totally unaware of what these Pakistanis were up to. Indeed, it is reasonable to conclude that Beijing intentionally fosters the emergence of multiple small nuclear entities as a diversionary tactic to dilute U.S. power while keeping India's attention confined to South Asia and thwarting its aspiration to compete as an Asian power center.
The point to make is that China has not been averse to using dissemination of its nuclear know-how and encouragement of nuclear proliferation as a strategic tool. Similarly, it is not averse to using North Korea to maximize its leverage with the United States and expand its regional influence.
Washington is banking on China's playing a constructive role in bringing about North Korea's de-nuclearization, and Beijing has professed that it shares U.S. concerns and is doing its best to accommodate them. At the same time, however, Beijing has claimed that its influence with the quirky Kim Il-sung regime is limited and that Washington must therefore grant China latitude in trying to moderate its intransigence. Consequently, China has taken on the image of honest broker and peacekeeper.
Beijing is playing a skillful diplomatic game, in no hurry to exhaust its usefulness as middleman. In any case, the issue will be around for quite a while, assuring Beijing's stage play a long run. If it were really serious about squelching North Korea's nuclear aspirations, it could put the squeeze on Pyongyang by cutting off fuel and food supplies from China. It is amazing, then, how successfully Beijing has been able to sell itself as peacemaker in the North Korean nuclear imbroglio.
As long as Pyongyang is assured of its lifeline from China, it can hold out against U.S. pressure indefinitely. Dragging out the crisis in this way gives Beijing room to maneuver so as to reinforce U.S. dependence on it. As an indication of its confidence in that dependence, Beijing had no compunctions about omitting from a Xinhua News Agency report on the talks Kelly's demand for complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all North Korean nuclear programs. Evidently, it believes that Washington's bottom line need not be taken seriously.
Over-extended as it is in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is in no position to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korean nuclear installations. Depending upon Beijing but without any real help from it, Washington, Tokyo and Seoul can only look forward to a widening conflict with Pyongyang, enabling Beijing to continue to prey on others' fears. If the United States and its allies do not rethink their strategic goals, China is likely to expand its regional influence at their expense.
--S.P. Seth is a free-lance writer based in Sydney, Australia.
--------
Cheney to Promote Nuke Reactors to China
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China-Reactors.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- On a trip to China next week to talk about high-stakes issues like terrorism and North Korea, Vice President Dick Cheney will have another task -- making a pitch for Westinghouse's U.S. nuclear power technology.
At stake could be billions of dollars in business in coming years and thousands of American jobs. The initial installment of four reactors, costing $1.5 billion apiece, would also help narrow the huge U.S. trade deficit with China.
China's latest economic plan anticipates more than doubling its electricity output by 2020 and the Chinese government, facing enormous air pollution problems, is looking to shift some of that away from coal-burning plants. Its plan calls for building as many as 32 large 1,000-megawatt reactors over the next 16 years.
No one has ordered a new nuclear power reactor in the United States in three decades and the next one, if it comes, is still years away. So, China is being viewed by the U.S. industry as a potential bonanza.
Cheney's three-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai next week is part of a weeklong trip to Asia that will also include a stop in Tokyo. He departed Washington on Friday.
A senior administration official, briefing reporters about the trip, said Cheney will not ``pitch individual commercial transactions.'' But he intends to make clear ``we support the efforts of our American companies'' and general access to China's markets, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some critics are concerned about such technology transfers.
``This pitch could not be more poorly timed,'' Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, told a hearing of the House International Relations Committee recently.
Citing recent Chinese plans to help Pakistan build two large reactors that are capable of producing plutonium, he said it is not the time for China to be rewarded with new reactor technology. U.S. officials said the Chinese have given adequate assurances that such sales will not pose a proliferation risk.
Bid solicitations for four new reactors are expected to be issued by the Chinese within months.
The leading competitors are U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Co. and a French rival, Areva, which is peddling its next-generation reactor built by its Framatome subsidiary.
Westinghouse is putting its hopes on its 1,100 megawatt AP1000 reactor, an advanced design that is still waiting approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before it can be built in the United States. Westinghouse, owned by the British nuclear firm BNFL, is the only U.S.-based manufacturer of a pressurized water reactor, the type of design China has said it wants to pursue.
``Clearly the China market is very important to the industry and a supplier like Westinghouse,'' said Vaughn Gilbert, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh-based reactor vendor. ``The Chinese market is one that we're pursuing.''
Each of the AP1000 reactors are expected to cost about $1.5 billion. ``We would assume there would be more than one order,'' Gilbert said, since China has indicated it wants a standardized design across its reactor program. A successful bid could mean 5,000 American jobs, Gilbert said in an interview.
For the nuclear industry, the potential windfall goes beyond building the power plants.
``The opportunity is not just in selling the Chinese a number of reactors, but engaging them for a longer term in a strategic partnership,'' says Ron Simard, who deals with future plant development at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. That could mean future construction contracts as well as plant service business.
The reactor business has been nonexistent in the United States since the 1970s. No American utility has ordered a new reactor since the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
So, vendors like Westinghouse are relying on business elsewhere, especially Asia.
China currently has nine operating reactors, including French, Canadian, Russian, and Japanese designs as well as their own model, producing 6,450 megawatts of power, or about 1.4 percent total capacity. Chinese officials have estimated that by 2020 the country will need an additional 32,000 megawatts from its nuclear industry, or about 32 additional reactors.
Even with the surge in reactor construction, nuclear power will only account for 8 percent of China's future electricity needs. Chinese officials said at an energy conference in Washington last year their country must more than double its coal-fired generation and build more dams, erect windmills and tap natural gas to meet future electricity demands.
-------- depleted uranium
Viequenses ask for depleted uranium tests
Friday, April 9th, 2004
(AP)
http://www.puertoricowow.com/html/general-detail.asp?amaspHidden_listActive=true&amaspField_newshd=Viequenses%20ask%20for%20depleted%20uranium%20tests&amaspHidden_newshd_dataType=string
SAN JUAN - The recent controversy regarding soldiers alleging to have been contaminated in Iraq with depleted uranium has prompted the Committee for the Rescue & Development of Vieques to demand that the government test Viequenses for that specific pollutant.
At least two soldiers of Puerto Rico descent who are members of the New York National Guard stationed in Iraq have claimed to have been contaminated with depleted uranium found in U.S. armed forces' weapons.
The U.S. Navy has confirmed the use of uranium capped bullets in the military practices it used to conduct in Vieques.
"The local Health Department has been completely negligent in not developing a comprehensive program to test our population for depleted uranium," said committee spokeswoman Nilda Medina.
The group demanded that the Health Department conduct a study promised several years ago and to test for traces of heavy metals.
"We have no doubt that the high cancer rate among our people is directly related to bullets capped with depleted uranium and other toxic material accumulated here after decades of military training," Medina said in a prepared statement.
-------- india / pakistan
U.S. offered to supply India with nuclear weapons: PM
Friday, Apr. 9, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040409.windia9/BNStory/International/
Bhubaneshwar, India - The United States offered to supply India with nuclear weapons in an attempt to dissuade it from launching nuclear tests in 1998, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told an election rally Friday.
Mr. Vajpayee told the rally in Bhubaneshwar, capital of eastern Orissa state, he rejected Washington's offer because India needed to demonstrate it was capable of building its own nuclear arms.
"When I told them (Americans) you also have made that bomb, they replied when required you can take that from us. I told them frankly this bomb needs to be made and not borrowed," Mr. Vajpayee said.
He said the offer came as the United States encouraged India not to go ahead with nuclear tests in 1998.
"But we went ahead with the tests," Mr. Vajpayee said.
Both India and its rival, Pakistan, have an undeclared number of nuclear weapons.
The prime minister reiterated the government's position that India would never be the first to launch a nuclear attack, but added: "We will not hesitate to use it if somebody used the bomb against us."
Mr. Vajpayee made the comments during a rally for a general election that will be held in four phases between April 20 and May 10.
-------- japan
Japanese Opposition to forces in Iraq
April 9, 2004
(Save Iraqi Children Nagoya)
We -- large numbers of ordinary Japanese citizens -- opposed to the participation of Japanese military forces in the illegal attack on the people of Iraq by the United States and Great Britain, appeal to the Iraqi Mujahiddin not to kill our three fellow Japanese brothers. They share with us the same determination to stop the Japanese government from occupying your country.
We do not accept your hostage-taking, which only provide fuel to terrorism by states such as USA. We want you to know that very large numbers of Japanese people have been strongly opposing the presence of Japanese military forces in your country. However, please remember killing the three innocent Japanese you are now holding hostage, will not solve the problem. Instead it will only create hatred towards your country by our people.
We, the people of Japan, are in solidarity with the people of Iraq. Please be patient, and give us more time to convince our Government to withdraw from Iraq.
Till then, we urgently call upon your patriotism to avoid breaking the historical friendship between the Japanese and the Arab people.
Sincerely, Nobue Kugimiya (Save Iraqi Children Nagoya)
-------- korea
North Korea says standoff with US at 'brink of nuclear war'
SEOUL (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409115806.6oukxw6z.html
North Korea said Friday the standoff over its atomic ambitions was on the brink of nuclear war as US Vice President Dick Cheney headed to the region for talks with key Asian allies.
The Stalinist state's official news agency accused Washington of "driving the military situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war" with plans for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea.
Cheney is expected in Tokyo on Saturday on the first leg of an Asian tour that also takes him to China and South Korea.
North Korea described six-party talks held in Beijing in February as "fruitless," their harshest assessment so far of the meeting that brought together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
"The US demand that the DPRK (North Korea) scrap its nuclear programme first is the main obstacle in the way of solving the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the US," the Korean Central News Agency said in a commentary.
"It is a well-known fact that the second round of the six-way talks held in Beijing last February proved fruitless due to the US demand that the DPRK dismantle its nuclear program first."
Washington is demanding the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear prorgammes, both plutonium and enriched uranium schemes, before it will offer concessions to the impoverished state.
Pyongyang denies having a uranium programme and has said it will freeze its plutonium weapons programme in return for simultaneous rewards from Washington.
A new round of six-party talks is expected before the end of June while working parties are supposed to be set up to resolve address contentious issues.
South Korea's foreign ministry said all participating countries were ready for working level talks apart from North korea, which has yet to give the go ahead.
In the commentary the North Korean news agency said Pyongyang had no choice but to boost its nuclear weapons drive in the face of US intransigence and its "moves to put the strategy of pre-emptive nuclear attack into practice."
Cheney's trip to Asia has been overshadowed by the deteriorating security situation in Iraq where insurgents are threatening to kill three Japanese hostages unless Tokyo pulls out troops from the war-torn region.
Seven South Koreans were released earlier Friday after also falling into the hands of insurgents.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
N.Y. Lab to Clean Radioactive Reactor
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Reactor-Cleanup.html
UPTON, N.Y. (AP) -- The Energy Department has proposed a $96.8 million cleanup plan to remove radioactive material from a shuttered reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, scrapping a proposal to entomb it in concrete instead.
The proposal, made Thursday at a meeting of the lab's citizens advisory committee, was hailed by environmentalists who had criticized the agency's plan, announced in December, to entomb the reactor for up to 87,000 years.
