Monks Protest During Press Tour of China

A Tibetan monk, center, spoke to foreign journalists at the Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet, during a tour arranged Thursday by Chinese officials. (Andy Wong/Associated Press)
SHANGHAI Mar. 28th. (NY Times) — Weeping and yelling, "Tibet is not free,” a group of red-robed monks on Thursday disrupted a carefully scripted tour for foreign journalists in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, as Chinese officials tried to portray the recent Tibetan riots as the work of thugs and separatists. The 15-minute protest by about 30 monks, who spoke first in Tibetan and then switched to Mandarin, was in the Jokhang Monastery, one of Tibet’s holiest shrines. The protest, videotaped by reporters, ended after government handlers shouted for the journalists to leave and tried to pull them away, an Associated Press correspondent on the tour said in an interview. The protest erupted during a tour of the temple. Some of the monks shouted that there was no religious freedom in Tibet and that the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, had been wrongly accused by China of orchestrating the protests to disrupt the Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing in August. Some journalists said one monk complained that the government had planted fake monks in the monastery to talk to the reporters. It was unclear whether the protesting monks were arrested. The government later said that the monks had lied but would not be punished.

The protest was another embarrassment for senior Chinese officials, who had invited the group of foreign journalists to visit Lhasa under escort to promote the government’s version of the unrest in Tibet, which China calls an autonomous region. Reporters were also shown a detention center that housed some of the rioters, The Associated Press reported. Interviews were closely monitored; the police interpreted for Tibetan prisoners, who spoke little Mandarin. Luoya, who like many Tibetans uses just one name, said he had burned down a motorcycle shop in Dazhi County, east of Lhasa. “All my friends were setting fires so I joined them,” he was quoted as saying. Reporters spoke to Mr. Luoya, 25, through the bars of his cell as a policeman stood by. When asked about relations between Tibetans and Chinese in Lhasa, Mr. Luoya said, “There are no relations.”

Foreign coverage and reaction of the violence in Tibet have focused on China’s heavy crackdown and arrests in the aftermath of the riots and have led to talk among some foreign officials of boycotting the opening ceremony of this summer’s Olympic Games. The Chinese wanted the reporters to see damage caused by the rioters and to interview Han Chinese victims of the violence, the worst here in 20 years. China’s official news agency, Xinhua, mentioned the unscripted monks’ protest in a brief dispatch, saying 12 monks “stormed into a briefing by a temple administrator to cause chaos.” Several American news organizations were invited to send representatives on the three-day press tour, but The New York Times was not. The protest came a day after President Bush encouraged President Hu Jintao of China in a telephone discussion to initiate talks with the Dalai Lama, who is based in India. China’s state-run media said that Mr. Hu responded that China had always been open to discussions with the Dalai Lama, as long as he renounced independence for Tibet and abandoned efforts to “fan and mastermind violent crimes.”

There was also pressure on Thursday from an international group of distinguished scholars, who wrote an open letter to Mr. Hu calling on China to “take steps to end the harsh repression” in Tibet. The scholars, who specialize in Tibetan studies, also said the “tactic of blaming the unrest on the Dalai Lama masks a refusal, on the part of the Chinese government, to recognize the failures of its own policies.” For nearly a week, the state-controlled media have contended that some Western news organizations have wrongly described the riots in Tibet as “peaceful protests” and that some photographs distorted the government’s actions in Tibet. China’s state-controlled media, though, have been allowed to publish only favorable articles on the government’s role in Tibet. At the same time, some foreign journalists in China have complained about efforts to impede or disrupt their reporting, despite the government’s pledges of greater openness in the months leading up to the Olympics. On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that after the protest at the Lhasa temple, the area was sealed off. Later in the day, journalists seeking to report independently, away from government guides, were followed, making Tibetans reluctant to talk.
By David Barboza with Chen Yang contributed research.
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At Shuttered Gateway to Tibet, Unrest Simmers Against Chinese Rule

In a vast area of mountainous Chinese villages near the Tibet border, life centers on the spiritual, as at a nunnery, above, but the area remains a battle zone. (Greg Baker/Associated Press)
CHENGDU, China: Mar. 26th. (NY Times) — In the back room of a Tibetan teahouse, three robed monks spoke in whispers. One monk said his home in Luhuo County had been littered with fliers calling on Tibetans to protest. A second monk said soldiers had surrounded his monastery in Aba County. The third dialed home. After folding shut his cellphone, he said the police had killed one Tibetan protester and injured nine others in Serta County. “Tibetans are dying for no reason,” said the Luhuo monk, as the whine of a police siren drifted through an open window. “But this is happening in remote places, and nobody knows.” From this city of 10 million people in the middle of China, all roads leading west have been closed — except to convoys carrying soldiers and riot police officers to subdue Tibetan antigovernment protests. Chengdu has always been a gateway to the remote Tibetan plateau, but now it feels like a border outpost, tense and anxious, at the eastern edge of what several Tibetans here described as a war. If it is a war, it is one the outside world cannot see. Police roadblocks have closed off a mountainous region about the size of France, spanning parts of the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai. Foreign journalists trying to investigate reports of bloodshed are turned away or detained. Even in big cities like Chengdu, Tibetans say they are wary of police retaliation. They pass along secondhand accounts of clashes mostly on condition that their names will not appear in print.

What seems clear is that in the isolated region west of Chengdu, the sometimes violent protests, already the broadest and most sustained agitation against Chinese rule in two decades, have continued despite the influx of armed security forces. Lhasa itself is now under heel. But a vast area of highlands and placid villages, where Tibetan life usually centers on temples and monasteries built of wood and earth, remains a battle zone. On Tuesday, protesters and the police clashed in Garze, a prefecture of Sichuan, state media and a Tibetan rights group said. Some 200 monks and nuns began a march earlier in the day that turned violent when the police sought to suppress the crowd, the India-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. China’s Xinhua news agency said the police opened fire in self-defense after the demonstrators attacked them with knives and stones. The rights group said one 18-year-old monk was killed and another was critically injured, while Xinhua said protesters killed one policeman. In Chengdu, Tibetans gravitate to a neighborhood that is beside an ancient Chinese temple called Wuhouci. The area is known for a teeming marketplace that sells Tibetan Buddhist ceremonial objects, clothing and art. Usually, Tibetan monks and traders pass through the market, buying crimson robes or printed scriptures, but the police lockdown has left many people stranded and desperate for news from home. “Do you know how many died in Aba?” asked Nyima, 28, a monk from the Garong monastery in Nyagrong County. He has lived in Chengdu for three months, sleeping above his shop.

