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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Slavery In Our Times

An actress learns human trafficking doesn't just happen over there.' 'Cries for Help: Actress Emma Thompson at an exhibit illustrating the experiences of women sold into sex slavery (Mario Romuli / UN.GIFT)

Mar 17, (Newsweek) - When I was growing up in London, I walked past a massage parlor on the way to school every day. If my friends and I ever gave a thought to what went on behind its doors, we saw it as a bit of a giggle; it existed in a world away from our own. Fast-forward 30 years to 2006, when I first met 19-year-old Elena through my work with the Helen Bamber Foundation, a U.K. charity that helps abuse victims. Elena's story was all too common but had a huge impact on me.

An intelligent girl with ambitions, Elena had been enticed to London from Moldova with a promise of a good job and a bright future. Once in the U.K., however, her passport was taken from her and she was kept in solitary confinement to break her will. She was warned that her family in Moldova would suffer harm unless she did what she was told. And then she was put to work as a sex slave, servicing a procession of men in the most appalling circumstances. What made her story so personal for me was where she'd been imprisoned: the same massage parlor I'd once treated as a joke. It underlined an awful truth: that human trafficking is not just a problem for other communities or other people. It exists on our own doorsteps, and our lack of action shames us all.

It's hard to put an accurate figure on the full scale of this misery. But the International Labor Organization estimates that there are at least 2.5 million forced laborers who are victims of human trafficking at any one time. Their plight can be seen as the hidden side of globalization: a sickening business worth more than $30 billion a year. It is a crime that scars every region and almost every country. Some 120 nations are routinely plundered by traffickers for their human raw materials, and more than 130 countries are known as destinations for their victims. Like Elena, these victims may end up in the sex trade. Many others find themselves condemned as slave laborers, forced to work in domestic service, in hazardous factories or at grim sites like the cocoa plantations of West Africa. Thousands more, many just children, become unwilling conscripts in bitter wars. Nearly all suffer physical or sexual abuse, creating mental and physical scars they carry for the rest of their lives.
By Emma Thompson
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ZIMBABWE: Engulfed by Sewage

Raw sewage flows outside homes in Kuwadzana 3 township in Harare, Zimbabwe,November 2007. Residents say they now have to lock their children inside their houses to avoid them catching diseases.
BULAWAYO, 14 March 2008 (IRIN) - To get to Sinikiwe MaKhumalo's doorstep in Zimbabwe's second largest city, Bulawayo, visitors have to step on a thin plank perched precariously over a trench that prevents sewage from flowing into her house. The 57-year-old grandmother has endured this arrangement to access her home in the city's Old Magwegwe working class suburb for the past five months after a sewer burst close to her residence. Service delivery has collapsed in Bulawayo, after local authorities recently announced that the municipality was insolvent and unable to cater to the needs of its almost two million residents. "The disgusting odour is awful and becomes more unbearable by the day," she lamented over the city municipality's failure to repair burst sewers in her locality. "I just hope a new team that cares about residents' welfare will be elected to take over the running of the city at the end of the month".

Zimbabwe is scheduled to hold presidential, provincial and municipal polls on 29 March. MaKhumalo's neighbour, Ingrid Mayobodo, fearful that her two children would contract communicable water-borne diseases, sent them to live with her sister in another suburb. "I could not stand them playing 'hop-skip-and-jump' over pools of sewage effluent to get into the house from the street." She feared her children risked contracting diseases in such an unhealthy environment. "Mosquitoes are a menace at night. We keep doors and windows shut at all times, living like we are in prison to avoid mosquitoes getting indoors." Mayobodo suggested the council should at least spray the pools of sewage effluent with insecticide to control mosquito breeding or use disinfectants to suppress the nauseating stench. "We can no longer enjoy our meals in such conditions."

The city's unsanitary conditions has left residents fearful of a fresh outbreak of cholera. The last outbreak occurred at the height of a water crisis in 2007 when close to 300 people were hospitalised and 11 died as a result of drinking contaminated water. The region's consistently low rainfall in the last few years had led to dwindling water levels in the city's dams. Heavy seasonal rain in December 2007 and January 2008 has filled up most of the city's supply dams, allowing for water restrictions to be lifted and enabling residents to flush their toilets after use. However, the sewer pipes remain blocked, resulting in sewage overflowing into the streets from manholes: "Our major problem is a shortage of manpower to deal with more than 500 reported cases of sewer bursts," Phathisa Nyathi, the city municipality's spokesman, told IRIN.

Council workmen at work on a burst sewer in Old Magwegwe told IRIN that maintenance of the aging sewerage system was a daunting task, but it was aggravated by residents flushing down solid objects, causing sewer pipe blockages. "At times we retrieve stones, broken glass, spoons, rags or mops and other hard objects when clearing blockages in the system," council worker Jotham Ncube said. Ncube said most of the families could no longer afford standard toilet paper and have had to resort to newspapers or torn pieces of cardboard boxes for their ablutions. "It is no longer unusual to find entire sheets of a newspaper, used sanitary pads, children's shirts or shorts among items blocking the system", he said. Zimbabwe is grappling with a more than 100,000 percent annual inflation rate - the highest in the world - and unemployment levels of about 80 percent. Blockages were also occurring from the accumulation of sand in sewer pipes. "People use river sand to clean their soot-covered pots because they cook over wood fires when electricity is cut off during load shedding [a euphemism for electricity outages] instead of commercial scouring powders that are soluble," Ncube said. The dirty water was then flushed down the toilet.