``This is a major victory for environmentalists and the public,'' advisory committee member Adrienne Esposito said.
The plan, which would remove more than 99 percent of the radioactive graphite from the reactor, still requires review from regulatory agencies as well as a public comment period starting in June. The project should take two to four years, said Frank Crescenzo of the Department of Energy's Brookhaven office. Some surrounding soil would also be taken away under the plan.
The graphite reactor operated from 1950 to 1969. The removal of graphite and the cleanup of mercury from the nearby Peconic River is part of the final process of decommissioning the reactor at the Brookhaven National Lab.
``I am pleased that local families will not have to wait 87,000 years wondering about the safety of their drinking water,'' said Rep. Tim Bishop, who had helped organize discussions to consider new ways to deal with the reactor.
Both New York senators and Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy also hailed the decision.
Said Crescenzo: ``The congressional delegation and the public made it clear that the graphite was a big concern for them. Their concern certainly influenced the process.''
Brookhaven Lab, located in eastern Long Island, employs more than 2,800 scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff, and has an annual budget of $463 million. Major programs include nuclear and high-energy physics, physics and chemistry of materials, environmental and energy research, nonproliferation, neuroscience and medical imaging.
On the Net:
http://www.bnl.gov
-------- washington
Nuke Site Workers Fear Health Problems
By SHANNON DININNY
04/09/04
Associated Press
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/ap/ap_story.html/National/AP.V3296.AP-Hanford-Workers.html
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP)--Steve and Virginia Wallace know the symptoms of exposure to chemical vapors: headaches, nosebleeds, a metallic taste.
With a combined 30 years working at the Hanford nuclear site, the two respiratory equipment specialists believe workers there aren't being adequately protected.
The state and federal governments are investigating procedures at Hanford's so-called tank farms amid allegations that corners are being cut--and workers endangered--to speed cleanup of the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
More than 90 workers have sought medical care for exposure at the tank farms in the past two years, according to data gathered by the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group. Few workers will speak publicly.
A 1997 draft report by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory concluded that the risk of contracting cancer from exposure to the vapors could be as high as 1.6 in 10.
In the industrial world, normal risk is for one worker in 10,000 to contract cancer from exposures in the workplace, according to Tim Jarvis, a former researcher at the laboratory and peer reviewer of the report. Jarvis now is a private consultant often contracted by the Government Accountability Project.
``The report shows that exposure to tank vapors is extremely hazardous and will most likely lead to fatal cancers in the workers if exposure is continued,'' he said.
``My own personal opinion is I'm not being protected,'' said Virginia Wallace, who takes samples inside the tanks. Her husband is an instrument technician. ``People are afraid to seek medical attention. I've been scared.''
For 40 years, the Hanford reservation made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Today, work there centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup to be finished by 2035 under an accelerated schedule pushed by the Bush administration.
The most deadly waste, about 53 million gallons of radioactive liquid, sludge and saltcake, sits in 177 underground tanks less than 10 miles from the Columbia River. Plans call for turning much of that waste into glass logs and burying it at a nuclear waste repository.
Experts have identified as many as 1,200 chemicals, including some known cancer-causing agents, in the tanks.
CH2M Hill, the Colorado-based contractor hired to handle cleanup, and the Energy Department, which manages the cleanup, say most of the chemicals are diluted and pose no danger to workers. Only three--ammonia, nitrous oxide and butanol--have been found in the tanks' air cavities at levels exceeding occupation exposure limits, CH2M Hill said.
``No one has received a toxic dose of these chemicals,'' said Rob Barr, director of environment safety and quality for the Energy Department's Office of River Protection.
``We are concerned and they should be concerned,'' Barr said. But, he added, ``We have a very high assurance that there are no long-term effects of the chemicals that are out there, because they are at such a low level.''
CH2M Hill says the rising number of exposures are, in part, a result of educating workers about vapors and encouraging them to report unusual smells.
More than 800 people work in the tank farms for CH2M Hill. The total work force at Hanford is about 11,000 people.
Following four vapor incidents in two weeks last month--which sent nine workers for medical evaluations--CH2M Hill halted routine work in the tank farms. The company has restarted some work since, but employees who enter the tank farms must wear respirators.
Critics argue that respirators can't protect against all 1,200 chemicals.
Last month, the Energy Department began formally investigating the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, the private contractor that monitors and provides health care to Hanford workers. The contractor has denied allegations that include fraud and medical-records mismanagement. Officials there did not return telephone messages seeking comment Friday.
A report CH2M Hill commissioned last fall by four independent experts cited failures to communicate procedural changes or safety issues about vapors.
Susan Eberlein, vice president of safety for CH2M Hill, said the company is continuing to educate employees about vapors and improve communications.
``We're trying to minimize exposures as much as possible,'' she said.
-------- us politics
Clinton Expresses Doubts His Response To al-Qaeda Attacks
Big News Network.com
Friday 9th April, 2004
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=2c35ecf240ec5422
The commission probing the Sept. 11 terror attacks met Thursday with former President Bill Clinton in a three-and-half hour, closed-door session during which, commissioners said, he expressed some doubts about his administration's response to terrorist attacks by al-Qaida.
"He was very frank, he gave us a lot of very helpful insight into things that happened (and his) policy approaches (to them)," said Reagan-era Navy secretary commissioner John F. Lehman.
The meeting -- though likely to be overshadowed by the public testimony under oath the commission heard the same day from current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice -- brings into sharp relief long-standing allegations that Clinton's response to a series of attacks by Islamic terrorists made the United States appear weak, and encouraged al-Qaida in their belief that they could strike the United States with impunity.
"We did go into some of the obvious criticisms of the eight years under his tenure," Lehman told CNN, after news of the Clinton meeting broke late Thursday afternoon.
He added that the former president was now second-guessing some of the decisions that he made at that time. "He was very frank, very open about talking about some decisions where, had he known some things, (they) might have gone one way or another way."
The commission -- formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States -- has already reported that there were several occasions after the attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa when senior officials might have had an opportunity to order terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden killed, either with cruise missiles, or by locally recruited Afghan CIA agents.
On four occasions in 1998-99, commission investigators told a hearing last month, officials -- including counter-terror tsar Richard A. Clarke, CIA Director George Tenet and Clinton national security advisor Samuel R. Berger -- opted not to strike locations where bin Laden was thought to be. Officials said their information was not certain enough, and the number of innocent civilians who might be killed was unacceptably high.
Commissioners said they also asked Clinton about policy matters. "We asked him a host of big questions, big policy recommendations," said former Indiana Democratic congressman and commission member Tim Roemer.
The former president's office said in a statement that Clinton was "pleased" to have had the opportunity to meet the panel "and believed it was a very constructive meeting."
Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, who was Clinton's deputy attorney general, told CNN that the former president -- as he is wont -- was very voluble.
"He even answered questions we didn't ask," she joked.
Commissioner Slade Gorton, the former GOP senator from Washington State added that the meeting over-ran by almost an hour, but was "very valuable," because "President Clinton has done a lot of thinking since he left office on issues like this," and said the commission was grateful for his advice.
Both panelists also took the opportunity to comment on papers from the Clinton White House which -- though provided to the current administration by the former president's archive -- were not turned over to the commission.
After the issue was brought to light by former Clinton official Bruce R. Lindsey, commission lawyers were given access to the papers and concluded that -- of more than 10,000 documents, less than 70 were relevant to their inquiry and not duplicative of material already obtained elsewhere.
"We haven't gotten them yet," Gorton said of the documents, "and they are relevant to our mission... We fully expect that we will get all of them so that they can inform our ultimate report."
"Now that we found out why it was that we didn't get certain Clinton administration documents that were withheld by the White House," added Gorelick, "we're going to issue a parallel request for similar bush administration documents."
--------
Kerry Assails Bush's Foreign Policy
Why Is U.S. Almost Alone in Iraq? Senator Asks in Meeting on Economy
By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62741-2004Apr8.html
MILWAUKEE, April 8 -- Sen. John F. Kerry criticized President Bush's foreign policy Thursday, questioning why the United States is virtually alone in Iraq and pledging that as president he would work closer with the international community.
"Why is the United States of America almost alone in carrying this burden and the risks which the world has a stake in?" the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee asked a packed town hall gathering here.
On a day when the economy was his main message, Kerry used the opening minutes of his town hall meeting to challenge Bush's credentials as commander in chief at a time when events in Iraq have put the administration on the defensive.
"There is no Arab country that is advanced by a failed Iraq. There is no European country that is safer by a failed Iraq. Yet, those countries are distinctly absent from risk-bearing. . . . This is essentially an American occupation," the Massachusetts Democrat said.
"We ought to be engaged in a bold, clear, startlingly honest appeal to the world to see their interests," he said.
Kerry declined to comment on the testimony of Condoleezza Rice, saying he wanted to read the entire transcript first. But he said that he hopes her appearance before the Sept. 11 commission contributes to "our finding out what we need to do to protect the security" of the country.
Instead of the stature of the United States in the world community being enhanced, Kerry said that "every poll shows that the United States is held in lower regard than it ever has been. I pledge that when and if you elect me president . . . I will return to the United Nations, and we will rejoin the community of nations in a proper way."
Kerry demanded an explanation for the administration's insistence on sticking to its deadline for exiting Iraq. "The president needs to explain to who are we turning over power to on the 30th of June. What will we be protecting on the 30th of June?" Kerry said.
At one point, Susan McGovern, daughter of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern and a member of the audience, told Kerry that Wisconsin voters want to hear strong statements against Bush's foreign policy and environmental record.
"You tell me if this is strong enough," Kerry replied. "George Bush and the Republicans in Washington today have run the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of this country."
Kerry eventually segued into his intended goal of the day: bringing his new economic message to this significant Midwest battleground state, and pledging to restore to Americans the prosperity of the 1990s.
Speaking at a downtown YMCA center one day after his major economic address in Washington, Kerry reiterated his intention to reduce the federal budget deficit by cutting spending and raising taxes on the wealthy. He said he would create ample tax incentives for companies to maintain manufacturing plants in the United States rather than outsourcing their work overseas -- a practice that continues to cause significant job losses domestically. Kerry also said he would review all the free trade agreements if elected to ensure that other nations abide by labor and environmental standards.
Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral votes, is viewed as a key battleground. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore prevailed in the state by a hair. Bush has already visited Wisconsin at least 10 times since the past election, and strategists for his campaign have said the state is a high priority in its electoral plan. In February, Kerry won a narrower than expected primary victory here over Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.). "In order for John Kerry to become the next president the United States, he must carry Wisconsin, " said Gov. Jim Doyle (D), who appeared with Kerry at the town meeting.
Kerry was greeted at the Milwaukee airport by a group of Hmong veterans, originally from a tribe in southeast Laos and Vietnam. An enthusiastic and diverse crowd of several hundred chanted Kerry's name at the local YMCA. The candidate seemed relaxed and happy, shaking hands despite his doctors' orders to hold off for a few weeks after recent shoulder surgery.