After the unrest in Lhasa, violent clashes between Tibetans and security forces erupted in Aba. Officials later said the police fired in self-defense on a crowd of Tibetans that had attacked the local police station and set it on fire. Tibetans who have called relatives in Aba say the death toll may be more than 20; that could not be independently confirmed. A young Tibetan woman from Aba who sells Buddhist statues and jewelry at a local shop said her family was safe but had also warned her that the conflict in Aba had not yet ended. “They are fighting a war,” said the woman. A Tibetan college student from Aba had also made a worried call home. His relatives described a confrontation that began at the local Kirti monastery. The student’s family said a huge contingent of soldiers arrived with weapons. “People got very nervous,” the student said. In recent years, authorities tightened religious restrictions, including closing down a religious school. On March 16, protests began at Aba after a monk at Kirti declared that Tibetans should not have to live under Chinese rule. Protesters holding images of the Dalai Lama marched through the streets, the student said.

The police initially did not stop them. But when protesters burned a police station, soldiers with machine guns fired into crowds, killing at least 13 Tibetans, the student said. He said several Chinese soldiers had been killed. “The next day, the town looked green with the soldiers,” he said. “Every day, helicopters hover over the city.” The police said Chengdu itself is secure. But the Wuhouci neighborhood is enduring its own lockdown. Armed police officers now surround the neighborhood. White patrol cars cruise the streets, flashing their lights as officers bark through megaphones at vehicles to keep them moving. Last week, the local police called a news conference to dispel rumors of a bomb threat. Chinese shopkeepers gossiped about reports that a Tibetan man from Aba had stabbed and killed two Han Chinese in the city. The police confirmed that a stabbing had occurred but said a single victim had only minor injuries.

Monks and other Tibetans are meeting in quiet corners. In the back room of the Tibetan teahouse, the three monks compared notes. One, age 40, told news of Serta County, where he said Tibetans had taken over a government compound and raised the Tibetan national flag. Another monk had come to Chengdu from Aba to purchase printed Buddhist scriptures. Now, he gathered information by telephone. Armed police officers had circled six monasteries in Aba and arrested “many, many” monks, he said. He was told that 23 people had died so far, even though China’s state-run media has reported only four injuries. Two days later, one of the three monks again called his hometown of Luhuo. “The sound of gunfire can be heard in Luhuo,” the monk said. “A lama died. A soldier died. They are fighting a war now.”

By JAKE HOOKER with Jimmy Wang contributed reporting from Chengdu, and Jim Yardley from Beijing.
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Hope and Fear for Zimbabwe Vote

Campaign posters in Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe.(Bishop Asare/European Pressphoto Agency)
HARARE, Zimbabwe: Mar. 26th. (NY Times) — When 100 young men stormed onto his property last week, Knox Solomon Danda, an opposition candidate for Parliament in rural Zvimba, hid under a table with his wife and children, he said, pulling the tablecloth low to the floor to better conceal their cowering shapes. His 5-year-old daughter began to whimper. He held her close to muffle the sound. “I don’t know whether these men meant to kill us or simply scare us,” he said. The intruders pelted the house with bricks, and though Mr. Danda and his family escaped unhurt, he said two of his supporters were pummeled in an adjacent maize field. One endured a gash to his ribs from an ax.

Election time has again come to Zimbabwe — expectant days of hope and suspense, but also of fear, with the lining up at the polls customarily preceded by what many people here describe as a campaign of state-supported intimidation and skulduggery. Voters will go to the polls on Saturday, with President Robert Mugabe, the iconic leader of a nation enduring catastrophic hardship, trying to retain the power he has held for 28 years. Here in Harare, there is the usual speculation about the political winds. In what provinces is the president’s party strong? Where is it weak? But the more frequent conjecture involves the mechanics of an outcome that is presumed to be rigged. “Even if Mugabe only gets one vote, the tabulated results are in the box and he has won,” said Andrew Moyse, who coordinates a project that monitors coverage in the Zimbabwean news media. Echoing that sentiment, Noel Kututwa, the chairman of a coalition of civic groups dedicated to honest elections, said: “We will not have a free and fair election. There is desperation for change. But, in the end, I can’t say that Mugabe won’t win, because he probably will.” Mr. Mugabe, 84, a hero of the nation’s liberation struggle and one of the last of Africa’s ruthlessly autocratic “big men,” is often imputed here with mythic cunning. Certainly, great advantages have accrued to his incumbency. The state controls radio, television and the only daily newspaper. The reporting of events is reliably biased toward Mr. Mugabe, extolling his courage and generosity while depicting his opponents as little more than footmen for the British, Zimbabwe’s former colonial masters.

In a country suffering rampant hunger, the government bolsters its standing by distributing subsidized food, routinely favoring, critics allege, members of Mr. Mugabe’s party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. In a country enduring epic inflation of more than 100,000 percent, the campaigning president has been able to bestow tractors and plows on village chiefs whose gratitude is expected to be a reciprocal harvest of votes. Then there are the brass tacks of the election. Groups like Mr. Kututwa’s complain about an election commission dominated by Mr. Mugabe’s cronies, rules that bar people from registering in cities where the president is less popular, a paucity of polling stations in those locations; and long outdated voting rolls that in the past have been accused of permitting guileful ZANU-PF advocates to cast ballots for the dead. “There are many tricks to play; the illiterate stand in separate queues and we mark the votes for them,” said Gift Mukumira, a former ZANU-PF youth organizer who has become unhappy with Mr. Mugabe. He lives in Epworth, on Harare’s outskirts. “Last time, our people were bused from Mutoko and allowed to vote a second time in Epworth.”