Magwegwe Residents Association chairman Bazara Banyana rejected the argument that apportioned blame on residents and said people had always used the same methods of ablutions and cleaning of their utensils. He said residents cannot be expected to condone the absence of services when the residents pay rates and taxes to the council in the expectation of the provision of those services.
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In Tibetan Areas, Parallel Worlds Now Collide

GABU VILLAGE, China: Mar. 20th. (NY Times) — For Caidan, a 40-year-old farmer whose life in this traditionally Tibetan area revolves around its Buddhist temple, the aluminum smelter that belches gray smoke in the distance is not a symbol of material progress, but rather a daily reminder of Chinese disregard. “Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air,” said Caidan, who, like many Tibetans, goes by a single name. Asked if Tibetans in this part of Qinghai Province in China’s rugged west had benefited from jobs at the factory, a man sitting nearby shook his head and launched into a litany about preferential treatment that he said was systematically given to members of the country’s Han Chinese majority. “Tibetans get the low-income and the hard-labor jobs, and although there are some Han who make the same as us, most of those who were brought in by the boss make twice as much money,” the man said. “They’re all paid as technicians, even though some of them really don’t know anything.” Caidan said there was only one solution to the problem: allowing the return from exile of Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. “We are unhappy that the state suppresses us, and as long as the Dalai isn’t allowed to return, we will remain unhappy,” he said. “Tibet is the Dalai’s home.”

After decades of heavily financed Chinese efforts to strengthen its control over Tibet and to tame the country’s far west through gigantic infrastructure projects and resettlement of Han Chinese from the east, the outbreak of protests and riots and a fierce crackdown by Chinese security forces in and around Tibet have laid bare a harsh reality of policy failure. In Tibet and in neighboring provinces, like Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, where Tibetans and other ethnic minorities live in large numbers, Tibetans and Han live in closer proximity than ever before, but they occupy separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear. To be sure, there is no legalized ethnic discrimination, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.

Chinese news programs on the events in Lhasa have reinforced an impression of separate universes that scarcely intersect — one Han and one Tibetan. The programs were clearly intended as propaganda to place the blame for riots on Tibetans and rally Han Chinese in support of a government-led suppression. Over and over, television broadcasts have repeated the same footage of rampaging Tibetans smashing shop windows and of injured, hospitalized Han, while making no mention of the widely reported deaths among Tibetans during the police crackdown that followed, nor of the underlying grievances that sparked them. Since the last widespread unrest in Tibet two decades ago, Beijing has sought to undermine separatists in what it calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It has invested billions of dollars, encouraged an influx of Han Chinese, and inserted itself deeply into the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism to eliminate the influence of the Dalai Lama, who fled China for India in 1959 after a failed uprising. But real assimilation, if it were ever the goal, remains elusive. In the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Han shopkeepers, hostel owners and others who are picking up the pieces of their lives after riots that destroyed many Chinese-owned business there spoke with scarcely concealed condescension, and often with outright hostility, of Tibetans whom they described as lazy and ungrateful for the economic development they have brought.

“Our government has wasted our money in helping those white-eyed wolves,” said Wang Zhongyong, a Han manager of handicraft shops, said in an interview in Lhasa. Mr. Wang’s shops sell Tibetan-themed trinkets to tourists, one of which was smashed and burned in the riots. “Just think of how much we’ve invested in relief funds for monks and for unemployed Tibetans,” he said. “Is this what we deserve?”. Among Han in Lhasa, comments like these stood out for their mildness. “The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable,” said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver, in an interview. “We don’t have a good impression of them, as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable. “We believe in working hard and making money to support one’s family, but they might think we’re greedy and have no faith.” Even among long-term residents in Lhasa, Han Chinese said they had no Tibetan friends and confessed that they tended to avoid interaction with Tibetans as much as possible. “There’s been this hatred for a long time,” said Tang Xuejun, a Han resident of Lhasa for the last 10 years. “Sometimes you would even wonder how we had avoided open confrontation for so many years. This is a hatred that cannot be solved by arresting a few people.” Tibetans, meanwhile, complain that they have been relegated to second-class citizenship, that their culture is being destroyed through forced assimilation, that their religious freedoms have been trampled upon.

A Tibetan university student in her early 20s who declined to give her name explained relations this way. “I really don’t want to talk about politics, saying whether or not Tibet is part of China. The reality is that we are controlled by Chinese, by the Han people. We don’t have any say, so in my family we don’t even talk about it.” Although the young woman said that her family was relatively well off and that she was receiving a good education, the future was bleak here even for someone like her because the system favors the Han. “I’m not even sure I can get a job after graduation,” she said. “For rich Tibetans and for officials, they send their children out to Chengdu or Beijing.” A sense of the fear many Tibetans live with could be heard in the comments of a religious leader in Aba Prefecture in Sichuan Province, the site of a protest by monks and others earlier this week in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrations, and the scene of a subsequent fierce crackdown. “I only know that the Communist Party is good, that they are good to us,” said the religious leader, Ewangdanzhen, when asked about official explanations that have blamed the Dalai Lama for the protests. “I only believe in the Communist Party. Splitting is bad. We want unity and harmony. We don’t have any contacts with him and we don’t need to contact him.”