Kerry, who embarked this month on a major fundraising effort across the county, collected $2 million Thursday night in Chicago at a dinner attended by 1,500 prominent Democratic supporters. A similar event in Washington on Wednesday night brought in $3 million.
---------
Powell Calls U.S. Casualties 'Disquieting'
By Dana Milbank and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62524-2004Apr8.html
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday gave the administration's most sober assessment yet of the uprising in Iraq, calling the recent rise in U.S. casualties "disquieting" and acknowledging that coalition allies are "under the most difficult set of circumstances."
Powell served as the administration's point man while President Bush spent the second straight day out of public view on his ranch in Crawford, Tex. In congressional testimony, Powell said that despite the troubles in Iraq, the U.S. military will be able to quell both the new Shiite unrest and the Sunni insurgency within "the next few days and weeks."
"Whether we are confronted by an outlaw and his mobs claiming to themselves the mantle of religion, or by disgruntled members of the former tyrant's regime, or by foreign terrorists, we will deal with them. In that we are resolute," Powell said. Alluding to the first signs of fraying among the 33 nations that have deployed troops in Iraq, Powell also said that the U.S. coalition partners are "staying the course, even under the most difficult set of circumstances."
Bush spent the morning watching national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's televised testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then toured his ranch with Wayne LaPierre Jr., chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and other leaders of hunting groups and gave an interview to Ladies' Home Journal. On Sunday, he is to appear in public at nearby Fort Hood, the home base for seven soldiers recently killed in Baghdad.
Democrats criticized Bush for taking the Easter-week vacation while U.S. forces are struggling to put down an uprising in Iraq. Campaigning in Milwaukee, Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, said: "I notice President Bush is taking some days off down at Crawford, Texas, and I'm told that when he takes days off, you know, he totally relaxes: He doesn't watch television, he doesn't read the newspapers, he doesn't make long-term plans, doesn't worry about the economy. I thought about that for a moment. I said, sounds to me like it's just like life in Washington, doesn't it?"
White House communications director Dan Bartlett retorted that Bush is "not skiing" in Texas, as Kerry did on a recent vacation in Idaho. He said Bush remains in contact with his military advisers and is spending Easter weekend with his family. "Most Americans will understand that," Bartlett said.
This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.
The anti-Bush group America Coming Together issued a news release yesterday noting that Bush was on his ranch on Aug. 6, 2001, when he received a crucial intelligence briefing that was prominent in Rice's testimony yesterday.
The president and his White House aides have not changed their public claims that the uprising in Iraq is the work of a relatively small number of extremists who will inevitably be crushed. But, in private, Bush is apparently expressing a more grim view. According to the Kremlin, he placed a 20-minute call to Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday, and "serious distress was expressed" about the "escalation of violence." Bush aides refused to discuss the details of the conversation.
While the White House has been sanguine about the turmoil in Iraq, some of its allies are calling for a more frank acknowledgment of trouble. Kenneth L. Adelman, a Reagan administration official who is close to several Bush officials, said he is surprised that "it's a lot tougher slogging than I expected" in Iraq. He said Bush should make new overtures both to Democrats and to traditional allies urging them to condemn the violence. He should tell them that "now is not the time to say I told you so, and urge the allies to become more heavily involved," he said.
Powell, in his testimony to the foreign operations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, conceded that the new provisional Iraqi government is likely to face serious security challenges after the June 30 transfer of power, making it reliant on ongoing U.S. military support. "This will be a new government that is still getting its sea legs, that is still developing institutions of democracy, that has not yet finished a constitution and has not yet held an election to give it full legitimacy," Powell said.
"It will be challenged by the kinds of forces that you see challenging us today," he said.
Powell said U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is exploring three broad options for the handover of power to a new provisional Iraqi government: keeping the current 25-member Iraqi Governing Council; expanding it to bring in broader representation; and holding a "mini loya jirga," or national conference of prominent people, the approach used to select a new government for Afghanistan in 2002. Powell said that expanding the governing council "seems the most practical" option.
U.S. officials hope that Brahimi, who has just started holding talks in Iraq, will come up with a workable formula within the next two or three weeks, although there is growing concern that the unrest will make his ability to travel to other parts of Iraq impossible.
After the handover, Powell predicted, the United States will continue to be able to use its billions in reconstruction aid and political leverage to influence the policies and shape of Iraq as it debates a new constitution and holds its first election.
Powell also held out the prospect that members of the 26-nation NATO alliance might be willing to contribute to security in Iraq, particularly after June 30. "I think that in due course we will be able to structure a role for NATO that may add to the number of nations that are here, but more significantly, will give a collective tone, an alliance tone, to what we are doing," he said.
In a briefing at NATO headquarters in Brussels during Powell's trip last week, however, a senior official cast doubt on a NATO role in Iraq soon, since the priority is expanding control of Afghanistan's fragile new government beyond Kabul.
Milbank reported from Crawford, Tex.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Warlord's Force Seizes a City In Afghanistan
By Stephen Graham
Associated Press
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62511-2004Apr8.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 8 -- Militia forces tied to a powerful warlord overran a provincial capital in Afghanistan on Thursday, forcing the governor to flee in what could be the biggest challenge yet to the U.S.-backed interim government of President Hamid Karzai.
The takeover of the city of Meymaneh hinders efforts to establish stability in Afghanistan, where elections were postponed in part over security concerns.
Militia forces loyal to Abdurrashid Dostum stormed into Meymaneh, the capital of Faryab province, about 260 miles northwest of Kabul, said Ali Ahmad Jalali, the Afghan interior minister.
"They have control of the city," Jalali said, adding that the "massive" force had met little opposition. Jalali said the government would deploy forces to the area to oust the militia and reinstate the Kabul-appointed governor, Enayatullah Enayat, who had fled to the airport.
Last month, Karzai deployed 1,500 troops from the U.S.-trained Afghan army to the western city of Herat after bloody factional fighting left 16 dead, including a cabinet minister.
U.S. officials had hoped the Afghan army would play an important role in U.S.-led operations along Afghanistan's border area with Pakistan in pursuit of militants tied to the ousted Taliban militia and al Qaeda. But the force consists of only 8,000 men, despite increased training programs.
U.S. military and embassy officials in Kabul had no immediate comment on the latest fighting or deployment plans.
In unrelated violence, two Afghan army soldiers were among seven people killed across the insurgency-torn south and east, officials said. One died in a gun battle during an operation in southern Helmand province. An American soldier was wounded in the battle.
Another Afghan soldier was killed by a mine in neighboring Uruzgan province. Three militants and two police officers were also reported killed in Helmand.
-------- africa
Lamenting Sudan's War And Working for Peace
By Nora Boustany
Friday, April 9, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63066-2004Apr8.html
A ldo Ajou Deng, one of 100 children born to Deng Akuei, a Dinka tribal chief in southern Sudan, said that when he was a young man, he could trek miles across Africa's largest country without worrying about food or safety.
Villagers often invited young travelers into their homes for communal meals of millet porridge, okra stew and dried fish served on spongy layers of flat bread.
"I remember the civility and generosity of the Sudanese, not this violence," he said, reminiscing about the weeklong journey from a southern province to Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. "I used to walk for miles, take the lorry to the nearest train station and then head to Khartoum without taking provisions. Strangers always took me in."
"If I left my belongings by the side of the road, no one touched them," said Deng, 63, who first became a member of parliament in 1967 and later served in several governmental posts, including chairman of a parliamentary human rights committee. "We have lost this hospitality. I keep wondering now, can it come back?"
By the early 1990s, Deng had grown disillusioned with the government's aim of an Islamic state and frustrated with efforts to block his human rights investigations. In 1993, he sent his nine children out of the country, ostensibly to attend school in Egypt. It was only in midair that he confided to his wife, Martha Leon John, that the family was forever leaving behind their home in Khartoum, property in the south, cars and bank accounts.
Deng was in Washington this week to meet with U.S. officials and nongovernmental organizations about his vision for a peaceful Sudan, where fighting has occurred for most of the years since the country gained independence in 1956. The current civil war began in 1983, when a group of southerners formed the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to fight the northern government and its imposition of Islamic law. Two million Sudanese are estimated to have died during the past 20 years of warfare, many of starvation and disease. The government of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, president and prime minister since 1989, has proclaimed an Islamic state.
"I want Sudan to maintain its geographic borders," Deng said in an interview Wednesday, "but I want to see power distributed equally to all areas in a federal system."
"I have known Sudan very well, I know the people in the south, in the north, west and east. My only conclusion is that its governments, of which I had been a part once, neglected the country by not ever drawing a real constitution that makes room for its diverse traditions, ethnicities and religions," Deng said.
During the first 10 years of his life, Deng helped raise cattle owned by his father, who wedded 20 wives before he died in 1995. Deng attended a Catholic missionary school, where Italian priests nicknamed him "Aldo," which stuck, and taught him hymns that he still likes to sing. He left for secondary school, where he was tutored by British instructors. And at 6 feet 8, he excelled at basketball and mastered the high jump.
He was drawn into politics at age 22, when Col. Jaafar Nimeri sought to appease southerners by involving them in national politics.
Deng currently lives in exile in London and shuttles among Cairo, Nairobi and southern Sudan. He has been actively negotiating with Sudanese government officials and the rebels to help bring a measure of peace to Sudan.
At least three of Deng's nine children are on basketball scholarships at American universities. He came to the United States to watch his son Luol, 18, a 6-8 freshman forward at Duke University, play in the NCAA tournament semifinals against the University of Connecticut in San Antonio. His daughter Arek, 21, is a 6-4 center at the University of Delaware.
Deng said that even if the problems in southern Sudan are solved, fighting in the western Darfur region of the country remains a hurdle to peace and democracy. Thousands of people have died in the area, and Doctors Without Borders has spoken of the need for militarily secured havens. The Sudanese government signed a cease-fire with rebels in the region Thursday to allow humanitarian agencies access to the area.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan warned Wednesday that a Rwanda-style genocide was in the making in Sudan and said an international military force could be necessary, a suggestion promptly rejected by the government.
Oil concessions granted by the government to Canadian, Swedish and Chinese firms have involved the clearing of villages and an exodus of refugees, Deng said.
"When the government built pipelines through the Nubian mountains, entire villages were wiped out, even mosques were burned down while preachers were giving their sermons," Deng said.
"So far, no one has benefited from this oil, $3 billion in annual revenues that are not even on the books," he added. "Now we are going to call for an investigation into the atrocities committed by these governments with the help of foreign companies. They all participated in these crimes against humanity."
--------
A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity
April 9, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/africa/09RWAN.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
KIGALI, Rwanda, April 8 - Although he is not a government spokesman, Ernest Twahrwa can recite Rwanda's official view toward ethnicity with great precision: "There is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandan."
Mr. Twahrwa, a Hutu, is halfway through a six-week government re-education camp set up to purge him and other former fighters of any ethnic ideologies that they may still harbor from 1994, when extremist Hutu massacred 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu.
"They're trying to change what we think," Mr. Twahrwa said. "There have been many changes in this country. I need to change too. I need to be a new person."
This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinctions by decree.
The re-education camp is one way of driving the point home to people who once lived by the motto "Hutu power." As Hutu fighters who fled to Congo after 1994 return to Rwanda they are sent to the camp. Along with civics they are taught some hands-on skills like carpentry. They leave with $75 and, at least in theory, a whole new way of thinking.