But for all of Mr. Mugabe’s wily tactics, he is burdened by an economy that went into free fall in 2000 when agricultural land owned by whites was seized, an act that has reaped only disaster. About a quarter of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people have fled the country; 80 percent to 90 percent of those left are unemployed. The president now acknowledges his people’s hardship but defends his policies as postcolonial justice, insisting that “national sovereignty” is at stake. His two leading opponents argue that the confiscated farms have not been used to benefit the poor but rather to reward Mr. Mugabe’s friends. One of those candidates is Morgan Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader who received 42 percent of the official vote in 2002 and contends that the election was stolen from him. Last March, Mr. Tsvangirai was so badly beaten by the police at a prayer rally that his bruised head resembled a melon that had been rolled down a hillside. This time, he has campaigned largely without interference, speaking to huge crowds. “We expect the enemies of justice to engage in every trick in the book,” Mr. Tsvangirai said Sunday in a speech. Members of his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, allege that nine million ballots have been printed, even though there are only 5.9 million voters. They suggest that the surplus will end up marked for Mr. Mugabe.

The other main challenger is Simba Makoni, a former finance minister and longtime ZANU-PF stalwart who is leading a rebellion in the party. He has the vocal support of a few other well-known party dissidents and perhaps the furtive backing of many more. It has become a common parlor game in Harare to speculate about which of Mr. Mugabe’s professed loyalists now secretly support Mr. Makoni — and whether that clandestine support might pry apart the party’s vote-rigging apparatus. By law, the votes are supposed to be counted at each polling place, with the totals publicly posted. If that is widely done, groups like the Zimbabwe Election Support Network led by Mr. Kututwa can use sampling techniques to assess the accuracy of the results announced nationally. “But this posting of the vote has never happened,” he said. International election observers are being restricted to a select group of guests from nations like China, Iran, Libya, Russia and Venezuela. Also present is a delegation from the Southern Africa Development Community, a bloc of Zimbabwe’s neighbors. In recent elections, as Mr. Mugabe’s opponents cried foul, observers from the bloc pronounced the voting process fair.

This past year, a development community delegation led by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa tried to get the political rivals in Zimbabwe to agree on new election procedures. Though several accommodations were reached, Mr. Mugabe has reneged on a majority of them. Most recently, he overturned a procedure barring policemen from inside polling stations. Whatever the vote count, the outcome is likely to be vigorously disputed. The commander of the nation’s military, Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, has been quoted as saying that the army will not abide by a result that favors “sellouts and agents of the West.” He and others cast the election as a continuation of the liberation struggle. Last week, the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prevent deadly conflicts, issued a report that called the situation “volatile, with a high risk of violence.” It asked the African union to prepare to broker a power-sharing deal that might save Zimbabwe from the mortal consequences of a wildly disputed election.
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Deaths - 9/11, Iraq & Afganistan

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Disclaimer
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Opposition Party in Zimbabwe Accuses Mugabe of Printing Millions of Extra Ballots

HARARE, Zimbabwe: Mar. 24th. (Associated Press) — Zimbabwe’s main opposition party accused the government on Sunday of printing more than three million excess paper ballots for the coming presidential election and accused the country’s longtime leader, Robert Mugabe, of trying to rig the vote. Tendai Biti, secretary general of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said leaked documents from government printers showed that nine million ballot papers were ordered for the 5.9 million registered voters in the presidential election on March 29. Legislative elections are scheduled to take place the same day. Correspondence supplied by Fidelity Printers, producers of the nation’s banknotes, also showed that 600,000 mail-in ballots were ordered for a few thousand soldiers, police officers and civil servants who were expected to be away from their home districts and for diplomats and their families abroad, Mr. Biti said. “We are extremely worried about the extra ballot papers,” he said. The chairman of the electoral commission, Judge George Chiweshe, refused to comment about the specific accusations, but he told reporters that his duty was to ensure free and fair elections.

The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, said he expected Mr. Mugabe to “engage in every trick in the book” to rig the vote. At a campaign rally in the western part of Harare, the capital, a crowd of at least 30,000 people gathered in an open field to hear Mr. Tsvangirai. It was the largest crowd yet for an election rally. Only about 3,000 people, many of them bused in from rural areas, turned out to hear Mr. Mugabe in the country’s second largest city, Bulawayo. Mr. Mugabe, 84, a former guerrilla fighter who has led the nation since independence in 1980, vowed to stay in power. “Tsvangirai will never, never rule this country,” he told the crowd. “Those who want to vote for him can do so, but those votes will be wasted votes.” Mr. Mugabe also said that Zimbabwe would carry out a new law requiring all foreign- and white-owned companies to give 51 percent control of their operations to black people. “We want to see Zimbabwean people in control,” he said. “Our people must run the businesses. They should not just listen to white bosses.” In a carnival atmosphere that contrasted with Mr. Mugabe’s austere meetings, Mr. Tsvangirai, 55, said Mr. Mugabe was “really mad” over recent opposition gains ahead of the election. A few uniformed police officers watched the field. Many supporters, singing and wearing Tsvangirai T-shirts, arrived on antiquated trucks and vans belching exhaust smoke.

In past elections, Mr. Mugabe’s opponents have been prevented from openly wearing campaign T-shirts and distributing posters, fliers and other campaign materials. Mr. Tsvangirai and the other presidential candidate, former Finance Minister Simba Makoni, say they are gaining considerable support as a result of anger over a record inflation rate of 100,000 percent and widespread shortages of basic supplies. The opposition protested a last-minute change to voting procedures that would give police officers a supervisory role at polling places, saying it would intimidate voters. Western observers are barred, and Zimbabwe has invited only delegates from countries it considers friendly.
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Peacekeeping in Darfur Hits More Obstacles

Poorly equipped Nigerian peacekeepers riding last month in a pickup through a camp in Genina in western Darfur for Sudanese civilians displaced by violence. (Lynsey Addario)
ABU SUROUJ, Sudan: Mar. 24th. (NY Times) — As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world’s largest, is in danger of failing even as it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by Sudan’s government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict. Poorly equipped Nigerian peacekeepers riding last month in a pickup through a camp in Genina in western Darfur for Sudanese civilians displaced by violence. The force, a joint mission of the United Nations, officially took over from an overstretched and exhausted African Union force in Darfur on Jan. 1. It now has just over 9,000 of an expected 26,000 soldiers and police officers and will not fully deploy until the end of the year, United Nations officials said. Even the troops that are in place, the old African Union force and two new battalions, lack essential equipment, like sufficient armored personnel carriers and helicopters, to carry out even the most rudimentary of peacekeeping tasks. Some even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets United Nations blue, peacekeepers here said.

