------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
U.S. to Tell China It Will Not Object to Missile Buildup
U.S. to Give Details of Shield Tests to China
Pakistani Co. Rejects U.S. Charges
North Korea Proposes Resumption of Unification Talks
China to Get Update on Missile Defense
McKinney Raises "COINTELPRO" program with UN Human Rights Commissioner

MILITARY
Trial Offers Look at Secretive Warriors in Bosnia
Protests close debate on Albanian rights
Colombia's Army Steps Up Its Challenge to Rebels
Gov't Study Raises Doubts on Drugs
'Waging Modern War': A Defeated Victor Reflects on Kosovo

OTHER
Bush Policy on Stem Cells Appears Safe on Hill
No-Show Politics
Consensus Lacking on How to Address Legacy of Slavery
U.S. police are finding Babel in their backyards

ACTIVISTS
Turkey Raids Kurdish Protests



-------- NUCLEAR

------- china

U.S. to Tell China It Will Not Object to Missile Buildup

New York Times
September 2, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/international/asia/02CHIN.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - The Bush administration, seeking to overcome Chinese opposition to its missile defense program, intends to tell leaders in Beijing that it has no objections to the country's plans to build up its small fleet of nuclear missiles, according to senior administration officials.

One senior official said that in the future, the United States and China might also discuss resuming underground nuclear tests if they are needed to assure the safety and reliability of their arsenals. Such a move, however, might allow China to improve its nuclear warheads and lead to the end of a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing.

Both messages appear to mark a significant change in American policy. For years the United States has discouraged China and all other nations from increasing the size or quality of their nuclear arsenals, and from nuclear tests of any kind.

The purpose of the new approach, some administration officials say, is to convince China that the administration's plans for a missile shield are not aimed at undercutting China's arsenal, but rather at countering threats from so-called rogue states.

Today Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, offering a more nuanced explanation of the administration's strategy, emphasized that the United States was not seeking a deal with China.

"The United States is not about to propose to the Chinese that in exchange for Chinese acceptance of missile defense, we will accept a nuclear buildup," she said. But she stopped well short of saying the administration would oppose the buildup.

"We have told the Chinese that the missile defense system is not aimed at them, and we intend to make that point more forcefully," she said. "We do not believe that there is any reason for the Chinese to build up their nuclear forces, but their modernization has been under way for some time."

Other officials say that while there may not be an explicit agreement, both American and Chinese strategists know that China needs more weapons to ensure that it could overwhelm a missile defense system.

But word of the new approach drew scathing criticism from Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democrat of Delaware who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "This is absolutely absurd," he said today. "It shows that these guys will go to any length to build a national missile defense, even one they can't define. Their headlong, headstrong, irrational and theological desire to build a missile defense sends the wrong message to the Chinese and to the whole world." This is especially true, he said, regarding India, which would try to balance against any Chinese buildup.

"This is taking 50 years of trying to control nuclear weapons and standing it on its head," he added.

The administration decided on the strategy during a review by officials preparing for Mr. Bush's trip to China next month. The president's top advisers concluded that China's nuclear modernization is inevitable and that they might as well gain advantage by acquiescing in it.

"We know the Chinese will enhance their nuclear capability anyway, and we are going to say to them, `We're not going to tell you not to do it,' " a senior administration official deeply involved in formulating the strategy said in an interview this week. "Why panic? They are modernizing anyway."

Though Beijing has long planned to build up its arsenal, outside experts and a review last year by the Central Intelligence Agency have warned that an American missile shield could prompt China to expand its deterrent even further, possibly setting off an arms race across Asia.

Beijing now has fewer than two dozen nuclear missiles able to reach the United States, as part of a minimal deterrent created by Mao in the 1950's and 1960's. To replace those aging missiles, China is now developing mobile, solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles that would be far more likely to withstand a first nuclear strike.

A report to Congress last year noted that intelligence officials predicted in 1999 that by 2015 China was likely to have " `a few tens' of missiles with smaller nuclear warheads" that could hit the United States.

One of those new missiles, the DF- 31, may be able to reach northwestern edges of the United States, though it is designed primarily to hit Russia and Asia; the longer-range DF-41, still under development, could reach much of the continental United States.

Some in the Bush administration now believe that the Chinese buildup may be larger - and that by acquiescing in it, Washington may defuse objections to its missile defense plans. If those plans are causing any change in Chinese nuclear strategy, administration officials insisted in interviews, it is only at the margins.

"At most, missile defense might speed up their program slightly, or prompt them to build a few more missiles," one official insisted. "But they are on that path anyway, and may add only modestly to it."

A number of China experts disagree. Robert A. Manning of the Council on Foreign Relations, who published a long study last year of China's nuclear ability, said on Friday: "It's hard for me to accept the idea that what we do is totally irrelevant. If you are a Chinese military planner, your architecture and force structure depend on what the United States is doing, first and foremost."

In an interview last month with the publisher, editors and reporters of The New York Times, China's president, Jiang Zemin, deflected a question about China's response to the missile defense plan and suggested that his visitors knew more about the size and quality of China's fleet than he did. "I hope he was joking," one of Mr. Bush's top aides said.

As for the ban on nuclear testing, both the United States and China have signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Bush administration has made clear that it wants that accord to remain in indefinite limbo in the Senate, which rejected it two years ago.

A senior official said this week that in future years a resumption by China of underground tests of its nuclear weapons might be accepted by the United States, which might also someday want to resume testing.

"We don't see the need for any tests, by anyone, in the near future," the official said. "But there may, at some point, be a need by both countries to make sure that their warheads are safe and reliable."

Whether the administration's new approach to China is considered a change in American policy or simply, as the administration insists, a recognition of nuclear reality, the implications could be enormous.

At home, Mr. Bush risks angering the right wing of his own party, which has long protested any buildup in Chinese arms.

And Democratic critics of the missile defense plan, like Mr. Biden, have also argued that even before the technology for a missile shield is proven, Mr. Bush may set off an arms race that could include China as well as the world's newest nuclear nations, India and Pakistan.

"The question is, can you accept another 50 or 60 nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at the United States at a time that Americans believe that they are no longer being targeted?" asked Bates Gill, an expert in Chinese nuclear strategy at the Brookings Institution.

Mr. Gill, who says he believes that the administration is "right to acknowledge the practical inevitability" of the modernization of Chinese nuclear forces, also warns of a possible side effect should China incorporate new technologies to defeat the missile shield.

"We shouldn't be sanguine about the possibility of China proliferating antimissile defense technology in the future, if the U.S.-China relationship goes badly," he said. "That could include basic decoy and shrouding technology for Pakistan, and potentially Iran and North Korea."

The new American stance could also have a major impact on the nuclear politics of Taiwan and Japan. Every major nuclear advance on the mainland leads to renewed calls in Taiwan for an independent nuclear force - a movement that the United States quashed during the cold war. American intelligence agencies keep a close eye on Taiwan to make sure that its program is not resuscitated.

As the only country ever to have suffered the devastation of nuclear attacks, Japan has long renounced nuclear weapons, and it is almost inconceivable that it would reverse that policy as long as it can depend on American nuclear protection.

But Japanese officials have said privately that while they endorse missile shield research, they worry that it would only encourage China to speed its positioning of both medium- and long-range nuclear missiles. They fear that any placement of theater missile defenses in Japan - where 60,000 American forces are based - could provoke China to increase the number of weapons targeted there.

In interviews, administration officials dismiss the argument that the missile defense would set off any kind of arms race in Asia.

"The Indians know what the Chinese are doing, and so does everyone else," a senior official said. "If we canceled the whole missile defense program tomorrow morning, China would still build more and better missiles, and other countries would figure out their response."