That new thinking has its critics - those who say that denying that ethnicity exists merely suppresses the painful ethnic dialogue that Rwanda requires.
But the government insists that if awareness of ethnic differences can be learned, so can the idea that ethnicity does not exist. Rwanda has an entrenched culture of obedience, and the populace has been quick to pick up on the government's no-ethnicity policy, at least in conversations with an outsider.
To hear Mr. Twahrwa put it: "Ethnicity is bad. I want it to go away."
Ethnicity has already been ripped out of schoolbooks and rubbed off government identity cards. Government documents no longer mention Hutu or Tutsi, and the country's newspapers and radio stations, tightly controlled by the government, steer clear of the labels as well.
Most dramatic is how Rwanda's eight million people now shun the identifications that seemed to loom so large 10 years ago as Hutu extremists began their mass killings.
"We don't like to use the terms at all in class," said Bosco Manishaka, the assistant director of a Kigali primary school. "The children do learn about the history of the country and how we were divided. We advise them to learn from the past."
It is not just considered bad form to discuss ethnicity in the new Rwanda. It can land one in jail. Added to the penal code is the crime of "divisionism," a nebulous offense that includes speaking too provocatively about ethnicity.
Rwanda's approach contrasts markedly with that employed in neighboring Burundi, which has the same ethnic makeup as Rwanda and the same recent history of ethnic violence. Burundi's transitional government has opted to set aside certain positions for Hutu and certain positions for Tutsi. The two ethnic groups rotate the presidency. A Tutsi held it for 18 months, and now a Hutu fills the seat.
Critics argue that Rwanda's crackdown on "divisionism" has turned into a way of quashing dissent toward the governing party of President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebel movement that swept in from Uganda in 1994 to oust the Hutu militias known as Interahamwe, which were responsible for much of the violence. His administration has shut down opposition parties for being too divisive and jailed journalists and activists for the same.
The government does not want to hear suggestions that one ethnicity or the other has too much power. Those are divisive thoughts. It is not possible to know, or even discuss, whether the majority Hutu population is well represented in universities. No such records are kept.
To try to repair tensions that still linger from 1994, and reduce a huge backlog in the judicial system, Rwanda has created community courts called gacacas. Locals gather together to rehash the killings. They are encouraged to point fingers at suspected killers. The accused are given a chance to stand up and defend themselves, or to apologize.
Confessions can sometimes bring the most extraordinary result: a hug from the accuser and an offer of forgiveness. More often, though, there are arguments.
At one such court in the Gikondo neighborhood of Kigali, a Hutu man stood up to deny that he was responsible for the dead bodies that were found in his yard during 1994. He said he had just found them there.
A man in the crowd challenged him. "Tell us what happened," the man said.
"You're lying," said another.
But the accused, fidgeting with his glasses, stuck to his story.
Despite the government's policy, the terms Hutu and Tutsi do sometimes manage to come to the surface.
"To deny that ethnicity exists in our country is lying," Jean Nayinzira Nepomuscene, a Hutu who ran against Mr. Kagame last fall but garnered just 1 percent of the vote, said in an interview. "If a person is a Tutsi you can't tell him not to be a Tutsi. A Hutu, you can't tell him not to be a Hutu."
Mr. Kagame's main opponent in the election was a Hutu, Faustin Twagiramungu, who overtly appealed to the Hutu majority for support. Mr. Kagame's government likened his approach to the techniques used by Hutu extremists in 1994 to foment the mass killings, and threatened to jail him.
When the Belgians ruled colonial Rwanda they favored the Tutsi over the Hutu and issued identification cards to institutionalize the difference.
After Rwanda's independence, political battles and periodic massacres revolved around the ethnic labels. Still, intermarriage remained common, with children taking on the ethnicity of their father. Physical differences between the two groups blurred.
Abudallah Shabami, another student at the re-education camp, located several hours north of Kigali in Ruhengeri, says he has fought on behalf of the Hutu even though his family is a blend. "There are both Hutu and Tutsi in my family," he says. "My wife is a Tutsi. My mother was a Tutsi."
He caught himself and remembered his lessons. "I see myself as a Rwandan now, because there are no more ethnicities here," he said.
Ethnicity has not been dislodged from peoples' minds, though.
A Tutsi woman, who was raped in 1994 by so many Hutu militiamen in the village of Taba that she lost count, said she has difficulty interacting comfortably with Hutu.
"I don't trust them," said the woman, who, identified only as J.J., testified about her ordeal before the international tribunal on Rwanda.
François Ngarambe, who is president of Ibuka, a group representing survivors, said his young children had only a vague notion of the ethnic differences that led to the killings in 1994. "They don't see themselves that way," he said. "That's what gives me hope."
-------- arms
US drops ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Iraq
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409185815.cnasoclf.html
The United States on Friday dropped its longstanding ban on the export of lethal military equipment to Iraq, on the one-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to US forces.
The State Department eliminated the restriction by amending its arms export regulations to allow for such sales to the Iraqi army and police should the president determine them to be "in the national interest of the United States."
"Exports may be authorized of lethal military equipment designated by the secretary of state for use by a reconstituted (or interim) Iraqi military or police force ... if the president determines ... that the export is in the national interest of the United States," it said in a notice published in the Federal Register.
The change also allows the export of small arms to Iraq "for private security purposes," according to the notice, which adds that the president must notify Congress of the sales within five days of the approval.
A ban on the export of non-lethal US military aid to Iraq was dropped last year, but the restriction on lethal assistance had remained in place until Friday.
Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the announcement had not been timed to coincide with the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's government but was rather an element of US preparations for the June 30 restoration of sovereignty to Iraq.
"This is an authority that gives us an added tool in our bilateral relationship with the future Iraqi government," Ereli told reporters.
-------- asia
Philippines, Mongolia to join US-Thai Cobra Gold exercises
BANGKOK (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409093705.vbl7wp1e.html
The Philippines and Mongolia will join the United States, Thailand and Singapore next month in the largest annual war games for American troops in Asia, with nearly 20,000 personnel involved, officials said Friday.
"This year Cobra Gold has expanded to five participants, including the Philippines and Mongolia," which are due to send for the first time a total of just 24 troops to the massive joint exercises scheduled May 13-27 along the Thai coast, a US embassy official here told AFP.
The air, land and sea manouvers scheduled May 13-27 will include the participation of about 13,500 US service members, approximately 6,000 Thais and 95 Singaporeans, he added.
The 2003 drills involved a total of 13,000 military personnel.
This year's expanding multilateral nature of Cobra Gold "is injecting a little more of a real world scenario into the exercises," he said, referring to the international scope of peace enforcement operations which are a key component of the training.
The live-fire exercises, launched 23 years ago and originally limited to US and Thai troops, will include an anti-terrorism component for the third straight year.
According to an embassy statement, Cobra Gold "is designed to improve US, Thai, Singaporean, Mongolian and Filipino combat readiness ... enhance security relationships and demonstrate US resolve to support the security and humanitarian interests of US friends and allies in the region."
Ten other nations will observe this year's drills, including Australia, China, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
Malaysia declined a Thai invitation to be an observer, citing its lack of readiness to join.
----
Malaysia to haul some 10,000 national service AWOL youths to court
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409090514.chs8do5w.html
Some 10,000 Malaysian youths who have failed to turn up for a fledgling national service training programme will be hauled to court and may face a possible jail sentence, a senior official said Friday.
Ahmad Fawzi Mohamad Basri, national service training council chairman said the names of those absent from the programme would submitted to its legal department.
"We will submit their names to the legal department for action," he was quoted by Bernama news agency as saying.
Ahmad Fawzi said under the National Service Act, those who failed to turn up could be fined 3,000 ringgit (789 dollars) or sentenced to six months jail or both upon conviction.
Malaysia started non-military national service training for 18-year-old youths in February to boost patriotism and racial integration.
But reports of fighting, riots, extortion and sexual harassment have prompted opposition politicians to call for a suspension of the two-month-old scheme.
Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is also defence minister, was quoted as saying that the trouble should not be blown out of proportion.
"One or two incidents have happened and we are looking at them. However, it does not warrant the suspension of the whole program," he said Tuesday.
-------- business
Pentagon: Tanker Plan Needs Major Changes
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Pentagon-Boeing.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon should not move forward on a $23.5 billion plan to acquire 100 midair refueling tankers from Boeing Co. until significant changes are made to the deal, the Pentagon's inspector general said Friday.
In a highly critical report, Inspector General Joseph Schmitz said procedural and financial problems with the deal could cause the government to spend up to $4.5 billion more than necessary.
Once the changes are made, however, there is no compelling reason not to complete the deal, the report said.
The long-anticipated report said the Air Force's decision to acquire the tankers as a commercial item put the Pentagon at ``high risk for paying excessive prices and profits and precludes good fiduciary responsibility'' for Defense Department funds.
It also said senior Air Force officials failed to comply with military contracting laws; accepted insufficient or inaccurate Boeing data during negotiations; and wrongly waived any right to audit the program once it gets started.
The Air Force, in a response included in the report, said it followed procedures outlined by Congress ``and reviewed and improved within the (Defense) Department using approved acquisition processes.''
The Air Force and Boeing also disputed the report's claim that the Air Force ``cannot ensure to the war fighter'' that the tankers will meet the military's operational requirements.
In a detailed statement, Boeing said it met 26 key performance standards set out in a November 2001 Air Force document and modified the following March. The company created ``a totally compliant design'' that meets all Air Force requirements, as well as standards set by senior Pentagon officials, Boeing said.
The Air Force said in its response that the new KC-767s ``will be the world's newest and most advanced tanker'' and are ``critical to the defense of our country.''
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a leading supporter of the deal, said the report ``confirmed what I have been saying for nearly three years: We need these airplanes, and there is no reason to stop the tanker lease from moving forward.''
The planes will be made at Boeing's Everett, Wash., plant, and modified for military use in Wichita, Kan. In the unusual deal, the Defense Department would lease 20 767 tankers and buy another 80 planes.
``The bottom line is that the IG found no reason not to proceed with the tanker deal -- and that's good,'' said Jim Albaugh, president and CEO of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems.
Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy, an Air Force spokeswoman, said the report demonstrates ``fundamental differences in interpretation'' between the audit team's experts and Air Force acquisition and legal experts.
``Although this was an admittedly complex and novel proposal to lease commercial aircraft modified to serve as tanker aircraft, the audit team found no compelling reason to not proceed with the leasing arrangement,'' Cassidy said.
The Air Force believes that language enacted by Congress in late 2001 supports the lease program, and that its terms provide sufficient protection for taxpayers, Cassidy said.
The inspector general has been looking into the deal since last year, after questions arose about ethical issues surrounding the way Boeing pursued the multibillion-dollar contract.
A grand jury in Virginia is investigating potentially illegal actions by Darleen Druyun, a top Air Force official involved in the contract talks who was later hired by Boeing. Druyun was fired last year, after an internal review found improprieties in her hiring.
