also: 1,500 West Papuans in Indonesia mark anniversary with prayer

CNN.com
December 1, 2001

Irian activist's life threatened

By Amy Chew

photo: Independence activists are calling for an independent inquiry into
Eluay's death. Photo: AP

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- A leading pro-independence activist in the
Indonesian province of Irian Jaya says he has received a death threat, ahead
of the 40th anniversary of the territory's failed bid for sovereignty from
Dutch colonial rule.

Thoha Al-Hamid of the separatist Papuan Presidium Council (PDP) said the
threat said he would suffer the same fate as Theys Eluay, the PDP's chairman,
who was killed on November 10.

"On the night of November 28, I received an SMS (short message service) on my
mobile saying: "Brother Thoha, be prepared to follow Father Theys," Thoha
told CNN from the Irian Jaya capital of Jayapura.

Eluay was found dead in his car at the bottom of a ravine on the outskirts of
Jayapura after having dinner with a local military commander.

Police has classified his death as "murder" -- the military has rejected
allegations from Eluay's family and associates that it was involved in his
death.

"I was shocked. We are not safe. We need a guarantee for our right to live,"
said Thoha who is the PDP's secretary-general and a right-hand man of Eluay.

Asked whether he regarded the threat as serious, Thoha said: "How can I not
regard this as serious because just a few weeks ago, Theys Eluay was killed."

"It is not impossible that those in power are using violent ways to finish
off their political enemies and I am considered an enemy for fighting for
independence," Thoha added.

The PDP has been waging a campaign for independence through peaceful
negotiations, and shunning the hardline stance of the armed Free Papua
movement, which has waged a low level insurgency for decades.

Failed bid

photo: The Indonesian military will head an inquiry into Eluay's death.
Photo: AP

On Saturday, the PDP will celebrate the 40th anniversary of a declaration of
independence from Dutch colonial rule by tribal chiefs in 1961.

At the time Indonesia's founding father, President Sukarno, rejected the
declaration, arguing that since Irian Jaya, also known as West Papua, had
been part of the Dutch colonial empire that gained independence as Indonesia,
it should remain part of the new nation.

The Netherlands transferred sovereignty to Indonesia in 1963. This was
formalized with a U.N. sanctioned vote for integration by about 1,000 tribal
leaders, which included Theys Eluay, in 1969.

Indonesian police have reinforced their presence around the province for
Saturday's anniversary.

"We have mobilized 400 extra personnel. The situation in Papua is normal
today and my police chief expects the situation to be orderly tomorrow as
well," police spokesman, Janner Pasaribu, told CNN.

Last year's anniversary was marred by clashes between independence supporters
and security forces, resulting in the death of some 10 people.

But this year, the PDP said the celebrations would be peaceful, saying it
will hold prayers and tribal procession to mark the anniversary.

"We will hold prayers in churches...and tribal processions. We are avoiding
activities which are political in nature as it could be manipulated or give
rise to repressive measures to be taken. The people have suffered enough,"
said the PDP's Thoha.

Resource-rich Irian Jaya is home to the world's largest copper and gold mine,
operated by PT Freeport Indonesia, a unit of New Orleans-based Freeport
McMoran Copper & Gold Inc.

Independence supporters see Jakarta as plundering its vast resources without
heeding its basic rights and welfare.

In response, the Indonesian government has granted special autonomy status to
the province in an attempt to ease separatist tensions.

------------------------------

Papuans in Indonesia mark anniversary with prayer

SENTANI, Indonesia, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Some 1,500 separatist supporters held a
mass prayer meeting on Saturday in Indonesia's remote eastern Papua province
to mark the anniversary of a unilateral declaration of independence by tribal
chiefs.

Witnesses said the event had so far been peaceful despite lingering tension
over the unsolved murder of top Papuan pro-independence leader, Theys Eluay,
three weeks ago.

"Papua must be made a peaceful zone, free from the threat of violence," Tom
Beanal, deputy head of the pro-independence Papua Presidium Council, told the
prayer gathering around Eluay's home in Sentani town, some 3,700 km (2,300
miles) east of Jakarta.

"An international dialogue must soon be held to shed light on Papua's
history," Beanal added.

Around 10 people were killed in incidents linked to the hoisting of the
Papuan separatist Morning Star flag during last year's anniversary, which
marks a universal declaration made in 1961. Independence leaders said no
other events were scheduled for Saturday. Security in the town was light.

Police have questioned about 100 witnesses over the killing of council
chairman Eluay, whose death has heated up separatist passions in the
jungle-clad territory that produces significant amounts of gold, copper, oil
and timber.

Police have said the possibility that elements of Indonesia's military were
involved in the murder had not been ruled out.