Ms. Rice said today, "We are hoping to have with the Chinese a relationship in which we can discuss missile defense issues openly."

But until now, there have been few discussions between China and the Bush administration about missile defenses.

In the late spring, James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, was sent to Beijing to give a rough outline of the administration's plans to his Chinese counterparts.

Instead, the administration's focus has been on talking to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and winning his agreement to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which bars most of the tests for a missile shield that Mr. Bush hopes to begin in Alaska next year.

American officials have raised with Mr. Putin and his aides the possibility that Russia could contribute to the missile shield project and that some of its technology might be incorporated in it. No similar offer is contemplated with the Chinese now.

--------

U.S. to Give Details of Shield Tests to China
Aim Is to Assuage Fears On Missile Defense Plan

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 2, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30546-2001Sep1?language=printer

The United States plans to offer China an advance look at plans for testing President Bush's proposed missile defense shield, part of an emerging effort to soften Beijing's opposition to the plan, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States will begin intensive talks over the next several weeks to try to convince China it would not be threatened by the shield and should not accelerate a buildup of nuclear missiles pointed at the United States.

"We want to engage China on issues regarding missile defense, and we really haven't," Rice said in an interview. "We want to have serious talks with them about why this is not a threat to them. We want to have serious talks with them about why we think stability in the Asia-Pacific region would be well served by this capability."

Another administration official said that as a sweetener for China, the United States will signal that it recognizes both sides might want to resume nuclear weapons testing in the future. Such tests, now precluded by a voluntary worldwide moratorium, could allow China to field a new generation of mobile, multiple-warhead missiles.

The official said the United States has no plans for nuclear tests but reserves the right to conduct them because of concerns about the safety of nuclear weapons. "We have to maintain the reliability of our stockpile," the official said. "That's not something we can deny to others."

A missile defense shield, a system that would allow the United States to intercept enemy missiles, is one of Bush's most earnestly sought goals. The administration has not settled on the system's architecture, but it is likely to include land- and sea-based components, with the possibility of spaced-based elements. The administration maintains that the shield is designed not to defend against world powers such as China, but to offer protection against terrorists and rogue states such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

The proposals described yesterday are part of an emerging policy toward China that is taking shape as Bush prepares for a state visit with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Beijing next month.

The relationship got off to a sour start when China held 24 crew members of a Navy surveillance plane for 11 days during Bush's third month in office. Now the administration is engaged in intense debate over the proper carrots and sticks to offer the Chinese: At the same time it is offering Beijing inducements to cooperate with missile defense, it is taking a tougher line on nuclear non-proliferation.

In response to concern over missile transfers to Pakistan, the United States imposed sanctions yesterday on a major Chinese arms manufacturer and banned U.S. companies from launching their satellites on Chinese rockets.

A senior U.S. official said yesterday that this American effort to stem missile proliferation showed that the Bush administration is not relying exclusively on the development of a missile shield to confront the dangers posed by the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

"We're being realistic," another administration official said. "We imposed these sanctions because the law required us to and because it was right to do. Overall, it's still about reducing the world's reliance on nuclear weapons."

Morton H. Halperin, a former official of the State and Defense departments who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the talks Rice described are based on the administration's understanding that an effective missile defense shield would be very difficult to deploy without the cooperation of European allies. "It will be very hard to get that support if the deployment is over the objection of Russia and China," Halperin said.

China has about two dozen missiles pointed at the United States, and scholars expect that number to increase tenfold over the next decade. Rice said that because of the ongoing buildup, opponents of a missile defense shield should not argue that it "is somehow going to drive an arms race."

"No one likes the fact that there is a modernization going on. We don't think it's good for the world," Rice said. "But if we stopped all of our missile defense plans tomorrow, you would not see the Chinese cease their military modernization. This is a modernization that predates serious missile defense negotiations."

Rice said the briefing on missile defense technology and testing plans will be similar to ones that have been provided to Russia and U.S. allies in Europe.

Rice was interviewed after the New York Times posted an article on its Web site saying that the United States planned to abandon its objections to the Chinese buildup in an effort to overcome that country's opposition to Bush's missile defense program.

"The implication here that the U.S. is acquiescing in the Chinese nuclear modernization in order to buy China's acceptance of missile defense is just not right," Rice said. "The United States will continue to say that further nuclear buildup is not necessary and is not good for peace and stability. There's no conscious policy to try to take advantage of this recognition of the Chinese military modernization for something else."

The possibility of accepting nuclear tests by China would constitute a major change in U.S. policy. Bush opposes ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which bans testing of nuclear weapons, on the grounds that it is not verifiable or enforceable. It was rejected by the Senate in 1999. But the president supports an informal moratorium on testing that was initiated by his father in 1992.

"Testing is not a near-term issue for anyone," Rice said. "We believe that the moratorium should stay in place. We don't believe that anyone has any reason to test."

Conservatives warned the administration against giving too much ground for the sake of the missile shield. Kenneth Adelman, who was President Ronald Reagan's arms control director, said he disagreed with the notion that "if you act very sweetly toward the Chinese, the Chinese will reciprocate."

"My experience over many years of negotiating with the Chinese is that they take what you give and give almost nothing in return," Adelman said.

Staff writer Alan Sipress contributed to this report.

-------- india / pakistan

Pakistani Co. Rejects U.S. Charges

September 2, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-US-Sanctions.html?searchpv=aponline

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- A Pakistani company hit by U.S. sanctions for allegedly buying missile technology from China has denied Washington's accusations, saying Sunday that Pakistan developed its missile program by itself.

``It is very unfortunate that the United States has imposed sanctions without knowing the facts,'' said Samar Mubarak Mand, chairman of the state-run National Development Complex of Pakistan.

A State Department official said Saturday that the United States had imposed sanctions on the company along with a Chinese arms producer, China Metallurgical Equipment Corp.

In Beijing, a man who answered the phone at the China Metallurgical Equipment Corp. said he didn't know anything about the matter and referred questions to executives who weren't at work Sunday.

The penalties limit U.S. companies' ability to provide technology to China's satellite industry. Details of the sanctions against the Pakistani company were unclear, however.

Mand said he doubted the Pakistani company would be affected.

``We are not involved in missile technology transfer to any country, group or individual, nor do we import it from any other country,'' he told The Associated Press.

Washington has accused China of sharing missile technology with Pakistan, ignoring an accord with the United States that bars Beijing from such exports to nations developing nuclear missiles.

Pakistani companies even remotely related to arms manufacturing have been under the U.S. sanctions since 1990 because of the country's nuclear program. Fresh sanctions were imposed in 1998, when Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in response to similar tests by rival neighbor India.

Pakistan's National Development Complex, located in the capital, Islamabad, does science and engineering research, said Mand, who was a key member of the team of scientists that conducted Pakistan's nuclear tests in May 1998.

-------- korea

North Korea Proposes Resumption of Unification Talks

September 2, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Dialogue.html

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- In what was seen here as an attempt to influence a key vote in the South Korean parliament, North Korea proposed Sunday to resume as soon as possible talks with the South that have been on hold since March.

The proposal, which amounted to a policy reversal, came a day before Chinese President Jiang Zemin was to begin a three-day visit to North Korea, the first by a Chinese leader in nine years. Chinese officials said Jiang was to urge North Korea to reopen dialogue with the South.

There was no immediate reaction from the South Korean government to North Korea's statement Sunday. But analysts said the communist North's move appeared to be an attempt to influence South Korean politics rather than a reflection of Jiang's trip or Pyongyang's relations with Washington.

The North's statement, broadcast on Pyongyang Radio, said: ``We propose that dialogue between North and South Korea reopen as soon as possible to open a wider road to reconciliation, unity and national unification.''