Boeing also fired its chief financial officer over what it depicted as an attempted cover-up of the hiring procedures. The Pentagon later suspended the contract pending completion of the inspector general's report and separate studies by the Pentagon's general counsel, the Defense Science Board and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
The report released Friday outlines three options for the Pentagon, including delaying the entire project until an analysis of alternatives is completed -- which could force officials to reopen the project to new bids.
In the best option for Boeing, the report advises the Pentagon to alter more than a dozen aspects of the deal before moving forward with the existing plan.
Another option calls for the Pentagon to make changes and acquire 100 tankers, and then initiate an analysis of alternatives for any remaining planes.
On the Net:
Boeing Co.: http://www.boeing.com
-------- iraq
Bulgaria will not pull troops out of Iraq: FM
SOFIA (AFP)
Apr 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040409173500.hrok9nyb.html
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy on Friday said his country would not heed an ultimatum from Shiite militia to pull its troops out of the strife-torn southern Iraqi city of Karbala.
"Bulgaria's position with regard to our military contingent cannot change," Passy told Bulgarian radio station Darik during a visit to Turkmenistan.
"Each one of us has to do our job regardless of the risks it carries," he added.
The United States on Thursday rushed 120 soldiers to Karbala to reinforce Bulgaria's 480-strong contingent amid fierce fighting between Shiite militia loyal to radical leader Mosqata Sadr and coalition troops.
Sadr's chief of staff in Karbala has given the Bulgarians an ultimatum to pull out ahead of a major religious festival in the city this weekend.
Bulgaria's left-wing press on Friday called on the government to immediately withdraw its troops, who form part of an international force under Polish command in southern Iraq.
Four Bulgarian soldiers were injured in an ambush in the city this week and on Wednesday a Bulgarian truck driver was killed in the southern city of Nasiriyah.
Five Bulgarian soldiers were killed in a multiple bombing in Karbala on December 27.
----
General May Bolster Force in Iraq;
Militias Kidnap a Dozen Foreigners Fighting Continues;
Troop Deployments May Be Extended
By Thomas E. Ricks and Sewell Chan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62460-2004Apr8?language=printer
BAGHDAD, April 8 -- The top U.S. commander in the Middle East said Thursday that he is considering holding several thousand troops here beyond their planned departure this spring in an attempt to squelch continuing uprisings by Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the chief of the U.S. Central Command, said he might extend the combat tour of the Army's 1st Armored Division and might also request that the 3rd Infantry Division, which left Iraq last summer, be brought back much sooner than planned.
Meanwhile, militia forces loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr controlled two key cities in southern Iraq, Abizaid's top ground commander acknowledged. Shiite militiamen also kidnapped a dozen foreigners on Thursday, the fifth day of their armed campaign to oust the U.S.-led occupation.
The abductions of seven South Koreans, three Japanese, and two Arab residents of Israel suggested that the Shiite militias had adopted a strategy of targeting foreigners seen as cooperating with the occupation. Although the Koreans were released by the evening, images of the Japanese and Israeli captives were broadcast on Arabic-language satellite television, along with demands that U.S. allies withdraw from the country.
In the western city of Fallujah, where U.S. Marines are trying to crush a Sunni Muslim rebellion and establish control of the city, street-by-street fighting continued. In Kut and Najaf, south of the capital, Shiite militiamen maintained control of government buildings and police stations, while foreign troops remained quartered outside the cities. Shiite militiamen also occupied much of Kufa, which neighbors Najaf, and prepared for a battle with Italian troops farther south in Nasiriyah.
In Baghdad, Iraq's interim interior minister suddenly resigned, stunning Iraqi and U.S. officials. The departure of Nouri Badran, a Shiite Muslim, reflected severe dissatisfaction with the performance of the national police, which Badran oversaw. While many police officers have fought alongside U.S. troops to quell the urban unrest, others have ceded their stations, vehicles and weapons to the insurgents.
In an interview with two reporters at a U.S. base on the outskirts of the tense Iraqi capital, Abizaid hinted at imminent U.S. combat operations in parts of central Iraq where Shiite militiamen hold positions that were supposed to be under the control of troops from Poland, Spain, Ukraine and other nations participating in a U.S.-led military coalition.
"I think it's safe to say that U.S. units will be used anywhere in this country," said Abizaid, who would not elaborate on his plans to reassert control of cities overtaken by members of Sadr's Mahdi Army and other armed Shiite groups.
Abizaid also indicated that the next phase of U.S. combat operations would be lengthy and could be more extensive than the Marine action in Fallujah. "I think you'll see a series of very clear military moves over the next couple of weeks that will get ourselves in position to do what needs to be done," he said.
"We're going to do whatever it takes to ensure that we're successful out here, and if that includes bringing in more troops, we will," he said. "We will do whatever is necessary to get the situation under control, to include bringing in additional forces [and] extending forces."
"Everything is on the table," he said.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Abizaid's top ground commander, said he expected that "a sustained campaign" would be needed to quell the insurgency initiated by Sadr, the young Shiite cleric who has called for an end to the occupation.
"My assessment is that we will continue to see this violence for some time, until Moqtada Sadr turns himself in or his militia is destroyed," Sanchez said.
While Sanchez vowed to retake Kut imminently, he said the military is avoiding entering Najaf -- where Sadr is protected by hundreds of followers -- because of a major Shiite religious festival that involves a procession through the city. The festival of Arbaeen is to start Friday.
To date, most of the military action against Sadr's militia has been in a teeming Shiite slum in Baghdad, where U.S. troops have struck at facilities used by the Mahdi Army and fought running battles with the cleric's followers. In areas under the jurisdiction of other foreign forces, those troops have assumed a defensive posture as Sadr's militiamen have sought to seize government buildings.
In Baghdad, a U.S. helicopter fired at a Sadr office before dawn, heavily damaging it and injuring several Iraqis. In Karbala, southwest of the capital, Polish and Bulgarian soldiers repelled an attack by Sadr followers near the municipal hall during an intense firefight that began Wednesday evening and lasted until dawn, a Polish spokesman said. Nine attackers were killed and 20 wounded.
In Nasiriyah, a city south of Najaf where Sadr's men have repeatedly clashed with Italian troops, gunfire echoed through the city's deserted streets around midnight. At least two mortar rounds detonated, and the dull echo of explosions could be heard from the direction of the horizon, against the backdrop of heavy machine-gun fire.
Earlier in the day, Italian troops had withdrawn across the Tigris River, ceding streets to small knots of militiamen armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Police were in the streets, but paid no attention to the militiamen.
The provincial governor of Nasiriyah, Sabri Rumayidh, said Italian forces had informed him of a 6 a.m. deadline Friday for the Sadr militia to withdraw from the streets and disarm. If it did not, Rumayidh said, the Italians planned to reenter the city and disband the group by force. U.S. officials declined to comment.
In Kut, where Ukrainian forces withdrew from the city center Wednesday after two days of clashes in which a soldier was killed, several U.S. Humvees could be seen near the base where the Ukrainian forces had regrouped.
The U.S. military announced that six troops died Wednesday and Thursday, bringing to at least 38 the number killed in combat since Sunday.
The three deaths on Thursday involved a Marine killed in Fallujah, a soldier killed by a roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul and a soldier killed by a roadside bomb, a grenade and gunfire near the town of Khan Bani Saad, northeast of the capital.
On Wednesday afternoon, a soldier from the 1st Armored Division died when two rockets hit Camp Cooke, an Army base north of the capital. That evening, a member of the 1st Infantry Division was shot to death at a checkpoint near the northern city of Samarra. Also, a Marine was killed in western Iraq that day, the military announced.
Badran, the former interior minister, said he was pushed out of the job by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq. According to Badran, a Shiite Muslim, Bremer told him Wednesday that Shiites could not head both the interior and defense ministries. Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, another Shiite, was sworn in as defense minister Thursday morning before members of the Iraqi Governing Council.
"Bremer told me they nominated a Shiite name as minister of defense and that we cannot have two Shiite ministers in the interior and defense positions, because this would disrupt the balance in the administration of the country," Badran said at a news conference. "I asked him what the solution would be. He said, 'You have to give up the position.' "
Badran added: "I was forced to do it."
In a statement, Bremer and Massoud Barzani, a Kurd who holds the Governing Council's rotating presidency, said they regretted Badran's resignation.
"He has served with skill and courage in a difficult position at a difficult time," the statement said. "He deserves the thanks of the Iraqi people, and he certainly has ours." The statement did not address Badran's allegations.
Badran has been criticized for the mixed performance of the Iraqi police, particularly in the clashes that started Sunday.
Images of three Japanese abducted Thursday -- two men and a female aid worker, all blindfolded -- were broadcast on the al-Jazeera satellite television network along with a demand that Japan withdraw its forces from Iraq within three days or the hostages would be burned alive. Masked men carrying guns, knives and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were shown surrounding the weeping hostages.
Japan has 550 noncombatant soldiers, the first deployment of troops outside Japan since World War II, stationed in Samawah to work on water purification and reconstruction projects. Japanese Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda called the abductions "unforgivable" but said they did not justify a Japanese withdrawal.
In a separate incident, seven South Koreans -- Christian missionaries who are trying to set up a church and school in Mosul -- were kidnapped near the northern town of Taji but released after a few hours. In Nasiriyah, the governor announced that a 37-year-old British citizen working for a Qatari company was kidnapped Monday, and officials there held meetings into the night to try to negotiate his release.
In addition, a Canadian humanitarian aid worker for the International Rescue Committee was taken hostage Wednesday by a local militia in Najaf, the agency said Thursday. Fadhi Ihsan Fadel was the first Canadian to be abducted in Iraq, Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesman Sameer Ahmed said in Toronto, the Associated Press reported.
Abizaid said he was looking at ways to increase his combat power by about two brigades, or almost 10,000 troops.
As part of his discussions with commanders, he said, "we've decided to take a look at force structures throughout the entire theater, and I'm not releasing anybody from the theater" until he has had additional discussions with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld "about what we need here to get through the transitional period" -- a reference to the planned turnover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.
It is possible, he said, that the 3rd Infantry might be sent back to Iraq ahead of schedule, or the 1st Armored Division might remain there longer than planned.
Either move could prove politically volatile and extremely unpopular with Army families. When the 3rd Infantry, which led the charge into Baghdad a year ago with a series of tank raids, had its tour of duty extended last summer, the unit's morale plummeted, and some soldiers in the division were openly critical of Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Likewise, the 1st Armored has been in Iraq since last May and for months has counted on going home about now. Army wives said in a recent Washington Post/Kaiser Foundation/Harvard University survey that unplanned extensions of deployments were a major cause of hardship and demoralization in their families and had eroded their trust in the Army.
In addition, either move would boost arguments by congressional Democrats that the Army, which has about 480,000 active-duty troops, is too small for the tasks it is being assigned by the Bush administration.
Overall, Abizaid's assessment of the situation in Iraq was more optimistic than the picture painted by many of the week's news reports, but sounded slightly more pessimistic than recent comments by Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials.
"First of all, we are not headed for disaster as long as we are resolute, courageous and patient," he said. "Secondly, I believe that the only shock that has registered is in the minds of the media and not in the minds of the American people.
"The American people are tough. They know this is going to be hard."