Eluay was found dead in his overturned car after having dinner in the
provincial capital Jayapura with the local commander of the feared Kopassus
special forces. The military has said that as an institution, Kopassus was
not involved.

Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in 1963 after heavy diplomatic pressure
on the Netherlands, Indonesia's former colonial power. In 1969, a U.N.-run
plebiscite was held among local leaders, including Eluay, which supported
Indonesian rule but it has long been criticised as unfair.

ADB approves 100 million dollar loan to Indonesian education project

MANILA, Dec 1 (AFP) - The Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced Saturday
that it had approved a 100 million dollar loan to Indonesia for an education
project intended to help some 1.26 million poor children.

The loan will support the continued decentralization of basic education
management in Indonesia and will be implemented by local governments,
communities and schools in rural districts in Nusa Tenggara Barat province,
poor districts in Bali and impoverished communities in Jakarta, the ADB said.

Poor children in secondary and primary schools and their communities will be
the main benificiaries of the project to revamp school facilities, buy and
deliver textbooks and supplies and help children complete basic education,
the ADB said in a statement issued from its headquarters in the Philippine
capital.

The ADB loan will have a term of 32 years including a grace period of eight
years. It will have an interest rate of one percent per year during the grace
period and 1.5 percent thereafter.

also: FPI Closes Nightclub

Jakarta Post [online]
December 1, 2001

Police arrest 30 members of Jihad Force

JAKARTA (JP): Police arrested at least 30 members of the Jihad (Holy War)
Force from Yogyakarta, Magelang and Solo in the East Java town of Ngawi on
Saturday.

"They were arrested when they entered Ngawi aboard several buses," Spokesman
of the East Java Police Sr. Insp. Sad Harunantyo said as quoted by Antara.

Police seized some guns, bayonets and other sharp weapons from them during
the arrest, he said.

Sad said the force members were arrested after scores of people vandalized
the house of an official of the Islamic Communication Forum, Muqiyi, in Ngawi
on Friday.

"Muqiyi's house was vandalized by hundreds of people after he found six
people drinking alcoholic beverages. The 30 members of the force arrived at
Muqiyi's house and probably wanted to defend him," Sad said.

He expressed hope that people would not take the law into their own hands in
dealing with unlawful acts.

"The people are only allowed to inform the police, and not to take the law
into their own hands," he said.

------------------------------------

Laksamana.Net, November 30, 2001

FPI Closes Nightclub

An all-night disco in Jakarta's Chinatown has been forced to close for the
remainder of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadhan, following a huge protest
in Kota district by the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI).

About 1,000 FPI members, brought in on trucks at 11.30pm Thursday (29/11/01),
rallied outside the '1001 Nights' disco on Jalan Gajah Mada, threatening to
burn it to the ground if it was not immediately closed, Antara reported.

FPI leaders were eventually granted a meeting with the disco's management,
the local lurah (municipal neighborhood chief) and security authorities.

A closure agreement, written in longhand, was signed at dawn Friday by the
disco's public relations chief Jarot, local lurah Dasuki, and some witnesses.

Under the agreement, the nightclub will not be able to open until a week
after the post-fasting celebration of Idul Fitri, which falls over December
16-17.

The FPI members, mostly dressed in white robes, rejoiced in the street upon
hearing they had managed to get the nightspot closed down, saying it was a
great victory for true believers of Islam.

FPI leader Jafar Siddiq proudly said it was an "achievement" of all members
of his group, which has a history of attacking nightspots and brothels.

He said the radical group would again take the law into its own hands should
the venue dare to reopen early. "If they open again their disco tomorrow, we
are going to destroy it, because the people would have a good reason to do
so," he asserted.

Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso has ordered the closure of nightclubs, bars,
discos, saunas, massage parlors and games parlors throughout Ramadhan. His
decree states that cafes, restaurants and live music halls are allowed to
operate under reduced hours - about 7pm to 12.30am - except on three days at
the beginning and end of Ramadhan.

The decree does not explicitly ban the sale of alcohol but warns that any
establishments caught violating the closure order would lose their operating
licenses.

Like most clubs in Kota, the 1001 Nights disco generally stayed open until
4am or beyond. Sources say certain nightspots can flaunt the governor's
decree by paying bribes to municipal officials and security forces.

The FPI has spent the past two weeks sporadically targeting bars on Jakarta's
main backpacker street, Jalan Jaksa, but with little success.

On at least three occasions FPI members have been trucked into the area after
midnight and demanded the bars be closed. Jaksa locals - who depend on
foreigners for their livelihood - have reached a compromise with the group,
by closing certain drinking establishments by 1am and allowing others to
remain open until dawn.

The radicals have been more successful in Lampung province, southern Sumatra,
forcing several clubs to close.

