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NUCLEAR
Thousands demonstrate nuclear waste shipment to German dump
China backs Iran amid 'difficult' nuclear talks with EU
China Seeks to Avoid Iran Nuclear Issue
Iran and Europe Locked in Nuclear Talks
APNewsBreak: Traces of plutonium found at Egyptian nuclear facility
U.S. Wins Washington Nuke Sludge Ruling
MILITARY
Sudan Peace Talks Stall Over the Issue of Flights Over Darfur
AU condemns Ivory Coast air raids
U.S. Expands List of Lost Missiles
US triples global estimate of shoulder fired missiles
Banzai! Debunking the kamikaze myth
Ethnic Rivalries Still Bitter in Balkans
China: Damage Control After Criticizing Bush
EU, India eye counterterrorism
Fallujah and Those Mass Graves
'It's nothing personal. We don't want you here'
Fallujah pounded ahead of assault
Battle Near, Iraqi Sunnis Make Offer
Iraqi Rules for Candidacy Spur Some U.S. Concern
Annan's Warning On Fallujah Dismissed
All Sides Prepare for American Attack on Falluja
Five Palestinians Killed by Israeli Troops
Arafat on brink sparks burial debate
With Arafat in Coma, Near Death, Conflict Mounts Over Burial Site
U.S. tightens military alliance
US ready to put weapons in space
U.S. Air Force launches a GPS satellite
C.I.A. Is Said to Choose a No. 3
Russian Jury Convicts Scientist in His Retrial
Abolish the CIA!
Annan protests Fallujah strategy
2 GIs defend their killing of wounded Iraqi
National Guard Agrees to Halt Exercises After Strafing School
Veteran Wins His Discharge After Taking Army to Court
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Chile's Army Accepts Blame for Rights Abuses in the Pinochet Era
Beheadings on the Rise Around the World
POLITICS
Group seeks Schwarzenegger's records
Bush Adviser On Iraq Policy To Step Down
Bush Will Not Seek Mass Resignations
Glitch Found in Ohio Counting
OTHER
Putin Ratifies Kyoto Protocol on Emissions
Montreal Hospitals Hit by Deadly Epidemic
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- europe
Thousands demonstrate nuclear waste shipment to German dump
(AFP)
Nov 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041106160057.hjgq3ook.html
DANNEBERG, Germany - Thousands of anti-nuclear protestors gathered in northern Germany on Saturday to protest at the imminent arrival of a shipment of highly radioactive waste from France to a German storage dump.
The estimated 5,500 protestors gathered as a train carrying 12 containers of nuclear waste prepared to leave the La Hague nuclear plant in northern France later on Saturday, at about 8:00 pm (1900 GMT).
It was expected to cross the French-German border on Sunday and to reach the German town of Dannenberg 24 hours later, where the waste is expected to be loaded on to trucks to cover the last few kilometres to the Gorleben dump.
After demonstrating in Danneberg market square on Saturday, demonstrators gathered at the railway station, temporarily blocking the tracks to be used by the train.
More than 12,000 police were deployed last year for similar convoys in one of the largest security operations of its kind ever mounted in Germany.
Anti-nuclear and environmental campaigners say the shipments are dangerous and that the waste will contaminate the water table at Gorleben.
Germany, which has no treatment facilities of its own, sends spent fuel rods for reprocessing at the La Hague plant before they are returned here for storage.
-------- iran
China backs Iran amid 'difficult' nuclear talks with EU
TEHRAN (AFP)
Nov 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041106221302.ctwsndxt.html
China gave Iran crucial backing on Saturday in its stand-off with the UN's nuclear watchdog, with Beijing saying it opposed US efforts to have the Islamic republic referred to the United Nations Security Council.
The comments from Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing came as officials from Britain, France and Germany were trying to persuade Iran to limit its sensitive nuclear activities or risk possible international sanctions.
It was later announced from Paris that the talks had made "considerable progress" towards reaching a preliminary agreement on Tehran's nuclear program.
However Iran's top nuclear negotiator had earlier described the talks as "difficult" and said both sides were sticking to their positions.
"There is no reason to send the issue to the Security Council," Li said at a press conference with his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharazi.
"It would only make the issue more complicated and difficult to work out," Li said, contradicting Washington by saying "the Iranian government is having a very positive attitude in its cooperation" with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Li refused to speculate on whether China would use its veto in the Security Council in the event of Iran's case being sent there.
He did say he had told US Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw "that China supports a solution in framework of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)".
The United States accuses Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons under cover of its civilian atomic energy program and wants the UN watchdog, the IAEA, to take Tehran to the UN Security Council when the agency meets in Vienna on November 25.
Tehran denies that charge, insisting it only wants to generate electricity.
Russia, another permanent and veto-wielding Security Council member, has also voiced its strong opposition to Iran's case being referred there by the IAEA. Moscow is helping Iran build its first nuclear power plant in a deal worth some 800 million dollars.
Li's comments added yet another layer of diplomatic difficulty for the European Union, which is using a "carrot and stick" approach with Iran in a bid to get it to suspend uranium enrichment.
But a French foreign ministry spokesman said late Saturday considerable progress had been towards reaching a preliminary agreement on Tehran's nuclear program.
"Following difficult discussions the two sides have achieved considerable progress towards a preliminary agreement on a joint approach to the questions," he told journalists.
The negotiations, which began Friday, were earlier said to have been deadlocked over the duration of a suspension as well as the timing or scope of incentives that the European Union could offer Iran.
The talks were conducted at senior official level, with the troika of Britain, France and Germany representing the 25-nation EU.
Europe's three powers have offered Iran nuclear technology, including access to nuclear fuel, increased trade and help with Tehran's regional security concerns if the Islamic Republic halts enrichment.
Enrichment is the sensitive part of the fuel cycle makes fuel for civilian reactors but it can also be used to manufacture the material for the explosive core of atomic weapons.
Tehran has until now resisted Europe's demand for an indefinite suspension, arguing that it would infringe its right to maintain a civilian nuclear power programme.
Enrichment is permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) -- the treaty overseen by the IAEA and to which Iran is a signatory -- if for peaceful purposes.
After the talks in Paris a French diplomatic source described them as having been very difficult.
"The Iranians are fighting like lions," but the source added "contacts are to continue and hopefully enough progress has been made to form the basis of an agreement."
Hassan Rowhani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, told state television before the Paris announcement Saturday that the talks in Paris were "very complicated and difficult" and reiterated Iran's refusal to give up what Tehran sees as its right to master the sensitive nuclear fuel cycle including enrichment.
"We will not accept any constraint. It is us who will decide on the duration (of a suspension of enrichment) and we will will keep it in place for as long as we want," said Rowhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. He said both sides were sticking to their positions on key questions.
A close aide to Rowhani engaged in the Paris talks, Hossein Moussavian, told state television here that Iran wanted the Europeans to define a rapid timetable for talks in the near future in return for the continuation of an enrichment suspension.
He said Iran was not interested in "open ended" dialogue on the issue, which has already dragged on for 18 months, and said topics needed to cover "economic, political, security and technology" cooperation between Iran and the EU.
He also said Iran was expecting the EU to back its bid to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO), something that the US has been blocking.
----
China Seeks to Avoid Iran Nuclear Issue
November 6, 2004
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- China does not want to see Iran hauled before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions over its nuclear program, but the nation's foreign minister would not say Saturday if China would veto any such censure.
Visiting Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said resolving the standoff within the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency, would "serve all parties."
His remarks came as Iranian and European officials met in Paris to continue negotiations aimed at a compromise. State-run television reported Saturday the Europeans had rejected an Iranian offer to suspend nuclear activities for six months.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hossein Mousavian, was quoted from Paris as saying both sides were showing flexibility, but agreement has not been reached.
Officials from Iran, Britain, Germany and France are holding their talks at an undisclosed location in Paris.
The three European powers have offered Iran a trade deal and peaceful nuclear technology - including a light-water research reactor - in return for assurances that the country will indefinitely stop uranium enrichment, a technology that can produce nuclear fuel or atomic weapons.
The Europeans have warned Iran that they will back Washington's threat to refer the Islamic republic to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions unless it gives up all uranium enrichment activities before a Nov. 25 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
Tehran suspended uranium enrichment last year but has refused to stop other related activities such as building centrifuges.
Li told reporters he had spoken by phone before arriving Saturday in Tehran with U.S. Secretary Colin Powell as well as top British and Japanese officials about how to "properly resolve" the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.
"I told my colleagues that China supports a solution within IAEA. The Iranian government is having a very positive and active cooperation with the agency," Li said during a press conference with his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi.
"Referral to the U.N. Security Council will only make the issue more complicated and more difficult to work out," he said.
However, asked if China would veto any Security Council call for sanctions, Li did not directly respond, saying only: "I don't really know if it will be brought to the Security Council."
Kharrazi described the Paris talks as "complicated and difficult," and reiterated Iran's insistence any solution recognize Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
Senior Iranian officials, most recently supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeatedly have said Iran has no intention of building nuclear weapons as the United States contends.
Uranium enriched to a low level can be used to produce nuclear fuel, but if enriched further it can be used to make nuclear weapons. Iran is not prohibited from enriching uranium under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but faces growing international pressure to suspend such activities.
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Iran and Europe Locked in Nuclear Talks
November 6, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/international/europe/06iran.html?pagewanted=all
PARIS, Nov. 5 - In an effort to stop Iran from producing a nuclear bomb, the 25 leaders of the European Union on Friday offered Iran economic and political incentives if it suspended its production of enriched uranium.
The proposal, issued in a statement at the end of a two-day summit meeting in Brussels, coincided with negotiations that opened here in which Iran was seeking concessions from France, Germany, Britain and the European Union to allow it to produce enriched uranium. Uranium can be enriched both for peaceful purposes and to develop nuclear weapons.
In the negotiations, which stretched late into the night, the Iranians were willing only to consider a temporary suspension of perhaps six months to buy time for a broader agreement and avoid the threat of sanctions, according to officials involved in the negotiations. One European official labeled the Iranian position "suspension minus."
The goal of the Europeans, by contrast, has been to push Iran to agree to suspend its uranium enrichment indefinitely in exchange for the promise of economic and political rewards, officials said.
Iran has said that its uranium enrichment program is only for energy production purposes, claiming it as a sovereign right and a matter of national pride. On Oct. 31, Iran's Parliament unanimously passed a bill supporting the resumption of uranium enrichment. On Tuesday, Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, ruled out a definitive halt to uranium enrichment but expressed confidence that a compromise could be reached.
"Our nation must be given the assurance that it will not be stripped of its right," Mr. Khatami told reporters at the Parliament, adding that he was optimistic that negotiations in Paris would succeed.
That sentiment was echoed by Hussein Mousavian, the Iranian negotiator in the talks, who told Iran's state television, "I am optimistic because the two parties are determined to reach an accord satisfactory to both."
The spirit of optimism seems to be grounded in two assumptions by Iran.
The first is that the Europeans seem willing to bend to Iran by offering concessions to avoid a confrontation on Nov. 25, when the United Nations' nuclear monitoring body, the International Atomic Energy Agency, meets in Vienna. The second assumption is that the international community will not have the political will to impose sanctions on Iran if it does not comply - particularly economic sanctions at a time when oil prices are so high.
Under pressure from the Bush administration, the I.A.E.A. is scheduled to rule at its meeting later this month on whether Iran has met demands that it cooperate fully to disclose its nuclear activities. The Bush administration is poised to turn the matter over to the Security Council for discussion of sanctions if Iran does not cooperate.
The Europeans, who have worked to avoid sanctions, nevertheless admit that Iran has reneged on an agreement reached with France, Germany and Britain in October 2003 to suspend uranium enrichment and to accept stricter international inspections of its nuclear sites.