The peacekeepers’ work is more essential than ever. At least 30,000 people were displaced last month as the government and its allied militias fought to retake territory held by rebel groups fighting in the region, according to United Nations human rights officials. For weeks after the attacks, many of the displaced were hiding in the bush nearby or living in the open along the volatile border between Sudan and Chad, inaccessible to aid workers. Most wanted to return to their scorched villages and rebuild but did not feel safe from roaming bandits and militias. A week spent this month with the peacekeeping troops based here at the headquarters of Sector West, a wind-blown outpost at the heart of the recent violence, revealed a force struggling mightily to do better than its much-maligned predecessor, but with little new manpower or equipment. Despite this, the force is managing to project a greater sense of security for the tens of thousands of vulnerable civilians in the vast territory it covers, mounting night patrols in displaced people’s camps and sending long-range patrols to the areas hardest hit by fighting. But these small gains are fragile, and if more troops do not arrive soon, the force will be written off as being as ineffective and compromised as the one before. “We really don’t have much time to prove we can do better,” said Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the Senegalese commander of the roughly 2,000 troops in West Darfur, just one-third of the expected total for the area. “God gave the prophets the ability to achieve miracles so that people would believe. So people here will believe when they see improvements on the ground. And that cannot wait for more troops. We need to do better with what we have.”

The deployment of the biggest peacekeeping force in modern history in one of the most remote, hostile and forbidding corners of the globe was bound to be a logistical nightmare. Darfur is landlocked, water is scarce, the roads are rutted tracks crossed by the mud and sand traps of dry riverbeds. But those problems pale in comparison with the diplomatic and political struggles the mission faces. When previous large missions were organized in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the central governments in those countries had collapsed or were so weak that they had little choice but to accept peacekeepers. The government of Sudan agreed to accept United Nations-led peacekeepers in Darfur only after a long diplomatic tussle and under a great deal of pressure. The progress to get the mission in place has been slow, and much of the blame for this has been placed at the feet of the Sudanese government. For months after the UN Security Council approved the force, Sudan insisted on limits on its makeup and independence, demanding the power to dictate which countries contributed troops, to shut down its communication systems when the government carried out offensives and to restrict the movement of peacekeepers at night.

Ultimately, the government signed a compromise agreement with the United Nations allowing the force to operate, but Sudan was successful in insisting that the vast majority of troops come from African countries, and will be supplemented by soldiers from other regions only if suitable African troops cannot be found. This has delayed the force’s mission, because African armies are not usually able to deploy quickly with equipment and training to meet stringent United Nations standards, United Nations officials and Western diplomats said. Sudanese government officials have argued that African troops are up to the job, and that non-African troops would be seen as neocolonial interlopers. These problems have raised fears that the United Nations force would suffer the same fate as the African Union force, which was hobbled from the start by a weak mandate, which was to observe a cease-fire, not protect civilians. The thousands of troops deployed by Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal and other nations were mainly there to protect the military observers, who were unarmed, and the unarmed civilian police, whose job it was to guard the camps for the internally displaced people. But the original cease-fire was quickly violated, and later agreements failed to bring peace. The African troops soon were seen, perhaps unfairly, as useless note-takers who visited the scene of atrocities long after the evidence had been carried off and the dead buried, gathering testimony that seemed to disappear into a bureaucratic black hole.

All of that has changed with the new hybrid mission. The force has a robust mandate to protect civilians. But that is easier said than done, said Maj. Sani Abdullahi, the man in charge of the single company charged with fending off roaming militias and rebels to protect tens of thousands of displaced villagers in a handful of camps and thousands more vulnerable residents of remote villages. One Sunday morning, Major Abdullahi, 34, a wiry Nigerian officer who served in peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, led a few truckloads of troops to visit Abu Sorouj, one of the towns flattened by a recent government offensive in West Darfur. The town is just a few dozen miles away, but the drive took three bone-crunching hours. Abu Sorouj was attacked nearly a month earlier, and most of the villagers had fled, some to Chad. They said they were blocked by the Chadian authorities from reaching refugee camps. So within days, some were returning, afraid of losing their land if they became long-term displaced people living in camps. Before the attack, Abu Sorouj was a bustling town of hundreds of mud-brick huts roofed with thatch, clumped together in sprawling family compounds. It had a cinder-block school and clinic supported by a nongovernmental aid agency.

Today, it is an apocalyptic scene of ashy ruin. The residents who have returned salvaged what they could, sifting through the blackened rubble to find cooking pots, bedsteads and buried troves of grain. Fadila Ahmed Mahamat, a great-grandmother whose legs are withered stalks, sat amid the charred ruins of her home, digging holes in the sand with bare, gnarled hands to construct the frame of a makeshift dwelling out of branches from a pen that had been used to keep sheep. “Everything is gone,” she said. “I have nothing.” Surveying the scene, Major Abdullahi let out a low whistle. “My God,” he said. “Look at this.” A few of the town’s sheiks remained, and they clamored to tell him their complaints. Arab gunmen, whom the villagers here call janjaweed, roam the edge of town, they told Major Abdullahi, coming at dawn and dusk to steal what little remained here. The women could not go to the river to collect water. The men could not leave the town to find big branches to build shelters. “We need security,” one said. “Why don’t you patrol more often?” another asked. “When you come, the janjaweed stay away for two or three days.” Major Abdullahi told them: “We don’t have the number of troops on ground we need. As soon as we do, we will spread out. We are doing everything we can to make you feel more secure.” All talk ceased as a pickup truck loaded with government soldiers drove up. An officer jumped out, smiling with an outstretched hand. But his smile was tense, and after some pleasantries he asked why the peacekeepers had come. “The place is secure,” said the officer, Maj. Amar Ibrahim. “Even the Arabs who ride on camels and horses and harass people, we have patrols to chase them away.” Major Abdullahi smiled and nodded. “We really appreciate that and commend your efforts,” he said through an interpreter. “But we really need to ask you to do more. People still do not feel safe.”