10 reports compiled by Joyo Indonesia News:

- Mahathir's September bonus: Opposition crippled
- Malaysia's unemployment aggravated by September attacks on US
- US and China hold 'productive' missile talks, no result announced
- Myanmar proclaims "new era" in ties with Thailand
- Japan public jubilant at arrival of baby princess
- 25,000 rebels of different factions operating in Philippines: military
- Family of hostages held in Philippines appeal for U.S. help
- Vietnam ruling party chief Manh leaves for China
- Australia said to ask Nauru to take more boatpeople
- Ex-Bank of Thailand boss chastised for handling of 97 currency crash

The Economist
Issue cover dated November 29, 2001

Malaysia

Mahathir's September bonus

Arguments over the Afghan war are crippling the opposition

KOTA BAHRU

THE war in Afghanistan may be making other Muslim leaders squirm, but it has
been good for Mahathir Mohamad.While his counterparts face the unpalatable
choice of alienating either America or their own citizens, Malaysia's veteran
prime minister has managed to raise his stock with both, thanks to the
intricacies of his country's racial politics. In other words, America's
effort to force the Taliban from power is strengthening the Malaysian
strongman's grip on it.

Just a few months ago, many commentators were writing Dr Mahathir off as a
spent force. After 20 years in power, his popularity among his fellow Malay
Muslims, the majority of the population, had long been in decline. Malaysia's
economy, which had not yet recovered fully from its last recession in 1997,
was faltering again. Dr Mahathir was resorting to increasingly drastic
measures to shore up his government, from easing out his old friend and
finance minister, Daim Zainuddin, to locking up members of opposition parties
on vague conspiracy charges. The questions that had sapped his support at the
past election-over the management of the economy, the independence of the
judiciary and his own authoritarian tendencies-seemed more pertinent than
ever. His riposte, that the Islamists of PAS, the main opposition party, were
actually extremists in disguise, sounded irrelevant and implausible.

September 11th changed all that. American investigators suggested that
Malaysia had been the source of an anthrax-laden letter, though they withdrew
the claim later. A Malaysian Muslim, who had been arrested in Indonesia after
the bomb he was carrying exploded, was accused of belonging to a global
terrorist network. Fanatical-looking demonstrators turned up outside the
American embassy in Kuala Lumpur during a PAS-led protest.

Dr Mahathir was happy to denounce extremism and share intelligence with
America, since that fitted in nicely with his domestic agenda. George Bush
was so pleased that he granted Dr Mahathir a long-withheld audience, despite
his loud condemnation of the bombing of Afghanistan. But the biggest pay-off
was on the home front. Amid the global uproar, Malaysia's Internal Security
Act, under which some opposition figures had been detained without trial, no
longer seemed so draconian. And the notion that PAS and the Taliban had
something in common no longer seemed so improbable.

Malaysia does not allow opinion polls, so it is impossible to tell with any
certainty how much Dr Mahathir's coalition, the National Front, has profited
from this turn of events. But it is clear which way the wind is blowing. A
small opposition party recently asked to rejoin the government, having
defected from it a decade ago. Meanwhile, the Alternative Front, the main
opposition alliance, is falling apart. The Democratic Action Party, which
draws most of its support from Malaysia's Chinese minority, pulled out in
September to avoid association with PAS's religious outpourings. The third
member of the alliance, the Justice party or Keadilan, is embroiled in a
public row about the influence of Islamists within its own ranks.

PAS has made things worse by rising to Dr Mahathir's bait and reiterating its
demand for an Islamic state. Its leaders were even foolish enough to issue a
call for jihad in support of Afghanistan. When asked if they meant that
Malaysians should take up arms, they refused to rule it out.

In reality, PAS is more pragmatic than these statements suggest. Kelantan and
Terengganu, the two states it runs, are a far cry from Afghanistan. In Kota
Bahru, Kelantan's capital, children while away the Muslim fasting month of
Ramadan watching rock videos in Internet cafes. Despite the fast, Chinese
restaurateurs do a roaring trade, and their customers wash their food down
with beer. PAS's edict that men and women should queue separately in
supermarkets and sit apart in cinemas is observed mainly in the breach.

But Kelantan and Terengganu are poorer, more rural and less diverse than the
rest of Malaysia. To make headway, PAS needs to win over more middle-class,
urban Malays. High-minded Islamic talk or expressions of sympathy for Afghans
may appeal to such voters, but any hint of actual instability seems to scare
them off. And with Malaysia's Indian and Chinese minorities, which together
make up 34% of the population, now thoroughly spooked, it is hard to imagine
the opposition patching up its differences.

----------------------------------------

Malaysia's unemployment aggravated by September attacks on US

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 1 (AFP) - The worsening world economy and the September 11
terror attacks on the US have caused tens of thousands of workers to lose
their jobs in Malaysia, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said
Saturday.

