U.S. Air Raids on Iraq Become an Almost Daily Ritual

As Fighters Retaliate for Threats, Mission Faces Allies' Questions
By Roberto Suro Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 30, 1999; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/30/086l-083099-idx.html

Again this weekend, the F-15s and F-16s set off from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey into the skies over Iraq where they dodged antiaircraft fire and retaliated with missiles and bombs in a little-noticed aerial war fought for high stakes and with increasing ferocity this summer.

In what has become an almost daily ritual, the U.S. fighter-bombers run routine patrols of the "no-fly" zone created in northern Iraq at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and almost always a menace emerges: tiny puffs of smoke signal antiaircraft artillery; or a cockpit alarm announces that radar has "illuminated" the plane; or, more troubling, the aviators detect an Iraqi missile or airplane aloft.

The U.S. aircraft then "respond in self-defense," as the Pentagon puts it. But that doesn't mean they attack the threatening radar or antiaircraft installations. Instead, the payback usually comes hours later and miles away, and it may be delivered by different aircraft.

Last Monday, for example, patrolling aircraft detected antiaircraft fire from three locations. The self-defense response came in the form of precision-guided munitions dropped on a radar site near a major dam. On Tuesday, antiaircraft fire again, and the retaliation was smart bombs on a military installation 28 miles away. On Wednesday, the Iraqis fired antiaircraft guns and later turned on their tracking radar for a moment, provoking bombs on a military depot deep in the desert.

Thursday and Friday were days off. Saturday the routine began again.

Unlike other bombing campaigns against Iraq, which were designed to force a specific concession from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the Clinton administration acknowledges that the current undertaking is reactive by design and has no long-term objectives other than containing Iraq by enforcing long-standing rules for the no-fly zones, one in the north and another in southern Iraq.

"You really can't even call it an 'air campaign' because we are simply responding to Saddam's provocations," said a senior U.S. policymaker. "This was never envisioned as a way to bring about Saddam's overthrow or to take out a significant part of his military establishment."

Administration officials say the bombings help prevent Saddam Hussein from harming his neighbors or internal opposition. "The primary contribution that the patrols make is, they support the containment policy by responding aggressively and quickly to challenges to the patrols," said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon.

Still, the bombings have become a major military mission. Since Iraqi air defenses began challenging allied planes over the no-fly zones last December, U.S. and British aircraft have flown some 10,000 combat or combat-support sorties, unleashing more than 1,000 bombs and missiles on more than 400 targets, according to military officials.

A recent assessment concluded that the bombings had wrecked as much as a quarter of Iraq's most important air defense weapons--long-range surface-to-air missiles and the radar equipment that guides them, Pentagon officials said. "The degradation of Iraqi air defense assets is a fringe benefit to the way the Iraqis are reacting to our patrols, but that is not the objective of our operations, and Saddam Hussein could stop it tomorrow if he stopped threatening our aircraft," said a senior Pentagon official.

The airstrikes are by far the most forceful action aimed at Iraq. More than a year has passed since Iraq shut down the U.N. weapons inspection program that President Clinton so often proclaimed essential to keeping the peace, and the administration faces an uphill diplomatic effort to impose a new inspection regime. And, nearly three years after Iraqi tanks destroyed an anti-Saddam coalition engineered by the CIA, administration officials acknowledge that within Iraq there is no effective opposition that favors the United States.

Meanwhile, the United States and Britain--Washington's only full partner in the airstrikes--face increasing criticism from some former Gulf War allies. A senior French diplomat said last week that the military situation is "drifting out of control" and that France has "difficulty understanding the U.S.-British airstrikes." Francois Rivasseau, deputy spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, told reporters that "these raids have now moved quite a long way from their original, basic purpose" of preventing the Iraqi military from using aircraft against armed Iraqi opposition groups--the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south.

U.S. aircraft pursued that purpose for more than seven years, flying patrols in the no-fly zones virtually unchallenged by Iraq. Then last December, the United States and Britain conducted a four-day bombing campaign, Operation Desert Fox, to punish Iraq for obstructing U.N. inspectors. Soon after the bombing ended, Iraq began to fire surface-to-air missiles at aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, and the United States started retaliating.