In Brussels this week, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany said Iran had to "stop the fuel cycle." Otherwise, he predicted, "we are moving forward in a very serious situation."
But Iran has charged that the Europeans have reneged on their promises under last year's agreement to deliver peaceful nuclear technology and other economic incentives in exchange for its cooperation.
Mr. Mousavian has taken a hard line on the issue of uranium enrichment. "Cessation is rejected, indefinite suspension is rejected," he was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying in Tehran on Tuesday. "Suspension shall be a confidence-building measure and a voluntary decision by Iran and in no way a legal obligation."
To avoid a diplomatic showdown and to salvage last year's agreement, the Europeans proposed a package of economic incentives for Iran last month that included access to imported nuclear fuel for its reactors, help with regional security concerns, and increased trade, including access to spare parts for Iran's aging airline industry.
That incentive strategy was underscored in the European Union decision contained in the European Union's statement on Friday. "A full and sustained suspension of all enrichment and reprocessing activities, on a voluntary basis, would open the door for talks on long-term cooperation offering mutual benefits," the statement said.
The European leaders also pledged to press for long-term "political, economic and technological" cooperation and the resumption of negotiations on a trade agreement between Iran and the European Union.
In Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, took the unusual step of delivering the weekly Friday Prayer sermon in which he insisted that Iran had no intention of developing nuclear weapons, which, he said, were forbidden under Islam.
"They accuse us of pursuing nuclear weapons," Ayatollah Khamenei said. "I am telling them as I have said before that we are not even thinking about nuclear weapons. Our nuclear weapon is our young and devoted youth and our believing nation."
In an interview published Friday in The San Francisco Chronicle, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he had no clear proof that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. "We haven't seen any concrete evidence that points to a fact that Iran has a nuclear weapons program," he said in the article. "We have seen Iran experimenting with all aspects of the fuel cycle, but we still have lots of work to do."
But the United States, Britain, France and Germany and other countries believe that despite its denials, Iran is pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program under cover of its civilian atomic energy program.
-------- mideast
APNewsBreak: Traces of plutonium found at Egyptian nuclear facility
(AP)
November 6, 2004
http://www.fox23news.com/news/world/story.aspx?content_id=80021F14-DEA0-4DDA-8B63-D4AC3DB9C990
VIENNA, Austria - U.N. experts have found traces of plutonium near an Egyptian nuclear facility and are investigating whether it could be weapons-related or simply a byproduct of the country's peaceful atomic activities, diplomats told The Associated Press on Friday.
The diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, warned against assuming that Egypt might have contravened the Nonproliferation Treaty by trying to separate plutonium, a substance used in nuclear weapons. The traces could be from a cracked research reactor fuel element or have other origins that have nothing to do with weapons research, they said.
"From time to time, these things pop up in places they should not be at," said a diplomat familiar with the investigations of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. "Most of the time, there is a reasonable answer."
Still, he said IAEA experts were considering all scenarios that would explain the origin of the particles pending the completion of analysis of the environmental samples in several European laboratories.
The diplomat said the IAEA's information was still too sketchy to firmly establish how old the plutonium traces were but suggested they appeared to have been released into the environment no later than the 1980s.
Egypt appeared to turn away from the pursuit of a nuclear weapons program decades ago. The Soviet Union and China reportedly rebuffed its requests for nuclear arms in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, Egypt gave up the idea of building a plutonium production reactor and reprocessing plant.
Egypt runs small-scale nuclear programs for medical and research purposes. Plans were floated as recently as 2002 to build the country's first nuclear power reactor, but no construction date has been announced.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- washington
U.S. Wins Washington Nuke Sludge Ruling
Saturday November 6, 2004
By SHANNON DININNY
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4599279,00.html
YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) - A federal appeals court ruled Friday that it was too early to decide whether the Energy Department should be allowed to leave radioactive sludge in underground tanks in Washington state instead of shipping it to a central repository.
Friday's ruling overturns a lower-court ruling in the lawsuit brought by environmental groups and American Indian tribes. The lawsuit claimed mixing the sludge and combining it with concrete grout - as the government plans for Idaho, South Carolina and Washington state - could endanger groundwater and rivers.
The Energy Department maintains that some highly radioactive residue in the waste tanks is too expensive to extract. The department has proposed reclassifying it as less dangerous, combining it with grout and leaving it in place.
Although the lawsuit cites all three states, only Washington state is affected by the ruling because Congress approved a measure this year allowing the reclassification for South Carolina and Idaho.
Friday's ruling overturns a decision last year by a federal judge in Idaho who barred the Energy Department from reclassifying the waste.
Washington and several other states filed ``friend of the court'' briefs to the appellate court, asking it to uphold the Idaho judge's decision.
The appeals court panel said it was too soon to determine if the Energy Department's plans violated the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Waiting would not be a greater danger ``than the one already imposed by our high-level-waste Frankenstein,'' said the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Elliott Negin, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, denied that the ruling was a defeat for the environmental group. ``All it said is that the timing is off,'' he said.
Colleen French, an Energy Department spokeswoman, said the agency was reviewing the ruling and would not comment.
As much as 100 million gallons of nuclear waste were stored over the years in 239 tanks in the three states. Some of it has been removed and processed for permanent disposal, but about 85 million gallons remain to be processed.
Critics contended that leaving any waste in those tanks will threaten the Columbia River at south-central Washington's Hanford site, as well as the Snake River aquifer under the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and the groundwater at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
About 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production is buried in Hanford's 177 aging underground tanks. An estimated 67 of the tanks have leaked radioactive brew into the soil, contaminating the aquifer and threatening the Columbia River less than 10 miles away.
Under a 1989 agreement, the Energy Department is required to remove at least 99 percent of the waste at Hanford.
On Tuesday, Washington state voters approved an initiative requiring the Energy Department to clean up all the tank waste, among other things. The initiative is expected to face legal challenges.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Sudan Peace Talks Stall Over the Issue of Flights Over Darfur
November 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/international/africa/06darfur.html?pagewanted=all
ABUJA, Nigeria, Nov. 5 (AP) - Disagreement over banning flights over Sudan's troubled Darfur region stalled the signing of a security accord between the government and rebels, who met for another day of talks on Friday here in Nigeria's capital.
The United Nations said the security situation in the region continued to deteriorate, undermining the ability of United Nations agencies to provide aid.
African Union mediators and Western diplomats have been trying for two weeks to broker an accord to end fighting in Darfur that has uprooted 1.6 million people and killed tens of thousands.
President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria met Thursday with rebels and government officials to break the deadlock over flight restrictions in Darfur.
"The headache is the question of the no-fly zone all over Darfur," said Ibrahim Mohammed Ibrahim, the spokesman for Sudan's government delegation. "We are negotiating on that exclusive point." The day's talks ended with no agreement.
The draft calls for "an effective cease-fire on land and air, in particular: refraining from all hostilities and military actions."
Pressure from Mr. Obasanjo and others appeared to have yielded results when both rebel groups at the talks announced at late-night talks on Thursday that they would sign the accord without any amendments.
However, the Sudanese government is refusing to sign. The head of the government delegation, Majzoub Khalifa, has said he will accept the restriction on flights only in return for a promise by rebels to confine themselves to specified garrisons.
The African Union's chief mediator at the talks, Allan-Mi Ahmad of Chad, said the body would not budge on what was in the draft accord.
Sudan's Arab-dominated government is accused of carrying out bombing raids in coordination with ground attacks by Arab tribal militia on the villages of non-Arab African farmers.
Sudan's government is accused of backing Arab militiamen in a campaign of violence including rapes, killings and the burning of villages in order to put down a 20-month rebellion by non-Arab African groups. The government denies the charge.
Hardships like disease and malnutrition are believed to have killed more than 70,000 of the displaced within Darfur since March. Many more have been killed in fighting since the conflict broke out in February 2003, although there is no firm estimate of the direct toll.
The talks began in Abuja two weeks ago after two earlier rounds collapsed.
South African military officials said Friday that they expected to grant an African Union request to send about 200 more troops to join the peace mission in Darfur. The contingent would assist in monitoring an April 8 cease-fire between the government and rebel groups, the South African military said.
The African Union is in the process of increasing its mission in Darfur sevenfold, to more than 3,000 people.
Tension has mounted in Darfur since the abduction of 18 Sudanese of Arab origin last week, and non-Arab African refugees are worried about possible government reprisals.
"There is violence that is increasing across the region," said José Díaz, spokesman for the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.
Mr. Díaz cited the use of helicopter gunships and the forced relocation of refugees from camps back to villages, where they have little protection from Arab militias known as the janjaweed. "The government of Sudan does not seem to be carrying out any effort to disarm the janjaweed or bring them to justice," he said in Geneva.
----
AU condemns Ivory Coast air raids
BBC
6 November, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3987787.stm
The African Union has condemned the government of Ivory Coast for mounting air strikes on rebel areas in the north and urged both sides to cease firing.
Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian leader who chairs the AU, voiced deep concern at the bombing, saying it contravened accords on ending the civil war.
A rebel town came under attack for the third day running as Mr Obasanjo held talks in Otta, south-west Nigeria.
The violence marks the first major unrest since last year's peace deal.
Two planes dropped bombs on the rebel stronghold of Bouake at about 1300 GMT on Saturday, a UN official in the town told Reuters news agency by telephone.
Reports also spoke of machine-gun fire and mortar bombardment around the town, but it is unclear where the fire has been coming from.
The BBC's Anna Borzello reports from Nigeria that it was originally thought the Ivorian government and rebels might attend the talks in Otta, hastily convened by Mr Obasanjo.
In the event, it turned out to be a brief consultation between high-level officials from the AU and the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).
Stronger mandate
President Obasanjo called on the UN to strengthen its mandate in the country, so that its troops could better deal with truce violations.
Young Patriots demonstrating in the Ivorian city of Abidjan on Thursday
In Pictures: Showing anger Peace process in tatters?
Only the UN's Security Council has the authority to increase the powers of the peacekeepers.
The new violence went against "the process of national reconciliation", the Nigerian leader added in a press statement, issued after talks with colleagues including AU head Alpha Oumar Konare.
Both the AU and Ecowas urged all parties in the conflict to halt all hostilities and promised to set up a "high-powered committee to address the political issues involved in the conflict".
UN officials in Ivory Coast said earlier that 18 people, most of them civilians, had been killed in the bombing attacks.
UN peacekeepers intervened on Friday to stop two convoys of government troops moving north. There are fears that the air strikes may be preparation for a government ground attack.
BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Welsh says stopping government aircraft attacks is difficult, because even if the peacekeepers had the authority to shoot them out of the sky, it would be likely to cause violent demonstrations by those fiercely loyal to the president.
The country has been split in two since last year's peace deal, with 10,000 French and UN troops deployed to monitor the ceasefire.
Last week, the rebels, known as the New Forces, withdrew their ministers from the unity government, accusing the army of preparing to return to war.
Street protests
Government aircraft bombed Bouake three times on Thursday alone and also attacked Korhogo, 225km (140 miles) to the north. Fresh strikes followed on Friday.
Demonstrators took to the streets of the economic capital, Abidjan, setting fire to buildings housing opposition parties and newspapers accused of colluding with the rebels.
Much of the violence in the city has been blamed on the Young Patriots, a group which supports President Laurent Gbagbo.
Ground battles also took place between government and former rebel forces in the central town of Raviar, in the UN-patrolled buffer zone which splits the country, the UN said.
The New Forces rebels have said they will act if government forces cross the UN buffer zone.
Government officials have not confirmed the air strikes.
-------- arms
WEAPONS
U.S. Expands List of Lost Missiles
November 6, 2004
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/politics/06weapons.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 - American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday.
A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, American officials said.