Abdullah in an interview with Bernama news agency said 34,502 workers have
lost their jobs in the year to November 17.

Of these 29,900 workers, or 86.7 percent, were Malaysians while the rest were
foreigners, he said. Last year's unemployment data were not available.

"We hope employers will retrench foreign workers first. But if we study the
matter, we see other aspects. Maybe Malaysians do not want to take up the
jobs left by foreign workers," Abdullah said.

Foreign workers are mainly found in the services and plantation sectors,
whose poor wages and tough working conditions are often shunned by Malaysians.

Abdullah said the job losses could be explained by a fall in demand for
products, which had led to the shutting-down or relocation of factories.

Labour Department statistics obtained by Bernama show three-quarters of the
jobs were lost in manufacturing with trade and finance showing the next
biggest losses.

Most of the losses were in Penang, Johor and Selangor, where Malaysia's
export-dependent information technology industries are based, Bernama said.

The central bank last week announced an economic contraction of 1.3 percent
in the third quarter, the first year-on-year drop since the first quarter of
1999, amid sharp falls in manufacturing output.

Malaysia last plunged into recession in 1998 amid the Asian financial crisis,
but it rebounded the following year and recorded a heady 8.5 percent growth
last year.

The government has cut its growth forecast for this year for a second time to
between 1.0 to 2.0 percent, and has imposed a range of fiscal measures to
boost consumer spending.

-----------------------------

AFP, December 1, 2001

US and China hold 'productive' missile talks, no result announced

The United States and China held "productive" arms control talks but
apparently failed to end a row over Beijing's alleged missile sales, the
State Department said.

A State Department official said discussions here between Chinese Vice
Foreign Minister Wang Guangya and US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
John Bolton and other officials had been "productive," but refused to
elaborate on whether any understanding had been reached with Beijing.

Bolton "reiterated (our) emphasis on (missile) non-proliferation as a
critical aspect of the war on terrorism," the official said.

"They also discussed a broader range of arms control issues and
non-proliferation and arms control talks will continue in the months ahead,"
he said.

No date for a next round of high-level talks was set, the official said.

He added that the discussions had also included a review of US plans for a
national missile defense and the status of US talks with Russia over the
contentious matter, which both Moscow and Beijing oppose.

Regional and counter-terrorism issues were also discussed and the latter was
the only issue the State Department official would say the two sides had
agreed to.

"We agreed with the Chinese delegation on the need to expand our dialogue on
counter-terrorism issues and deepen our bilateral and multilateral
cooperation toward that end," he said.

The official declined to comment further.

Washington has accused China of infringing a November 2000 pledge not to
export nuclear-capable missile technology restricted by an international
nonproliferation accord.

On September 1, the United States imposed sanctions on a Chinese state-owned
firm it accused of funneling missile technology to Pakistan.

China has denied the charges and Pakistan said it received no missile
components, but the United States has refused to lift the sanctions, which
have hit Chinese hopes of its satellites being launched on US rockets.

Missile proliferation has rattled Sino-US relations since the beginning of
President George W. Bush's term this year, although cooperation on terrorism
since September's attacks on New York and the Pentagon has considerably eased
tensions.

A team of US experts returned from Beijing in late August saying they were
not satisfied with Chinese moves to cut missile proliferation.

One week later, the State Department slapped sanctions on China Metallurgical
Equipment Company (CMEC) and Pakistan's National Development Complex (NDC),
which was accused of receiving the components.

Under the Arms Export Control Act, the US president can bar US military
contracts and licenses for a period of two years for firms believed to be
involved in proliferation.

No discernible progress was made on the issue during Bush's visit to the Asia
Pacific summit in Shanghai in October.

China initially took a hard line on the sanctions, warning the United States
in September that sensitive talks on proliferation could not resume until
they were lifted.

---------------------------------

Myanmar proclaims "new era" in ties with Thailand

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters, Dec. 1, 2001) - Myanmar's military government has said
relations with neighbouring Thailand have entered "a new era" of goodwill
after recent meetings between leaders of the two countries, state-run
newspapers reported on Saturday.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra visited Myanmar in June to patch up
faltering relations between the two countries following border skirmishes
between Thai and Myanmar troops and a war of words over the drugs trade.

"The frequent exchange of visits at all levels as well as the personal amity
and rapport between the leaders of the two nations provide a great momentum
for our relations," powerful intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt was quoted
as saying.

Myanmar government data shows Thailand is the third biggest foreign investor
in Myanmar, after Singapore and Britain.

"These visits had served to consolidate our relations and usher in a new era
in bilateral ties," the general said in a speech to Thai and Myanmar
businessmen and officials in Yangon on Friday.