In January and February the action was intense, with Iraqis regularly firing surface-to-air missiles at the patrols and U.S. and British aircraft hitting as many as six targets a day--always radar equipment, missile installations or other sites that were part of Iraq's air defense system. The number of engagements dropped off in the spring as aircraft were shifted to the air campaign against Serbia.

Since the end of the Balkan conflict, the tempo has increased, according to U.S. military officials, with combat sorties now routinely taking place three or four times a week. And, under new rules of engagement approved by Clinton in late June at the request of the military command, pilots have expanded authority "to protect themselves and protect their missions," according to Bacon.

Those pilots are often reservists or National Guard officers who do two-week stints at Incirlik as part of their annual service commitments. When pilots of attack aircraft fly into Iraq, they now regularly carry a list of pre-approved "response options" that can be bombed if the patrol encounters something considered an Iraqi threat--and that happens virtually every time they fly, according to a senior Pentagon official. On many days, the attack planes go directly to a target and drop bombs as a response to a perceived provocation earlier in the day or even the day before, the official said.

According to Iraq, the airstrikes have caused a steady stream of civilian casualties, including more than 20 deaths in August. The Pentagon took the unusual step of countering one such claim last Tuesday with a statement insisting that two civilian deaths in the town of Ba'ashiqah were caused by unexploded Iraqi antiaircraft shells falling back to earth, although the statement offered no supporting evidence.

The administration's sensitivity reflects concern over a U.N. Security Council session next month at which competing proposals on Iraq are to be debated, according to senior officials. The United States is backing a British-Dutch proposal to require Iraq to accept a new weapons inspection program. France has drafted a rival plan that U.S. officials view as too easy on Iraq. French diplomats have argued that a compromise is necessary to break the logjam and bring an end to the U.S.-British bombing "of which the civilian population is the main victim," said France's Rivasseau.

Since the end of the Kosovo air campaign in June, the Clinton administration has been considering expanding the "self-defense" bombing of Iraq to include military targets other than air defense system and widening operations to targets in central Iraq, far from the no-fly zones, according to a senior Pentagon official. Those discussions are at the Cabinet level, but the plans seem likely to be shelved because a more aggressive military effort could arouse opposition at the United Nations and among Arab allies in the Mideast, senior officials said.

The Pentagon opposes any escalation that could put its pilots in danger for uncertain purposes. "We see no reason to go off in another direction or an even slightly different direction," said a senior Defense Department official.

In the meantime the Pentagon has also shelved plans to significantly reduce its deployments around Iraq. A year ago the military hoped to pull back as much as a quarter of the roughly 22,000 personnel in the Persian Gulf region and to respond to future crises with rapid deployments of troops and aircraft. The proposal was put on hold last fall as confrontations developed over Iraq's resistance to U.N. inspections.

With little likelihood of expanding military activity over Iraq or reducing it, the administration appears locked into a game of tit-for-tat that could continue for as long as Saddam Hussein--whatever his motivation--is willing to give the United States reasons to strike back.

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A War Against Iraqi Children

Sunday, August 29, 1999; Page B06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/29/156l-082999-idx.html

The Aug. 12 news story "Mortality Up Among Children in Iraq" is a critical reminder of the high death rates of Iraqi children since the imposition of economic sanctions nine years ago.

I was part of a delegation that visited Iraq last fall. The article omits several important facts that help explain why children in the autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Iraq tend to fare better than those in central and southern Iraq. In our conversations with U.N. officials in Baghdad, we learned that under the U.N. oil-for-food program, some 13 percent of revenues go to the Kurdish northern region (15 percent of Iraq's population), while only 53 percent of revenues go to the remaining 85 percent of Iraqis.

In addition, international agencies responsible for distributing oil-for-food goods in northern Iraq are given a generous "cash component" to cover the expenses of transporting food and medicine from central storage facilities to local distribution points. No similar cash component is given to the Iraqi government, which is responsible for distributing food and medicine in the heavily populated central and southern sections of the country. As a result, some goods remain in central warehouses.

U.N. officials also told our delegation that oil-for-food revenues are woefully inadequate to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. And so, children will continue to die from water-borne diseases bred because broken water-treatment systems have yet to be repaired.