Far from giving up on their way of life, though, or renouncing their attachment to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader the Chinese government has long vilified as a separatist, or “splittist,” most Tibetans interviewed while dodging heavy police checks during a 450-mile road trip through Tibetan areas in Gansu and Qinghai provinces professed near-universal devotion to the Dalai Lama, and vowed to continue resisting government attempts to control their faith. “All Tibetans are the same: 100 percent of us adore the Dalai Lama,” said Suonanrenqing, a 40-year-old resident of a Tibetan village in Jianzha County in Qinghai Province. Asked about China’s decision to commandeer an ancient Tibetan religious rite and select the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995, and the implications for how Beijing would manage things after the Dalai Lama, who is 72, dies, Suonanrenqing’s response suggested indefinite tensions between Chinese and Tibetans. “We’re not sure if it’s true that the Panchen was appointed by the government, but if it is true, we cannot support him,” he said. “We wouldn’t support a Dalai Lama appointed by the government either. These people should be chosen by monasteries.”

Although Suonanrenqing spoke candidly, worrying only at the end of a lengthy conversation if his comments could bring him trouble, many conversations with Tibetans began with nervous denials that they knew anything at all of the events of Lhasa. Their wariness was warranted by a severe security crackdown in clear evidence wherever Tibetans live in large numbers. After dodging one police roadblock, a reporter making his way late at night toward a town in Gansu Province where Tibetans had protested in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrators the day before was set upon by plainclothes police officers at a highway tollbooth and forced into a nearby building for questioning before being turned away. The following day, when visiting Taersi, an important Tibetan monastery in Qinghai Province, the reporter was closely tailed by plainclothes police officers who were seen videotaping his conversations with local monks. “I have no idea what’s happening in Lhasa,” said one 32-year-old monk, who agreed to sit and chat in a small restaurant with a foreign visitor but apparently felt the topic was too dangerous to touch upon. “We don’t have anything to do with that.”

Despite the vigilant police, the nearby Lijiaxia Valley, a starkly beautiful area dominated by the Yellow River with craggy, desiccated mountains and windswept farmland, Tibetan villages were easy to spot by the colorful prayer flags that flew from roofs and hilltops. Here, many initially claimed to know nothing of the events in Lhasa. But some quickly dropped this cautious pose. One poor villager, who rolled homemade cigarettes using old newspaper, was aware that Chinese news broadcasts were showing footage of Tibetans rioting in Lhasa. “Have there been any pictures of Tibetans getting killed?” he asked. When told no, he nodded his head and said, “Of course not.”
By Howard W. Lynch
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China seals off TibetanCapital

Chinese authorities have sealed Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, cutting off the city from visitors with a large military and armed police presence ahead of a “surrender deadline” of Monday at midnight.
China: March 16th. (Financial Times) - The government has also tightened control over information coming out of the Himalayan region, blocking many Internet sites, including Youtube, which could be used to upload video content of the protests over the last week. The protests began on March 10, when Buddhist monks staged protests against Chinese rule over Tibet, which China administers as a “special autonomous region”. Last week marked the 49th anniversary of the flight by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, to exile in Dharamsala, India. Chinese media have reported 10 “innocent civilian” deaths and injuries among police and troops sent in to restore order. Exiled Tibetan officials in Dharamsala have said that at least 80 people were killed, according to Reuters.

Beijing faces difficult decisions in coming days over the level of violence it authorises to suppress demonstrations and regain control of Lhasa, and some monasteries elsewhere in Tibet and China where there is unrest. The resolution of the issue is taking place against the backdrop of the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, and the huge international attention that event is generating. Wen Jiabao, China’s Premier, will hold his annual press conference on Tuesday, at the close of the National People’s Congress, which is telecast live. Residents of Lhasa contacted on Sunday said sporadic gunshots could be heard through the day as Chinese police attempted to keep people off streets and rooftops. The spectre of inter-ethnic violence also loomed, after Hui Muslim Chinese reportedly attacked Tibetan homes to avenge pro-independence protests that escalated on Friday, when demonstrators ransacked businesses owned by Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, Huis and other settlers.

Chinese state media dropped a country-wide reporting ban on the unrest at the weekend, as it became untenable after widespread leaks of eyewitness accounts, pictures and video footage of the growing violence in Lhasa. Official media footage showed Tibetans overturning police cars, looting businesses and assaulting ethnic Chinese on the streets of the regional capital. However, state media showed no images of the suppression of the protests, and stuck to the official line that the unrest had been orchestrated by a “separatist Dalai Lama clique”. Even more ominously for Beijing, protests have flared further afield in cities in neighbouring Qinghai and Sichuan provinces, where there are large monasteries and sizeable Tibetan populations. Reuters reported that a police station in Aba county, Sichuan, was burned down, quoting a police officer at the scene. This year’s violence in Tibet marks the most serious clashes since the late eighties, when independence protests were forcibly quelled. China’s current president, Hu Jintao, was then party secretary of the country’s most restive region.
By Richard McGregor and Jamil Anderlini in Beijing, and Tom Mitchell in Hong Kong
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Lawyers Demand Release of Judges in Pakistan