It was signed by Im Dog Ok, a vice chairman of North Korea's Committee for Peaceful Unification of the Fatherland, a powerful semiofficial party organization that handles Pyongyang's policy regarding South Korea.

The message, addressed to South Korea's unification minister, Lim Dong-won, also came a day before South Korea's parliament plans to vote on a no-confidence motion against Lim, who was instrumental in arranging last year's first-ever Koreas summit.

Exchanges between the divided Koreas thrived after the historic June 2000 summit, but stalled this year over tensions between North Korea and the United States.

``Unification Minister Lim is one of the few South Korean dialogue partners North Korea can trust. North Korea can interpret his going away as a serious setback to inter-Korea relations,'' said Paik Seung-ki, a political science professor at Kyongwon University.

Lim was facing the no-confidence vote in connection with a controversial visit to North Korea by 311 civilian delegates two weeks ago.

The South Korean delegation of religious, civic and labor leaders visited the isolated North to celebrate the Aug. 15, 1945, liberation of the Korean peninsula from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule.

Seven delegates accused of violating South Korea's anti-communist national security law by praising the North's communist government during the weeklong trip were arrested upon their return.

South Korean President Kim Dae-jung has openly refused to dismiss Lim, saying that doing so would seriously impair his ``sunshine'' policy of engaging the communist North. Lim, a former government intelligence chief, is a key architect of the policy.

But political officials say chances are high parliament will approve the no-confidence motion since Kim's key ruling coalition partner, Kim Jong-pil, supports Lim's ouster. Kim Jong-pil's party, the United Liberal Democrats, has the power to sway the outcome of the vote.

Chang Kwang-keun, a spokesman for the leading opposition Grand National Party, denounced the North's proposal as ``an open attempt to meddle in our internal politics.''

Korea was partitioned into the communist North and the pro-Western South at the end of World War II in 1945. The two sides fought a three-year war in the early 1950s.

The Chinese president's three-day visit comes as North Korean leader Kim Jong Il attempts to ease the nation out of its self-imposed isolation. The trip also reaffirms ties forged when Beijing sided with Pyongyang in the 1950-53 Korean War but strained by China's decision in the early 1990s to form diplomatic ties with the South.

Jiang and Kim are likely to take up a wide range of issues, from rebuilding the North's economy to relations with Washington and unease about U.S. missile-defense plans, analysts say.

-------- missile defense

China to Get Update on Missile Defense

September 2, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- China will get an update on U.S. missile defense plans before President Bush visits Beijing next month as the United States tries to convince other countries that the proposed shield is not a threat, the White House said Sunday.

``This is part of the administration's outreach to China and other nations such as Russia to discuss with them the reason why we are developing a missile defense system and how it is designed to protect us from rogue nations or accidental launches,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said in a telephone interview.

``It is something we are hoping they will support because it is not aimed at China,'' he said. ``The president thinks it is important to consult with our allies and other nations.''

Fleischer denied that the Bush administration was courting China's support of the missile defense system in exchange for U.S. acceptance of a nuclear or military buildup by Beijing, as reported in Sunday's New York Times.

The White House is pursuing missile defense ``separate and apart'' from the issue of China's desire to expand its limited arsenal of nuclear missiles, Fleischer said. ``The United States has made it clear and continues to make it clear that a military buildup there is not necessary.''

He also said there was no change in U.S. policy on the testing of nuclear weapons, now precluded by a worldwide moratorium. ``We have no plans to resume testing,'' Fleischer said.

The United States might raise the future possibility of underground tests being resumed in both nations, according to the Times and The Washington Post.

Initial Capitol Hill reaction to those reports was critical.

``I would not like to see the Chinese expand their nuclear capabilities,'' said Sen. Arlen Specter said Sunday on CBS' ``Face the Nation. ``I think it is much too soon to even think about matters that offset our missile defense.''

China is ``the coming colossus of the world and a superpower,'' said Specter, R-Pa., who added he had just returned from a China trip where he talked with government leaders. ``I would not want to see them become any more powerful in the nuclear line. I think we ought to formulate our policy in many different ways to try to avoid just that.''

Fleischer said the system is intended to protect the United States and its allies from hostile nations with missile capabilities such as Iran, Iraq and Libya.

``Other nations have nothing to worry about from American development of a missile defense system,'' he said. ``It will protect the peace in the world ... when the real threat to peace are these rogue nations.''

China fears the missile shield would undercut the deterrent effect of China's small nuclear arsenal.

``China's position on missile defense is clear-cut and consistent,'' China's Foreign Ministry said in late August after Bush said the United States would withdraw a 1972 arms control treaty signed by Washington and Moscow. ``We hope the U.S. government will seriously consider the position of the international community and proceed with caution.''

A missile shield, now in its early stages of development, would knock enemy missiles out of the sky before they reach the United States.

China now has some two dozen missiles aimed at the United States; experts say that number could increase tenfold over the next 10 years.

------- us nuc politics

McKinney Raises US Government's "COINTELPRO" program with UN Human Rights Commissioner

DURBIN, SOUTH AFRICA
09.02.01
http://www.truthout.com/0563.McKinney.CON.UN.htm

Today, in a meeting with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney presented Robinson with two documents as evidence of the US governments violations of both US and international law and, in particular, specific violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The first document given to Robinson was confidential memorandum 46, written by National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski on March 17, 1978 and it details the federal government's plan to destroy functioning black leadership in the United States. This document provides a critical insight into the federal government's concern at the apparent growing influence of the African American political movement.

The second document is a report entitled "Human Rights in the United States [The Unfinished Story-Current Political Prisoners- Victims of COINTELPRO]" and it was compiled by the Human Rights Research Fund, headed by Kathleen Cleaver. This document provides an overview of the counterintelligence program which, from the 1950s to the 1980s, was run in the United States against political activists and targeted organizations.

The excesses of the counterintelligence program were first exposed in 1975 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, known as the Church Committee. "From as early as the 1950's and right up until the 1980's the US government directed the machinery of state against the African American political movement and, in so doing, effectively put an end to the civil rights movement inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King.

COINTELPRO was in clear violation of the US Constitution and a wide range of US laws, as well as, in clear breach of internationally accepted standards for human rights and fundamental freedoms. That our government would turn its full resources against its own law abiding citizens is unforgivable and ranks us among those rogue nations of the world who have chosen to kill hope and sow misery in its place," stated McKinney.


-------- MILITARY

-------- balkans

Trial Offers Look at Secretive Warriors in Bosnia

New York Times
September 2, 2001
By MARLISE SIMONS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/international/europe/02BOSN.html

THE HAGUE, Aug. 31 - Islamic "holy warriors" came from various countries to the mountains of central Bosnia, but the people there knew them mainly for their reputation for ferocity and cruelty.

They volunteered for the Bosnian Army but also had their own code of conduct. And under that code, any mistreatment of civilians and prisoners of war was strictly forbidden.

Yet the United Nations war crimes tribunal here has accused them of doing just that - committing atrocities against civilians and prisoners.

None of the Muslim warriors are expected to appear in court, according to tribunal officials. But three of their former superiors, all commanders in the Bosnian Army, were arrested for war crimes and brought to The Hague earlier this month to stand trial.

The three, retired Generals Mehmed Alagic and Enver Hadzihasanovic, as well as Brig. Amir Kubura, have pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set.

The case is unusual, not only because the three are the highest ranking Bosnian Muslims indicted so far, but also because many of the charges against them involve crimes said to have been committed by the mujahedeen. The case is expected to throw light on mujahedeen, the secretive movement of Islamic volunteer fighters who have been operating in the Balkans for the better part of a decade.

Tribunal investigators reportedly have had access to Western intelligence in preparing their case, and part of this information is expected to be used in court.