While the Iraqi government bears much of the responsibility for the plight of its people, nine years of broad economic sanctions have amounted to a slow war against innocent children and civilians. There would seem to be little space for such a harsh policy in the theological libraries of those who subscribe to either pacifist or just-war understandings, or among those who believe in basic human rights.

J. DARYL BYLER
Director, Mennonite Central Committee, Washington Office

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Congressional delegation travels to Iraq

8/29/99- USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/index/iraq/iraq603.htm

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)- Five U.S. congressional staff members ignored State Department objections Sunday by beginning a fact-finding mission to Iraq, the first such journey since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

A U.S. travel ban makes visits to Iraq difficult, but group members got around the ban by not technically using their American passports. They carried special papers with their passports for recording their entry and departure.

Still, it was clear the U.S. administration was not pleased about the visit. No U.S. Embassy staff received the group on its arrival Saturday in Amman, Jordan, as is customary, and embassy officials there disavowed anything to do with the five-day mission.

''We are here to see the impact of (U.N.) sanctions on the Iraqi people,'' trip organizer Phyllis Bennis said Sunday following the 10-hour drive from neighboring Jordan. Flights to Iraq are barred under economic sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the Gulf War.

Before leaving Amman, Bennis, of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, described the visit to Iraq as ''the beginning of a process for Congress to have an independent look at what is happening in the country.''

Some members of Congress have begun to question the Clinton administration's Iraq policy, which includes the sanctions and near-daily strikes on Iraqi air-defense sites that lock on to U.S. jets patrolling skies over northern and southern Iraq. The administration has said it intends to keep the pressure on President Saddam Hussein, and wants him forced out of power.

The United States and Britain have insisted the sanctions will remain until Iraq convinces the United Nations it is rid of all of its weapons of mass destruction.

The delegation was meeting Sunday night with Hans von Sponeck, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, for a briefing on the ''oil-for-food'' program, according to a source close to the group.

Under that U.N. program, Iraq can sell a limited amount of oil to buy humanitarian goods including food and medicine. Bennis said that while in the country, the group also would explore the possibility of U.S. grain sale to Iraq and look into the impact of U.S.-Iraq policy on the region as a whole.

The congressional staffers were planning to visit several sites in Baghdad over the next two days, then spend a few days outside the capital. None of the five were willing to speak with reporters in Jordan or Iraq - another sign of the sensitivity of their decision to visit Iraq.

No meeting was planned with Saddam, Bennis said.

The official Iraqi News Agency reported the delegation's arrival Sunday but gave no details.

The staff members in Iraq are: Amos Hochstein, who works for Rep. Sam Gejdenson, D-Conn.,; Peter Hickey, with the office of Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga.; Jack Zylman, from the staff of Rep. Earl Hilliard, D-Ala.; Brian Sims, who works for Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill.; and Danielle LeClair, from the office of Rep. Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

In 1995, President Clinton sent Bill Richardson - then a Democratic congressman representing New Mexico and now the nation's energy secretary - to Iraq to meet with Saddam and secure the release of two Americans imprisoned for four months after straying across the Iraqi border with Kuwait.

In 1998, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan made a controversial visit to Iraq as well.

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Iran Confronts a Long-Hidden Problem: Drugs

By COLIN BARRACLOUGH, August 29, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/082999iran-drugs.html

TEHRAN, Iran -- The problem of illicit drugs is commonly associated with prosperous, liberty-minded societies in Europe and America, not a theocratic state run by some of the Islamic world's most conservative mullahs.

But Iran is slowly discovering that it too has a drug problem. It has a drug smuggling problem. It has a drug violence and kidnapping problem. More and more, it seems, it has a drug use problem. And increasingly Iranian authorities have begun to grapple with this problem in the open.

"After the revolution, our leaders thought that the idea of drug use was imported from the West, so it was necessary to protect our society from outside," said Afarin Rahimi, an Iranian who works for the United Nations Drug Control Program, which opened an office in Tehran in June. "Now it's being understood that the problem is a domestic one."