Aitzaz Ahsan, center, the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, during a protest in Islamabad on Saturday. (Anjum Naveed/Associated Press)
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan: Mar. 9th. (NY Times) — Beside racks of hanging meat and barrows of oranges in the alleys of the old town here, Aitzaz Ahsan, leader of the lawyers movement in Pakistan, was back on the campaign trail on Saturday, calling for the release of top justices from house arrest. Fresh from being released after four months in detention, Mr. Ahsan said the recent parliamentary elections were not enough proof that President Pervez Musharraf's government was dedicated to democracy. He insisted that the next step had to be the release of the former chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was fired along with the rest of the Supreme Court during a state of emergency imposed by Mr. Musharraf on Nov. 3. Mr. Chaudhry and nine other justices remain under house arrest. “Our struggle is to make Pakistan a state where the judiciary is independent, and what Musharraf did to the chief justice is an example of how under him no judge is ever independent,” Mr. Ahsan said to a crowd of lawyers who chanted for Mr. Musharraf’s resignation. The warmth of the reception for Mr. Ahsan and his rallying cry for Mr. Chaudhry was evident Saturday, with shoppers and storekeepers smiling as they recognized him, stepping up to shake his hand and showering him with pink rose petals.

The rally here on Saturday was part of a series of marketplace demonstrations between the capital, Islamabad, and this nearby city to show support for the chief justice. The lawyers are planning a week of demonstrations on behalf of the justices, called Black Flag Week after the protesters’ flags and armbands. But the rallies, which are also a show against Mr. Musharraf, are sending another message, too: that the lawyers are not willing to take the back seat to their partners in the opposition. The recent parliamentary elections resulted in a huge victory for the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, the party of the former prime minister, Benadir Bhutto, who was assassinated. Mr. Ahsan is a senior party member, but is now at loggerheads with the party over the issue of the release of the chief justice and the restoration of an independent judiciary. Mr. Chaudhry and his family have been stuck inside their home in Islamabad behind barricades of barbed wire and rows of policemen, with only furtive telephone connections to the outside world. Mr. Ahsan insists that little more is needed to resolve Mr. Chaudhry’s situation than for the police cordon to be removed from around his home. Once that is done, the judge has pledged to walk to the Supreme Court building not far from his house. An executive order could then be written reinstating the chief justice, the lawyers say.

But Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party and the widower of Ms. Bhutto, contends that the restoration of the judiciary and Mr. Chaudhry should be decided by the new Parliament, a far longer process. Between those positions, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, led by Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister and an opponent of Mr. Musharraf, argues that a resolution calling for the return of the full bench of judges should be passed by the new Parliament as soon it convenes. Behind the scenes, the United States is trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mr. Chaudhry, whom Washington sees as too much of a Musharraf opponent. The United States ambassador, Anne Patterson, met with Mr. Zardari, and suggested that the Supreme Court judges except Mr. Chaudhry should be reinstated, said Shahbaz Sharif, a senior member of the Pakistan Muslim League-N. In a meeting with Ms. Patterson this week, Tariq Mahmood, a former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, said he told her that the United States should “appreciate the results of the elections” in which secular political parties received an overwhelming vote. He said he told the ambassador: “My message was very simple: You love democracy, you live in a democracy, why do you want to deprive us? You are always supporting the dictator.”

Mr. Mahmood said he got the impression that the United States was more concerned with Mr. Musharraf and the fight against terrorism than with an independent judiciary. “As far as the war on terror is concerned, this can be better fought by the parties,” Mr. Mahmood said. “This perception that the Americans have is slightly different to how we are.” For the past year, Mr. Chaudhry has been a rallying point for the opposition in Pakistan. On March 9 last year, Mr. Musharraf dismissed Mr. Chaudhry, but after a lengthy campaign by lawyers in Pakistan’s major cities and after legal arguments led by Mr. Ahsan, the chief justice was reinstated on July 20. Then, after a series of judicial decisions that displeased his government, Mr. Musharraf, nervous about how Mr. Chaudhry would rule on the legality of his own October re-election, fired Mr. Chaudhry and the other judges on Nov. 3.
By Janed Perlez
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Sharing Clean Technologies With Developing Countries

VATICAN CITY, 7 MAR 2008 (VIS) - Made public today was the text of an address delivered by Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Holy See permanent observer to the United Nations in New York, during the 62nd U.N. General Assembly which met on 11 and 12 February to consider the theme: "Addressing Climate Change: the United Nations and the World at Work". "The use of 'clean technologies'", said the archbishop speaking English, "is an important component of sustainable development.

To help industrialising countries avoid the errors that others committed in the past, highly industrialised countries should share with the former their more advanced and cleaner technologies. Moreover, markets must be encouraged to patronise 'green economics' and not to sustain demand for goods whose very production causes environmental degradation. Consumers must be aware that their consumption patterns have direct impact on the health of the environment".