What is known is that several thousand of the warriors first appeared in Bosnia in 1992, supported by funds from Iran and Saudi Arabia. Among them were young men from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and other Islamic nations. Estimated to number three to five thousand, they played a crucial role in the Bosnian Army as it battled with Serbs and then Croats over territory in central Bosnia.

Under the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord, the mujahedeen were meant to leave Bosnia, but a number stayed, married local women and moved into houses left empty by refugees. Others left for Albania, where they helped train the rebels who became known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. This year, according to Western diplomats, the fighters have appeared once more, now on the side of Albanian rebels in Macedonia.

Few details are publicly known, but the indictment of the three former Bosnian commanders offers some insights into the instructions and actions of the holy warriors.

It says that most joined the same brigade, where recruits had to swear by oath that they would follow the example of a proper Muslim soldier. They were given a code of conduct, set out in a booklet called "Instructions to the Muslim Fighter," which in Bosnia was first published in 1993.

Its section dealing with war booty may explain why many Bosnian soldiers, including mujahedeen, are accused in the indictment of widespread plundering of Bosnian Serb and Croat homes and farms. The booklet, as quoted in the indictment, says that if soldiers are unpaid, "a fifth of war booty shall fall to the state treasury, and the other four- fifths belong to the soldiers."

The booklet's passage on prisoners of war says "the killing of women, children and priests who do not participate at all in the war and who do not directly or indirectly assist the enemy, is forbidden; Islam likewise forbids the torture and brutalization of prisoners of war and the mutilation of enemy wounded and dead."

According to the indictment, in Bosnian towns and villages where mujahedeen operated during 1993, "at least 200 Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb civilians were killed and many more were wounded."

--------

Protests close debate on Albanian rights

September 2, 2001
By Katarina Kratovac
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010902-27369636.htm

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Lawmakers halted debate yesterday on legislation meant to give ethnic Albanians more rights, a move that could stall Macedonia's fragile peace process.

Parliament Speaker Stojan Andov said it was impossible for deputies to go ahead amid barricades on roads and protests staged by those opposed to concessions to ethnic Albanians. There was no indication when the debate would resume.

Although Macedonians also have erected roadblocks to underscore their demands, Mr. Andov singled out an ethnic Albanian barricade for criticism as he adjourned the debate.

Even before the suspension, the first day of debate ended on a jarring note late Friday with several radical deputies from VMRO, the top party in the Macedonian government, denouncing the proposed constitutional changes.

"Macedonia is under the gun to pass constitutional changes, and those who oppose them are falsely accused of promoting war," Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski was quoted as saying in the Vecer newspaper.

He urged a nationwide referendum on the constitutional changes, suggesting that would relieve legislators of the burden of responsibility.

The changes would make Albanian an official language in areas where ethnic Albanians comprise more than 20 percent of the population, and would provide a degree of self-rule for them there. It would also ensure ethnic Albanians proportional representation in the government and police, as well as in the Constitutional Court, which has final say in legislative matters.

Angry Macedonians kept up the blockades. One, on the border with neighboring Kosovo, was to protest the arrival of NATO troops for "Essential Harvest" -- the mission to collect arms surrendered by ethnic Albanian rebels as part of the peace deal.

Elsewhere, Macedonians from Dzepciste village, along a northwestern road toward Kosovo, set up their own barricade, demanding rebels release five persons held as hostages.

Many Macedonians are angry about the peace plan, claiming the ethnic Albanian insurgency was rewarded through concessions to the minority.

Another roadblock, by ethnic Albanian villagers from the northwestern village of Poroj, prevented a convoy of Macedonian refugees from nearby Vratnice from returning to the capital, Skopje, after visiting the homes they fled during the six-month insurgency.

Mr. Andov accused ethnic Albanian rebels of the National Liberation Army, or NLA, of mounting the Poroj roadblock. "We demand that terror over innocent civilians cease, and that all blockades are cleared," he said. "The parliament showed readiness to debate the peace accord, but this cannot take place as long as there is mass harassing of civilians by the NLA."

By yesterday afternoon, Macedonian state television reported that the convoy had been allowed through.

The parliament debate is part of a step-by-step process meant to culminate in more rights for ethnic Albanians once the rebels hand in their weapons to NATO. Before NATO can begin the second phase of weapons collection, 80 deputies in the 120-seat assembly must vote in favor of amending the constitution.

As planned, the alliance stopped collecting arms on Thursday after culling about a third of the 3,300 weapons offered by the rebels.

-------- colombia

Colombia's Army Steps Up Its Challenge to Rebels

September 2, 2001
By JUAN FORERO
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/international/americas/02COLO.html

TAME, Colombia - Ghostly in the greenish pall of the helicopter's instrument panel, the squad of soldiers crouched in the tight cabin as the Black Hawk lowered them onto a darkened field in Colombia's oil-rich Arauca Province.

Hundreds of other troops had already secured roads, while helicopters moved still more squads across the rice paddies of eastern Colombia. In a nearby war room, officers charted progress on maps marked "Secret," a banner reminding them of the mission: "Strike a convincing blow against the enemy."

Of late, a revived Colombian military has done just that, checking rebel offensives and winning several skirmishes.

Late last year, the army scattered a large guerrilla column in the north, while another operation rooted out rebels long entrenched just south of the capital. In April, an operation in eastern Vichada Province led to the capture of a major Brazilian trafficker. And in the last two weeks, the army has pounded a 2,000-strong rebel force in Guaviare Province.

The army is not about to win its war against Colombia's most powerful rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Colombian and American military analysts also say the 125,000-member army still cannot hold large swaths of territory.

But the recent operation in Arauca reflected a new level of organization for a military that was long known for being poorly financed, inept and corrupt. Today, instead of small jungle patrols and isolated garrisons, the army deploys large numbers of troops in well-orchestrated offensives less vulnerable to the disastrous losses suffered against leftist rebels not so long ago.

This operation moved 2,000 troops of the elite Rapid Deployment Force, several transport aircraft and helicopter gunships into rebel-dominated territory. Success was moderate, but the operation itself showed a new level of mobility and planning.

"Here, if you make a mistake, they will wipe out a battalion," said Col. José Tafur, who helped oversee an offensive that swept through this region from June to mid-August. "So we operate on a brigade level, with a minimum of 1,000 men, so we do not lose anything."

In the last two years, under former Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramírez and a new military leadership, the Colombian Army has added tens of thousands of combat soldiers, reorganized its officer corps, instituted a merit-based promotion system and improved coordination with other armed branches. The reforms are widely viewed as the most significant in decades, offering a new challenge to a powerful rebel group that grew from 8,000 fighters a decade ago to 17,000 today.

"Carrying out operations is now possible, " said Gustavo Bell, who was named defense minister in May. "Strategic areas have been retaken that until just a few years ago were considered bastions or mobility corridors for guerrillas."

The changes come as many analysts, among them moderates both here and in the United States, argue that the army should be fortified to strengthen the government's hand in peace talks with the rebels. Those talks, the centerpiece of President Andrés Pastrana's three-year-old administration, have faltered.

"Putting the military in a stronger position will likely change the calculation of the FARC and force them to negotiate in good faith," said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based group.

However, the counterinsurgency efforts remain controversial in Washington and Europe.

The United States provided Colombia with $860 million last year, most of it to pay for 69 transport helicopters and training for a 3,000-member army brigade to fight the drug trafficking that is an important source of income for the rebels. But Washington, for now, has steered clear - at least publicly - of supporting counterguerrilla efforts. "The political stomach for going into the counterinsurgency business is zero," said Anne Patterson, the American ambassador.