The officials said they did not know whether missiles from Iraq remain there or have been smuggled into other countries, though a senior administration official said Friday that "there is no evidence that they have left the country.''
It was unclear whether Iraqi military or intelligence personnel removed the missile systems during the initial invasion of Iraq or whether they disappeared from warehouses after major combat ended.
Shoulder-fired missiles - which are small, lethal and easy to use - are attractive weapons for terrorists. In recent months, Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies have repeatedly warned that Al Qaeda intends to use them to shoot down planes. In 2002, attackers who launched two small Russian-made SA-7 missiles almost hit a commercial aircraft taking off from Mombasa, Kenya. The new estimate of a larger number of the missile systems was discussed at a classified Defense Intelligence Agency conference in Alabama this week, the officials said. They declined to discuss the methods by which the new estimate had been reached, saying that it was classified.
American intelligence analysts have said in the past that during Saddam Hussein's rule, Iraq stockpiled at least 5,000 of these missile systems, and that fewer than a third had been recovered. The shelf life of the missiles can vary, with battery life depending on the conditions under which they are stored.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last fall that "no threat is more serious to aviation" than the shoulder-fired missiles, which can be bought on the black market for as little as $5,000, are about five feet long and weigh as little as 35 pounds. More than 40 aircraft have been struck by shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles since the 1970's, causing at least 24 crashes and more than 600 deaths worldwide, according to a State Department estimate. In Iraq, the missiles have been used in more than a dozen attacks on American planes and helicopters, including those taking off and landing at Baghdad's international airport.
In recent months, the number of successful missile attacks on American aircraft and helicopters in Iraq has declined, but American officials have said the reason has largely been the precautionary measures taken by the United States military.
An unclassified study released in June 2004 by what is now the Government Accountability Office cited "U.S. government estimates" that a few thousand of the portable missiles were "outside government controls.'' A separate study released in November 2003 by the Congressional Research Service cited counterterrorism experts in saying that as many as 4,000 to 5,000 shoulder-fired missiles might be available to Iraqi insurgents.
The new estimate by American intelligence agencies was described by government officials who had access to the classified intelligence report. They said the tripling of the number represented the first formal effort to determine how unaccounted Iraqi stockpiles may have compounded the surface-to-air missile threat. Only several hundred shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles from the Iraqi arsenals have been turned in to American forces in a buyout program, the government officials said.
A Defense Department official said Friday that more than one million shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles had been produced since the weapons were first manufactured in the 1950's, with 20 countries producing more than 35 different types of weapons. According to the accountability office study, 500,000 to 750,000 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles are still believed to be in the worldwide inventory. Many of the older missiles are militarily obsolete and have been destroyed.
Until the invasion of Iraq, many of the shoulder-fired weapons believed to be outside government controls were those provided by the United States and its allies to mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan to assist in their resistance against Soviet forces during the 1980's. Those weapons included American-made Stinger and British-made Blowpipe missiles, but by December 2002, American-led forces in Afghanistan had captured more than 5,000 of the missiles from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, according to news reports at the time.
The Defense Intelligence Agency conference on the worldwide threat to civil aviation posed by these portable air defense systems was held Wednesday and Thursday by the agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center, at Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Ala.
The range and accuracy of the weapons can vary widely by type, with the Russian-made SA-16 regarded as the most lethal in Iraq's prewar arsenal. It is not known how many of the missiles may have been fired at American planes and helicopters during the invasion in 2003.
In an effort to address the missile threat, the Department of Homeland Security has asked government contractors to find a way to protect passenger jets from small shoulder-fired missiles. The technology has been installed on military planes for years, using laser-jamming equipment and decoy flares to deflect the missiles, and some contractors have determined that passenger planes could be outfitted with antimissile technology relatively soon.
The State Department has also started an aggressive effort to persuade other countries to join in an effort to limit the availability and proliferation of the weapons. In July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that calls on the president to pursue even stronger measures, and directs the administration to expedite approval of new antimissile technologies. The Senate has not yet acted on the bill.
The new government estimate follows the disclosure late last month that more than 300 tons of powerful explosives had disappeared since early March 2003 from an Iraqi site previously monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Video images that emerged after that report appears to suggest that at least some of the explosive material disappeared after the fall of the Iraqi government. Unlike those explosives, surface-to-air missiles in Iraq were not sealed or monitored by weapons inspectors before the war and may have been widely dispersed among the Iraqi forces in the field.
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US triples global estimate of shoulder fired missiles
NEW YORK (AFP)
Nov 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041106174058.6sjyt8rn.html
After the fall of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein US intelligence services tripled their estimate of the number of shoulder-fired missiles in circulation, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Before the war officials estimated some 2,000 such deadly missiles were circulating out of the control of national armies. Now they believe the number is around around 6,000, according to the Times.
Shoulder-fired missiles are small and easy to use against aircraft.
US analysts estimated that Saddam's regime had a stockpile of at least 5,000 shoulder-fired missiles, but less than a third have been accounted for, leaving some 4,000 missiles missing, according to the Times.
The missing Iraqi missiles include Russian-built SAM 7 and SAM 16.
Officials do not know if the missiles were removed during the US-led invasion or looted from arsenals after the regime collapsed.
It is also unknown if the missiles have been taken out of the country or are in the hands of Iraqi insurgents.
Since the fall of Saddam's regime about a dozen shoulder-fired missiles have been used to attack US planes or helicopters. US officials say there have been few recent attacks because of precautionary tactical measures.
-------- asia
Banzai! Debunking the kamikaze myth
Asia Times
Nov 6, 2004
By Bennett Richardson and Fumiko Hattori
http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FK06Dh01.html
MABAL ACAT, Philippines - Like many violent acts during wartime, the Japanese kamikaze attacks of World War II have been vilified or conveniently dismissed as a freakish aberration that cannot be understood in rational terms. The self-sacrifice of the young Japanese pilots has been written into popular history as derived from an extreme interpretation of the samurai code and the wartime belief that the Japanese emperor was a living god.
"Banzai!" or "Long Live the Emperor", was their battle cry, or so popular mythology has it.
But the way the pilots who survived the war tell it, their prime motivation was simply desperation to protect the people they loved from coming to harm in a war that was rapidly - and very clearly - deteriorating into defeat. If they could keep the Allies from their shores and loved ones, they would have achieved their purpose.
In interviews conducted in Japan, some of the would-be kamikazes expressed relief, sadness even today that their comrades had died, and even some survivor guilt.
A handful of veteran Japanese pilots and their families gathered here on October 25 to pay tribute to that sentiment, at the spot where the first kamikaze mission took off exactly 60 years ago from a nondescript airfield about 80 kilometers north of Manila.
Local historian and artist Daniel Dizon witnessed the departure of the original kamikaze pilots on their missions when he was a boy of 14. He said most of the pilots "acted like they were going on a picnic". Dizon has been instrumental in creating kamikaze memorials in the area, and last month he helped to unveil a statue of a kamikaze pilot, a memorial largely funded by Filipino admirers in of what they consider the pilots' extraordinary courage.
"How can you forget something like that? They were brave - it's difficult to describe," Dizon told Asia Times Online.
One of the pilots at the memorial, Tsukasa Abe, now 77, said, "I am extremely grateful that the local people have erected this statue for us ... I am grateful that relations haven't been ruined despite what the Japanese did" in the Philippines.
After successive defeats across the Pacific, Japanese commanders had recognized by October 1944 that it was only a matter of time before the United States would invade the main islands of Japan itself. As the number of operational planes diminished and the Allies increasingly focused on the Pacific theater, senior Japanese navy air commanders decided there was no alternative but to create a special-forces unit to crash dive planes, armed with 250-kilogram bombs, into the flight decks of enemy carriers. These aircraft and the men who flew them came to be known as the kamikaze, named after a divine wind that saved Japan from a Mongol invasion in 1274. This legendary wind, probably a typhoon, destroyed Kublai Khan's fleet as it lay at anchor off the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.
The kamikaze name apparently was given to the first group asked to volunteer in the Philippines by senior commanders who ordered the tactic. The moniker was supposed to be something of an honorific for the original unit only, but quickly it came to be applied to other units using the same suicide tactic.
Kamikaze known as 'special forces' The kamikaze were widely known as "special forces" - the pilots did not call themselves kamikaze - but the word became popularized and has stuck in the Western imagination; it has come to mean anyone who acts recklessly or suicidally. That was far from the case with the pilots, interviews with a number of them in Japan showed. They survived because their missions were aborted, they couldn't find a suitable target, they themselves were shot down and forced to ditch into the water, or they had to turn back because of bad weather or mechanical failure.
"Not one person went because they thought they wanted to die," Toyotaro Nakajima, a former special-forces pilot, said in an interview. He later ended up living and working in the US for many years. "It was an order - help your country, your country being the family that you loved, your brothers and sisters, friends, your home town - to protect these things from the enemy," he told Asia Times Online.
After the kamikaze sinking of the aircraft carrier Saint Lo on October 25, 1944, in Leyte Gulf off the coast of the Philippines proved that the tactic could inflict severe damage, the Japanese navy expanded the special forces during the Battle of Okinawa. According to the US Strategic Bombing Report on the Pacific War, the Japanese flew 2,550 kamikaze missions from October 1944 to the end of the Okinawa campaign in June 1945, the vast majority of the kamikaze missions, though final and definitive figures were not collected by the US after the Okinawa campaign.
They managed a hit rate of about one in five planes; that is, one in five planes managed to hit an enemy ship, sinking some, damaging others. Others had mechanical problems during flight, ran into enemy air cover en route to the front, or were hit by anti-aircraft fire from the ships they were trying to hit.
Other former kamikaze pilots agreed that most special-forces pilots were thinking primarily about their families when they left on their one-way missions.
No one shouted Banzai for the Emperor! Shigemitsu Saito, now 78, a fighter pilot in campaigns including those in New Guinea and Guadalcanal, said the schoolboy comic-book image of the Emperor-worshipping kamikaze pilot bears little relation to reality. "The Emperor never really came into it - that's just something the newspapers made up. I doubt anyone actually went to his death shouting 'Banzai for the Emperor!'" he laughed.
Though the initial units were directly asked to volunteer for such missions by their superiors, later pilots were asked to fill in a form and state whether they would be willing to go on such missions - most pilots said they would. Then those who had expressed willingness later received a "special-forces order" from central command, and then they had to go. These orders were often posted on notice boards at air bases for all to see. Because pilots knew that their chances of surviving the war were slim to begin with, the prevailing sentiment at the time was that they should seize any chance that their deaths would not be wasted - by keeping the enemy away from Japanese shores.
Hiromi Kawasaki, now 77, was a navy pilot trainee when he saw a recruitment poster for a top-secret project pinned to the notice board at his base. The stand-out attraction for the 18-year-old was that volunteers would have the chance to go to the front after only two or three months of training. Given that it could have taken up to a year to see combat if he had stayed in the regular forces, Kawasaki took little heed of the warning on the poster that the mission had "no guarantee of survival".
He was assigned to the manned-torpedo unit, a variation on the original crash-dive aerial tactic. Kawasaki was trained to pilot a single-man torpedo with a 1.55-ton explosive warhead into enemy ships, using little more than a stopwatch and a periscope for navigation.
He said he had few qualms about volunteering, as the probability of death for an ordinary Japanese navy pilot was already extremely high - Japanese soldiers used to joke that joining the military not only got you a discount on your movie tickets but also on your life span, he laughed. "From the outset, I never really expected to return from the front," he told Asia Times Online.
But since Kawasaki was posted to coastal Shikoku in southern Japan to await the US invasion that never came, he lived to tell the tale.