"Indeed, the challenge of climate change is at once individual, local, national and global. Accordingly, it urges a multilevel co-ordinated response, with mitigation and adaptation programmes simultaneously individual, local, national and global in their vision and scope. ... It demands a global alliance for the adoption of a co-ordinated international political strategy towards a healthy environment for all".

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Kenya Rival Is Cautiously Optimistic

NAIROBI, Kenya: Mar. 4th. (NY Times) — Raila Odinga is a happy man. On Sunday, he went to the beach and was pictured on the front page of Kenya’s leading newspaper, The Daily Nation, lounging by the waves, wearing shorts and argyle socks. On Monday, as he polished off a bowl of vegetable soup and sautéed fish at the Nairobi Club, Mr. Odinga seemed relaxed, chatty and upbeat — for the first time in weeks. “Better half a loaf than no bread,” Mr. Odinga said of a power-sharing agreement struck on Thursday that marries his political party to his rivals in the Kenyan government. Mr. Odinga, 63, is Kenya’s top opposition leader, and his decision to drop his claim to Kenya’s presidency — which he says he rightly won — and to accept the newly created position of prime minister has helped pull this country back from the brink of chaos.

Last week, the governing party agreed to form a coalition government with Mr. Odinga’s party, a breakthrough in a dangerous political crisis that erupted in December with a flawed presidential election. The incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, was declared the winner, despite widespread evidence of vote rigging. The election set off weeks of bloodshed, destruction and ethnic balkanization, which for a moment put Kenya’s entire future in doubt. The political violence has mostly calmed down, though on Sunday night more than 10 people were killed in western Kenya in clashes over contested land. Mr. Odinga, in an interview on Monday, credited the unstinting pressure by the EU and the United States government with forcing Mr. Kibaki to compromise. “They knew the game was up,” Mr. Odinga said, referring to Mr. Kibaki’s side, which had insisted for weeks that it would not share power with the opposition, but finally conceded to just about all of Mr. Odinga’s demands except for the presidency. Mr. Odinga said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been especially influential — and tough. She visited Kenya last month, and by the accounts of Mr. Odinga and others with knowledge of her meetings, she gave Kenya’s president a serious tongue-lashing and told him that his plan to prevent Mr. Odinga’s team from getting any real power was “unacceptable.”

People close to Mr. Kibaki have conceded that the foreign pressure had played a role in Mr. Kibaki’s about-face, especially from donor nations like the United States, which has provided Kenya with more than half a billion dollars of aid each year. And, Mr. Odinga says, that pressure must continue. “We’re still at a very critical stage,” he said. The next step is for Parliament to ratify the political agreement signed by Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki. There are many questions to sort through, like how the government will function with essentially two bosses and what will happen to the vice president, a position that now seems to be eclipsed by that of the prime minister. Parliament is scheduled to meet Thursday. But the biggest question seems to be how Mr. Odinga and Mr. Kibaki will get along. The two had teamed up in 2002, when Mr. Kibaki won his first term as president. But they soon had a bitter falling-out. Mr. Odinga said he had no problem working with Mr. Kibaki. He said his only potential problem was “the clique around him.” He said this clique could persuade some Parliament members to skip the vote on the power-sharing agreement. The agreement needs a two-thirds majority to be put into Kenya’s Constitution through an amendment. So far, Mr. Kibaki’s political allies have said that they would support the agreement, though some have continued to grumble about its ramifications.

Mr. Odinga seems to be cautiously optimistic. He spoke Monday of the ministries his party wanted to take over, including finance and internal security, and how he planned to provide better housing to improve conditions in Kenya’s slums, which had been incubators of violence during the election crisis. He also said he was excited about the American presidential race, and was rooting for Barack Obama, who is half Kenyan and whose father was a Luo, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group. Luos have felt marginalized for years. There is an old joke in Kenya that has gotten a lot of chuckles lately, that a Luo will be president of the United States before being president of Kenya. “We beat them to it,” Mr. Odinga said, laughing so hard that his eyes watered. “I just wasn’t sworn in.”
by Jeffrey Gettleman
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Israeli Ground Forces Pull Out of Gaza Strip

Palestinians sat amid the rubble of their destroyed home in Jabalia after Israeli troops pulled out of the northern Gaza Strip on Monday. (Abid Katib/Getty Images)
GAZA CITY, Palestine: Mar. 4th. (NY Times) — As israel withdrew its forces from the northern Gaza Strip after a two-day assault on Hamas militants on Monday and Palestinians emerged from their houses to inspect the damage, Hamas leaders seemed to be following the playbook of their Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, in its 2006 war with Israel. Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, said that Hamas has “gone from the stone to the rocket. What we learned from Hezbollah,” he said, “is that resistance is a choice that can work.”

The clearest example of echoing Hezbollah came on Monday when thousands attended a so-called victory rally , and Mahmoud Zahar, an influential Hamas leader, briefly came out of hiding to tell the celebrants that his organization would rebuild any house that had been damaged by the Israeli strikes. Holding up his group as the source of reconstruction as well as resistance is precisely the message that brought Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, local and regional acclaim when his organization faced down Israeli attacks in the summer of 2006 through rocket barrages on Israel. The latest surge in hostilities between Israel and militants in the Gaza Strip left 116 Palestinians dead, according to Dr. Moawiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, the deadliest fighting in Gaza in a year. Two Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting in northern Gaza on Saturday, and one Israeli civilian was killed last Wednesday by rocket fire in the border town of Sderot.