Critics, however, say the American aid does indirectly contribute to the army's counterinsurgency efforts, since coca fields and drug processing laboratories are often protected by the rebels. In addition, $5 million in American aid went to create an intelligence center for the police and military and $55 million went to classified intelligence programs, said George Vickers, director of the Washington Office on Latin America, a research organization.

The buildup also worries human rights groups and some members of Congress, who say the army needs to do more to punish rights violators and break ties with right-wing gunmen responsible for killing thousands of people. If not, the paramilitary groups could continue to grow alongside the army, said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas Division for Human Rights Watch.

The military's problems were long compounded by poor organization and spotty training that analysts say led to a string of humiliating battlefield defeats, raising concern in Washington that Colombia's government could fall. Morale was in a free fall.

"The dead, we suffered over them, cried over them," recalled Maj. Rubiel Pérez, a 15-year veteran of many battles. "There were people who were responsible, for lack of intelligence, lack of planning, lack of organization."

Even today, the military faces severe problems. A formidable foe can still launch withering attacks, like an assault by 500 rebels on an army base in the south in June. Thirty soldiers were killed, highlighting intelligence-gathering deficiencies, said two American military analysts familiar with after-battle reports.

The army is also simply too small to cover the country, which is twice the size of France. Until recently, Colombia's combat force was not much larger than El Salvador's during that country's civil war. Yet Colombia is 50 times as large.

And even when the army has carried out successful offensives, it has often been unable to set up a permanent presence, a weakness magnified by the state's own absence in much of Colombia, said Richard Millett, an American analyst who has written about Colombia's army. "The military can't substitute for the presence of the state," he said.

That was plainly evident in the recent operation in Arauca, which swept through the center of the province. Though army brass called the operation a success, only 14 rebels have been killed in two months of fighting.

In interviews, soldiers and commanders alike acknowledged that after the military withdraws, the rebels might simply return - in effect changing nothing.

"The troops who come in cannot cover the whole area," said Col. Alfredo Bocanegra, commander of the Special Forces Brigade, which operated here.

Residents in several villages throughout Arauca also raised questions about the army's tactics. Some said soldiers treated them brusquely or threatened them, telling them the "head-cutters," meaning paramilitary gunmen, would be following.

"They said collaborate with us, or else there will be consequences," said Jesús, 32, a villager in Puerto Nidia, who spoke on condition that his last name be withheld. "They see the whole population as guerrillas."

In Matecoco, villagers said soldiers had executed two wounded rebels who surrendered after a firefight. A young peasant woman said the men had been shot by a soldier who said his brother was killed in combat with the rebels.

Academics say the army has never really had the support it needed because of the ruling class's historic distrust of the military. Indeed, the percentage of the budget that went to the military last year - 7.5 - was just below the 1990 level, though the crisis is more serious. Still, financing has risen from $1.5 billion in 1995 to more than $1.9 billion this year. And Defense Ministry documents show the armed forces are hoping for more than $2.2 billion next year.

The army eventually plans to buy 25 helicopters, 13 of which will be transports. These are the key for a 6,000-member Rapid Deployment Force that for years operated with little equipment or coordination.

Perhaps most significant, the army will have 55,000 enlistees by December, up from 23,000 in 1998, while the number of draftees eligible to fight increased from 57,000 to 103,000 in three years. In all, the army is poised to grow to nearly 160,000 combat troops by 2004.

Combat soldiers interviewed in this region - soldiers who no longer go on jungle patrols or staff isolated garrisons - said that they now feel more confident.

"Now, we have a military objective, the enemy," said Marco Rincón, 25, a soldier with the Rapid Deployment Force. "The change is total. They tell you there is an operation, and you go. There is a goal, and you get it done."

-------- drug war

Gov't Study Raises Doubts on Drugs

September 2, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Drugs.html

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A government report has raised fresh doubts about Washington's drug-fighting strategy in Colombia, saying aerial fumigation of crops may be damaging the environment and is failing to curb drug production.

The report from the nation's comptroller-general's office urged President Andres Pastrana to suspend the spraying of drug crops until scientists can study the environmental effects of the herbicide.

``The majority of the environmental damages are irreversible,'' claimed the report, which was released Saturday.

The spraying of cocaine and heroin-producing crops is a major component of Pastrana's Plan Colombia, an anti-drug strategy that Washington is supporting with $1.3 billion in aid.

Gonzalo de Francisco, Pastrana's top adviser in the drug war, said the U.S.-backed plan was on track and that criticism that the sprayings were causing environmental damage was unfounded.

``Plan Colombia was never meant to be something that would happen overnight,'' de Francisco said. ``I am convinced that we are on the point of achieving what we set out to do, which is eradicating drug production in Colombia.''

The report from Comptroller-General Carlos Ossa's office said the eradication campaign has failed to curb the drug industry in Colombia -- the world's main producer of cocaine and the main exporter of heroin to the United States.

The overall acreage of drug crops continue to expand and is moving to other areas of the country, and is even jumping the border into neighboring countries, the report said.

It urged the government to devise strategies other than forced eradication to curb drug production, and said promised social aid for coca farmers struggling to switch to legal crops has been insufficient and slow to arrive -- a point acknowledged by a high-level delegation of the Bush administration that visited Colombia last week.

The report cannot force the government to take specific action. However, it can be used as a weapon by Plan Colombia's other opponents.

A Bogota judge recently ordered a temporary halt to the fumigations in Amazonian Indian lands, acting on a request by the tribes there. That ban has since been lifted.

Under the U.S.-backed plan, crop-dusting planes have destroyed some 125,000 acres of coca -- the raw ingredient of cocaine -- using the herbicide glyphosate. Critics have charged that the herbicide is making people sick and polluting the environment. U.S. officials say it is safe.

The drug industry is fueling a 37-year civil conflict pitting the guerrillas against the government and the paramilitaries.

-------- u.s.

'Waging Modern War': A Defeated Victor Reflects on Kosovo

New York Times
September 2, 2001
By ROGER COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/books/review/02COHENTW.html?searchpv=nytToday

Early in his hard-charging account of the way he ran the NATO bombing of Kosovo, Gen. Wesley K. Clark offers a single-paragraph description of his upbringing. His father, we learn, was one Benjamin Kanne, a Chicago lawyer of Jewish descent who died in the boy's infancy and whose background was long hidden by his Christian mother. She married an Arkansas banker named Clark. ''I was raised as a Baptist (I later converted to Catholicism in Vietnam),'' Clark writes, adding that his education was in the public school system, except for one year when he went to a military academy ''because of disputes over racial integration'' in Little Rock's Central High School.

This is an intriguing passage but -- like much of Clark's ''Waging Modern War'' -- it leaves several questions unanswered. Just how the general's belated discovery of his roots in the shtetls of Eastern Europe affected him, just what was the impact on him of the racism of 1950's Arkansas and just why he (parenthetically) became a Roman Catholic in Vietnam are all matters that Clark chooses not to elucidate. His evident love of soldiering and his quick intelligence are not matched by any penchant for self-analysis.

What is clear, however, is that Clark developed strong feelings about the ethnic persecution in the Balkans pursued by the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, throughout the 1990's. These sentiments were not shared by his superiors in Washington. His book -- part memoir, part fragmented stab at defining ''modern war'' -- is in many ways a chronicle of the frustrations these divergent views engendered. ''I would have preferred the target of my persistence to have been only the enemy, rather than the Pentagon as well,'' he writes in the tone of half-choked indignation that marks much of his story.

Clark arrived at NATO headquarters in Belgium on July 10, 1997, to take up the position of Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. His qualifications for this pivotal position were eminent. He had served as a major at NATO; he was versed in American military strategy after a spell with the Joint Chiefs in the top planning position; and he had come to know the byways of the Balkans through his coordination of the military aspects of the 1995 Dayton agreement that ended the Bosnian war. No reward, he suggests, could have been sweeter than this four-star European post. ''But sometimes,'' Clark continues, ''dreams turn into nightmares.''