Earlier in the year, Bangkok accused the United Wa State Army, an ethnic
minority group allied to the Yangon government, of flooding Thailand with
hundreds of millions of metamphetamine pills.

Myanmar responded by accusing the Thai army of supporting an insurgent ethnic
group in Myanmar -- the Shan State Army -- and profiting from the drugs
trade.

Although Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the world, many western
governments have placed limited sanctions and suspended development
cooperation, citing the country's poor political and human rights record.

------------------------------------

AFP, Saturday December 1, 2001

Japan public jubilant at arrival of baby princess

The Japanese people were celebrating after Crown Princess Masako gave birth
to her first child in eight years of marriage to Crown Prince Naruhito,
revelling in some good news to lift the economic gloom.

"I would like to congratulate the princess. Everyone was waiting for this
moment," said Toyoaki Kurihara, a 27-year-old office worker from Tokyo

"I am so happy about it," he said.

The 37-year-old princess had the 3.1 kilogram (6 pounds 12 ounces) baby girl
at 2:43 pm (0543 GMT) after going into labor around 12:40 pm.

"I am so thrilled. I feel as if this is something that is part of our own
family. I am so relieved that both mother and child are healthy," said
Yoshinori Kobayashi, a 48-year-old who runs a lunch box shop, in Meguro, a
posh southwestern Tokyo suburb, where Masako's parents live.

"For me, it does not matter if the baby is a boy or a girl," Kobayashi said.

His special 850-yen (6.9-dollar) royal baby lunch comprising a cradle-shaped
rice ball and vegetables wrapped in a slice of beef like a baby wrapped by a
blanket had been flying off the shelves since the morning, he said.

Murakami, 250 kilometres (155 miles) north of Tokyo, was to host a town party
where everyone would be served free sake or rice wine, said local official
Yoshio Oda. Murakami is the ancestral home of Masako's family.

"Everyone is so happy. We have been waiting for this day. We launched 10
fireworks around 3:40 pm in the city to show our congratulations," Oda said.

The little princess's arrival will not change the line of succession, as the
current Imperial Household Law does not allow a woman to ascend to the
Chrysanthemum Throne.

But most Japanese well-wishers did not appear to be disappointed that the new
baby was a girl rather a male heir presumptive.

"I do not care if the baby is a girl or a boy. This is great news for Japan
and gives us hope as we struggle amid a long recession," said 74-year-old
housewife Imako Sudou.

Kazuko Suzuki, a 51-year-old boutique worker, agreed, but added: "Given
gender equality, a girl should be able to become an emperor," meaning girls
should be able to ascend to the throne too.

No baby boy has been born in the imperial family in 36 years. Prince
Akishino, the younger brother of the crown prince, was the last boy to be
born into the family, in 1965.

But politicians and scholars have already ruled out any suggestion that the
birth of a girl would plunge the country into an immediate constitutional
crisis over the succession, since Masako could still have more children.

For 20-year-old law school student Kazumasa Koike, December 1 is a double
birthday -- for him and the new princess.

"I am really honoured that I share the same birthday with the princess,"
Koike said. "I have been waiting for the royal birth and feel very relieved
by it. This is such good news."

Holding her one-year-old boy, 25-year-old housewife Kyou Kadono sent her
congratulations to the princess and wished her and her mother both well
through the trials and tribulations of child rearing.

"I just want to express my heartfelt congratulations to Princess Masako," she
said. "Child rearing is a tough job. I want the princess to take good care of
herself."

-----------------------------

25,000 rebels of different factions operating in Philippines: military

BAGUIO, Philippines, Dec 1 (AFP) - The Philippine military faces 25,000
rebels from communist and Muslim insurgent groups across the country, the
armed forces spokesman said in this northern resort city on Saturday.

"It's funny, we have some 25,000 rebels in our midst and we still do not
regard (ourselves as being) in an emergency situation," Brigadier General
Edilberto Adan said in a statement to a local civic group.

Adan said 12,000 were from the New People's Army (NPA), the guerrilla arm of
the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) while about 1,000 were
from the Abu Sayyaf Muslim rebels, notorious for kidnapping Christians and
foreigners in the southern islands.

Another 1,000 rebels are followers of renegade Muslim governor Nur Misuari
who staged a short-lived revolt in the south last month in an apparent bid to
prevent the holding of elections on November 26 to select his replacement,
Adan said.

The rest belonged mostly to the Muslim separatist Moro Islamic Liberation
Front (MILF), which has been fighting for a separate Islamic state in the
southern Philippines but which has signed a ceasefire and opened peace talks
with the government earlier this year.

Manila halted peace talks with the communists earlier this year after they
assassinated two legislators but both sides have been looking at reopening
negotiations.