Although Iran's religious rulers were loath for many years to deal with the problem publicly, an increase in the amount of drugs entering the country, growing pressure from the West, and a more liberal government under President Mohammad Khatami have brought the issue to the fore.

Over the past five years, the Iranian authorities have stepped up their battle against well-armed smugglers who transport much of the world's illegal supply of opium, heroin and hashish through Iran to markets both here and in the West from sources in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, two decades of war have made the country a haven for drug runners linked to various armed factions.

"The production of illicit drugs in Afghanistan is astonishingly high," said Mohammad Fallah, the director of Iran's Drug Control Headquarters, the country's national anti-narcotics bureau. "It flows from the country like water from a tap. We are having greater success in cutting down the flow, but our task is difficult."

That task is harder still because Iran's location and its 1,200-mile eastern border make it the first line of defense against the traffickers, and it has not been an easy line to hold.

Some 2,700 Iranian law-enforcement personnel have died in Iran's quiet drug war since the 1979 Islamic revolution -- so many that the country's Drug Control Headquarters has even published a book of "martyrs" with photographs and eulogies to the dead.

Despite such losses, Iran's reported seizure rates would astound anti-narcotics forces in North America or Europe. Since 1979, authorities say they have seized more than 1,300 tons of contraband drugs, more than half in the past five years. Indeed, the country now accounts for 85 percent of opium seizures and more than 30 percent of heroin and morphine seizures worldwide.

Increasingly, the smugglers are fighting back. This month, drug traffickers kidnapped four European tourists in southern Iran, in a daring effort to exchange them for jailed comrades, a tactic they used successfully in June and that has escalated their challenge to authorities. The hostages have yet to be released.

The smugglers, mainly drawn from the Baluchi people, a tribal group straddling the Iran-Pakistan border, possess a fearsome arsenal of weapons, many obtained from the Afghan mujahedeen who fought an American-backed war against Soviet invaders in the 1980s.

Authorities say that heavy machine guns mounted on all-terrain vehicles often protect drug convoys, while the traffickers themselves are sometimes armed with rocket-propelled grenades or mortars. Iranian officials say that some groups have shot down Iranian helicopters and warplanes with surface-to-air weapons, including, Fallah says, American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

"The traffickers are so heavily armed that Iran's response has quite properly been a military one," said a Western diplomat in Tehran.

The United Nations estimates that most of the 3,500 tons of opium produced annually in Afghanistan is exported through Iran; an additional 500 tons originates in Pakistan. Most is smuggled across Iran's eastern border region through arid, inhospitable terrain that provides perfect cover for the traffickers, who employ a wide array of smuggling techniques.

Some vehicles, packed with opium and heroin, are driven across remote border areas at night. "The drivers travel only in darkness, using night-vision goggles to see their way," said Fallah, a former intelligence officer with the Iranian police force.

The traffickers are also known to use methods that do not rely on technology but are nonetheless effective. Fallah described one in which traffickers employ a mother camel that has recently given birth.

"They separate the mother from its young, leaving the baby in Iran but taking the mother to Afghanistan," he said. "They place this female at the head of a camel caravan, each animal loaded down with drugs. The mother will walk night and day, leading the whole caravan, and will not stop until it reaches its young."

Armed traffickers simply monitor the caravan's progress from a safe distance through binoculars. "Even if we intercept the caravan, there is no one to arrest, only camels," he said.

Not all the drugs that enter Iran leave for markets abroad, and the recent opening of the United Nations drug-control office here has served to highlight a growing demand for opium and heroin within Iran itself, particularly among the 70 percent or so of the population that is under 30 and frustrated by Iran's strict social codes and high unemployment. Indeed, officials estimate that as many as 1.2 million Iranians may be addicts.

Iran's prisons hold so many drug offenders -- 60 percent of inmates are jailed on drug possession, dealing or trafficking offenses -- that the judiciary has recently quit jailing offenders, opting instead for fines, lashes and long-term treatment at one of the 40 or so outpatient centers throughout the country.

While the drug issue is one of the few that Iran and Western countries might agree on, Iranian officials complain that they have borne the brunt of the fight against drug trafficking with little recognition or outside help. Cooperation is complicated by the fact that most Western countries have legislated against supplying military goods to Iran.