It is strange to read these words, as if through some rewriting of history victory had been turned into defeat. After all, NATO's 11-week bombing campaign against Serbian forces, which began on March 24, 1999, was ultimately successful. Whatever its shortcomings, and there were many, Clark must take much credit for the toppling of Milosevic last year.

Instead, in these pages, the now retired general takes umbrage. Anger, it seems, drove him to his pen. The reasons for his ire are multiple: the short-sightedness of the Pentagon, the coldness with which he was treated by former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, a lack of support from the Joint Chiefs, a failure in Washington to grasp the complexities of modern war, a general disregard for his advice. Of former President Bill Clinton and Secretary Cohen, he asks: ''Wouldn't they have been able to make better decisions, and have them better implemented, I thought, if they brought the commander into the high-level discussions occasionally?'' A reasonable question.

Behind the personal animosity -- most of it never adequately explained -- lurk some important points. Among them is Clark's underlying assessment that despite the annual expenditure of several hundred billion dollars, the American military has little readiness or preparation for the very messy regional conflicts it is now most likely to fight.

The Persian Gulf war, he suggests, is a poor paradigm, yet a widely adopted one in the Pentagon. The flat desert terrain there, the broad international consensus surrounding the campaign and the clear objectives of Operation Desert Storm may not readily be reproduced: indeed, they were not in Kosovo. ''For the U.S. military, it was neither the conflict we had prepared for nor the war we wanted to fight.'' Or, as one senior Pentagon officer told him -- only half jokingly -- We don't do mountains.''

Nor, it turns out from these pages, does the Pentagon do Apache helicopters, whose swift employment might have given pause to the Serbs in the first weeks of the campaign. The story of Clark's frustrated efforts to add the Apaches to his array of air power, and so target Serbian paramilitary forces more accurately, forms one of the book's subplots. ''When a service doesn't support the use of its own assets in combat, assets developed over two decades and at a cost of billions of dollars, there's no end to the detail of the questions that can be asked,'' Clark notes bitterly.

The picture of the Pentagon that emerges here is not encouraging. Clark, faced by the initial failure of the bombing to bend Milosevic, is obliged to begin preparations for a possible ground campaign. For, as he notes, ''there could be no future for NATO as we knew it without success in this mission.'' But he meets only resistance in Washington. In one mind-bending exchange with the Joint Chiefs, he is told that the United States has to be ready to fight simultaneous wars in Korea and the gulf, leaving scant resources for Europe. ''Surely,'' Clark shoots back, ''you're not saying that we're going to give up and lose in the only fight we have going, in order to be ready for two other wars that are not threatening?''

He is similarly incredulous when the Pentagon insists, after the bombing succeeds, in putting American troops in the southeastern sector of Kosovo because it appears to be the least dangerous. Scarcely the sort of thinking that carried American boys onto the beaches of Normandy.

But then, as Clark himself writes, modern war is ''not a fight for national survival,'' like World War II, but more often a ''carefully restrained and limited action.'' It is, he suggests, ''the response developed by the democratic West after a century of trauma in Europe.'' And it is characterized by messy decision making that involves elaborate political discussions, intense media coverage, a tendency to rely on high-tech missiles and air power (even though they may not get the job done, or only get the job done at terrible expense) and a distaste for the use of ground troops who might actually get killed. Clausewitz's adage, ''No one in his right mind would, or ought to, begin a war if he didn't know how to finish it,'' may have become ''an unreasonable standard,'' Clark writes, because force will increasingly be used not to gain outright victory but to bend an opponent to the West's diplomatic will.

His book amounts to a plea for the Pentagon to ponder such matters. This plea is important. ''Waging Modern War'' should be circulated in the reforming Pentagon of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. For Clark is asking if the attitudes engendered by the Vietnam War and the American loss of life in Somalia in 1993 provide an adequate approach to the complexity of modern conflict. Unfortunately, the general weakens his arguments by not marshaling them coherently, by often appearing to be driven by pique and by himself zigzagging through various descriptions of the Kosovo conflict -- calling it ''war'' several times, then saying, ''We weren't at war, nor did we want to be.''

Relieved of his post early by President Clinton, Clark departed from Belgium a frustrated man. ''It was a modern war,'' he writes. ''But because they wouldn't call it a war, we couldn't call it a victory.'' The ''they'' and ''we'' are telling: the former refers to a Pentagon seen almost as an enemy, the latter to Clark and his fellow commanders at NATO. ''Though NATO had succeeded in its first armed conflict, it didn't feel like a victory,'' he continues.

Such gloom amounts to a miserable denouement to a difficult but decisive NATO action. It is indicative of the questions still looming over military strategy. Which wars is the United States ready to fight? What losses is the country ready to accept? How much importance does post-cold-war Europe have for Washington as compared with Asia and the Persian Gulf? What degree of leadership is America ready to offer a NATO alliance in which the European Union wants a larger role? General Clark's bizarre defeat-in-victory feeling should give urgency to tackling these issues. For no missile defense shield will conjure them away.

Roger Cohen is the deputy foreign editor of The Times.


-------- OTHER

-------- genetics

Bush Policy on Stem Cells Appears Safe on Hill

By Justin Gillis and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 2, 2001; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30326-2001Sep1?language=printer

As Congress begins to scrutinize President Bush's controversial new policy on embryonic stem cell research this week, it appears that neither opponents nor supporters of the work have the votes on Capitol Hill to overturn Bush's compromise.

While that could change depending on the outcome of three upcoming Senate hearings, for now both sides acknowledge they fear reopening the fight because the nation could wind up with a worse policy, from their perspective, than the one Bush approved.

"At the end of the day, the president has at least bought himself some time," said conservative commentator William Kristol, whose new Bioethics Project opposes research on embryonic stem cells and cloning. "I'd be surprised if there was a serious effort to overturn the Bush policy."

Advocates of stem cell research remain skeptical that the existing colonies of cells that Bush has approved for federal funding will be as useful for science as his administration claims. At the same time, most of them are happy that at least some research will go forward. Opponents of the work are unhappy that Bush did not ban it completely but are pleased by elements of his plan that were designed to discourage destruction of embryos.

The politics of the issue remain volatile and uncertain, in part because Congress has been on summer recess and many members have yet to delve into the intricacies of the Bush plan. Senators will analyze it in detail in a string of hearings before two panels -- the first of which will be held on Wednesday in one of the Senate's large, ornate hearing rooms. Lawmakers will try to resolve several controversies that have erupted since Bush announced his policy in an address to the nation on Aug. 9.

At the first hearing, to be chaired by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the first witness scheduled to speak is Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a Republican who has championed research on embryonic stem cells.

Specter is expected to focus attention on what he sees as gaps in the administration's policy -- particularly lingering questions about how many stem cell colonies are really available for research and how useful they might be when scientists are ready to begin human tests. The Kennedy hearing will be followed on Sept. 12 and Sept. 19 by hearings in front of a subcommittee that approves money for medical research.

Embryonic stem cells used for research are human cells derived from microscopic, days-old human embryos slated for destruction at fertility clinics because they are no longer needed by the couples that created them.

The colonies of cells -- derived and kept alive in the laboratory for the first time in 1998 -- can, in theory, renew themselves indefinitely and be induced to turn into any kind of human tissue, possibly offering a source of replacement tissues and organs for ailing bodies.

The cells are controversial because their creation involves the destruction of embryos. Many groups that oppose abortion, test-tube fertility treatment or both are against the research, depending as it does on the commission of an act that they regard as morally equivalent to murder.