The Abu Sayyaf, who are still holding two Americans and a Filipina nurse
seized in a kidnapping spree in May, are subject of a massive military
man-hunt in the southern islands. Misuari's forces are still being pursued by
troops while their leader was arrested in Malaysia after fleeing after his
failed revolt.

Adan said the government must draw up more stringent anti-terrorism and
anti-subversion laws to deal with the different rebel groups which remain a
threat despite the attempts to negotiate peace.

-------------------------------

Family of hostages held in Philippines appeal for U.S. help

NEW YORK (Reuters, Dec. 1, 2001) - The family of an American couple held
hostage for six months by Philippine guerrillas linked to Osama bin Laden
called on Friday for the U.S. government to do more to help free them.

After seeing a television video of missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham,
who were kidnapped by Muslim Abu Sayyaf guerrillas from a resort in the
Philippines in May, Gracia Burnham's sister, Mary Jones, said they were
clearly suffering.

"I'd like to see the United States get more involved in assisting the
Philippines in getting my sister out," Jones said on CBS Television's "The
Early Show."

"Six months is a terribly long time for them to be in this condition and
anyone that sees the video can clearly see that they are suffering; that they
are in terrible condition. You can barely recognise them in that video. We
would like to see more done and we want them out soon."

The couple from Wichita, Kansas, were interviewed on Sunday while in
captivity on the southern island of Basilan, according to freelance
journalist Arlene de la Cruz, and a video of the interview aired on
Philippines television on Monday.

While Gracia Burnham voiced fear of dying in captivity, her husband spoke of
his determination to return home with her.

Abu Sayyaf leader Abu Sabaya said during the interview his group was "willing
to negotiate" the release of their captives but that they preferred to die
fighting than surrender.

Martin Burnham's mother, Oreta, said she was saddened to see how much her son
and daughter-in-law were suffering but did not support paying a ransom for
their release.

"I think there are other means that they can use to get them out safely. We
are concerned they are not getting out and we'd like to see more done," she
told CBS.

The United States has linked the Abu Sayyaf to Islamic militant bin Laden and
his al Qaeda network, prime suspects in the September 11 air attacks on the
United States.

The group claims to fight for an Islamic state in the south of the mainly
Catholic Philippines but pursues kidnap for ransom as its main activity.

A third American taken hostage with the couple, Californian tourist Guillermo
Sobero, was beheaded by the group in June.

The Burnhams, who have three children, have been based in the Philippines for
15 years. They were kidnapped while celebrating their 18th wedding
anniversary.

Philippines soldiers captured two members of the Abu Sayyaf on Sunday near
Isabela City on Basilan island as government forces continued to scour the
island for the captives.

--------------------------------

Vietnam ruling party chief Manh leaves for China

HANOI, Nov 30 (Reuters) - The chief of Vietnam's ruling Communist Party, Nong
Duc Manh, left Hanoi on Friday for an official visit to communist neighbour
China.

Manh, making his first visit to China since taking over as party chief in
April, will hold talks with leaders in Beijing, including President and
Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, the official Vietnam News Agency
reported.

The office of the Communist Party central committee confirmed Manh's
departure, but gave no details.

Diplomatic relations between Vietnam and China are generally warm and
economic ties strong after they were normalised in 1991.

Twelve years ago the two countries fought a brief but bloody war following
Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia to oust the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge.

They remain at odds over territory in the South China Sea, including the
reputedly oil-rich Spratly archipelago.

The two countries have both made big strides to develop international trade.
China is due to join the World Trade Organisation in December and Vietnam
approved earlier this week a trade pact with the United States.

The state-run Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper said the two sides would sign
several documents on bilateral cooperation during Manh's visit, but gave no
specifics.

Manh was accompanied by senior party and government officials, including
Trade Minister Vu Khoan, Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien, Fisheries Minister
Ta Quang Ngoc and Deputy Planning and Investment Minister Vo Hong Phuc.

He will stay in China until December 4 and also visit the cities of Xian and
Ningbo.

In September, Manh told China's visiting parliamentary leader, Li Peng, he
expected the friendly ties and cooperation between the communist neighbours
would continue to improve.


SHARED INTEREST IN WTO

Manh's visit to China, whose membership of the WTO was approved in Qatar
earlier this month after a 15-year quest, comes after Vietnam's National
Assembly ratified a historic trade pact with the United States on Wednesday.

If properly implemented, diplomats say the pact should ease Hanoi's eventual
accession to the world trade body, and the Vietnamese delegation is expected
to compare notes with Chinese officials on the process.

WTO Director-General Mike Moore arrived in Vietnam late on Thursday and held
talks with Trade Minister Vu Khoan about ways to speed up Vietnam's accession
to the WTO. He was due to hold talks with Prime Minister Phan Van Khai on
Friday morning.