Kawasaki said that during the war, the manned-torpedo pilots all wanted to take part in an attack and eagerly waited their turn on the attack roster. Missions were assigned according to the order in which pilots had graduated from training, with the first graduates assigned to the first missions. And so if someone botched his mission and had to be reassigned to the next attack, it was always very disappointing for the younger pilots waiting further down the line, he recalled.
They didn't care for money, fame or life "We thought we didn't need money, or fame, or our lives - that was the mindset," Kawasaki said.
But once the war ended, he realized he would have to find a way to live. Eventually, he ended up working in a flour mill and getting married.
"I've been able to lead an interesting life," he said, adding that if he had the chance to go back in time, he probably wouldn't place himself in harm's way so enthusiastically. "It seems strange that I was a soldier at 18 and now I'm almost 80."
Some of the survivors escaped death when the war fortuitously ended before the day of their scheduled sortie. Former special-forces pilot Tsukasa Abe, interviewed in the Philippines, dodged what would have been his fate by just a few hours - his scheduled mission was for the afternoon of August 15, 1945, but at noon the Emperor of Japan broadcast to the nation that Japan must "endure the unendurable" and accept defeat.
Of those pilots who remain, almost all watched close friends fly off to sacrifice their lives in kamikaze attacks.
"It was very painful to see them off," remembered one special-forces pilot. "They were going first and you were staying behind, so you felt indebted in a way." And yet despite seeing his friends perish in this manner, this pilot, who declined to give his name, was remarkably candid about how it felt to realize that it would not be his fate to die in battle.
"It would be a lie to say that I didn't have at least some feeling that I was glad I wasn't chosen," he said.
Although the use of the kamikaze tactic didn't change the final outcome of the war, there is some evidence that those pilots who flew to their deaths hundreds of kilometers away were indirectly able to protect their families from harm. Because of the threat posed by the kamikaze attacks to Allied forces, more than 2,000 B-29 sorties that were to have attacked civilian and industrial targets in mainland Japanese cities ended up being diverted to striking kamikaze airfields in Kyushu.
Reliable estimates indicate that between 34 and 45 ships were sunk by kamikaze attacks and hundreds more were damaged. Kamikaze pilots were also known to ram enemy planes in midair. In addition, many sailors who witnessed kamikaze attacks suffered psychological trauma due to the shocking nature of the suicide tactic.
US sailors terrified of kamikaze Bill Obitz, standing just a short distance from where a kamikaze plane hit the USS Missouri on April 11, 1945, said sailors were scared of kamikaze because "you knew when they came in that that you were either going to shoot them down or they were going to dive into the ship".
While the bomb failed to explode in the attack he witnessed that day, Obitz said the dedication evident as the pilot lined up his single-man plane on the final run toward 45,000 tons of battleship firepower was fearsome. It was awe-inspiring that "you knew that he wouldn't turn back", Obitz said.
Some have suggested that the Japanese kamikaze were an inspiration for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago, on September 11, 2001, but the surviving pilots unanimously disavowed any comparison to modern terrorists - their aim in World War II was only to hit military targets. Whether the September 11 terrorists ever thought about the Japanese kamikaze attacks will never be known.
"It's a major mistake to say that the September 11 attacks were kamikaze attacks - the special forces were only ever used in a theater of war," said Kawasaki, the former manned torpedo pilot who never got his chance to die. "We never carried out any attacks [against civilians] like the ones on September 11," he said.
The former pilots also said it was a soldier's duty to obey orders and their underlying motivation was different from that of today's suicide bombers. The kamikaze tactic was a defense to keep the Allies at bay, more than an attack.
"Nobody was chasing after death or trying to commit suicide - we did it because we had a duty to protect our country. To me, there's a major difference," said former kamikaze pilot Nakajima.
Bennett Richardson is a Tokyo-based freelance journalist with a special interest in Japanese defense policy, politics and modern history. Fumiko Hattori is an independent researcher and translator specializing in the World War II Pacific theater.
-------- balkans
Ethnic Rivalries Still Bitter in Balkans
Kosovo, Bosnia Sharply Divided; Macedonians Fear Vote May Spark Violence
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 6, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29172-2004Nov5?language=printer
LJIPJAN, Serbia and Montenegro -- Naser Bytyci and Branko Smilic are dentists who pulled teeth from fighters on opposite sides of Kosovo's ethnic war. Five years into a tenuous peace between ethnic Albanians and Serbs, the dentists live in the same town and practice the same profession. But Bytyci, an ethnic Albanian, pulls only Albanian teeth, and Smilic, a Serb, pulls only the teeth of Serbs.
Bytyci says he would not mind fixing Serb teeth, but that all the Serbs in town refuse to visit him or Albanian doctors of any sort. Smilic professes to be uninterested in giving Albanians root canals.
"It is better for each side to take care of its own," said Smilic, a stout man with a round face. "Suppose a patient got angry and began blaming the doctor because he was Serb or Albanian?"
It is safer, too, he argues, because recent violence against Serbs demonstrated that the foreign peacekeeping troops here cannot protect the Serbs.
The divided dentistry represents a persistent problem for Kosovo half a decade after NATO-led forces pushed the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army from the province and freed the ethnic Albanians from rule by then-president and current war crimes defendant Slobodan Milosevic.
Not only are the majority Albanians and minority Serbs living in segregated, mutually hostile communities, but they have been unable to integrate even ostensibly neutral public services such as health care. The "parallel structures" mock the stated aims of U.N. overseers in Kosovo to create a multiethnic society in advance of talks designed to resolve the political status of the province, which remains officially part of Serbia.
Kosovo's problems have a cousin in Macedonia to the south. There, a seemingly innocuous plan to reduce the number of municipalities nationwide by consolidating several areas has riled the majority Slavic population, which identifies itself simply as Macedonian.
The Macedonians assert that the plan, part of a U.S.-supported program of ethnic reconciliation, will make worse what they call efforts by the Albanian minority to split the country in two. Albanians say they just want to redress gerrymandering that has kept them at a political disadvantage.
The Macedonians have called a referendum, scheduled for Sunday, to squelch the municipal boundary plan. Several Macedonian analysts speak darkly of renewed violence if the referendum fails. A riot by Macedonians in July -- with trash and cars burned and windows smashed in the town of Struga -- provided a taste of the possible consequences, they say. Conversely, Albanians predict violence if the referendum kills the plan.
All over the Balkans region, the violence that burned in the 1990s has been doused, but the basic conflicts are unresolved. General trends are often negative.
In Bosnia, efforts to bring Serbs, Croats and Muslims into a workable government partnership have stalled. Few refugees who were driven from their homes during Serb campaigns of ethnic cleansing have returned permanently. Nor have Serbs returned after fleeing such places as the Bosnian capital Sarajevo at war's end. Croats remain segregated from Muslims in the western city of Mostar, touted as a symbol of peace when its graceful Ottoman-era bridge was recently restored. The town is almost totally devoid of Serbs.
Further afield, ethnic rivalry within Serbia and Montenegro, the last remaining chunks of Yugoslavia still glued together, threatens the country's unity. In 2006, the two republics are scheduled to vote on whether to remain united. Some Montenegrins are campaigning for secession.
Officials of the European Union, which has pressed to keep Serbia and Montenegro in one piece, say they fear that a Montenegrin exit would create an epidemic of breakups in neighboring countries: Serbs and Croats would want to go their own way in Bosnia, as would Albanians in Kosovo, other parts of Serbia and Macedonia.
A visit to Kosovo produces a sense of movement away from conciliation. The province held parliamentary elections on Oct. 23, but all but a handful of the approximately 120,000 Serbs who live among 1.7 million Albanians boycotted the vote, even though Serbs are guaranteed 10 of the 120 seats in the legislature.
In March, Albanians rioted, burning thousands of Serbs out of their homes. Nine Serbs and 12 Albanians died in the violence. Many Serbs left in the aftermath, resulting in a net loss of the Serb population for this year, U.N. officials say.
Smilic sent his wife and two children into exile in Serbia to escape the house burnings. He said he remained behind in part for protest, in part for economic advantage. The Serbian government in Belgrade pays him a stipend to stay put. He also collects pay for his dental services from the Albanian government in Pristina. However, he resists demands that he integrate with the Albanian staff at the main health center in the town.
He said that after the 1999 war, the center was renovated and the Serb staff, reduced from its prewar dominance, asked for a separate entrance for both medical personnel and patients. When that was refused, the Serbs set up a clinic in a private house.
"Of course, I don't think our Albanian colleagues would attack us if we went to the health center," said Smilic . "But there is danger from outsiders." He says the root of the problem lies in Albanian demands for full independence from Serbia, a subject that will arise at international talks proposed for as early as next year. "They want to be independent, and that means no Serbs. We can't move freely around here now, you can imagine if the peacekeepers leave and just the Albanians are in charge," he said.
Bytyci says the Serb fears, while authentic, serve as an excuse for radicals in that community to avoid any contact with Albanians in any institution. "We have three entrances to the health center. The Serbs can use any one they want," he said at his dental office near the clinic. Serb doctors and dentists "are taking money from the Kosovo government, but refuse to coordinate. No one knows where and if they work. They just come once in a while, take a share of medicines and disappear."
Bytyci said he has complained about this to UNMIK, the U.N. administrators in Kosovo. He said the Serbs receive almost a quarter of the local health budget, which, according to Bytyci, is excessive given their proportion of the town population. "The U.N. says it has to be careful. They don't want to upset anyone, so they don't do anything," Bytyci said.
U.N. officials acknowledge the problem but are reluctant to take dramatic steps. "At this stage, a lot of progress does not depend on the international side. You need a lot more from the local communities," said Peggy Hicks, director of UNMIK's office of returning refugees. "That's the key ingredient."
In Macedonia, unlike Kosovo, Albanians and Macedonians work together in government and have not adopted strict separation. Macedonians outnumber Albanians by about two to one in a total population of more than 2 million.
The proposed municipal reform originated in the so-called Ohrid agreement, which was negotiated under U.S. and European Union mediation in 2001 in a city by that name to end a seven-month armed revolt by Albanians. Albanians in Kosovo abetted the fighting.
Under the Ohrid deal, the Macedonians and Albanians agreed to increase the use of the Albanian language in government offices and to increase Albanian employment there. In recent weeks, envoys from the United States and E.U. have paraded through Macedonia to campaign against overturning the municipal reorganization plan. The E.U. has warned Macedonia that the dust-up could delay Macedonia's eventual membership in the union. Marc Grossman, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, advised that "Macedonia again faces a choice between the past and future," the Reuter news service reported.
In Struga, the plan yokes outlying villages and city under a single administration and makes Albanians the majority in the new political unit. At first, the Struga riot was directed against the local political offices of Macedonia's defense minister, Vlado Muchkovski, who was visiting the town, but it spread to other parts of town. Attitudes have not softened since.
On the Corso, the main pedestrian promenade in the resort town, café owners Micko Markovsky, a Macedonian, and Nusrat Ziba, an Albanian, serve about the same quality cappuccino and play the same Euro-pop music over their boom boxes, but agree on almost nothing else.
"We have change after change and they favor the Albanians," said Markovsky, who owns the Mia Pizzeria and Bistro. "What we need is jobs and the government concentrates on things that are not needed instead. This plan looks like a road to breaking Macedonia into two."
Ziba, owner of Queen's Bar, claimed that police stood aside as rioters rampaged up his street. "The Macedonians are used to privilege and don't want to recognize us as equals," he said. "Believe me, if we rioted like they did, there would have been plenty of dead Albanians around."
-------- china
China: Damage Control After Criticizing Bush
(Inter Press Service)
by Antoaneta Bezlova
November 6, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/bezlova.php?articleid=3918
BEIJING - The 2004 vote for the U.S. president would have gone down in history as one of the most painless polls for China since Washington recognized its communist government in 1979, had it not been for a political gaffe committed by Beijing on the eve of the elections.