Scientists have said that the young field of stem cell research won't advance rapidly without federal money because private investors are generally unwilling to finance such early work.

After months of pressure from both sides, Bush announced on Aug. 9 that he would allow the government to pay for research on stem cell colonies that had already been created. He said he wanted to reduce the incentives for further destruction of embryos.

But fewer verified cell colonies appear to be available for research than Bush initially said, and the ones that are available have been mixed with mouse cells in the laboratory. That could severely limit their usefulness in human tests because the mixtures could pose a risk of infecting people with animal viruses.

But as a piece of political strategy, all sides of the debate acknowledge, Bush's decision has so far proved masterful. He has effectively neutralized critics on both the left and the right.

The Bush policy is "not as bad as some of the alternatives," said Richard Doerflinger, who lobbies on abortion and related issues for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "My expectation is, in the immediate future, there are enough members of Congress willing to give the president's plan a chance to work."

A spokesman for the Republican Main Street Partnership, which favors stem cell research, used nearly the same language to sum up the group's predicament. "Clearly, it was better than the alternative," said Ron Talley.

One notable exception is the view of the Family Research Council, a conservative group that has called its supporters to action. "Mr. Bush had the opportunity to slam shut this Pandora's box, but instead he opened it, just a crack to be sure, but enough to let loose this evil," Ken Connor, president of the council, wrote to supporters last week.

Some scientists working in the field said they worry that debate over how well Bush's policy will work in the long run may cloud immediate research goals that have suddenly become attainable using federal funds.

"The fundamental point is that, before the president's speech, it was not possible to use federal funds to study human [embryonic stem] cells -- and after, it was possible," said Ron McKay, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who has spent years experimenting with mouse cells. "If I had one human [stem] cell in my hand, our group could do very useful work on that cell."

McKay said that he is not discounting concerns over the quantity, quality and accessibility of stem cell colonies but that he believes federal policy can be adjusted as those issues arise.

The question at the moment is whether the hearings will turn up anything sensational enough to change the political dynamic. Senate aides said they expect Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson to be peppered with questions about his assertion early on that, under the Bush policy, scientists would have more than 60 "robust" cell colonies to experiment on.

That number was a shock to scientists in the field. The NIH waited for 18 days after Bush gave his speech to release a list backing up the claim. It contained 64 cell colonies, but it turned out that not enough work had been done on most of them to verify that they are likely to be useful in research. Indeed, not only have they not been proven to be "robust," most of the cell colonies on the list have yet to be definitively shown to be made up of embryonic stem cells.

The stem cell issue is likely to get its most thorough airing in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where a substantial majority of lawmakers, including more than a dozen Republicans, have gone on record favoring such research.

"I think the central point is that if the 64 cell lines and what the president has said proves to be inadequate, there's a lot of residual determination in the Senate to see meaningful stem cell research go forward," Specter said. "We just have to answer these questions. We do intend to get to the bottom of it."

-------- human rights

No-Show Politics

New York Times
September 2, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/weekinreview/02MARQ.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON -- To go or not to go?

The United States decided last week to snub a racism conference in Durban, South Africa, by sending only a midlevel delegation to protest efforts to equate Zionism with racism and promote reparations for slavery. In a world where international meetings often provide a forum for nations to challenge or second-guess America's dominance and interests, it isn't always easy to decide when to stay home and when to plunge in and fight.

"They create terrific problems for American policymakers," Lee H. Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said of such gatherings. "The agenda is often taken over by voices we don't agree with."

Mr. Hamilton, the former Democratic chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said he was ambivalent about boycotting the Durban meeting, which began this weekend, though "in general, my instinct is that the U.S. should go to these conferences and make its case."

Gaddis Smith, an emeritus professor of history at Yale, said it was a "serious mistake" for the United States to absent itself from conferences where conflict awaits, or to scale back its presence. The Bush administration is demonstrating "a head-in-the-sand attitude," Mr. Smith said. "We're more likely to be a target of anti- American rhetoric if we're not there. It says the United States has something to hide."

Ever since the Senate dashed the hopes of President Woodrow Wilson and voted to reject American membership in the League of Nations, the United States has shown itself willing to shun world gatherings it distrusts.

At times, the mere threat of an American boycott has prompted other nations to address Washington's objections. In 1980, with tensions boiling over in the Middle East, the Carter administration derailed an Arab effort to expel Israel from the United Nations General Assembly by making clear that it would withdraw and effectively paralyze the organization.

But sometimes threats are insufficient. In 1984, the Reagan administration withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, complaining that it was wasteful, poorly managed and a stage for anti-Western propaganda. The American departure put the agency under economic pressure, and Unesco's board voted the following year to tone down its activism. But the gambit failed to produce rapid reforms. After a 17-year boycott, House lawmakers this spring finally urged the administration to rejoin a much less politicized organization.

In 1992, American officials stewed for months over whether President George Bush would attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The administration opposed the two main agreements at the environmental conference - accords to protect biodiversity and curb emissions that contribute to global warming - but with the United States a major force in both conservation and pollution, Mr. Bush risked being blamed for singlehandedly wrecking the meeting by staying home. He decided to attend and ultimately persuaded the world leaders to water down their treaty on emissions.

In 1995, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton led an American delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Many Republican lawmakers had opposed the American participation, and Mrs. Clinton's attendance in particular, because of China's poor human rights record and their belief that the conference would endorse abortion. When Chinese security agents clamped down on demonstrators at the conference, Mrs. Clinton excoriated her Chinese hosts for their failure to tolerate dissenting views.

Running through the American ambivalence toward such meetings are competing imperatives. With a commercial, political or military presence in virtually every corner of the globe, the United States has a unique stake in international affairs. To protect its interests, it secured a dominant role in the main institutions of the post-World War II era: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

YET the American impulse has been to dismiss the international order when it is seen as running counter to the national interest or as meddling in domestic affairs. "We Americans always talk about multilateralism," said Kenneth N. Waltz, a political scientist who teaches at Columbia University. "In fact, we're unilateralists."

That perception, which is widespread among American allies as well as critics, has grown in recent months as the Bush administration has rejected the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia and the Kyoto accord on global warming. Resentment has also built over the United States' failure to pay arrears to the United Nations.

The Bush administration learned this spring what happens when it ignores such rumblings: the United States itself gets boycotted.

For the first time in its 54-year history, the United Nations Human Rights Commission failed to approve a seat for the United States. The vote, which was seen as a rebuke to the Bush administration's foreign policy, left astonished American officials vowing to press for human rights from the sidelines.

But that's not the same as being in the game.

--------

Consensus Lacking on How to Address Legacy of Slavery
Debate at World Racism Conference Focuses on Apologies vs. Reparations

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 2, 2001; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30655-2001Sep1?language=printer

DURBAN, South Africa, Sept. 1 -- A variety of African leaders today demanded apologies, and in some cases financial reparations, from Western countries that benefited from the enslavement of tens of millions of Africans over three centuries and the colonization of African countries.

Speaking at the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, the leaders of a half-dozen countries eloquently described the devastating impact of slavery on Africa. But they sent mixed messages on how far its Western beneficiaries should go to make amends.

"Reparations need to be made in the name of Africa and of those millions of our ancestors who were brutally ripped from their homes and shipped to the new world," said President Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo. He urged the conference to adopt a plan that considered the cancellation of African debt to Western-based international creditors.

President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria said slavery and colonialization led to the "poverty, underdevelopment and marginalization" that still plague much of Africa. But he argued that although apologies are due from countries that "practiced and benefited from slavery," demanding financial compensation could "further hurt the dignity of Africa" and exacerbate international tensions.