Britain recently provided 3,000 flak jackets to Iran's beleaguered border guards, but only after the government gained special parliamentary approval for the shipment.

"The fight has cost Iran dear and yet the West doesn't care," said Mohammed Ali Tayarani, a deputy in Iran's 270-seat Parliament. "Prime Minister Tony Blair gave us flak jackets; we provided the guys to wear them.

"Which is more expensive?" he asked.

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Colombian Army Drill: Respect For Rights

Training Course Tests Empathy, Discipline
By Serge F. Kovaleski Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, August 29, 1999; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/29/207l-082999-idx.html

TOLEMAIDA MILITARY BASE, Colombia-Crawling on their bellies through thick underbrush, Colombian army troops exchange gunfire with a role-playing Marxist rebel and wound him with a make-believe bullet to the chest. "Save him. Help him, quickly," a commander bellows as soldiers haul the guerrilla on a stretcher to a medical tent where doctors start an intravenous drip.

Nearby, as a patrol enters a mock village, one of the troops threatens to execute a store owner whom he suspects is a rebel sympathizer. But a fellow soldier intervenes, stressing the need for humanitarian treatment of civilians. "So tell me, how is your family, how are your children?" he asks the merchant, whose wife looks on from their thatched bodega.

These dramatic scenes, acted out by Colombian soldiers, are part of a human rights training program for the armed forces designed to improve what has been widely criticized as a deplorable record of atrocities and abuses during this nation's 36-year-old civil conflict. The program, government officials say, is aimed at developing empathy, understanding and discipline within the military.

A 100-hour training course conducted at several Colombian military bases, it is an exercise in role playing, complete with costumes, props and sounds of war in which troops act as soldiers, guerrillas, priests, union activists, shoe shiners, peasants, children, vagrants and even a statue. The participants stage short skits that deal with war-related human rights themes, from treatment of wounded prisoners to protection of civilians and respect for their culture to procedures for handling Red Cross workers. Soldiers must also attend classes and study humanitarian law and the Colombian constitution before taking a final exam.

Although the human rights training is funded by the Colombians, the Pentagon is helping to pay for a new human rights manual for the armed forces that every member will be required to carry. The United States has also supplied some trainers for the program. And two months ago, the legislature here approved a new military criminal code, which says that genocide, forced disappearances and torture alleged to have been committed by members of the armed forces must be tried in civilian courts. The language of the code, however, is vague in that it refers to international human rights agreements that Colombia has yet to ratify. Military leaders said a main objective is to rebuild public trust in the armed forces, whose 315,000 members are widely viewed with suspicion by Colombia's 37 million people.

About 90 percent of the military has gone through human rights training, as have all of the national police, officials said. Gen. Fernando Tapias, head of the armed forces, said in an interview that he is seeing "palpable results" from the program.

Allegations of human rights violations filed with the attorney general's office dropped from 2,000 in 1996 to 310 in 1998, according to the Defense Ministry. So far this year, 40 complaints have been registered. But analysts said many violations go unreported out of fear of reprisals, as well as other reasons, especially now, during a time of heightened paramilitary activity.

Initiated about three years ago in response to international pressure, the training has taken on greater significance under President Andres Pastrana, who has made peace the top priority of his administration and has vowed to instill a sense of humanity within the armed forces. The Army's poor human rights record also has a bearing on distribution of critical U.S. counternarcotics aid, which by U.S. law cannot be steered to a Colombian military unit that is cited in credible reports for human rights abuses.

After working closely with the Colombian army in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Washington largely cut off direct aid because of human rights abuses. While training conducted by the Special Forces has continued, most U.S. funds to combat narcotics trafficking have gone to the national police, which has improved its human rights record and is recognized as one of the world's premier drug fighting forces.

The Clinton administration, however, is preparing a dramatic boost in military and economic aid to Colombia--which produces 80 percent of the world's cocaine--out of concerns that drug-financed guerrillas here could undermine counternarcotics efforts throughout the Andean region.

"The Colombian army and the military in general over the last year have improved markedly as it relates to human rights," Peter Romero, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said recently. But, he added, "that is not to give anybody a clean bill of health. Human rights vetting and training is still very important."