Although Beijing tried to distance itself from stinging remarks by the respected former foreign minister Qian Qichen, who hit out at the Bush administration's "cocksureness and arrogance" in its attempt to "rule the world," the published commentary, nonetheless, exposed certain Chinese leaders' anxiety over U.S. unilateralism and its future manifestations.
The incident also marred what promised to be a remarkably trouble-free U.S. election for Beijing. For the first time since the 1970s, China was no longer a vote-swinging issue in the U.S. presidential election campaign.
"The anti-China platform hasn't been vociferous in these U.S. elections," remarked Professor Rick Baum, political scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles..
In previous elections, challengers always assailed the incumbent president as being too "friendly" with Beijing leaders. Accusations against Beijing ranged from condemnation of the country's human rights record and the subjugation of the Tibetan people to China's alleged stealing of U.S. jobs.
However, the China threat hardly featured in the salvo of critical appraisals fired at U.S. President George W. Bush by his Democrat challenger John Kerry. And mainland Chinese analysts agreed more than disagreed that whoever won the elections, it would make little difference to U.S.-China relations.
"Unlike previous U.S. elections, this time both [Republican and Democratic] candidates have a clear recognition of China's rise as a world power and its importance as a strategic ally," said Zhang Guoqing, research fellow with the American Studies Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
"This U.S. acknowledgment of China's increasing world influence can not be easily undermined by a mere change of the U.S. president," Zhang said in an interview. Xue Yabo, a researcher with the Institute for National Defense under the China Renmin University, went even further to suggest that the "Bush administration's neoconservatism has contributed to the revival of American policy [that gravitates] toward China." "There is a tacit political agreement between Beijing and Washington that no other domestic considerations by either side should be allowed to disturb the global effort to combat terrorism," Xue wrote in the Beijing-based Xinjing Bao daily.
"The fight against terrorism is the core of Bush's neoconservative politics and Washington's policies toward China in the foreseeable future would be unavoidably constrained by this," he added.
Both U.S. and Chinese observers have praised relations between the two countries in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, as the "best ever" - with Beijing aligning itself with Washington in the "global war against terrorism." Also, both sides concentrated on expanding economic and trade ties with one another.
Although China opposed the war in Iraq, the overall climate had continued to be free of visible tensions.
But just as Beijing was becoming comfortable about any outcome of the elections, a press blunder exposed the undercurrent flaws in U.S.-China relations.
On Monday, the state-run English-language China Daily carried a prominent commentary by Qian - who happens to be the doyen of Chinese foreign policy. The timing of the article itself was prominent and it marked a sharp departure from Beijing's past refusal to comment on U.S. presidential elections.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry later said that the article was not "specially commissioned" and its timing was unfortunate. But whatever the circumstances behind its publication, there was little doubt about its unabashedly anti-Bush stance.
The commentary insinuated that Beijing is uneasy about the change of political dynamics in the aftermath of a U.S.-led anti-Iraq campaign. Also, Qian hinted that China was wary of another four years of the Bush administration, in terms of what it could deliver on the international front.
Qian also accused Bush's government of having "opened a Pandora's box, intensifying various intermingled conflicts, such as ethnic and religious ones." He criticized the "Bush doctrine" in which the United States created the so-called "axis of evil" and allowed for "preemptive strategies" to rule U.S. politics.
Within China's diplomatic circles, Qian's comments have been taken seriously.
Although retired, he is said to exert strong behind-the-scenes influence in China's foreign policy, and many diplomats believe his comments could reflect the thinking of certain Chinese leaders.
Qian is the most revered senior Chinese diplomat, who is credited with reestablishing China's international standing in the aftermath of the 1989 bloody crackdown on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square.
In the hours after Bush's reelection was confirmed, Beijing tried to repair the diplomatic damage done by the former foreign minister's remarks.
In a congratulatory message sent to the White House, President Hu Jintao lauded the progress in Sino-U.S. relations during Bush's first term in office.
Hu also said he was looking forward to working with President Bush in promoting "constructive cooperative relations" between the two countries during the U.S. president's second term.
State-owned newspapers, too, have been laudatory over Bush's reelection victory in a bid to blow over Qian's comments.
The Beijing Youth Daily said it had seen a more mature Bush emerge, commenting: "Today's Bush is no longer the ignorant, arrogant Western cowboy of the past."
-------- europe
EU, India eye counterterrorism
November 06, 2004
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041105-102430-9111r.htm
NEW DELHI - The European Union is set to firm up its strategic partnership with India at a summit meeting at The Hague on Monday, officials said, adding that counterterrorism efforts would also be in focus.
"India is one of the few countries with which the European Union has regular summits and is developing a strategic partnership," the head of the European Commission delegation in India, Francisco da Camara Gomes, told reporters here Thursday.
"The Indian side promises to support most of the proposals that we have put up in a paper as part of building a strategic partnership," Mr. Gomes said.
"The relationship has to be of the same parity, density, quality as the relationship we [the EU] have with the United States, Canada, China, Russia and Japan."
The Netherlands' ambassador in India, Eric Franciscus Charles Niche, told reporters the summit would also discuss counterterrorism.
"The focus has shifted from trade and investment to the political sphere, which deals with issues relating to tackling global terrorism," Mr. Niche said.
The Netherlands holds the six-month rotating presidency of the 25-nation EU until Dec. 31.
A senior European Commission source confirmed in Brussels that the main part of the summit would be devoted to starting up the EU-Indian strategic partnership.
"In doing this we are recognizing that India is gaining in real importance for the EU. Before, we looked more to China, and saw India rather as a leader in the developing world. Now it's an equal partner," the source said on the condition of anonymity.
Among other highlights at the summit, the two sides will sign a 33 million-euro agreement for 1,000 Indian students to pursue master's degree courses in Europe over the next three years.
But the details of Indian participation in Europe's Galileo satellite navigation project are still under discussion and will not be formally decided on Monday, the source said.
The EU hopes that by taking its partnership with India to a higher plane, it can also indirectly encourage progress on India's Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and other regional headaches, such as the Maoist rebellion in Nepal.
"If you encourage India toward modernization ... you push India toward stabilizing its region," the source said.
The two sides will also discuss the re-election of President Bush, the source said. "Both the European Union and India have always been strong defenders of multilateralism."
The summit will also take up cultural exchanges in film, literature and music. "India is very chic in Europe right now, so it's a good time to push ahead on the cultural front," the source said.
The Indian delegation will be led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who will hold talks separately with his Netherlands counterpart Jan Peter Balkenende.
-------- iraq
Fallujah and Those Mass Graves
Washington Post
by Jude Wanniski
November 6, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/wanniski/?articleid=3926
Memo To: David Broder, Washington Post Re: Those Mass Graves
Remember, David, back on Sept. 27, I posted a memo on the margin that I wrote to you, complimenting you on your column about how the news media had been "losing their way"? It had to do with your observation that the major news media were chasing sham stories while not asking serious questions about the most important topics of the day, including the war in Iraq - which both your newspaper and The New York Times acknowledged in price, apologizing for not being more aggressive in the months leading up to the president's decision to go to war. In my note to you, I suggested you look into the long-held conventional wisdom that Saddam Hussein committed genocide, a view largely propagated by Human Rights Watch. The organization estimated that as many as 290,000 Iraqis were killed by Saddam during his reign, with 100,000 Kurds slaughtered in 1988, in the last months of the Iran/Iraq war. Prime Minister Tony Blair at one point said as many as 400,000 Iraqis had been killed by Saddam's regime.
Partly as a result of the HRW assertions, the Bush administration justified its use of force to replace the duly constituted government in Baghdad. The most recent estimates of the dead total 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 60,000 to 80,000 Iraqi military, plus the almost 1,200 Americans who have died during the course of the war. We are currently bombing the 300,000 people of Fallujah in hopes of pacifying the city and may wind up leveling it altogether. Is the sky the limit on what it will take to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq? Don't you wonder?
Meanwhile, this week Human Rights Watch issued its long-awaited conclusive report on Saddam's genocidal record. As far as I know, the major news media have not picked up the report, which is available on the Internet at HRW's Web site. I read about the report in the British press. It turns out that in 19 months HRW's experts have not been able to find the missing 100,000 bodies it said were of Kurds who had been rounded up and trucked south of Kurdistan, machine-gunned to death, and buried in mass graves. In fact, it now blames the U.S. coalition for not securing those mass graves containing smaller numbers of Iraqis or keeping looters from carrying off official Iraqi records of the genocide and the mass graves. You should read the report in its entirety, David, and maybe you will get your editors to take a look too. Here are two pertinent graphs from the summary:
"In the case of both documents and mass graves, U.S.-led coalition forces failed to secure the relevant sites at the time of the overthrow of the former government. They subsequently failed to put in place the professional expertise and assistance necessary to ensure proper classification and exhumation procedures, with the result that key evidentiary materials have been lost or tainted. In the case of mass graves, these failures also have frustrated the goal of enabling families to know the fate of missing relatives. The findings of the report are all the more disturbing against the backdrop of a tribunal established to bring justice for serious past crimes, the Iraqi Special Tribunal. Human Rights Watch has serious concerns that the tribunal is fundamentally flawed and may be incapable of delivering justice.
"The extent of the negligence with which key documentary and forensic evidence has been treated to date is surprising, given that the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi authorities alike knew that trials of Hussein and key Ba'ath government officials would be important landmarks in Iraq's political recovery, that successful trials require solid evidence, and that, as international experience has shown, preserving such trial-ready evidence is a difficult task. Some of the evidence has been destroyed, but it is not too late to assume custody of millions of additional pieces of evidence. Some of this material, if it is given the urgent attention it needs and deserves, may prove critical in the proceedings of the upcoming trials. It will also play an important role as Iraqis attempt to construct an accurate historical record of their traumatic experiences under Ba'ath Party rule."
Do you see what I mean? Saddam Hussein will soon be put on trial for crimes against humanity, and the Iraqi prosecutors will not have the goods on him.
Now that the election is over, maybe you will have more time to devote to this exercise. You should at least give a call to Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, the retired CIA analyst who has never believed in the genocide stories, but has awaited the report of Human Rights Watch to see what it has found. After reading the report in its entirety, he told me they had, as he expected, come up empty: "This claim of HRW that they haven't got evidence that will stand up, because the graves have been compromised, overlooks one key fact: they were claiming that the Ba'ath killed hundreds of thousands. If these graves really contained all the bodies they're supposed to contain, the numbers of dead alone would convict the Ba'ath. If you read the report, they say over and over again they 'believe' such-and-such a grave actually contains thousands of bodies; but all they've been able to find is a few score (at best). I think that's what gives the scam away. They can't produce the hundreds of thousands, or even the tens of thousands they promised they would."
I've tried to get lots and lots of reporters interested in the story, David, but in every case they have a reason why they just can't do it at this time. They've lost their way, as you noted. As the dean of the Washington press corps, you should please help them find it.
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'It's nothing personal. We don't want you here'
Troops face tough task to win over local people
The Guardian
November 6, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1344914,00.html
On any other day but this one, the village of Ahmad al-Hamadi, on the green banks of the Euphrates, would be an idyllic place. In the rich agricultural gardens along the great river, it is easy to understand why this part of Iraq was the original biblical paradise.
Children in brightly coloured clothes play in the fields among fields of potatoes and corn maize. Men in long white dishdashehs climb up from the water's edge carrying fragrant bundles of water cress. But the dozen soldiers of the Black Watch, walking slowly down the road, could be forgiven for seeing this as a hellish place. On Thursday afternoon, eleven of their regiment were hit by a suicide car bomb at a checkpoint across the river a few miles to the east. Three of them, as well as their civilian interpreter, died instantly - the other eight suffered lesser injuries. And now, fewer than 24 hours after the attack, they are on patrol again.