The issue of reparations for slavery is one of the most contentious at this week-long conference, which opened Friday. Western countries and corporations fear being subjected to lawsuits from descendants or representatives of the estimated 11 million African slaves who were shipped to North and South America. This concern is one reason the Bush administration decided not to send a high-level delegation to the conference.

A number of diplomats and other observers said the reparations issue, along with the controversial language in a draft declaration equating Zionism with racism, could seriously undermine the likelihood that the conference will succeed in producing a final statement and plan of action against racism to which all participants can agree.

Several U.S.-based groups have prepared lawsuits that seek to hold U.S. institutions to account, including corporations and universities whose founders were involved in the slave trade. But experts and diplomats here said that could open up many legal, economic and historical questions.

"Of course it would be good if the world can acknowledge that slavery and colonialism were bad things, but the tricky part is whether that entitles someone to compensation, especially if they have no direct link with past slavery," said one European diplomat. "How do you identify who is the victim or who is responsible?"

Germany, which briefly controlled modern-day Tanzania, Namibia and Togo until World War I, did offer an apology today to countries that were victims of slavery and colonial exploitation. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said a recognition of guilt was the way to restore to the victims and their descendants "the dignity of which they were robbed."

"I should therefore like to do that here and now on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany," he said in a speech. As a form of reparation, some African countries consider the cancellation of their foreign debts to international financial institutions to be preferable, arguing that the massive amounts owed constitute a crushing burden on poverty-stricken nations and that forgiving such debt would be a just recompense for the "debt" of the West to generations of slave labor.

"The external debt burden is unbearable and renders null and void the capacity of our economies to take off," Prime Minister Pascoal Mocumbi of Mozambique told the conference today.

For other African countries, however, the issue is not so simple and the blame not so easy to place. In Sudan and Mauritania, for example, human rights groups report that slavery of certain ethnic groups is still widely practiced. Most African leaders, in deference to regional sensibilities, are careful not to mention this, but some diplomats said it makes the case for Western reparations much harder to sell.

Several African leaders made clear that they do not want the conference to founder by failing to reach consensus on the reparations issue. Several said they would be content with expressions of repentance from former colonial or slaveholding states, and others suggested a more limited, systematic approach to the question of financial compensation.

The most impassioned speaker for reparations was not an African, but Fidel Castro, the aging but loquacious leader of communist Cuba. Castro said his country, which benefited from generations of African slave labor on sugar plantations, supports reparations as an "unavoidable moral duty."

"The irrefutable truth is that tens of millions of Africans were captured, sold like a commodity and sent beyond the Atlantic to work in slavery," he said. "The rich, free-spending industrialized world certainly possesses the . . . resources necessary to pay back what is due mankind."

-------- police / prisoners

U.S. police are finding Babel in their backyards

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 2, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010902-13754424.htm

CITRUS HEIGHTS, Calif. (AP) -- Police nearly missed capturing a Ukrainian immigrant suspected of brutally killing six relatives because they couldn't speak the language.

Most everyone they talked to spoke Russian or Ukrainian, forcing investigators to abandon the usual rules. And when the crucial call came in to 911, it took police several minutes to find a Ukrainian translator and learn from the caller that Nikolay Soltys was hiding in the backyard of his mother's house in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights.

It's a phenomenon that is happening nationwide as law enforcement agencies cope with new immigrant communities.

About 11 percent of the nation -- 30 million people -- is now foreign-born, up from less than 5 percent in 1970, according to the 2000 census.

Minority enclaves are increasingly appearing outside the traditional entry points of California, Florida and New York. The Center for Immigration Studies found states with fast-growing populations such as Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada experienced jumps in foreign-born residents of more than 180 percent since 1990.

"The U.S. may be the most diverse country in the world. It means the community no longer has the shared understanding of what acceptable and unacceptable behavior is," said Northwestern University law Professor Paul H. Robinson, who helped develop criminal codes for Ukraine and Belarus.

Columbus, Ohio, police carry language identifier booklets to figure out which translator can help with the 30 to 40 language groups in central Ohio.

"It's certainly intensified over the last 10 years," said Columbus Sgt. Earl Smith. "And law enforcement has to always be in a process of adapting."

It's not just language that challenges police. Deep-seated cultural differences also have an effect.

For instance, Hmong women who have been raped rarely come forward because of the extreme stigma imported from their homeland in the mountains of Southeast Asia.

"They're really abandoned by their families. They're seen as damaged goods," said Michael Jordan, a spokesman for St. Paul, Minn., police.

Police there also have run into cultural differences on what constitutes domestic violence.

"'You're charging me with hitting my wife? She's mine. I paid for her,'" Mr. Jordan said, paraphrasing one argument. "In that culture they often pay a dowry, so they feel they own her."

Detroit police have had a tough time persuading members of the Bangladeshi community to testify against a countryman suspected of harassing fellow immigrants.

"They want to take care of it their way," and can't understand American concepts such as due process, said Lt. Paul Janness. "Luckily, it's been minor stuff. Nobody's killed anybody."

That's not the case in Sacramento, where investigators say distrust of authority and other cultural differences hampered an investigation conducted largely within the region's growing community of 75,000 Russians and Ukrainians.

Police had so little cooperation that Senior Pastor Adam Bondaruk of Bethany Slavic Missionary Church had to plead at the victims' funerals for his countrymen to put aside the fear of police they brought with them from the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Soltys was captured Thursday after his brother alerted police that he had spotted the fugitive hiding in his mother's back yard.


-------- activists

Turkey Raids Kurdish Protests
Hundreds Jailed as Police Disrupt Rallies for Minority Rights

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 2, 2001; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30694-2001Sep1?language=printer

ISTANBUL, Sept. 1 -- Police arrested an estimated 2,000 Kurdish demonstrators across Turkey today, corralling hundreds of detainees in a soccer stadium in Ankara and using tear gas and riot squads to disband a march by thousands in Istanbul.

The police action was an attempt by authorities to stop gatherings by Turkey's Kurdish minority to bring attention on World Peace Day to their demands for recognition and greater cultural freedoms.

Police and riot squads broke up a rally of about 2,000 demonstrators in central Istanbul, firing tear gas and chasing protesters in what then erupted into a stone-throwing free-for-all. Hundreds of protesters clambered over the remains of the city's ancient stone walls to elude police. Several hundred demonstrators were arrested, according to news reports, although organizers claimed as many as 1,000 people were detained.

In Ankara, the capital, police reportedly arrested at least 700 protesters who had gathered at a city park in violation of a government ban on the demonstration. Police hauled the detainees away in buses to overflowing jail cells, then reportedly herded the remainder of the protesters into a soccer stadium. Police said they later released 565 of the detainees.

Dozens of incidents were reported across impoverished southeastern Turkey, where the country's greatest concentrations of Kurds live and a 16-year conflict with Kurdish separatists has led to the killing or disappearance of 30,000 people. In the city of Diyarbakir, police fired their guns into the air to disband an estimated 3,000 people who were chanting slogans in support of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, whose capture 2 1/2 years ago prompted separatist rebels to give up their armed struggle with the Turkish military.

Although the intensity of the military conflict has declined significantly since then, Turkey's treatment of its Kurdish minority -- about 15 percent of the country's population -- is one of the country's greatest obstacles to membership in the European Union. Human rights organizations report numerous violations against Kurds detained by police, Kurdish writers are routinely jailed and the government prohibits broadcasting in the Kurdish language.

Skirmishes between police and Kurdish sympathizers began late Friday. In Istanbul, a 16-year-old worker for the People's Democracy Party, which campaigns for Kurdish rights, died when he fell five stories down a ventilation shaft while trying to hide from pursuing police, according to a party spokeswoman. He had been among a group of 200 people forcibly stopped from boarding buses to Ankara for the banned rally, the spokeswoman told news agencies.


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