But more than 200 rockets have been fired at Israel since Wednesday, according to Israeli military officials, including at least 21 longer-range Katyusha-style rockets that are manufactured outside Gaza and brought into the strip — another illustration of what Palestinians and Israelis see as the growing similarity between Hamas and Hezbollah. “We are very concerned that the role model for Hamas in Gaza is the Lebanese Hezbollah,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, when asked about parallels between this conflict and the one with Hezbollah. “I have no doubt that the people who built Hezbollah’s military machine are now building the military machine of Hamas,” Mr. Regev added. He named Iran, where Israeli security officials say the longer-range rockets used by both Hezbollah and Hamas were made. Israeli officials say that Hezbollah is not only a model for Hamas, but also provides it with training and logistical support. They add that Hamas has also adopted other Hezbollah tactics, operating out of civilian areas and in some cases storing weapons in homes, creating similar dilemmas for the army that it faced in its war in Lebanon in 2006. Soon after the forces left northern Gaza on Monday, two more of the imported rockets that Israelis refer to as Grads struck Ashkelon, a large Israeli coastal city about 10 miles north of the strip. One hit an apartment block causing damage but no serious injuries.

Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that controls Gaza, has claimed responsibility for most of the rocket fire. Hamas took over Gaza last June after routing forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah. Mr. Abbas, who is now based in the West Bank, suspended peace talks with Israel as the death toll rose in Gaza, and called on all sides to agree to a cease-fire and to allow him to act as a mediator, a day before Secretary of State Condoleza was expected to arrive in the area for talks. There was a second day of unrest in the West Bank on Monday, with Palestinians protesting the Israeli actions in Gaza and throwing stones at soldiers and Israeli cars in various locations. An Israeli settler shot dead a Palestinian youth, 17, on a road west of Ramallah. According to Israel Radio, the settler said he had gone out for a walk and was confronted by a group of Palestinians, some masked, who threw stones. In an apparent bid to remain relevant in Gaza, and in an echo of the actions of the Lebanese government in southern Beirut last summer, Mr. Abbas, who is now based in the West Bank, also instructed his government on Monday to allocate $5 million to compensate Gaza residents whose properties were damaged in the Israeli campaign. Israel says its ground and air forces have only been targeting rocket squads and weapons storage and production facilities in Gaza. Israel’s army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, and head of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, both described 90 percent of those killed in Gaza in the last few days as terrorists.

But that figure is challenged by medical officials in Gaza, who say about half of those killed were civilians, including several young children. The Israeli human rights organization Btselem also issued a statement on Monday saying that by its count at least 54 of the dead did not take part in the hostilities. Mr. Olmert was quoted as telling the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday that the recent military campaign, that started with concerted air strikes on Wednesday and the ground incursion early Saturday, was “not a one-time event. We are in the midst of a combat action,” he said, adding that “the objective is reducing the rocket fire and weakening Hamas.” On Monday evening, the Israeli air force struck another rocket-launching squad and the wagon in which they were transporting rockets in northern Gaza, an Army spokeswoman said. Palestinian officials said one militant was killed. Israel is mulling a much broader and longer ground operation in Gaza, the defense minister, Ehud Baruk, said in recent days. But both Israeli government and military officials say they are wary of such a campaign because of the inevitably high cost in lives on both sides and uncertainty about what might be achieved.

In terms of strength, Hamas is still far from Hezbollah. But if Israel does not act, Mr. Regev said, it will wake up one day to a much more dangerous situation in the south with a large part of the Israeli population within range of Hamas rocket fire. In the Gaza town of Jabalia, the focus of the Israeli ground operation, residents emerged from their houses to inspect the destruction left by the Israeli tanks and to bury more of the dead. Ahmad Darabeh, 37, a teacher and father of six, described how soldiers blew open the door of his house without warning before dawn on Saturday and took up sniper positions inside. The whole family was confined to one room, only allowed out to visit the bathroom once every 10 hours, Mr. Darabeh said. Mr. Darabeh said that one of his female relatives, Nihad Daher, 22, who lives nearby, was killed on Saturday by shrapnel when an Israeli Apache helicopter fired a missile at an armed group somewhere outside the house. Mr. Darabeh said he was impressed by the organization of the members of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. “It was striking to see their performance this time,” he said, adding that if the Israeli ground forces had not been backed up from the air, “Hamas could have beaten them.” The Qassam Brigades say that 37 of its members were killed since Wednesday, and other militant groups say they lost another 15. Many Palestinians in Gaza also expressed reservations about the Hamas celebrations, given the number of people who have died. Sitting outside her partially destroyed house in Jabalia, Aisha Abd Rabbo, 85, said she did not care about Mr. Zahar’s offer of compensation. “All I want is the return of those who were killed,” she said.
by Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner. Steven Erlanger contributed from Jerusalem.
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Americans Fire Missiles Into Somalia

Nairobi, Kenya: Mar. 4th. (NY Times) — American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets. Residents reached by telephone said the only casualties were three wounded civilians, three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known Al Qaeda terrorist.” The missile strike was aimed at Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan born in 1979 who is wanted by the FBI for questioning in the nearly simultaneous attacks on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and on an Israeli airliner taking off from there, in 2002, said three American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the strike or its details. One American military official said the naval attack on Monday was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles were believed to have hit their targets. Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently. “I did not know from where they were launched, but what I know is that they hit a house in this town,” said Muhammad Amin Abdullahi Osman, a resident of Dhobley, a small town in southern Somalia near the Kenyan border. Mr. Muhammad said two missiles slammed into the house around 3:30 a.m.