Correspondent Anthony Shadid in Nasiriyah and special correspondents Hoda Ahmed Lazim in Baghdad and Khalid Saffar in Kut contributed to this report.
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In Fallujah Marines Try to Quell 'a Hotbed of Resistance'
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62632-2004Apr8.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq, April 8 -- After four days of round-the-clock street clashes with elusive, heavily armed urban guerrillas, U.S. Marines moved Thursday to beef up their fighting capacity and take more aggressive action against an enemy that is proving both stubborn and resourceful. Helicopter gunships over the city made repeated dives at clusters of fighters, and artillery was brought in for the first time.
Sporadic firefights continued throughout the day, with snipers firing automatic weapons and grenades at U.S. troops who patrolled the city's deserted factory zone, searching dozens of buildings for weapons. After dark, dozens of mortar rounds and rockets were launched at the main Marine command headquarters here.
Earlier, the Marines uncovered large quantities of weapons from the industrial area they now control, including suicide-bomb kits, discoveries they said revealed both the formidable arsenal and the fanatical nature of their foes.
The U.S. military reported that one Marine had been killed Thursday and another Wednesday in fighting in central Iraq, including Fallujah. At least 38 U.S. troops are now believed to have died since Sunday throughout the country, making it one of the deadliest periods for U.S. forces in the year since the U.S.-led invasion.
The U.S. operation in Fallujah has still not moved beyond the industrial zone and into the densely crowded residential areas, a far more difficult task because insurgents can hide there easily and there is also a greater likelihood of endangering civilians.
"This tells me that Fallujah is everything we thought it was -- a hotbed of resistance with a huge amount of weapons," said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, who commands one of two Marine battalions involved in an operation dubbed Vigilant Resolve. "But today, we unhinged them and put a large crimp in their ability to resupply themselves."
Byrne said his troops had found plastic explosives, large bags full of rockets and mortars, bomb-making equipment and a variety of exploding vests and belts that are used by terrorists and other fanatical groups. One was a money belt sewn full of explosives with a detonator and lead fishing weights inside.
Byrne insisted that his operation was still "on plan" and that the Marines had not been surprised by the intensity of the resistance. He said the new weapons discoveries had given him "a much better perspective on what I'm fighting against. I'm learning more about the enemy on a daily basis."
But troops and officers, racing in armed convoys to their command headquarters to pick up supplies before heading back to the embattled streets, described the frustration of seizing blocks or buildings, only to see them retaken by insurgent forces.
"They shoot at us and fall back, and we don't have enough men to seal the area they fall back to," said Lt. Andrew Terrell, 24, who was impatiently waiting to be treated for a shrapnel wound so the troops in his Humvee could return to action. "Every time guys come back here, I'm taking guns off my line."
Despite the bombing Wednesday of a mosque where armed men had taken refuge and shot at U.S. troops, officers said insurgents had returned there overnight and were ferrying weapons inside, undeterred by the prospect of a further American assault.
Doctors at Fallujah's main hospital told journalists that up to 280 civilians had been killed in the operation, but Byrne denied this, saying any bodies were those of insurgents. He estimated that 80 percent of Fallujah's populace was neutral or in favor of the American military presence.
But there were reports that members of the Iraqi civilian defense forces in Fallujah had joined with the insurgents, and that ambulances as well as police cars had been used to carry weapons to them.
At the same time, a caravan of medical and food supplies collected by mosques in Baghdad approached this sealed-off city 35 miles west of the capital, along with several thousand marchers, some of whom shouted anti-American slogans and carried banners sympathetic to the insurgents. The Marines tried to assuage public anger and concern over the military operation by allowing the caravan to enter the turbulent city Thursday morning.
Marine officers said the caravan was mostly peaceful and that they allowed a number of supply trucks and ambulances to enter the city after they were searched by troops and sniffer dogs. But the crowd of about 1,500 marchers was turned back at a highway roadblock, and some participants shouted insults.
"We allowed more than half of the vehicles in. We used no physical force at all, and we wanted people to know we were there to help," said Capt. Will Dickens. But he added that when several mortar rounds were fired toward the highway post, the crowd cheered.
As the Marines contemplated how to intensify attacks on the enemy without alienating the general populace, several officers said they were keenly aware that one mistaken shooting could create hundreds of enemies, and that coming under constant fire could numb military forces to the humanity around them.
"I hope we don't get to the point where we are so jaded we start rolling down the streets in tanks and shooting at everything that moves," said Capt. Chris Chown. "If you start to lose that sense of humanity, you've lost your mission."
But the intensifying battle for Fallujah seemed likely to deepen the gulf between the U.S. forces and local residents and to obscure the more positive goals of American military actions here. As a result of the fierce fighting, all civil affairs programs planned by the Marines have been suspended until the city is secure.
Maj. Lawrence Kaifesh, who commands a civil affairs unit, said his plan had been to contact local religious and tribal leaders, find out what Fallujah's residents needed most and arrange for money to be spent on local projects. Now, all that is on indefinite hold.
"It's hard to do civil affairs until the area becomes stable and secure," he said as a mortar boom echoed loudly overhead. "The enemy seems determined, but I like to think this is one last gasp for breath before their day is ended."
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U.S. Declares Cease-Fire in Falluja, but Clashes Continue
April 9, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/middleeast/09CND-IRAQ.html?hp
The Marines halted most offensive operations in Falluja today so that talks could be held with a delegation of sheiks and the city's residents could collect their dead and wounded, the top American official in Iraq said.
The official, L. Paul Bremer III, added that coalition forces reserved the right of "self defense" and that they remained prepared to resume offensive operations "unless significant progress in these discussions occurs."
After the announcement, American military officers reported sporadic exchanges of gunfire in Falluja, which is about 30 miles west of Baghdad and the scene of fierce fighting in the past five days.
The announcement came on the anniversary of the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdaws Square, which was greeted at the time with wild celebrations by Iraqis.
Today the usually bustling square was quiet, sealed off by razor wire and squads of heavily armed American soldiers. Some took down posters of Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has led the insurrection in the south, that had been put on the modernist statue that has taken the place of Mr. Hussein's.
Near Falluja, Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, told reporters that his forces continued to respond to insurgent attacks.
"I would not describe this as a cease-fire," The Associated Press quoted the colonel as saying. "We are still aggressively defending our positions. However we have ceased offensive operations for now."
However, the coalition's deputy director of operations, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, told CNN that a unilateral cease-fire by American troops was in force, a position he maintained at a news briefing in Baghdad later today. But he added, "If fired upon, they will fire back."
Another American officer said that he had applied for, and received, permission to return to the offensive after repeated insurgent attacks, Agence France-Presse reported.
"We went into pause but the enemy kept attacking us on the western side of the city," Maj. Pete Farnum told a correspondent with the French agency who is accompanying United States troops around Falluja.
At the same time, a live report from Falluja by Al Jazeera television monitored in Baghdad showed an American helicopter firing on a part of Falluja called Hay Jolan.
The Arab station also showed Iraqi medics and residents in the city gathering up the dead bodies and wounded from the five days of fighting and quoted the medics as saying that until now there had been no chance to collect the victims.
A doctor at one of the city's hospitals, Rasi al-Esawi, said that 141 bodies had been collected at his medical center since the fighting started, with 30 collected just today.
The live coverage on Al Jazeera showed convoys of Iraqi cars coming into Falluja. The station, monitored in Baghdad, also reported shelling from American tanks, but the reports could not be verified.
The delegation from Falluja was reported by news agencies to be meeting with Marine commanders at their base outside the city. The exact purpose of the talks was not announced.
In other violence today, insurgents attacked an American oil convoy west of Baghdad, killing nine people, according to witnesses and a Reuters photographer at the scene. The convoy had been accompanied by military vehicles, but the nationalities of those killed was not immediately clear.
Earlier today, American-led troops retook the eastern town of Kut, two days after Ukrainian forces withdrew following clashes with Shiite militiamen loyal to Mr. Sadr.
Mr. Sadr's followers launched an uprising this week, battling American-led forces in Shiite areas across Iraq. One Ukrainian soldier was killed this week in Kut.
Shiite militiamen still control the center of the holy city of Najaf, where Mr. Sadr, who is the subject of an arrest warrant, is thought to be holed up.
In Karbala, 15 Iraqis were killed in overnight clashes between Shiite fighters and Polish and Bulgarian troops, and 6 Iranian pilgrims were shot dead near a Polish checkpoint between Babel and Kerbala, the Iraqi police said.
In political developments, Mr. Bremer named two members of the Governing Council to major posts: Samir Sumaidy, a Sunni independent, becomes interior minister, replacing Nouri Badran, a Shiite, who resigned on Thursday; and Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite independent, takes on the newly created role of national security adviser.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
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ALLIANCES
Signs That Shiites and Sunnis Are Joining to Battle Americans
April 9, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/middleeast/09SHIA.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 8 - When the United States invaded Iraq a year ago, one of its chief concerns was preventing a civil war between Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority in the country, and Sunni Muslims, who held all the power under Saddam Hussein.
Now the fear is that the growing uprising against the occupation is forging a new and previously unheard of level of cooperation between the two groups - and the common cause is killing Americans.
"We have orders from our leader to fight as one and to help the Sunnis," said Nimaa Fakir, a 27-year-old teacher and foot soldier in the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia. "We want to increase the fighting, increase the killing and drive the Americans out. To do this, we must combine forces."
This new Shiite-Sunni partnership was flourishing in Baghdad on Thursday. Convoys of pickup trucks with signature black Shiite flags flapping from their bumpers hauled sacks of grain, flour, sugar and rice into Sunni mosques.
The food donations were coming from Shiite families, in many cases from people with little to spare. And they were headed to the besieged residents of Falluja, a city that has now become the icon of the resistance, especially after the bombing on Wednesday of a mosque compound there.
"Sunni, Shia, that doesn't matter anymore," said Sabah Saddam, a 32-year-old government clerk who took the day off to drive one of the supply trucks. "These were artificial distinctions. The people in Falluja are starving. They are Iraqis and they need our help."
But it is not just relief aid that is flowing into the city.
According to several militia members, many Shiite fighters are streaming into Falluja to help Sunni insurgents repel a punishing assault by United States marines. Groups of young men with guns are taking buses from Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad to the outskirts of Falluja, and then slipping past checkpoints to join the action. "It's not easy to get in, but we have our ways," said Ahmed Jumar, a 25-year-old professional soccer player who also belongs to a Shiite militia. "Our different battles have turned into one fight, the fight against the Americans."
American leaders had been concerned that the rival sectarian groups would not find a common cause. Now, it seems, they have found a common enemy. "The danger is we believe there is a linkage that may be occurring at the very lowest levels between the Sunni and the Shia," Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the occupation forces, said on Thursday. "We have to work very hard to ensure that it remains at the tactical level."
He also said the call for unity is "clearly an attempt to take advantage of the situation."
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, an assistant commander of the First Armored Division, said military intelligence indicated that there might be some loose coordination between the renegade Shia movement of Moktada al-Sadr and a Sunni extremist group called Mohammed's Army in the western portions of Baghdad.