Their helmets are strapped on hooks to their belts - instead they wear tam-o'-shanters, the outsize berets topped by the quivering red feather or "hackle" which are the mark of the Scottish regiments. It is a strange and unnerving feeling to walk alongside them through the lush countryside, always conscious of the possibility of unseen and hostile eyes.
Why are the Black Watch out here so soon, unhelmeted and exposed? The answer is at the heart of the British strategy for its 30-day deployment in this dangerous corner of Iraq.
"It was great shock what happened yesterday, but what we've got to do is take it back to them," says Lieutenant Richard Holmes, leading the patrol. "We've got to get out, get the intelligence, and get feet on the ground, otherwise you'll never get anywhere."
This is the "softly-softly" theory, the "winning of hearts and minds", and yesterday the Black Watch was once again putting it into action.
In practice, it is almost childishly simple. The patrol walks slowly through Ahmad al-Hamadi and, while soldiers carefully scan the countryside around, a Scottish interpreter of Arabic and an officer say hello to local people.
They hand out fliers to passing motorists, bearing the photograph of a friendly Scottish soldier and a conciliatory text in Arabic. Three young men and a shaggy long-legged sheep sit under a tree, and the soldiers go up and talk to them.
They ask them about the price of potatoes. A boy named Saleh complains that he cannot afford to go to school. The soldiers ask gently about the local people who live around here; slowly, the theory goes, this kind of talk will win trust and eventually valuable intelligence about the insurgents lurking in these villages. Then comes the key question: what do the locals think about the British soldiers?
"They are afraid that you might beat them and shout at them," says Saleh. Is that really what people say? asks the soldier. "Yes," comes the answer.
"But they will let you in their houses, if they know that you're not going to hit them."
The British have been out on the ground for little more than a week and plainly, the hearts and minds around here are a long way from being won. Throughout the two hours I spent in Ahmad al-Hamadi, no one offered the Black Watch a rude gesture or word of abuse. They were polite, indifferent, curious at best - until the very end of the patrol, when an older Iraqi man stepped out of his car to talk.
He was an engineer and a fluent speaker of English, educated in the US and he, at least, had no interest in discussing potatoes. Point by point, he makes a simple, but devastating argument: that the Black Watch should not be here.
"Where do you come from?" he asked. "Scotland? So what do you do if someone comes to your land, to occupy your country? This is an Arab country, a Muslim country. How would you feel if someone came and destroyed your homes, killed your families?"
"Why does he sit like that?" said the man, pointing at a soldier crouched with his rifle raised. "It would be better for you to go. If you go no one will attack you. If you stay, they'll come from Falluja and Ramadi and they'll fight you."
The Black Watch thanked him, and politely walked on. About the professionalism and sincerity of the individual British soldiers, there is no doubt. But this is no longer about hard hats or soft hats. The message from Ahmad al-Ramadi yesterday was simply this: it's nothing personal - we don't want you here.
· This pool dispatch was compiled under Ministry of Defence restrictions
-----
Fallujah pounded ahead of assault
November 06, 2004
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041105-114300-5466r.htm
U.S. troops and combat aircraft unleashed artillery and precision strikes yesterday on terrorist hide-outs in Fallujah, shaping the battle space for what is designed as a final ground assault to cleanse the renegade city of foreign and Iraqi insurgents.
A combined force of Marines, Army soldiers and Iraqi national guardsmen ringed the city west of Baghdad, blocking exit routes. For weeks, the coalition has allowed residents to leave in an effort to further isolate an estimated 5,000 militants inside the city. Aircraft dropped leaflets urging residents to leave for designated refugee areas.
"The window is closing for a peaceful settlement," Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said at a press conference in Brussels, where he met with European Union leaders. "We intend to liberate the people.... The insurgents and the terrorists are still operating there. We hope they will come to their senses otherwise we will have to bring them to face justice."
Mr. Allawi's comments came after EU leaders responded to his call to build a strategic partnership with Iraq by offering $40 million to fund the fledgling democracy's first elections since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also weighed in on Iraqi elections yesterday, warning Mr. Allawi, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that an offensive on Fallujah will alienate Iraqis. Sunni clerics already have threatened to boycott the election if Fallujah is attacked.
"The threat or actual use of force not only risks deepening the sense of alienation of certain communities, but would also reinforce perceptions among the Iraqi population of a continued military occupation," Mr. Annan wrote in the letter to the leaders.
The Bush administration and Mr. Blair said Mr. Allawi will make the call on Fallujah. The administration believes Fallujah must be cleaned out ahead of planned elections in late January.
The United States has lost more than 1,000 service members in combat deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. In Anbar province, which includes the restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, Marines are killed weekly by rocket fire and roadside bombs.
Military sources said a major assault could come within days, as Marines completed training for hitting specific targets inside a sprawling city of 300,000. They were also training Iraqis in the correct battlefield techniques.
"I know you want to wear masks so nobody will recognize you but the terrorists wear masks, too, and Marines shoot people with masks," Reuters quoted Marine Staff Sgt. Anthony Villa as telling the Iraqis.
Inside the city, cleric Hadra al Mohammadiya spoke in a mosque to several hundred anti-coalition fighters.
"We are forced to go into this battle but we were hoping for peaceful solution," the imam said. "The Iraqi government and the American forces want this war to take place."
Retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis yesterday said Mr. Bush's decisive re-election Tuesday gives him the mandate to take the decisive action that is required.
"We'll take casualties. But we'll clean it up. That's the intent. Clean out the environment so we can have elections," he said.
Intelligence reports from inside the town and overhead surveillance have pinpointed where the insurgents live and organize. In recent months, commanders have called in air strikes and artillery barrages. Military sources said yesterday the strikes have killed at least 10 top lieutenants of Abu Musab Zarqawi. The Jordanian-born terrorist has used Fallujah as a base from which to direct an unending series of car-bombings against American and Iraqi troops.
Seven months ago, Marines seemed on the verge of subduing Fallujah. They conducted house-by-house, search-and-destroy missions that killed hundreds of militant. But Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top U.S. commander, halted operations after Iraqi interim government officials objected. The fear was that continuing the killing would prevent the naming of a transition government.
The halt proved costly. Zarqawi and other terrorists used the pause to build up men, arms and money - most of it pouring across the Syrian border.
Now, American and Iraqi troops faced a force probably five times as large as the one they would have battled in April, according to a military source.
It is not clear whether Zarqawi, who has personally beheaded captives, is inside Fallujah. Military sources told The Washington Times this past summer that he left the city and constantly moves from location to location. He takes a hands-on approach, personally greeting newly arrived jihadists from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other countries. He then gives the assassins car-bombing missions, usually against Iraqis who are aiding the Americans.
An attack on Fallujah would be the fourth major assault in Iraq since spring and summer to wrest control of insurgent-held territory. Previously, U.S. Army troops and Iraqi guardsmen pacified Najaf in southern Iraq, Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad and Samara north of the city.
Col. Maginnis said Fallujah will be the toughest yet.
"The number in Samara was probably a couple of hundred and they were not as hardened as some of these outsiders are in Fallujah," Col. Maginnis said. "They're spread out more in Fallujah than we'd like. It's going to be a little more difficult to track them down."
French President Jacques Chirac - who opposed the Iraq war - did not attend yesterday's EU meeting with Mr. Allawi, but said he was not snubbing Iraq's prime minister. At the time of the meeting, Mr. Chirac was flying to the United Arab Emirates to meet with its new leader.
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Battle Near, Iraqi Sunnis Make Offer
Major Shift Includes New Interest in Vote
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29157-2004Nov5?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 5 -- As Marines step up preparations for military offensives on two major Iraqi cities, a number of Sunni Muslim leaders are forwarding a plan to establish the rule of law in those areas through peaceful means, with the promise of reducing the insurgency across a large swath of the country.
Some of the groups leading the bid have encouraged violent resistance in central, western and northern Iraq. The groups say they will withdraw their support for violence if Iraq's interim government can reassure Sunni leaders wary of national elections, which are scheduled for the end of January.
The Sunnis have proposed six measures, including a demand that U.S. forces remain confined to bases in the month before balloting. Such an ambitious demand, which some advocates acknowledge is not likely to be met and may be open to negotiation, represents a dramatic shift by Sunni groups opposed to the U.S. operation in Iraq.
Until now, groups such as the Association of Muslim Scholars, which supports the new proposal, had insisted that no election could be considered legitimate until Western troops left Iraq. The association has repeatedly threatened to call for an election boycott through the loudspeakers of Iraq's Sunni mosques, which the association represents.
"We took an initiative regarding the elections. It is being welcomed by the people on the boycott side," said Wamidh Nadhmi, a Baghdad University political science professor who is spokesman for the initiative. "They said that if such agreements could be met by the Americans, they could change to participation."
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad offered no reaction to the proposal, which it received this week. A Western diplomat emphasized that any decision lay with Iraq's interim government.
In separate interviews, senior U.S. and Iraqi officials were privately skeptical of the overture and indicated it was unlikely to avert a military offensive on Fallujah and Ramadi, which commanders say could begin at any time.
"They don't seem to get it. The monopoly of power is over," said a senior Iraqi government official, referring to former President Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government. "One wonders how representative these elements are of the mainstream Sunni population. They may represent nostalgia for the past, but for sure no realistic vision for the future."
Some former officials with experience in Iraq called the Sunni proposal a potential breakthrough that could avert not only an assault on Fallujah but also a violent aftermath, when insurgents might take the fight elsewhere.
"Most of what we've learned about insurgencies is that you don't defeat one through purely military means," said Larry Diamond, who served in the U.S.-led occupation authority. "When you try to do that, you may win the battle but lose the war. The insurgency in the Sunni heartland is now quite broad-based, and I don't think we're going to defeat the insurgency in this part of the country through purely military means. I think we're looking at a protracted insurgency which will get worse if we go through with elections" that many Sunnis boycott.
"These groups," Diamond said, "have to be given evidence that it's in their interests to participate in the electoral process."
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a letter to President Bush disclosed Friday, warned that an assault on Fallujah "would be very disruptive of Iraq's political transition."
"Persuading elements who are currently alienated from, or skeptical about, the transition process to compete politically is key to creating a political and security context that will inspire confidence among all Iraqis," Annan wrote.
Iraqi and American officials also cite the impending election as a reason to take military action. Fallujah has been controlled by insurgents since April. They also move freely in Ramadi, the provincial capital, 30 miles to the west. In most of the rest of the country, voter registration began this week, and officials say the legitimacy of an ostensibly nationwide ballot will be undermined if residents of the Sunni Triangle area cannot take part.
Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, geographically concentrated in the country's midsection, was favored under Hussein. But Sunnis were markedly under-represented on the Governing Council put in place by the U.S.-led occupation and in the interim government that took power from the council in late June.
Elections could correct the imbalance, but many observers note that the country's majority Shiite Muslim population -- long disenfranchised and eager to claim elected office -- is better organized, larger, and pressing every advantage. On Thursday, the electoral commission announced that Iraqis who live overseas will be allowed to vote. The controversial decision is seen as benefiting Shiites who fled into exile under Hussein.
Nadhmi, the professor, emphasized that the groups behind the overture, who gathered under the umbrella of the Iraqi National Founding Conference, include Shiites and Christians. But the bulk of the conference represents Sunni interests. They include the Iraqi Nationalist Party, which has pan-Arab roots; the Democratic Reform Party, dominated by members of Hussein's Baath Party exiled to Syria; and the Association of Muslim Scholars, which claims to represent every Sunni mosque in Iraq and has frequently endorsed calls for resistance.
"This initiative is very significant," said an official involved in establishing the transitional government, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. "They're no longer saying, 'We're not participating because the country is occupied.' They're saying, 'The government is not right. The only way we can make it right is by elections.'