Despite the agreement giving the peacekeepers free rein, government troops complain about their presence. Major Abdullahi said he must be careful not to alienate these troops because he must rely on them to help provide security. “The reality is we need to work with them,” he said. “It does no good to antagonize them.” Major Abdullahi checked his watch. It was noon, and already he had to think about heading back. The armored personnel carriers, which had been provided to the African Union by the Canadian government and had been battered by years of abuse in Darfur’s harsh conditions, were already acting up. Two flat tires and engine trouble had made the journey to Abu Sorouj slow. But he could not risk being stuck on the way back. He promised the sheiks that he would return soon, but he could not say for sure how soon that might be.

It is unclear how exactly the deployment of troops in Darfur can be speeded up, give the built-in constraint that African troops be used first. Western activists concerned about Darfur say the Sudanese government is primarily responsible and have demanded that China, Sudan’s main trading partner and one of its suppliers of weapons, join other countries to press Sudan to allow troops of any origin the troops to deploy quickly. While the Sudanese government has been blamed for some of the delay, United Nations requirements have also slowed the force, some diplomats and political analysts say. The deployment “is not principally being delayed by the Sudanese government,” said a senior Western diplomat in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, who is not authorized to speak publicly. Other problems, like the United Nations bureaucracy and the reluctance of troop-contributing countries, were as much to blame, the diplomat said.

There is certainly no lack of money. Rodolphe Adada, of the Congo Republic, the mission’s civilian chief, said the force had a budget of $1.7 billion. What it needs is troops and equipment, and neither has been easy to get. More pressure on the Sudanese government, he said, would not help matters. “What more pressure can be put on the Sudanese government,” he said. “All the decisions have been taken. There is nothing left to say. What we need to do is act.” Some countries are reluctant to commit troops in an active conflict with no peace agreement or even a working cease-fire. “The international community had two choices — get a peace accord and deploy the mission after, or send the mission anyway,” Mr. Adada said. “It chose the latter. But how do you keep the peace when there is no peace to keep?”
By Lydia Polgreen
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One Man's Personal Mission To End Slavery in Mauritania

Mar. 23: (Washington Post) - Boubacar Messaoud remembered strolling from the flatlands of Mauritania toward the southern town of Rosso, a watermelon poised on his head. Beyond a riverbank, he could see a row of children in a yard. Messaoud, then 7, stopped to find out what was going on, with the pure curiosity of a child. He found out that the children were being signed up for school. Messaoud, the son of slaves who toiled in the fields of landowners, recalled that he was still unaware of the privations separating him from others. Among a knot of parents, Messaoud noticed the cousin of his family's owner and asked him to help him enroll, too. "I can't," the man replied. "What will your master say?" Messaoud put down his watermelon and cried.

The ancient tradition of slavery endures in Mauritania, although it was officially abolished in the 1980s. There are roughly half a million slaves among the country's population of 3.3 million, and at least 80 percent do not have access to a formal education, Messaoud said. Many remain illiterate. Messaoud was in Washington this month to speak at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and to lobby legislators on the issue, with assistance from the Open Society Institute, which promotes civil society and democratic institutions, and London-based Anti-Slavery International. Messaoud, who founded the anti-slavery group SOS Slaves in 1995, has waged many battles on behalf of slaves since that day more than 50 years ago when he faced his first obstacle to breaking the shackles.

The French principal inspecting the clutch of eager students outside the school asked why young Messaoud was sobbing. The principal shamed the slave master's cousin into registering Messaoud, who became the first in his family to go to school. He went on to college and became an architect with the help of scholarships and an uncle who ran a butchering business on the side after his farming chores were finished. Messaoud, 63, remembered the thrill and promise of possibility on his first day of school. "I relished the change from laboring in the fields, sowing seeds and tearing off acacia branches to build barriers fencing in the land," he said. Until then, rare childhood joys had included flopping around in the water to fish by hand. Unlike Mauritania's capital, Nouakchott, which is ringed by ribbons of desert and sand dunes, Rosso has a river running through it, cornfields and rice paddies. But Messaoud also remembered being bullied and dismissed by classmates as inferior. "When you go out in mixed society, life is hard," he said.

Slavery has been perpetuated in Mauritania by the persistence of tradition, distorted notions of religious obligation and a reluctance by some law enforcement agents to apply the law, especially in rural areas. Slaves are unaware that they are entitled to equal rights and don't know how to seek justice, so their bondage continues, Messaoud said. "A slave guiding a blind beggar in the streets of Nouakchott does it as an act of piety. He will not run away, believing his subjugation will secure him a place in paradise," he said. In fact, Islam prohibits a Muslim from enslaving other Muslims. In March 2007, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdellahi was elected president of Mauritania after negotiating with a bloc of freed slaves and pledging to enforce new legislation criminalizing slavery. Parliament endorsed the bill, which became law in August 2007. Messaoud welcomed the president's "courageous act" but urged the world to encourage him to go further. "The new law, which is good, is just one tool for overturning an age-old social order," said Romana Cacchioli, Africa program coordinator for Anti-Slavery International. "We need affirmative action to help lift this sector of society out of the dust. They must have access to land, to microcredit, so we must invest in reversing their exclusion. We must give them the confidence to speak up against their human rights violation."