Local army units have been linked with right-wing paramilitary death squads, while the army has frequently sought to protect officers accused of human rights violations by having their cases heard by a military tribunal. The military is believed to have never convicted a high-ranking officer on human rights charges. In many instances, officers stay on active duty while their cases are pending and some have been promoted during those periods.

In an extraordinary move in April, Pastrana cashiered Gens. Rito Alejo del Rio, the army's chief of operations, and Fernando Millan, both of whom are facing trial for alleged involvement in killings by paramilitary bands. And today, the Colombian attorney general ordered dishonorable discharges for three officers who failed to stop the notorious massacre in May 1998 of 32 people by paramilitary gunmen. While rights activists welcome these decisions, they say that further steps are needed to rid the armed forces of entrenched problems and ties to paramilitary militias, which are responsible for most of the 185 massacres reported in the first half of this year. The massacres left 847 people dead--259 more than during the same period last year.

"Like the Roman god Janus, the Colombian army has two faces. Everything looks good on the surface when they give their own version of events, but when you hear the story from civilians, you get a much different tale," said Robin Kirk, a Colombia researcher at Human Rights Watch. "You hear of an army that continues to support paramilitaries and officers that are not punished for directly participating in or implicitly supporting paramilitary activities."

The Colombian military, which designed the training program, prides itself on the realism of the training, the simulated situations and the nine or so outdoor sets where it occurs. At this installation about 45 miles south of Bogota, the armed forces' largest, one skit was performed around a small church and cemetery covered with crosses.

"Anything you need, ask the closest army squad. We are here to help and protect you," one of the troops told residents in a skit on the "Protection of Life and Dignity of the Civilian Population."

Jose Lozano, a 19-year-old soldier, said after the training, "I have learned how to respect the rights of civilians in a time of war. If we do not use these things, they will be against us. We do not want them to think we are a group of terrorists."

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WORLD: Colombia Sanctions Officers for Massacre

August 29, 1999 Washngton Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/29/236l-082999-idx.html

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The attorney general ordered dishonorable discharges for three military officers and suspensions for five policemen for failing to halt one of Colombia's most notorious mass killings in recent years, officials said.

The three middle level officers each commanded a military post in the north-central city of Barrancabermeja, where paramilitary gunmen killed seven people and hauled away 25 others in trucks at a street fair in May of last year. Paramilitary leaders later said they had executed the 24 men and one woman, whom they called rebels, and burned their bodies.

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Colombia Army Kills 10 Death Squad Fighters

Updated 3:59 AM ET August 30, 1999
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990830/03/international-colombia-paramilitaries

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombian troops have killed at least 10 members of an illegal ultra-right death squad that recently massacred scores of peasants in an oil-rich corner of the northeast, an army general said Sunday.

Despite government pledges to clamp down on the right-wing gangs, which have some 5,000 combatants nationwide, army and paramilitary units rarely clash.

International human rights groups and even the State Department accuse the military of sponsoring the right-wing extremists in their "dirty war" against Marxist rebels and their suspected civilian sympathizers.

"At the moment we're reporting 10 paramilitary fighters dead in successive combats," Gen. Alberto Bravo, head of the army's Fifth Brigade based in Norte de Santander province, told reporters.

He said soldiers had been tracking the death squad since it murdered at least 36 people in villages close to the town of Tibu, in Norte de Santander, last weekend. Bravo did not specify when the fighting began but indicated clashes were still continuing.

The United Nations and London-based rights group Amnesty International condemned last weekend's massacre and blamed the government of ignoring warnings that the paramilitary gang would attack the area -- a traditional Marxist rebel stronghold.

Amnesty said the killings were a sign of the continuing alliance between the army and the death squads.

Earlier this year, President Andres Pastrana launched peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's largest surviving 1960s rebel army. But the slow-moving process has failed to stem the long-running conflict in which more than 35,000 people have died in just the last 10 years.

In fact, stop-start negotiations, which are going ahead with no prior cease-fire agreement, have coincided with a surge in political violence by gunmen of both the left and right.

In an interview published in the latest edition of Newsweek International, due to go on sale Monday, one of the country's top paramilitary warlords, Ramon Isaza, threatened to step up his fight against the rebels.