He said troops from the First Armored and the First Cavalry Divisions were conducting reconnaissance and offensive operations against fighters from both groups, who have converged on the road to Falluja.
The city, 35 miles west of Baghdad, has become the rallying cry of the resistance. It is in its fifth day of siege. Marines are trying to root out insurgents after four American security guards were ambushed there last week and their bodies were mutilated by a mob. American troops have been fighting house to house and mosque to mosque against a determined group of guerrillas. According to people inside Falluja, the situation is grim and getting grimmer.
"It's a disaster," said Sheik Ghazi Al Abid, a wealthy tribal leader, who was reached by telephone. "There's no food, no water, no electricity."
The sheik said it was so dangerous that bodies have been left on the streets because people are terrified to venture outside to collect them.
"Anybody who moves will get shot," the sheik said. "We need all the help we can get." He also said more than 300 people had been killed, hundreds more had been wounded, and medical supplies and blood were running low." There are so many injured civilians," the sheik said, "they don't know where to go."
In Baghdad, blood banks were packed. Imams at both Sunni and Shiite mosques put out a message that Falluja residents needed blood fast. On Thursday, a group of Shiite men formed a line at one Baghdad blood bank that wended out the door. The men were ready to get pricked with a needle for their Sunni brothers. "We share a cause now," said Mohammed Majid, a taxi driver. "Why not share our bodies?"
Pentagon officials said Thursday that they had no definitive figures on the size or scale of the Sunni or Shiite militias. That is largely because the militia movement seems too fluid, and it is splintered among several factions. "It's a mob mentality," said one intelligence official. "They are recruiting among a lot of unhappy people."
Shiite extremist groups have a long tradition of hiding their true strength, in large part because their history has been marked by persecution by Sunni elites in many Muslim countries. In southern Lebanon in the 1980's, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency was never able to get solid estimates of the number of Shiite fighters involved in Hezbollah or the Islamic resistance that eventually forced the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, former United States intelligence officials said Thursday.
Those former officials pointed out that the practice of Taqiyya - dissembling about one's religion, especially in times of danger - is particular to Shiism. That secretive tradition has made Shiite groups extremely difficult for intelligence officers to penetrate, the former C.I.A. officers said.
Until last week, the Shiite groups had mostly sat out the resistance. Many Sunni fighters were loyal to Mr. Hussein. That alienated Shiites, who had been ruthlessly persecuted by the former Iraqi leader.
All that changed this week when Mr. Sadr activated his militia at the same time Falluja faced its biggest battle. Now, the two sides have joined. There were even reports on Thursday of armed men from Falluja escaping to Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad. Mr. Hussein is no longer mentioned. Fighting the infidels is.
James Risen contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
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Iraq Council Demands Immediate Cease - Fire
April 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Governing-Council.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In a split between U.S.-picked Iraqi leaders and American administrators, the Governing Council demanded an immediate cease-fire across the country Friday and a halt to military operations that punish civilians.
A Shiite member of the council also met with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is battling U.S.-led forces in the south, and announced he was suspending his membership in the Iraqi Governing Council until the ``bleeding in all Iraq'' ends.
Another member, Ghazi al-Yawer, threatened to quit the council over the Marines' bloody siege of the city of Fallujah, aimed at uprooting Sunni insurgents.
U.S. forces have been fighting a two-front battle this week -- against Sunni militants in Fallujah and al-Sadr's militia in the south -- that has killed more than 460 Iraqis and 45 Americans.
Friday's halt in the Fallujah assault was requested by the council to allow for talks on reducing the violence, U.S. coalition spokesman Dan Senor said.
But a top commander, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt insisted the talks ``are not negotiations.''
Al-Yawer, a Sunni member of the council, and the representative of another Sunni member met Friday with city leaders in talks at a Marine base outside Fallujah, council member Mahmoud Othman told The Associated Press.
Al-Yawer said that while he has not taken any formal steps, ``I will quit (the council) if the problem is not solved peacefully, because God will not bless a position of power that does not benefit its people.''
``If negotiations fail because of the stubbornness of the American side or the failure to adhere to a cease-fire, I will quit 100 percent,'' he told Al-Jazeera TV.
The council's request for negotiations pointed to the eagerness of the Iraqi leaders to distance themselves from the assault, which has angered many Iraqis and become for some a symbol of resistance against the Americans.
In a statement issued early Saturday, the council demanded ``an immediate cease fire'' and political solutions for the ``situations around the country, particularly in Fallujah.''
It also called for an end to the ``military solution'' and ``collective punishment that falls on innocent civilians'' -- a reference to the Fallujah siege.
It denounced terrorism and noted that ``no one is above the law'' -- a reference to activitied by both Sunni and Shiite insurgents
Shiite council member Abdul-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi met Friday with al-Sadr, the cleric U.S. commanders have vowed to capture.
``I will not go back to the council until we enter a constructive discussion about Iraq ... to achieve what the Iraqi people really want and to stop the bleeding in all Iraq,'' he told reporters outside al-Sadr's office in Najaf.
``I call on everybody to use the voice of wisdom and avoid violence,'' he said.
One of the strongest pro-U.S. voices on the council, Adnan Pachachi, denounced the U.S. siege, launched after Sunni insurgents killed four U.S. contract workers and a mob dragged their burned and mutilated bodies through the streets and hung two of them from a bridge.
``These (U.S.) operations were a mass punishment for the people of Fallujah,'' Pachachi told Al-Arabiya TV. ``It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal.''
Added al-Yawer: ``We all agree that those who did that (killed the four Americans) were criminals who deserve to be arrested. But the result was the mass punishment of a city. ... And that we refuse.''
Asked about the council members' criticism, Senor said U.S.. forces have ``a responsibility to address a situation that is hostile.''
He said the coalition cannot ``just turn our heads and look the other way'' when Americans are killed in Fallujah.
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DISPATCHES
Why Falluja Remains a Crossroads for Collision
April 9, 2004
By MICHAEL GORDON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/middleeast/09FALL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON - When American forces invaded Iraq last year, Baghdad was the prize. The generals dubbed it "the center of gravity," and the calculation was that its seizure would mean not only the demise of Saddam Hussein and his ilk but the end of the war.
It was a goal that the Bush administration believed was all but fulfilled when Saddam's statute was pulled down in Baghdad's Firdos Square a year ago this Friday. All that seemed to be left was some mopping up.
A year later, it is clear that the victory was never complete. The killing of four American contractors in Falluja last week and the mutilation of their bodies at the hands of a riotous mob indicate that many there have neither accepted their defeat nor the United States' plans for a new, more pro-Western Iraq.
With Shiites in open armed rebellion and the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr challenging the coalition, Falluja is not the only testing ground for whether the Americans are capable of reasserting control. Millions of Iraqis will be watching to see who prevails.
The Bush administration's project in Iraq would have been difficult under the best of circumstances.
But a deficit of American forces, the slow pace of early nation-building efforts by an American-led coalition that lacked a United Nations mandate and the constant rotation of U.S. forces have made the job harder - and made it easier for the insurgency in towns like Falluja to endure and even grow.
I went to Falluja in June with the 2nd Brigade of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, the same soldiers that conducted the April 5, 2003 "Thunder Run" - an armed dash through a still unconquered Baghdad - and fought their way into the center of the Iraqi capital two days later.
It seemed clear back in June that there were several reasons for the troubles in Falluja, a city of a quarter million that is located some 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, west of Baghdad. Falluja was not on the invasion path of American forces on their way to Baghdad and thus did not witness the full display of American might.
The population is heavily Sunni and more wary, if not outright hostile, to an American presence than other regions dominated by Shiites and Kurds, who were brutally repressed by Saddam. Falluja is also a convenient way station for Syrian and other foreign fighters looking to take on the American-led coalition.
Since Falluja is located on the major highway that goes from Baghdad to Jordan it is also a city virtually impossible for Westerners to avoid. In Falluja, worlds collide. But the United States' handling of the occupation has contributed to the problem there, too. In a culture that prizes personal relations, there has been too great a turnover in American units there and too great a difference in their size, methods and resources.
After the fall of Baghdad, it took a while for Falluja to draw much attention. When it did, it was for the wrong reasons. The 82nd Airborne Division was the first unit to dispatch troops there. They set up a base of operations in the city and soon found themselves confronted by demonstrators. Shots were fired at the troops. The soldiers fired back, and Falluja's residents say that 17 citizens were killed and more than 70 wounded - figures the 82nd disputes.
That April 28 episode set a bad tone for the units that were to follow. A 1,200-strong squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was given responsibility for Falluja after the 82nd left and took casualties.
So the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division was then handed the mission. The 4,000-strong unit pulled out of Baghdad and headed west with its M-1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and set up camp just outside Falluja and near the nearby town of Habbaniya.
The brigade's officers concluded that the problem in Falluja was not just the conglomeration of former Baathists who had profited under Saddam, religious extremists and foreign fighters - to use the terminology of briefers in Baghdad in describing their adversary.
The officers saw that those groups were also exploiting the town's poor or disaffected, including those whose relatives had been killed or wounded in the confrontations with the Americans. For $500, there were young men ready to take a shot at an American.
The brigade put on some early displays of force, enforcing a curfew with Bradley fighting vehicles and M-1 tanks. But the brigade also sought to build ties with local officials and build good will with the population.
The plan was to carry out selective raids that minimized the risk of hurting innocents while maximizing economic assistance and empowering local officials - much the same strategy that Major General David Petraeus employed assiduously and successfully in Mosul, further to the Iraqi north. The brigade paid blood money for every dead or injured civilian and spent almost $2 million on improvements to the city.
By early August, the situation was more stable. Soon, however, the 2nd Brigade left to return to the United States. The Falluja mission was handed back to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and after that to the 82nd Airborne, which sought to train the nascent Iraqi security force to control the city.
This month, the Marines returned to Iraq to take responsibility for Falluja and western Iraq. The Marines came to Iraq vowing to use a "Velvet Glove" strategy of building ties with locals.
But the killing of the American contractors and the inability of the new Iraqi security forces to establish order changed that. Sensing that a moment of truth had arrived, the Bush administration took off the velvet glove and ordered the Marines to take control.
The outcome of the new battle for Falluja will send a signal as to whether insurgents or the coalition will shape the future of Iraq. Overoptimistic assumptions within the Bush administration about the number of forces required to stabilize Iraq and the ever-changing array of forces that have tried to deal with the city have made the situation in Falluja and western Iraq more difficult than it need have been.
As a press release from the Marines noted this week, "Establishing a persistent presence in areas where U.S. forces have not consistently operated over the last 12 months has been costly."
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The Phantom Sovereign
By Jonathan Schell,
The Nation and TomDispatch.com
April 9, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18374
The Iraqi struggle for independence from American rule has begun in earnest. US forces there now face a double insurrection - one part Sunni Muslim, the other Shiite Muslim - that threatens at the same time to turn into a civil war. Only the Kurdish north is quiet. With these events, US policy for Iraq has taken leave of reality as thoroughly as America's claims regarding weapons of mass destruction did before the war. The policy was declared on November 21, when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced that on June 30 of this year the "occupation of Iraq will end," and Iraq will then enjoy "sovereignty."