The Open Society Justice Initiative, a program working for legal reforms in the region, said in a memo that the new law failed to spell out how to stop sexual exploitation of female slaves, had not provided a mechanism to help slaves file civil actions and lacked a timetable for implementing additional measures included in it. Messaoud emphasized that programs should be funded to teach freed slaves the skills they need to work in public institutions, such as the police force. Under the still-prevalent tradition, children inherit the status of their mothers and are passed on by masters as part of dowries or shared with other family members. "The girls can join a new household at the age of 5," Messaoud said. "They become the bride's servant and confidante. They rise at dawn to make tea and leave after everyone has had breakfast to work in the fields. They collect firewood and return to prepare the evening meal, then clean up after everyone has gone to sleep." Messaoud's two aunts died in the homes they served. His mother and uncle managed lands and saw their owners only when they came to collect their share of crops, he said. Women work the fields with their babies strapped to their backs. Many girls and women flee sexual abuse by their male masters, who by tradition can "claim" their virginity. Women who escape to the city often cannot find work, and some resort to prostitution. Others return to their masters and ask for forgiveness "with heads bowed," Messaoud said.

Slaves freed by their proprietors still suffer discrimination long after their days of bondage. Though most slaves are black, owners are black or white, Messaoud said, emphasizing that slavery persists because of tradition and a socialized mind-set, not race. No regulations prohibit slaves from going to school, voting or running for office, but few do, pinned down by work and the economic and political domination of the class that owns them. Messaoud, who has been jailed three times for his activism, said slavery also persists in Niger, Senegal, Mali and other sub-Saharan African countries. He has always owned up to his roots with people he has met, "to gauge what side of the fence they were on." "I learned from an early age never to hide it," he said of his background. "Mauritanian ambassadors in Mali and Moscow, where I studied, would threaten me, accusing me of tarnishing my country's image." But, he added, "I am convinced that a society that does not look at itself in the face is condemned."
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Haiti’s Poverty Stirs Nostalgia for Old Ghosts

A slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Some disenchanted Haitians yearn for the days of the Duvaliers, a dynasty that ended in 1986. (Ruth Fremson)
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Mar. 23rd. (NY Times) — The imported granite was smashed. The giant cupola was toppled. The grave of François Duvalier, the longtime dictator, is a wreck, much like the country he left behind. Haiti’s National Cemetery in Port-au-Prince, where François Duvalier, who ruled from 1957 to 1971, is buried. Some Haitians feel nostalgia for him and his son; others recall them with hatred. But Victor Planess, who works at the National Cemetery here, has a soft spot for Mr. Duvalier, the man known as Papa Doc. Standing graveside the other day, Mr. Planess reminisced about what he considered the good old days of Mr. Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, who together ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986. “I’d rather have Papa Doc here than all those guys,” Mr. Planess said, gesturing toward the presidential palace down the street. “I would have had a better life if they were still around.”

Mr. Planess, 53, who complains that hunger has become so much a part of his life that his stomach does not even growl anymore, is not alone in his nostalgia for Haiti’s dictatorial past. Other Haitians speak longingly of the security that existed then as well as the lack of garbage in the streets, the lower food prices and the scholarships for overseas study. Haiti may have made significant strides since President René Préval, elected in 2006, became the latest leader to pass through the revolving door of Haitian politics. But the changes he has pushed have been incremental, not fast enough for many down-and-out Haitians. “It’s time to show people that democracy is not just about voting but changing their real lives,” said Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis, who survived a no-confidence vote in February pushed by critics of his handling of the economy. Jean-Claude Duvalier, now in exile in France, sought recently to take advantage of the discontent by raising the possibility of a return to Haiti. In a radio address in September, he offered a tentative apology for his acts, saying, “If, during my presidential mandate, the government caused any physical, moral or economic wrongs to others, I solemnly take the historical responsibility.”

Mr. Duvalier’s remarks, in which he also asked for “forgiveness from the people,” together with the nostalgia one hears on the streets of Port-au-Prince, the capital, these days provoke fury among present-day leaders. They say they cannot believe that Mr. Duvalier’s National Unity Party is attracting followers, and that a giant photograph of the elder Mr. Duvalier hangs from the party’s headquarters. They wonder who is buying copies of a sympathetic new book about François Duvalier called “The Misunderstood” by Jean-Claude Duvalier’s former information minister, Rony Gilot. Even François Duvalier’s grave has received some sprucing up, and the talk at the cemetery is that supporters plan to rebuild it to its former glory. “It’s such an insult to the victims to praise the Duvaliers,” said Patrick Elie, whom Mr. Préval recently appointed to head a commission to look into whether the army disbanded under the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide ought to be rebuilt. “There is nothing redeemable about them. We’re still paying for what they did to the country.”

Mr. Elie, who was a minister in Mr. Aristide’s government, calls the praise of the Duvaliers a “conspiracy of amnesia” that makes his blood boil. “If you say François Duvalier was good, I feel like coming over and slamming my beer bottle in your face,” Mr. Elie said, sipping from a bottle of Prestige beer one recent evening. “There is a limit to tolerance. It becomes complicity with butchery. If you do that, I am going to go ballistic.” Mr. Préval has acknowledged the Duvalier nostalgia and says he is working to counter it. “People don’t know what the Duvalier regime truly represents,” Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald late last year. Acknowledging that there was peace back then, he added that Haitians born after Jean-Claude Duvalier fled in 1986 — who make up the bulk of the country’s population of 8.5 million — “don’t know the price of that peace.” Mr. Préval has sought to recover some of the tens of millions of dollars that the younger Mr. Duvalier has stashed in foreign banks, funds the president says were looted from Haiti. Mr. Préval is also is pushing a plan to create a museum at the site of a former prison next to the palace, in which the Duvaliers’ henchmen tortured political prisoners. The site would be a reminder of that era’s horrors, he has said.