In the attacks to which Mr. Nabhan is linked, three suicide bombers drove up to the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa on Nov. 28, 2002, and blew themselves up, killing three Israeli tourists and 10 Kenyans, many of them young people in a welcoming party in the lobby. That attack took place after terrorists aimed shoulder-fired missiles at an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa’s airport, but missed. The Kenyan police say Mr. Nabhan bought the sport utility vehicle used in the hotel bombing. Kenyan authorities also suspect that Mr. Nabhan was involved in the bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, in which more than 200 people were killed and 5,000 wounded. Monday’s attack was not the first time that American forces had fired missiles into Somalia or used airstrikes in pursuit of what the Pentagon has called terrorist operatives in the country. They did so at least three times last year.

Dhobley lies in the growing swath of southern Somalia that seems to be falling under the control of the country’s Islamist movement once again. The Islamists rose to power in 2006 and brought a degree of law and order to Somalia for the first time since the central government collapsed in 1991. But they were driven out of Somalia in late 2006 and early 2007 by a joint Ethiopian-American offensive. The Americans and Ethiopians said Somalia’s Islamists were harboring Qaeda terrorists, including men connected to the 1998 embassy bombings. Thousands of Ethiopian troops poured across the border, backed up by American warplanes and American intelligence. The Islamist movement then went underground. But in the past several months, the Islamists seem to be making a comeback, taking over towns in southern Somalia, including Dhobley, and inflicting a steady stream of casualties on Ethiopian forces with suicide bombs and hit-and-run attacks. Efforts by foreign diplomats and the UN to broker a truce have failed, and concerns are rising that Somalia could be headed toward another war-induced famine like the one it suffered in the early 1990s.
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Eric Schmitt. Mohammed Ibrahim &Yuusuf Maxamuud contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.
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Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur

Hawar Omar Muhammad was among the Suleia residents terrorized by the militias, known as the janjaweed, and bombs dropped by government planes. (Lynsey Addario for The New York Times)
SULEIA, Sudan: Mar. 2nd. (NY Times) — They came to this dusty town in the Darfur region of Sudan on horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone ran. The militiamen laid waste to the town — burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way, residents said. Asha Abdullah Abakar, wizened and twice widowed, described how she hid in a hut, praying it would not be set on fire. “I have never been so afraid,” she said. The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict. Such brutal, three-pronged attacks of this scale — involving close coordination of air power, army troops and Arab militias in areas where rebel troops have been — have rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the world’s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in Darfur genocide. Aid workers, diplomats and analysts say the return of such attacks is an ominous sign that the fighting in Darfur, which has grown more complex and confusing as it has stretched on for five years, is entering a new and deadly phase — one in which the government is planning a scorched-earth campaign against the rebel groups fighting here as efforts to find a negotiated peace founder.

The government has carried out a series of coordinated attacks in recent weeks, using air power, ground forces and, according to witnesses and peacekeepers stationed in the area, the janjaweed, as their allied militias are known here. The offensives are aimed at retaking ground gained by a rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, which has been gathering strength and has close ties to the government of neighboring Chad. Government officials say that their strikes have been carefully devised to hit the rebels, not civilians, and that Arab militias were not involved. They said they had been motivated to evict the rebels in part because the rebels were hijacking aid vehicles and preventing peacekeepers from patrolling the area, events that some aid workers and peacekeepers confirmed. “We are simply trying to secure the area from the bandits that are troubling civilians in the area,” said Ali al-Sadig, a government spokesman. “There is nothing abnormal about a government doing this.” But residents of the towns said the rebels had been long gone by the time the government attacks began, leaving defenseless civilians to flee bombs and guns. In interviews, survivors of the attacks described a series of assaults that had left dozens dead, turned large sections of towns into hut-shaped circles of ash and scattered tens of thousands of fearful residents, including hundreds of children, who fled classrooms in the middle of a school day and have not been reunited with their families. “My son Ahmed, he ran, but I have not seen him since,” said a woman named Aisha as she waited for a sack of sorghum from UN workers in Sirba, one of the towns that was attacked. “I just pray he is still hiding in the bush somewhere and will come back to me.”

The United Nations estimates that the recent fighting has forced about 45,000 people to flee their homes in Darfur, which is roughly the size of Texas and has a population of about six million people. Some fled to Chad, where they have not been able to reach the safety of refugee camps because of continued bombing along the border. Others fled to Jebel Moun, a rebel stronghold to the east, and aid workers fear for the safety of about 20,000 people who are in the path of future attacks if the government presses ahead with its offensive and the rebels vow to resist. Military officials from the peacekeeping force in Darfur said in recent days that the Sudanese military had added nearly a brigade of troops to West Darfur, along with two dozen tanks and armored vehicles and many heavy weapons. “You see a buildup from both sides,” said Ameerah Haq, the senior United Nations aid official in Sudan. “Both sides must desist. We have a population that is just being attacked and hit from both sides.”