During a visit of a Chinese delegation to Hanoi last week, the countries
vowed to boost two-way trade to $5 billion by 2005 and China committed to
granting Vietnam most favoured nation status.

Two-way trade this year is forecast to reach $3 billion from

$2.5 billion in 2000.

A World Bank report this week said China's WTO accession meant that Vietnam
would have to accelerate reforms to follow suit if it wanted to boost
exports. It would also mean more competition from China, especially when
quotas on Chinese textiles were abolished in 2005, it said.

-------------------------------------

Australia said to ask Nauru to take more boatpeople

MELBOURNE (Reuters, Dec. 1, 2001) - Australia had asked the Pacific island
nation of Nauru to accept hundreds more asylum seekers, the Sydney Morning
Herald newspaper reported on Saturday.

Nauru is already accommodating more than 700 asylum seekers after the
Australian government brokered a deal with the tiny nation to take them
temporarily while their claims for refugee status were assessed.

Nauru president Rene Harris said his government was approached by the
Australian consulate in Nauru on Thursday with the latest request.

He said the camp at Nauru could accommodate at least 400 to 500 more people,
but there were logistical problems with providing food, bedding and other
requirements.

Harris said his Cabinet would probably consider the matter during the visit
of Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer from December 11, the
paper said.

A spokesman for Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock declined to
comment on the report.

"We would not be discussing approaches. We would prefer to leave it up to
Nauru to say whatever it is they feel is appropriate," he told Reuters.

Australia has also sent asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea, but its policy of
diverting boat people to Pacific Islands for processing hit a snag last week
after negotiations with Fiji and Kiribati fell through.

That left more than 500 migrants claiming refugee status waiting on
Australia's Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island while the government
searched for another destination.

-------------------------------------

Ex-Bank of Thailand boss chastised for handling of 97 currency crash

BANGKOK, Nov 30 (AFP) - Former Bank of Thailand governor Rerngchai Marakanond
was Friday found to have been "severely careless" in his handling of the 1997
currency crisis.

But the Bank of Thailand said it had not made a decision on whether to hold
Rerngchai -- in charge of foreign currency reserves at the time -- solely
accountable for the loss to the currency of 70 billion baht (1.6 million
dollars).

"The BOT will take the weekend to decide whether Rerngchai had caused any
damage to the baht," BOT chief Pridiyathon Bebakul told a late night press
conference.

"If we find that he was responsible, we will start legal proceedings against
him on Monday," he added.

A finance ministry panel was one of several committees investigating
responsibility in the 1996-1997 currency crash, when the baht went into free
fall and Thailand was forced to seek a massive 17.2 billion-dollar loan from
the International Monetary Fund.

It had submitted a report to the BOT blaming Rerngchai for keeping the baht
pegged instead of floating it and suggested the bank fine the former governor
the 70 million baht.

Pridiyathon said that the bank first had to work out if Rerngchai was
responsible for the baht's losses, and then it would look at how much that
loss was.

also: WSJ: Top Survey a Boon For Asian Analysts

The Wall Street Journal
November 30, 2001

Even Top Senior Executives Have Been
Hit Hard by Asia's Tenacious Recession

By STAN SESSER

HONG KONG -- Mark Gilchrist spends a lot of time in his cramped three-room
apartment waiting for phone calls and emails that never come. To keep himself
busy, he reads literature, philosophy and history books and listens to music.
Since he was laid off by the Internet firm Chinadotcom six months ago, the
36-year-old former corporate executive has slept a lot too.

"At one point I was sleeping most of the day," says Mr. Gilchrist, who has
applied for positions with more than 60 companies. "It was like going into
hibernation. A lot of your sense of self-worth, and the feeling that you have
a place in the world, is connected to the work you do. I just couldn't think
of any reason to get up."

Like thousands of unemployed former corporate executives in Asia, Mr.
Gilchrist has gone from being a person of power and influence to someone who
is grateful if he gets a rejection letter to his job applications. "I've
tried to contact so many people who just don't respond," he says. "Did the
person get the letter? Did his secretary throw it in the trash? I have no
idea."

Things weren't meant to be this way. Degrees from first-class universities
and years of long hours and high-level experience were supposed to wrap
people like Mr. Gilchrist in a security blanket and protect them from the
downturns of life. "You work hard to go to the best schools, you work hard in
your career, you do what you think is really good work, and then you lose
your job," he says.

Too Much Experience Is Not Enough, Headhunters Say

Young, personable and presentable, Mr. Gilchrist should be a recruiter's
dream. And for 12 years of working in Asia, he was. With degrees from Harvard
and Stanford, he earned $165,000 running trade magazines for the Manager
Group in Thailand in the mid-'90s. He was barely 30 at the time. At
Chinadotcom, as a senior manager of strategy, he made $90,000 a year and, at
one point, had stock options worth more than $1 million on paper. "When
you're dreaming about the future, you feel very excited about the possibility
of accumulating some real wealth for yourself, but those dreams didn't last
long," he says.