Haiti has a poor track record when it comes to preserving its past. A previous effort to restore another ignominious site, the Fort Dimanche prison, failed. The crumbling prison, where political executions once took place, is now home to squatters, some of whom get by selling patties made from dirt to quell hunger pangs. “To think that the children being raised today do not have the reference of what wrongs have been done in the past,” said Wilson Laleau, vice president for academic affairs at the University of Haiti. “It’s so frustrating. We don’t use history and memory to understand our present and build the future. We keep beginning again from scratch.” Mr. Laleau, an economist, said the economic growth that Haiti experienced in recent years was not really growth at all but a burst to catch up to where the economy was decades ago. “The economy was not as weak back then,” he said of the Duvalier era. The old days come up in Haiti’s debate about whether to recreate the army. Mr. Préval’s commission is leaning against a traditional army, but it is grappling with how to control the rise of drug trafficking and what sort of force is needed to monitor the border that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. “I know that the higher level of insecurity has made people nostalgic for the strong hand,” said Mr. Elie, the commission’s leader. “They think the army is going to bring back what they call ‘the good old days.’ We don’t want people to fall for that nostalgic trap.”

Those old days, Mr. Elie said, were a time in which Haiti’s elite lived lives on the backs of the suffering masses. Creating a more equitable society, he said, is a long-term struggle that inevitably makes many uncomfortable. “The idea of recreating that monster that was the army is preposterous and unacceptable,” he said. “One thing they did well was taking .50-caliber weapons and shooting into shanty towns. They are going to have to step over my dead body if that’s the kind of army they want.” A United Nations peacekeeping force is now in charge of Haiti’s security. It has battled the gangs that used to control the slums in the capital and restored a semblance of normality in the poorest neighborhoods. The United Nations force, a mixture of soldiers and police officers, has also trained Haitian police officers, who are increasingly visible on the streets. The police force is being vetted to rid it of officers who are themselves criminals. But the judicial system is a shambles, ill equipped to prosecute law breakers. Some gang leaders arrested last year have already been released and are stirring up trouble again.

Moreover, kidnapping has become a new money-making opportunity for Haiti’s poor, with no one — babies, old people, rich or poor — safe from being grabbed from the streets for ransom. The situation in Haiti remains tenuous. “All of this remains very fragile,” said Hédi Annabi, a Tunisian who leads the peacekeeping force. “It’s not irreversible. If we were to leave or downsize now or in the immediate future, we would leave a vacuum, which would be filled by the bad guys.” Mr. Duvalier is not the only former leader with dreams of a comeback. In a New Year’s message, Mr. Aristide, now in exile in South Africa, declared in Haitian Creole, “We are waiting to meet again, face to face on Haitian soil.” About a thousand of his supporters took to the streets last July to celebrate his birthday and call for his return from exile. The political establishment in Haiti considers the likelihood that either Mr. Duvalier or Mr. Aristide will return to the presidential palace to be remote. But the two men have devoted followings and play the role of spoilers in the country’s volatile politics.

One of those who heard Mr. Duvalier’s radio address was Bobby Duval, who remembered shaking his head as he listened to the former dictator. “I heard his apology, but it’s a little late for that,” said Mr. Duval, who served 17 months in jail in the mid-1970s, a result of one of Mr. Duvalier’s crackdowns on critics. “He destroyed this country. He left our psyche completely destroyed. Since 1986, we’ve been suffering the aftereffects of what happened back then.” Mr. Duval said he would welcome Mr. Duvalier back, but only to experience what so many Haitians did during his rule. “If he comes back, he ought to go to prison to reflect on what he did,” Mr. Duval said. “Anything else would be spitting on all those who died under him.”
By MARC LACEY
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Voice for Abused Women Upsets Dubai Patriarchy

Sharla Musabih, right, the founder of City of Hope, Dubai’s first women’s shelter, said goodbye to a departing resident last July. (Tamara Abdul Hadi)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates: March 23rd. (NY Times) — For years, Sharla Musabih has fought a lonely battle to protect battered wives and victims of human trafficking here. She founded the Emirates’ first women’s shelter here and she became a familiar figure at police stations, relentlessly hounding officers to be tougher on abusive husbands. She has also earned many enemies. Emiratis do not often take kindly to rights advocates drawing attention to the dark side of their fast-growing city-state on the Persian Gulf, better known for its gleaming office towers and artificial islands. Still, no one was quite prepared for the stories that started appearing in Dubai newspapers this month. Suddenly, unidentified female victims were coming forward to say that “Mama Sharla” herself had abused them, forced them to work as servants and sold their stories to foreign journalists for thousands of dollars, pocketing the proceeds. She even sold one woman’s baby, the articles said, hinting at criminal investigations. To Ms. Musabih and her supporters, the accusations, which appear to be baseless, are the latest chapter in a long campaign of threats and defamation that began with angry husbands and has grown to include prominent clerics, and even the directors of a new government-financed women’s shelter, who, she says, would like to silence her.

The ferocity of the dispute is unusual for Dubai, and underscores a major challenge facing this proudly apolitical business capital. The city’s few rights advocates have always been quietly shunted aside. But as the conservative Muslim ethos of Dubai’s native Arab minority rubs against the varied perspectives of a much larger foreign population, debates about how to approach taboo subjects like domestic violence and the city’s prevalent prostitution are getting louder. Ms. Musabih, 47, a boisterous American transplant who was born and raised on Bainbridge Island, Wash., argues that confrontation is essential in fighting the patriarchal Arab traditions that allow men to beat their wives with impunity. She and her supporters also say the Emirates have not acknowledged the severity of their problem with human trafficking, the brutal business in which foreign women are lured here with promises of jobs and then forced into prostitution or servitude. Last year the United States State Department placed the Emirates and 31 other countries on a watch list for failing to effectively combat the illegal trade. “When a woman has three broken bones in her back, and the police don’t take it seriously, yes, I get angry,” Ms. Musabih said. Others say Ms. Musabih’s aggressive approach — which includes appeals to foreign news media as well as tough, face-to-face lobbying — is inappropriate in the Arab world, and has needlessly fueled the backlash she now faces. That assertiveness may also have made it easier to dismiss her as an outsider. Although she has lived here for 24 years, converted to Islam, is an Emirati citizen, wears a veil and has raised six children here with her Emirati husband, Ms. Musabih is still unmistakably American, from her moralistic zeal to her habit of calling the women in her shelter “darlin’.” “I have told her sometimes I think she is wrong, she goes too far,” said Lt. Gen. Dahi al-Khalfan, the chief of the Dubai Police, who has supported Ms. Musabih in the past but now tends to criticize her work as divisive. “There is a case between husband and wife; let the court decide! Leave it.”