Pressure is mounting on Sudan over Darfur. In January, a long-sought hybrid United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force began working in Darfur, but the Sudanese government’s quibbling over which countries the troops will come from and bureaucratic delays have stalled the force’s deployment. Sudan’s biggest trading partner and ally, China, has also come under pressure from advocates who have linked the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer to the fighting in Darfur. China has been more publicly critical of the Sudanese government in recent weeks. Sudan has also been trying to improve its relationship with the United States, and last week, President Bush’s new special envoy to Sudan, Richard S. Williamson, visited Darfur and the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, meeting with President Omar al-Bashir. Any improvement in relations, he said, would be contingent on tangible improvements in the humanitarian situation. “Since the first of the year another 75,000 people in Darfur have been displaced,” Mr. Williamson said in a telephone interview. “That is more than a thousand a day. There are not going to be any changes until that reverses.”

Despite the pressure, the government seems determined to fight on, and the most powerful rebel groups — the biggest factions of the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army — have refused to sit down for talks. So the violence continues, tracing a familiar arc as it wears on. It was five years ago last week that an attack by rebels from non-Arab tribes like the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, seeking greater wealth and autonomy for the neglected and impoverished region of Darfur, prompted the Arab-dominated government to marshal Arab militias in the region that ultimately evicted millions from their homes, burning, looting and raping along the way. The campaign effectively pushed many non-Arab people off their land and into vast, squalid camps across Darfur and Chad. In the first two years of the conflict, 2003 and 2004, joint attacks by the Sudanese Army, janjaweed militiamen and the government’s old Russian-made Antonov bombers terrorized Darfur, waging a brutal counterinsurgency against non-Arab rebel groups by attacking their fellow tribesmen in their villages. At least 200,000 are believed to have died as a result of the violence or sickness and hunger caused by the crisis, according to international estimates, with the majority of violent deaths in that period. But in the past two years, the conflict has grown more complex and chaotic, and while some coordinated attacks by janjaweed militias and aerial bombardment have occurred, they were not of the same scale or intensity. But Darfur has remained a deadly place.

In 2006, before a peace agreement and then in the aftermath of its failure, rebel groups fractured and began fighting among themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and hundreds died as a result of their battles. Today, according to some estimates, two dozen rebel groups are jockeying for territory and influence in Darfur. Some analysts and human rights workers say the government has sown chaos by splintering the rebel groups to weaken them. In 2007, Arab tribes, some of which had allied with the government and some of which had taken up arms to fight the rebels, also began to fight one another. Many of the violent deaths of 2007 were caused by these bloody battles between Arab groups and their militias, according to aid workers and diplomats in the region. But as the conflict enters its sixth year, an older, deadly pattern is returning, and with it fears are rising among villagers, aid workers, diplomats and analysts that Darfur is headed for a new cycle of bloodletting and displacement on a vast scale.

In recent weeks, bombs dropped from government planes hit Abu Surouj, Sirba, Suleia and other towns in West Darfur, then came janjaweed militiamen, who killed, raped and burned, helping themselves to livestock and grain, furniture and clothing. In one town, the raiders pried the corrugated metal roof off a school, aid workers said. In another, water pumps were destroyed. “This is the kind of destruction that makes it hard for people to return,” said Ted Chaiban, the Unicef representative in Sudan, who has toured the area of the attacks. “People need security. They are totally vulnerable.”

The recent violence in Chad, where rebel groups with bases in Sudan tried to topple the government in early February, has worsened matters. Rebels in Darfur, who diplomats and analysts say have received arms and cash from the family of Chad’s president, Idriss Déby, rushed into Chad to help defend him, creating a vacuum in the territory they had occupied. Sudan’s government seized the opportunity to retake the ground and now appears to be pushing farther into areas long held by the rebels, according to peacekeepers stationed here. Few people in the region were unhappy to see the Justice and Equality Movement evicted. Banditry was rife in the territory it controlled, and for months aid groups had dodged carjackings and other attacks. African Union peacekeepers had been barred from the area, according to Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the new regional commander of the hybrid United Nations-African Union force in West Darfur. "They were causing a lot of insecurity," General Keita said of the rebels, but he added that this did not justify attacks on heavily populated areas. In Suleia, only a few hundred residents remained of the 15,000 who had lived here. Those left behind were too weak to run and have sought safety near the army camp at the edge of town, sleeping in the open, huddled together for warmth against the frigid night winds. The Sudanese soldiers here have promised to protect them from militiamen who still roam the edges of town. They prevented militiamen from stealing sacks of grain delivered by aid groups, residents said. Adam Adoum Abdullah, a former rebel fighter who joined the Sudanese Army as part of a peace deal with one rebel group in 2006, commandeered an army truck to help collect what little food, blankets and bits of shelter remained in the town for those sleeping out in the cold next to the army camp. “I am ashamed that the janjaweed come with the soldiers,” Mr. Abdullah said. “What kind of army are we to fight like this? These people, they are suffering. We must help them.”
By Lydia Polgreen
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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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