"We must press ahead. Our mission is to remove the subversives from any part of the country where they exist," he said, speaking from his powerbase in the central Magdalena Medio region.

Last week, Carlos Castano, the overall leader of a nationwide alliance of paramilitary gangs accepted responsibility for the massacre near Tibu but said most of the victims were guerrillas.

In a rare sign that Colombian authorities may be beginning to respond to U.S. pressure to break ties between the army and paramilitary gangs, as a condition for increased U.S. military aid, the Prosecutor General's office fired Friday three army officers suspected of links to death squads.

A captain, a lieutenant and a second lieutenant were all dismissed for allowing a paramilitary unit to raid two working class neighborhoods and kill at least 32 civilians in the oil town of Barrancabermeja in May 1998.

The prosecutor's office said the trio had removed a road block that would normally have prevented the gang driving into the town and said they failed to react despite hearing gunshots just 800 yards away.

At least six other army and police officers were suspended for their role in the massacre for periods ranging between 15 and 30 days, including the head of Barracabermeja police Colonel Joaquin Correa.

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Colombia Unions Gear Up For General Strike

Updated 2:53 AM ET August 30, 1999
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990830/02/international-colombia-strike

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombian labor leaders laid final plans Sunday for a massive nationwide strike this week amid fears of more violence following a wave of urban bombings.

Up to 1.5 million union members from the public and private sectors were expected to participate in the strike to call for an end to government austerity measures and free-market economic policies.

The action is to start Tuesday and could last indefinitely.

Military sources said they believed Marxist guerrillas could stage attacks to coincide with the strike and block major highways in a bid to snarl traffic across the country.

The Communist Party, a close political ally of the guerrillas, issued a statement Sunday backing the strike.

"We're saying enough to the politics of hunger, misery and extermination that this and previous governments have conducted to maintain their privileges ... thanks to the sweat and work of those who produce the wealth," it said.

Newly appointed Labor Minister Gina Riano told the respected El Espectador newspaper that the strike would be a grave mistake.

"It will cost the country about 250 billion pesos ($130 million) a day and poses a very serious risk at a time when the law and order situation is so fragile," the minister was quoted as saying.

Public sector workers staged a 21-day stoppage last October. The strike collapsed when President Andres Pastrana refused to give in to workers' demands.

Colombia's most violent strike in recent memory was in 1977 when 20 protesters were killed in a single day amid widespread rioting in Bogota.

The looming action, which the government estimates would cost the country $130 million a day, comes against the backdrop of one of Colombia's worst recessions on record. Gross domestic product contracted 5.9 percent in the first quarter and urban unemployment has hit a record of around 20 percent.

"This is a political strike that includes aspects of labor rights," said Luis Eduardo Garzon, a senior Communist Party figure and head of the Unitary Workers' Confederation (CUT), the country's largest labor movement.

Labor organizations have called for grass-roots social organizations, students and housewives to join teachers, health, communications and oil workers and truck drivers in a bid to bring the country to a standstill.

Security forces have been placed on alert for possible violence and alcohol sales and firearms have been banned in Bogota and many major cities from Sunday.

Last Thursday, seven bombs were detonated outside savings and loans corporations in the capital, causing heavy damage but no injuries.

Military sources suggested the blasts could have been carried out by Marxist guerrillas in support of the general strike.

Overnight Saturday, two bombs exploded in the northwest industrial hub of Medellin -- one outside a regional human rights office and another outside a union building, police said. A third bomb planted outside local offices of the powerful oil workers' union USO was defused.

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Nicaragua Destroys 5,000 Mines

By The Associated Press, August 29, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Nicaragua-Mines.html

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) -- For the second time this year, Nicaragua destroyed 5,000 anti-personnel land mines from the country's arsenal Sunday, a step toward complying with an international land mine ban.

With Organization of American States Secretary-General Cesar Gaviria looking on, the mines were destroyed at a military base 11 miles west of the capital, Managua.

Nicaragua has destroyed 10,000 of the 130,000 anti-personnel land mines in its arsenal as it seeks to comply with a land mine convention sign