Ms. Musabih dates her work as an advocate from 1991, when she started tracking domestic violence cases and offering women shelter in her home in Dubai. In 2001, she rented a two-story house in the Jumeira district and opened a shelter for abused women and their children, naming it City of Hope. On a recent afternoon, children’s toys littered the floors in the shelter’s sunlit living room, and several women snacked in the kitchen, while others sprawled on couches watching television upstairs. Although Ms. Musabih has had some dedicated assistants over the years, it is basically a one-woman show; she deals with everything from belligerent former husbands to buying plane tickets, sometimes with her own money, for foreign women to return to their home countries. “I’ve repatriated 400 victims in the past six months,” said Ms. Musabih, a fast-talking, energetic figure who presides over the shelter like an overworked mother.

Establishing the shelter was unusual enough in the Arab world, where going outside the family to resolve domestic conflicts has little basis in law or custom. Ms. Musabih’s personal advocacy made her work even more startling. She would counsel women to leave their husbands if they were being beaten, and help represent them in courts or foreign consulates. She would also march into police stations and yell at officers if she felt they were not protecting women in danger. In the Arab world it is virtually unheard of for a woman to behave this way toward a man, and the officers sometimes felt they had been publicly humiliated. Some women who have spent time in the shelter say this tough approach is necessary. The police in Dubai “won’t do anything to protect you while you’re legally married,” said one former resident of the shelter, who declined to give her name because she still fears repercussions, from her husband and from others who oppose Ms. Musabih. After her husband beat her repeatedly, the woman said, she appealed to the police, who made her husband sign a promise that he would not do it again. He violated the pledge again and again, she said, but the police did nothing, even after he broke into another house where she was seeking refuge and raped her. “The police told me, ‘We can’t do anything, he’s your husband,’ ” she said.

But Ms. Musabih’s approach clearly shocked and angered many, and not just the husbands whose wives found shelter. A prominent cleric, Ahmed al-Kobeissi, recently gave interviews to Dubai newspapers in which he said Ms. Musabih’s work “goes against the traditions of Emirati people” because she “instigates wives against their husbands.” Mr. Kobeissi also voiced indignation at Ms. Musabih’s suggestion that Emirati men are among the clients of Dubai’s many prostitutes. Ms. Musabih’s work took on a higher public profile when she joined a crusade against the practice of using children, some as young as 4, as camel jockeys, once common in the Persian Gulf. Her advocacy led to a number of television and newspaper reports about the horrific abuses practiced on young jockeys, and appears to have helped lead to a ban on the practice in the Emirates in 2005. Ms. Musabih is full of praise for the Emirati government’s response on this issue, and says it responded quickly and effectively to her appeals to change the laws. But her highly public approach to the problem is said to have angered some influential Emiratis, who felt she had embarrassed the leadership instead of allowing the matter to be settled quietly.

In the early spring of 2007, government officials approached Ms. Musabih about plans for a new state-sanctioned women’s shelter, apparently intended to replace hers. At first she welcomed the idea, because her shelter was often crowded and she was struggling to manage financially. They praised her pioneering work and said she could help direct the new shelter as a board member. As the project evolved, it became clear that the government’s approach was vastly different from Ms. Musabih’s. It hired a director with a background in management and a more subdued style. On the grounds of an old rehabilitation center 20 minutes from Dubai with high fences and guards, the new shelter, known as the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children, resembles an American low-security prison. Ahmed al-Mansouri, the chairman of the foundation’s board, says there was a need for a more organized approach and a shelter that, unlike Ms. Musabih’s, was licensed by the government. He says she was not making adequate progress on the legal cases of the women in her shelter, a claim she vehemently disputes. He also describes the familial chaos of the City of Hope shelter as a “horrible way of living.” Certainly, the new shelter is more spacious, and has better access to schooling for the women’s children.

In October, buses arrived at City of Hope and they moved 35 women to the foundation shelter. But Ms. Musabih soon began to feel that the directors of the new shelter had betrayed her and were negligent with the women in some cases, a claim the foundation denies. She says the foundation was more interested in getting foreign women back to their home countries with a minimum of embarrassment, than in investigating wrongs that had been done to them and preventing those wrongs from recurring. If the new shelter was meant to replace Ms. Musabih and quiet her down, it became clear over the following months that it would not work. City of Hope continued to take in new women, and as Ms. Musabih kept criticizing the Dubai Foundation’s approach, her relations with its directors became steadily nastier. When one of the women who was moved to the foundation tried to commit suicide in December, Ms. Musabih accused its staff of negligence. After a heated exchange, the foundation’s director, Afra al-Basti, sued Ms. Musabih for slander.

It was then that the scandalous articles about Ms. Musabih began appearing in Dubai newspapers. The sources for those articles appear to have been women at the foundation shelter who, like some of their counterparts at the City of Hope, are vulnerable or unstable, and have been drawn into the dispute boiling around them. Some speak no English or Arabic, and are easily manipulated. How exactly they came to spread false stories about Ms. Musabih’s selling babies or taking thousands of dollars from foreign journalists is still not clear. Ms. Musabih, speaking by phone from Ethiopia, where she is setting up a shelter, said she felt betrayed. “I never thought it would go this far,” she said. “These people think I’m an enemy of the state and that I need to be controlled.” But even some of her supporters wonder whether Ms. Musabih, for all her pioneering accomplishments, could not have avoided all the ugliness if she had been willing to do things more quietly. “With Sharla, it is ‘No, I am right,’ and she always deals with people straight on,” said Awatif Badreddine, a supervisor at City of Hope. “But I tell her you have to deal with people differently here. The Arabs don’t like this. Sometimes you have to go around to get what you want.”
By Robert F Worth
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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