"If you look at their demands, they're not impossible. They are things that can be discussed."
Several of the demands are grounded in skepticism about Iraq's newly minted election commission, a low-profile agency established by U.S. and U.N. officials. The Sunni group says it wants the panel reconstituted with prominent Iraqi judges "known for their honesty," and it wants the panel's work supervised by election monitors from other Arab and Islamic countries.
The group also wants the repeal of election regulations barring senior Baathists from standing for office, saying international norms call for bans only on people convicted of crimes. Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, has reversed some elements of the "de-Baathification" program put in place by L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the U.S.-led occupation authority, but the bar on candidacy remains.
"There's a possibility of a Baathist slate," conceded Diamond, the former occupation official. "Now, these are nasty people. But I'd rather have them running peacefully in the election and winning a few seats in parliament than paying people to plant [roadside bombs] for our troops."
Most difficult for Iraqi and U.S. officials is the demand that American and other foreign forces remain outside major cities for the month of January. Insecurity is a profound problem across Iraq, and Iraqi police and other forces have not proven themselves capable of bringing certain areas under control.
The picture is further complicated by the presence of foreign fighters intent on carrying out violent strikes. Despite strains with Iraqi insurgents motivated by nationalism, Fallujah residents have said the foreign fighters continue to blend among the indigenous resistance. Negotiations between Allawi's government and Fallujah leaders broke down over the city's inability or refusal to eject the fighters.
One advocate of the new initiative said Iraqi Sunnis would persuade the foreigners to leave, though it may take time. He said attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces would dissipate sooner if significant numbers of former Baathists feel they have a stake in the "new Iraq."
"Everyone agrees they are the spinal cord of the insurgency, and these groups have moral authority over them," said the official, who was formerly involved in Iraq.
Diamond acknowledged the proposal carried risks and may arrive too late to dissuade U.S. and Iraqi officials "who think it's time to go in and kick some butt."
But he added, "If there's a chance that this could be the beginning of political transformation that could change the situation on the ground, I think we've got to take it. Especially since many of the foreign fighters are said to have left Fallujah."
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Iraqi Rules for Candidacy Spur Some U.S. Concern
U.N. Also Worries Pressure May Squelch Sunnis
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 6, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29081-2004Nov5.html
To run for a seat in the Iraqi National Assembly in the elections scheduled for January, candidates must meet conditions set by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq that are far more severe than any requirements for election to the U.S. Congress or most other elected bodies in this country.
For example, candidates must have "at least a secondary school diploma or equivalent," a "good reputation" and not been convicted of "a crime involving moral turpitude," according to the regulations of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI). In addition, candidates cannot have been a member of Saddam Hussein's secret police, nor "contributed to or participated in the persecution of citizens," nor have made money "in an illegitimate manner at the expense of the homeland and public finance."
The regulations are based on sections of the Transition Administrative Law (TAL), drafted under the direction of then-Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, L. Paul Bremer III. They have raised concerns among U.N. and U.S. officials that Iraq's interim government may try to eliminate candidates through pressure on the electoral commission, whose members were selected by the United Nations but approved by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
In an attempt to prevent former officials of Hussein's Baath Party from running, no candidate will be certified who had been in the party "with the rank of Division member or higher," a level that one former senior CIA official said was "not high and would cover many schoolteachers and college professors." In addition, a candidate who was a former party member will have to sign a document renouncing the party, disavowing all past links and swearing that he or she has no current "dealings or connection" with Baathist organizations.
The rules create "a real rat's nest to unravel," the former CIA official said, "and clearly will not bring Sunnis into the process unless it is waived." Officials fear that if the Sunnis, who once ruled Iraq and are now at the heart of the insurgency, are not represented in the new assembly, their militant leaders will find it easier to recruit new fighters.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in Middle East affairs, said he expects the rules to be applied "in a more ad hoc way" than spelled out in the TAL. The limitations on former Baath Party members are "Chalabi rules," Cole said, a reference to Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile leader who as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council helped develop rules to keep former Baathists from working in the new Iraqi government.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, "has been rehabilitating Baathists," Cole said, noting that many former party members, such as Allawi himself, "broke with Saddam and now are being brought back."
A senior United Nations official helping to manage the electoral process said yesterday in a telephone interview from New York that the Iraqi commission has yet to decide how to enforce the certification standards.
Under current plans, candidates will sign a declaration that they meet the eligibility criteria. But before the electoral commission certifies them, their names will be published around the country.
"The IECI won't be able to investigate the information," the U.N. official said, because there will be hundreds of candidates. "If there are objections to a candidate," the official said, "the commission is still writing the regulations as to how they will be adjudicated and challenges settled."
The candidate certification period is already underway and will continue through mid-December, the U.N. official said. At a news conference yesterday, Carina Perelli, director of the U.N. Electoral Assistance Division, said that seven lists of candidates had been registered "and more than 180 forms [for] registration of lists have been distributed at the request of the parties."
While most public attention has been focused on the complications of registering Iraqi voters at home and abroad, little attention has been paid to how the election for the 275 seats in the National Assembly will be held. That body will not just pass laws, but also primarily write a new Iraqi constitution.
Any individual can collect 500 signatures of Iraqis entitled to vote and take that to the commission to be certified as a candidate. More likely are to be lists of candidates put together by parties or other groups. But each list must by law contain a minimum of the names of 12 candidates.
Each individual candidate or list of candidates will be voted on nationwide. And each voter will have only one vote, whether for an individual or for a list of individuals.
To guarantee that women are represented in the assembly, one of every three candidates on a party list must be a woman. After the voting, seats will be awarded proportionately to the votes a candidate or party list received.
Perelli told reporters in June that a successful candidate would "probably have to get at least 27,000 votes to be elected." Yesterday, reporters were told that it may take as many as 50,000 votes to be elected, based on the number now expected to vote.
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Annan's Warning On Fallujah Dismissed
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 6, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29094-2004Nov5.html
NEW YORK, Nov. 5 -- The United States, Britain and Iraq on Friday angrily dismissed a warning from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that a military offensive in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah could jeopardize the credibility of upcoming elections in Iraq.
In letters dated Oct. 31 and addressed to President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and interim Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi, Annan said using military force against insurgents in the city would further alienate Sunni Muslims already feeling left out of a political process orchestrated largely by Washington.
"I wish to share with you my increasing concern at the prospect of an escalation in violence, which I fear could be very disruptive for Iraq's political transition," Annan wrote to the three leaders.
"I also worry about the negative impact that major military assaults, in which the main burden seems bound to be borne by American forces, are likely to have on the prospects for encouraging a broader participation by Iraqis in the political process, including in the elections."
Annan's comments and criticism drew anger and frustration from U.S., British and Iraqi officials.
"I don't know what pressure he has to bear on the insurgents," Allawi said in an interview with the BBC. "If he can stop the insurgents from inflicting damage and killing the Iraqis, then he's welcome -- we will do whatever he wants."
Annan pushed for a diplomatic, rather than a military, solution in Fallujah. But Allawi said the "window is closing" for diplomacy, and within hours U.S. warplanes pounded the heavily populated city while Marines and Iraqi troops hovered on the outskirts.
Asked about Annan's concerns Friday, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "Frankly, we differ."
Boucher added: "The Iraqi government has made very clear that they do have a strategy for resolving the problems of these towns like Fallujah. It's a strategy that has worked in some cases already, in Najaf and Samarra and a few other places. It's a strategy of reaching out politically to local leaders, of reasserting Iraqi government control and of moving militarily where that needs to be done, Iraqis and coalition forces together."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell discussed the letter with Annan in a weekend phone call, and the U.N. chief met privately on Monday with John C. Danforth, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Privately, Bush administration officials said they were livid about the letter, which was sent two days before the U.S. presidential election.
U.N. officials said Annan was sensitive to the timing and concealed his written concerns from many of his staff members. The contents of the letters were made public Friday in an article in the Los Angeles Times.
The United Nations is helping Iraq prepare for elections, and U.N. officials said Friday in New York that 85 percent of the registration centers have been set up and that its eight election workers in Iraq will be joined by 17 more before the January vote.
The planned election has been a key goal of the Bush administration, which has insisted, despite continual violence and insecurity throughout the country, that voting will proceed as scheduled. Washington and London have pushed Annan to beef up the U.N. presence in the country, but humanitarian staff members in the organization have been reluctant to go to Iraq, mostly because of the violence but also because of resentment over a war that was conducted without U.N. approval.
Relations between Washington and the United Nations have been at an all-time low since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In August, the United Nations lost one of its top envoys and nearly two dozen staff members when insurgents bombed U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. Since then, U.N. staffers have fought attempts by Annan to send them back to the country while the insurgency continues.
But Allawi and his U.S. and British backers argue that the only way to restore security in time for the election is by fighting the insurgency.
The Iraqi leader, who spent years on the CIA payroll, is a member of the country's Shiite majority and faces strong opposition to the offensive from the country's Sunnis. The Association of Muslim Scholars, a group of Sunni clerics, threatened to sit out the election and mount a nationwide campaign against the vote.
Those threats, along with concern for civilian casualties, prompted Annan's letter.
"Ultimately, the problem of insecurity can only be addressed through dialogue and an inclusive political process," he wrote.
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BATTLE PLANS
All Sides Prepare for American Attack on Falluja
November 6, 2004
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/international/middleeast/06falluja.html?pagewanted=all
NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 5 - American armored vehicles roared through the villages surrounding Falluja, the western town at the heart of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, on Friday as warplanes pounded rebel positions and ground forces ratcheted up their preparations for what appeared to be an imminent assault on the city.
Within Falluja, insurgents who were hiding themselves by day among a dwindling and embittered populace set up a defensive perimeter around the city and said they would defeat the Americans or die in a cause they called just.
Marines gathering outside the city practiced house-to-house fighting, while some American crews fitted their armored vehicles with front-loading shovels designed to unearth explosives buried in the roads on the way in. Marines fired artillery rounds throughout the day and night on positions around the city.
"We are going to rid the city of insurgents," said Lt. Col. Gary Brandl, a battalion commander in charge of about 800 marines at a base outside the city. "If they do fight, we will kill them."
Military intelligence officials say as many as 75 to 80 percent of the city's 250,000 residents have fled. That estimate was consistent with reports from inside Falluja.
As battle preparations went forward, top American commanders in Iraq and senior Bush administration officials in Washington were conducting final reviews of their own.
At the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., President Bush was briefed Friday morning on the battle plans in a videoconference with his top national security advisers to discuss Iraq.
American officials said the precise timing was being left to American commanders in the field and to Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq. "People here are asking, 'What about this issue?' or 'Have you thought about that?' But otherwise, they're leaving the planning up to the people on the ground," said a senior military officer in Washington.
Visiting European Union leaders in Brussels on Friday, Dr. Allawi reiterated his warning that "the window is really closing" on chances for a peaceful settlement of the standoff. Negotiators for the two sides have not met in more than a week.
At the United Nations, Secretary General Kofi Annan confirmed that he had formally expressed concern about the effects any invasion of Falluja would have on stability in the country ahead of elections scheduled for January. His concerns could cloud prospects for a major United Nations role in Iraq in the elections and afterward.
Dr. Allawi and American officials have insisted that they must reassert control over Falluja quickly in order to pave the way for the elections. Falluja lies squarely within a region of the country dominated by Sunni Arabs, a minority group whose participation in the elections is considered crucial if the outcome is to be accepted as legitimate. Favored under Saddam Hussein's rule, disenfranchised Sunnis are now leading the increasingly deadly insurgency.
Outside the city, the Americans were setting up military checkpoints to choke off access roads. Warplanes conducted at least five major airstrikes on Friday.