Since then, news commentators and officials have repeatedly told the public that on that date the United States "will hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people" (in the words of Dan Senor, a senior adviser to the CPA), who will then enjoy what is commonly called an "interim constitution." Every word of these short phrases is based on assumptions radically at odds with the facts.
1. "Sovereignty." According to Webster's, sovereignty is "supreme power, especially over a body politic." But it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to argue that the United States and its allies wield "supreme power" in Iraq. True, US forces can go where they like, but do they rule? Do the Iraqi people obey them? When the American authorities order something to happen, does it? On the contrary, none of the US plans for running the country announced by the Bush Administration has so far even been enacted, much less succeeded. Even now, GOP Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said that he has "no idea" what the plans for the June 30 transition are.
Iraqi political figures, by contrast, have been making a lot happen. According to the always invaluable (and now winner of a Pulitzer prize) Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, the most popular of the Shiite leaders, the comparatively moderate Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, launched a petition against the US-sponsored "constitution." The petition quickly gathered tens of thousands of signatures. This peaceful opposition to American rule, however, was quickly superseded, at least for the time being, by the Shiite insurrection, led by the extreme Islamist Muqtada al-Sadr.
The Iraqi blogger Zayed, until now pro-occupation, offers the following portrait of life in Baghdad the day after the insurrection:
"No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Mahdi [Sadr's militia] are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47's are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically."
There is no "sovereign," American or other, in this Iraq; there is anarchy. The less "sovereignty" the United States possesses, it appears, the more quickly it wants to surrender it.
2. "Hand over." How can the United States "hand over" power that it has never possessed? In any case, sovereignty is not a physical object, like a desk, that can be moved from one office to another. It is a relationship among people - one of command and obedience. Even if the United States did have sovereignty in Iraq, as it obviously does not, it would not be able to pass it on to someone else. Either the United States would remain the real sovereign behind the scenes or the new group would have to build up sovereign power for itself. Admittedly, the United States does possess something in Iraq - unopposable military force. But this is one thing, needless to say, that the United States decidedly will not hand over on June 30 or any other day. (Other things it is not planning to hand over are control of the central bank and the news media.) Will the Governing Council, which many Iraqis call "the Governed Council," command American troops or, for that matter, even their own Iraqi troops? Not likely. Meanwhile, the misnamed "administrator" of the misnamed "coalition" will be replaced by a misnamed "ambassador," presiding over what is to be the largest US "embassy" in the world.
3. "The Iraqi people." The Iraqi people will have no involvement, whether as givers or takers of power, on June 30. Those to whom the United States plans to hand over something or other (it will certainly not be power) are a small group of Iraqi officials, most of whom are to be US appointees. No one knows yet exactly who they will be or how they are to be chosen, Bremer's previous plan of selecting them by means of managed "caucuses" having been scuttled in the face of opposition from Ayatollah Sistani.
4. "Interim Constitution." A series of temporary regulations promulgated, before any election has been held, in the name of a conquering power and its local appointees is wholly misdescribed as a constitution. A constitution is the fundamental, enduring law of a country. In a democracy, it proceeds from the will of the people. Nothing of this kind will be instituted in Iraq on June 30.
5. "June 30, 2004." Among political observers, it is widely and believably said that this date is geared not to any events in Iraq but to the 2004 US presidential election. The Bush Administration wants to bolster the President's campaign by creating an impression of progress in Iraq, and is staffing the CPA's office of strategic communications with GOP operatives including Rich Galen, former press spokesman for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle.
Keeping all these things in mind, we should revise the commonly used phrases. Instead of saying, "On June 30, the Coalition will hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people," we should say, "On June 30, the re-election campaign of George W. Bush will hand over the appearance of responsibility for the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq to certain of its local appointees."
And the Iraqi people? They are busy, violently and otherwise, struggling for their own future. One of the organizers of the Sistani petition, Saad Taher, commented to Shadid, "America has a term: the rebuilding of Iraq. We are rebuilding ourselves. We want to create a new Iraqi personality. That's our task. That's not the Americans' task." For better or worse, these words are already on their way to becoming true.
Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.
-------- nato
Putin Doubts Expanded NATO Meets New Threats
April 9, 2004
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/international/europe/09RUSS.html
MOSCOW, April 8 - President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday that he hoped the expansion of NATO might have a positive effect on international relations but that the expansion is not effective against terrorist threats.
"Life shows that simply expanding will not enable us to effectively counter the main threats that we are facing today," he told Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the NATO secretary general, at a Kremlin meeting.
"This expansion did not help prevent the terrorist acts in Madrid, let's say, or help resolve the problems of Afghanistan," he added.
Mr. de Joop Scheffer's visit to Moscow comes nearly two weeks after NATO formally welcomed seven new members in Eastern Europe, including three former Soviet republics in the Baltics.
"Russia's position toward the enlargement of NATO is well known and has not changed," Mr. Putin said in a television appearance with Mr. de Joop Scheffer.
Russia has expressed concern over the deployment of NATO troops close to its borders, particularly over plans to have four F-16 fighter jets make regular flights near Russia's border from a base in Lithuania.
Russia said it might increase its military presence bordering three Baltic nations - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - if NATO stations permanent military bases on their soil.
Despite Moscow's opposition to the expansion of NATO, Mr. Putin said he hoped it would lead to "the strengthening of trust in Europe and the entire world."
He added that "each country has the right to choose the form of security it considers most effective."
Mr. de Joop Scheffer said he understood "the Russian psychology, when a Russian citizen sees NATO enlarge and wonders, and asks what that is all about."
He told Mr. Putin that Russia should work with the alliance in confronting today's global threats.
"The problems facing us are simply too big - terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq - to think that we can go it alone, that Russia or NATO can go it alone," he said.
Before meeting the president, Mr. de Joop Scheffer signed an agreement with the Russian defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, to improve communications by setting up a Russian liaison office at NATO's military headquarters in Mons, Belgium.
During a radio interview the NATO chief called the deployments normal and nonthreatening.
"Russian planes patrol Russian airspace, NATO planes patrol NATO airspace," he said. "It's perfectly normal."
-------- russia / chechnya
The Battle for Chechen Oil
By Timur Aliev
GROZNY, Chechnya, (ENS)
April 9, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-09-04.asp
Pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov plans to found a new oil company that would give the devastated republic a greater share of its oil riches, while making him more financially and politically independent from his Russian backers.
Currently, money from sales of Chechen oil have gone to Russian giant Rosneft and its local subsidiary Grozneftegaz. According to Kadyrov, Chechnya sees few benefits.
"In fact, Grozneftegaz is failing to play even a small role in reconstruction of the republic. Today 70 percent of taxes from oil sales stay in Moscow," Kadyrov said at a government session in Grozny last week. He complained that neither Rosneft nor Grozneftegaz have been putting any of this money back into Chechnya's badly damaged oil infrastructure or toward social needs.
Chechnya has only small reserves of oil, but it is of high quality. Grozny was also the site of one of the largest refineries in the Soviet Union, though much has been destroyed during Russia's two campaigns to crush independence forces in the last 10 years.
Oil extraction in Chechnya dates back a century, with production growing in the 1960s to a record of 21 million tonnes in 1971. After rapid decline through the 1980s, production stabilized at four to five million tonnes by the 1990s, just as the independence movement led by Jokhar Dudayev gathered pace.
Despite huge damage to infrastructure and the rerouting of an important pipeline from the Caspian around Chechnya, oil remains lucrative - both on a large scale and for local residents running illegal, homemade refineries.
But the battle for control has also become the focus of a political feud between Kadyrov and his opponents in Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as Akhmad Kadyrov, Russia's chief administrator in Chechnya, listens during a meeting in North Ossetia, July 2000. (Photo courtesy Tickets of Russia) Some factions, in the Kremlin in particular, want Kadyrov to shoulder increasing responsibility for running Chechnya and combating the guerrilla forces.
Others, such as the Russian finance and defense ministries are highly distrustful of Kadyrov, a former rebel commander who changed sides and became president last year in elections that independent observers denounced as fixed.
Kadyrov has ordered the general director of Grozneftegaz, Baudin Khamidov, to develop plans to establish a separate holding company that would be independent of Rosneft.
"Chechnya will benefit from this special status. We are a destroyed republic," Zaindi Durdiev, one of the authors of the plan and a former Chechen oil minister, said in a telephone interview. "The money that Grozneftegaz earns is currently collected by the Russian energy ministry, then it goes to the finance ministry, and only then back to us."
At the same time, Durdiev is sceptical that the Chechen oil firm will actually be created. "It is unlikely to happen, as people at governmental level in Russia oppose it," he said.
Creating a new oil company might become possible once an accord on Chechnya's powers is ratified. The draft of the agreement proposed by Kadyrov envisages equal participation by Russian authorities and the local Chechen government in exploiting the republic's oil resources. Under the proposed accord, production and export quotas would also be agreed with the Chechen authorities.
Rosneft says it does not object. "If the state considers it necessary to create another oil company there, let it do it," spokesman Dmitrii Panteleev said in a telephone interview.
He rejected accusations that Rosneft had failed to provide funding for social spending or the reconstruction of the oil industry. Panteleev said the company invested more than 3.5 billion roubles in Chechnya last year. More than 550 million roubles for economic and social assistance were transferred to the energy ministry, he said.
"Our activity in Chechnya is fully regulated by the state ... and it is not commercial in nature. The government commissioned us to create Grozneftegaz to operate there and reinvest part of the funds to maintain or increase oil production," he said.
Grozneftegaz says it spent some 125.5 million roubles last year in the social sphere and a further 38.3 million roubles in charity, as well as considerable investments in gas, water and electricity infrastructure.
Rashid Yunusov from the Chechen finance ministry believes Kadyrov is also at the heart of a complex legal dispute between Rosneft and Grozneftegaz with another company, Chechenneftekhimprom.
Oil well in Chechnya (Photo credit unknown) In 2002, state owned Chechen oil and gas businesses were meant to be transferred to Grozneftegaz. Instead, the assets were transferred to a newly created firm, Chechenneftekhimprom.
Then early this year, creditors of Chechenneftekhimprom, led by a company called Kreking, moved to secure payment. "They seized the property which Grozneftegaz was renting and some auctions were even held to transfer this effectively state owned property into private hands," said Panteleev.
Kreking, said Yunusov, is backed by the Chechen president. "The most important thing for Kadyrov is to manage to create a Chechen oil company before privatisation starts in Chechnya," he said. Rosneft refused to comment on Kreking's aims.
Vladimir Pribylovsky, an analyst from the Panorama think tank, said the heart of the dispute is political. "This is not an economic issue for the Kremlin. It is a question of whether the Kremlin should butter Kadyrov up with the oil, or whether he'll do without it."
The outcome could depend on which of the Kremlin clans gets an upper hand.
Two deputy assistants to President Vladimir Putin - Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin - "dislike Kadyrov for ideological state related reasons," said Pribylovsky. Both men are associated with the "siloviki", a group of political figures with military or KGB backgrounds.
Protecting Kadyrov, on the other hand, are members of the Yeltsin era grouping known as the "family." Their pragmatic viewpoint, Pribylovski said, is that paying off Kadyrov with oil is an acceptable price for hi