Insurgents inside the city continued their own preparations, filtering through waning crowds of ordinary people in the markets and on the streets.
A man who had been encountered at a fortified position on the perimeter of the city a few days before was seen downtown on Friday morning wearing a T-shirt and pants from a track suit. He was driving a motorcycle and carrying a huge bag of clips for an automatic rifle.
The man, who identified himself as Abu Muhammad, said the fighters were more numerous and better prepared than the last time they battled the Americans, in April. "We trust in God," he said, explaining why he thought that the insurgents were so strong. "We have two choices - victory or martyrdom."
Beyond those sentiments, the insurgents appear to have the benefit of some fairly sophisticated military advice. They have built a layered perimeter with at least one inner fortified ring that would give them a place to retreat to should the outer ring be breached.
American commanders in Iraq have expressed confidence they could complete their assault in a matter of days, but a senior officer said Friday that planners had no sure way of knowing how long insurgents would hold out. "Right now, they're hoping it doesn't go much longer than a week," the officer said.
Meanwhile, the insurgents continued with their deadly attacks. An American soldier was killed and five were wounded in an attack on a base near Falluja on Friday, the United States military reported. The injuries were said to be "the result of an indirect fire attack," a term the military generally reserves for mortars or rockets.
Two marines were killed during security operations around Ramadi, west of Falluja, on Thursday, while one soldier in the First Infantry Division died and another was wounded in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, when an improvised bomb exploded near their vehicle.
[A group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an ally of Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility on Saturday for a car bombing that killed three British troops south of Baghdad on Thursday, Reuters reported. The men were among about 850 British soldiers sent to free up American forces for the attack on Falluja. Also on Saturday, two car bombs exploded in the town of Samarra north of Baghdad, killing at least 19 people and wounding at least 23, police said.]
As preparations for the battle of Falluja sped forward, there were warnings that it could have devastating consequences far from the small piece of turf at issue.
The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that Secretary General Annan of the United Nations had sent a letter to the governments of Britain, Iraq and the United States expressing concern that continued military attacks on the rebel-held city would alienate people and disrupt elections. The United Nations did not release the text of the letter and, in a corridor conversation with reporters, Mr. Annan confirmed its existence but declined to discuss it.
Asked about United Nations worries about the effect on the elections of the American-led military assault on Falluja, Kieran Prendergast, the under secretary for political affairs, said, "It is important to understand that elections are not a stand-alone event, that the context in which they are held is very important if they are to have the effect of promoting stability in Iraq."
American military officials said the exact timing of any attack on Falluja hinged on a range of factors. Officials in Washington said Dr. Allawi wanted more time to discuss with his cabinet, as well as religious and tribal leaders, the political and military ramifications of an American-led offensive. Some Sunni leaders have appealed to the interim government to call off any attack.
Military officials said the remaining residents in Falluja needed a last warning to leave the city before any assault began.
The chief Marine intelligence officer in Iraq, Col. Ronald S. Makuta, gave this description in an e-mail message from his headquarters at Camp Falluja, three miles east of the city: "Those remaining fall under the categories of not having enough money to move out or simply do not want to leave their homes and possessions for fear that these will be gutted and or robbed by the foreign fighters, local insurgents, and criminals. Insurgents continue to wage a brutal campaign of murder, assassination, terror, kidnapping, coercion, and intimidation. The criminal content has also taken advantage of the lawlessness in the city, and are pursuing similar means."
The operation is shaping up to be the largest since the American invasion of the country 20 months ago. A senior military officer said that roughly 25,000 American and Iraqi troops were surrounding Falluja and Ramadi and the corridor between the two cities. Another senior military official said that from 10,000 to 15,000 of those troops were immediately around Falluja. They face an Iraqi insurgent force in the city that Colonel Brandl estimated at a few thousand fighters.
It is all intended to set right the disastrous events of April, when a large force of marines attacked the city after the killing and mutilation of four American contractors there. Though the Americans were making steady progress in the city center, they were forced to halt their attacks when Iraqi leaders became unnerved over reports, largely unconfirmed, that hundreds of civilians had been killed there.
That time, the fighting in Falluja helped fuel armed uprisings in other parts of the country against the American presence here.
Iraqi leaders and American commanders say they are worried about similar risings now, particularly in volatile cities like Mosul, but they say that circumstances have shifted markedly since then. This time, with the American occupation formally over, Iraqi leaders are in charge and willing to take some of the political heat for the operations.
American soldiers preparing to move into the city say they expect to find homemade bombs along roads and fortified positions around the city's perimeter. The Americans said they were preparing for close-quarters urban fighting.
Thousands of Iraqi troops have moved into position with their American counterparts and are expected to take part. In the pattern set in similar operations in Najaf and Samarra, American soldiers are to do most of the fighting on the way in, clearing the way for the Iraqi security forces to take control once the insurgents are defeated. With this method, Iraqi and American leaders hope for the best of both worlds: American muscle and an Iraqi face.
The performance of the Iraqi security forces is viewed as crucial to the success or failure of the mission in Falluja. In April, entire units of the Iraqi police and national guard disintegrated before uprisings in Falluja and southern Iraq.
Now, American commanders say they have higher hopes, particularly because of the intensive training that Iraqi units have received.
Dexter Filkins reported from near Falluja for this article, and James Glanz from Baghdad. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Falluja, and Warren Hoge from the United Nations.
-------- israel / palestine
Five Palestinians Killed by Israeli Troops
November 6, 2004
By MOHAMMED BALLAS
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JENIN, West Bank (AP) -- Five Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed Saturday in West Bank and Gaza Strip violence, the army and Palestinian sources said.
Israeli soldiers shot and killed 14-year-old Ala Samara during a clash in the West Bank town of Jenin.
Palestinian residents and hospital officials said Samara was unarmed and was standing near a group of stone-throwing youths when troops shot him.
Israeli military officials said the youths threw a firebomb at the troops, and soldiers fired at a youth who was about to throw a second firebomb.
The latest violence erupted as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, 75, lay in a coma in a Paris hospital fighting for his life.
Uncertainty surrounded Arafat's condition, and Palestinian officials held a series of meetings to try to consolidate power in case the ailing leader dies.
Israel has been operating for two weeks in Jenin, located in the northern West Bank, searching for weapons and Palestinian militants.
Earlier Saturday, Israeli soldiers shot and killed two Islamic Jihad militants who tried to infiltrate a Gaza Strip settlement.
The militants, armed with explosives and machineguns, crossed through an unauthorized area and approached the Gadid settlement in the southern Gaza Strip, the army said.
A gunbattle erupted between the troops and the militants. An Israeli aircraft fired a missile at the militants, killing them, the army said.
Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attempted infiltration. The group said a third fighter escaped.
In the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, two Palestinian militants were killed and a third was seriously wounded when their car exploded.
The men were members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent group linked to Arafat's Fatah group, residents said.
During four years of fighting, many militants have died accidentally while preparing attacks on Israel.
Israeli military sources said troops weren't in the area at the time of the explosion.
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Arafat on brink sparks burial debate
November 06, 2004
By Karin Laub
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041105-111154-7175r.htm
JERUSALEM - Israel is determined to keep Yasser Arafat out of Jerusalem even in death, with one Cabinet minister saying yesterday that the holy city is reserved for the burial of Jewish kings, "not Arab terrorists."
Palestinian officials said publicly that it is inappropriate to talk about funeral arrangements as long as their 75-year-old leader clings to life at a Paris hospital. A hospital spokesman said that Mr. Arafat was in a coma and "has not gotten worse."
One official said Palestinian leaders are hoping to enlist international support for a burial at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, Islam's third-holiest shrine, which was built on the ruins of the biblical Jewish temples.
The top Muslim cleric in Jerusalem weighed in for the first time yesterday, saying Mr. Arafat requested burial near Al Aqsa when the two met four months ago. The comments by the mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrima Sabri, marked the first official comment on Mr. Arafat's burial wishes.
The way the dispute is resolved could signal how Israel and the emerging Palestinian leadership - Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and his predecessor, Mahmoud Abbas - will get along in the future.
Mr. Arafat is reviled by many Israelis, and seeing him interred near Judaism's holiest site would draw public outrage. Israeli Justice Minister Yosef Lapid said Mr. Arafat "will not be buried in Jerusalem because Jerusalem is the city where Jewish kings are buried and not Arab terrorists."
His blunt remarks came despite Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's order to government officials to keep a low profile and avoid antagonizing the Palestinians.
However, Mr. Sharon himself told his Cabinet last week that he would not permit Mr. Arafat, his longtime nemesis, to be buried in Jerusalem.
It is not clear whether Mr. Arafat has left a written will, and Mr. Sabri said he is not aware of one.
He said the Palestinian leader told him "he has a desire to be buried in Jerusalem, near the Al Aqsa Mosque."
Israeli security officials said Gaza was the only burial option. Even a compromise initially floated by army planners - interment in the West Bank suburb of Abu Dis, which offers a view of Al Aqsa - has since been ruled out by the military.
Army officials also oppose burial elsewhere in the West Bank, in part because Palestinian security forces would have trouble protecting the large numbers of foreign dignitaries expected for the event.
Israeli military officials said they would ease travel restrictions on Palestinians during the funeral, but if the burial is in Gaza, only officials - and not the general public - will be allowed to travel there from the West Bank to attend. If the funeral is in Ramallah, the Palestinian public will be allowed to participate, but will have to endure rigorous checks at roadblocks, the officials said.
Rival Palestinian groups, including Islamic militants, gathered yesterday in Gaza in a show of unity they hoped would prevent the region from spiraling into further violence in the face of Mr. Arafat's dire condition.
Mr. Arafat's clan, the Al-Kidwas, are originally from Gaza, though the Palestinian leader grew up in Jerusalem and Cairo. The family has a small plot of 25-to-30 graves in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis. The overgrown patch is in the middle of a busy vegetable market and would not be considered appropriate.
Other burial options include a seaside plot next to his old headquarters in Gaza City, or Gaza City's "martyrs' cemetery" east of the city, close to Israel.
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With Arafat in Coma, Near Death, Conflict Mounts Over Burial Site
Israelis Say Jerusalem Not an Option for Palestinian Leader
By Glenn Frankel and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 6, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29158-2004Nov5.html
PARIS, Nov. 5 -- Palestinian officials acknowledged Friday that Yasser Arafat was in a coma and struggling to survive, while Israeli officials issued blunt warnings that they would not allow the Palestinian leader to be buried in or near the disputed capital of Jerusalem.
"Arafat is in a critical state between life and death," Leila Shahid, the Palestinian envoy to France, told RTL radio here, in the first official acknowledgement that Arafat, 75, was hovering near death.
"I assure you that he is not brain dead," she added. "He is in a coma. We are not sure what type. But it is a reversible coma." Senior Israeli officials said Arafat was being kept alive by life-support devices.
Later Friday evening, a French medical spokesman told reporters gathered outside the Percy military hospital in Clamart, a southwestern suburb of Paris, that Arafat was in "stable" condition and "has not gotten worse." The spokesman, Christian Estripeau, refused to elaborate, citing the need to "fully respect the privacy that the family has requested."
With death an imminent possibility, Israeli and Palestinian officials began arguing over questions of where to lay to rest the man who for four decades has been the embodiment of the bitter quest for Palestinian statehood.
People close to Arafat said his wish was to be buried in Jerusalem; senior Israel officials insisted he would not be buried in "greater Jerusalem," a term that encompasses the city and the neighborhoods immediately surrounding it. Some said the only place that would be acceptable was in the Gaza Strip, where Arafat's family has a burial plot outside the southern city of Khan Younis.
Officials on both sides said no discussions on the issue were underway, contradicting news reports that American and French diplomats were acting as intermediaries in private talks. Neither the U.S. Embassy here nor the office of President Jacques Chi