Mr. Gilchrist has learned that this recession isn't playing favorites. Senior
white-collar workers, who in previous recessions did the firing, are feeling
its wrath as much as workers further down the food chain. Fed in part by the
implosion of the dot-com industry, media companies, investment banking firms
and others have all felt the pinch, laying off not just low-level workers but
high-ranking executives. A Hong Kong job survey last month by headhunting
firm TMP Worldwide found that plans for new hiring by companies in the
business and professional sector were down 92% from January. Thirty-eight% of
the companies surveyed said they planned to lay off even more people in this
quarter.

On Monday, May 7, it was his turn. He had just returned from vacation when
Chinadotcom's director of human resources called him into his office and told
him that he would soon be out of a job. "It was very quick, it didn't last
more than five minutes," Mr. Gilchrist recalls.

A lot has changed since then. "It's ironic," says Mr. Gilchrist, "that when
you armor yourself with a title, anyone will see you, and they'll treat you
like you're close to God. And then when that armor is taken off, you're just
another rat in the gutter." Between May and June, Chinadotcom laid-off almost
40% of its workforce.

No Response

In the past six months he has sent job applications to 60 places, ranging
from the Ford Foundation and Goldman Sachs & Co., to the Shanghai Star
newspaper and, before Sept. 11, Care USA to run a relief program in
Afghanistan. Only four granted him interviews. Three were by telephone or
teleconferencing. Five headhunters are searching for jobs on his behalf. So
far, they've produced one interview.

As the second step of two of the job interviews, "I was virtually asked to
get on my knees and say 'yes, yes, this is something I really want to do.'
Then they never got back to me."

One company he applied to was U.S.-based Edelman Public Relations. During an
interview with the director of the Hong Kong office, Mr. Gilchrist was asked
to generate some thoughts about a potential new area of business. "We talked
about how they might like to set up a government relations practice in Asia,"
recalls Mr. Gilchrist. "He said that if I could think of some ideas on this
front, he would be happy to meet with me again. I wrote a long letter with
ideas for the kind of clients -- I mentioned specific names -- and projects
they could be attempting to get across. I sent the letter a month ago and he
didn't respond at all, not even to say thanks."

Mike Geczi, the head of Edelman's Hong Kong office, says he now gets 25
unsolicited job applications a week. Requests for ideas are "an exercise to
see what kind of thinking process the applicant has." He declines to comment
about his discussions with Mr. Gilchrist, but he does concede that getting
back to applicants is not his strong suit. "As a company we're not very good
at it. It sort of falls down the list, coming behind the needs of our
clients."

It's not the only time Mr. Gilchrist has put together a report only to have
it lead nowhere. "There are some companies who have asked for ideas on how to
build or expand their businesses, and then there's absolutely no response
whatsoever to what I submit," he says. "It's hard to know whether they're
trying to use me, just to get free consultation."

Another place he applied was Global Sources Ltd., a Manila-based company that
matches corporate suppliers with buyers. When he spoke with the company's
vice president for human resources, Philip Chatting, three months ago, they
talked about meeting up in Manila or Hong Kong. It never happened.

"I'm flooded with work most of the time," explains Mr. Chatting, who says he
remembers Mr. Gilchrist but won't comment on individual applicants. "I work
late every night and on weekends. Do I do a costing for organizing a new
business unit, or do I write thank-you letters?"

Lately, there are a lot of letters to write. When Global Sources runs an ad
for the occasional open position, Mr. Chatting is deluged with applications.
The company received 300 responses from as far away as Russia and Nigeria to
a recent ad for a marketing manager. "I got a lot of people who had been at
the vice president level," he adds, "and this would be a middle-management
position."

For recruiter Dan Chavasse, "This environment is horrible." As head of the
Hong Kong office of Michael Page International, one of the headhunters
working for Mr. Gilchrist, he says dealing with the glut of applicants is a
depressing exercise. "This is not why I joined the recruitment industry. What
we want to do is find people jobs."

Frugal Living

Not all laid-off executives have coped as well as Mr. Gilchrist. He says a
mutual friend introduced him to a British-educated Chinese executive in Hong
Kong who had exhausted his funds, had his apartment repossessed and his
furniture and personal effects sold at auction. The man was now homeless and
talked about committing suicide.

"The anxiety and worry about the work situation is very considerable," says
David Bailey, director of the St. John's Cathedral counseling service in Hong
Kong. "In this round of economic hardship, we're getting more clients than we
did three years ago with the Asian financial crisis." Mr. Bailey says clients
include not only those laid off, but executives who fear being laid off and
even some "who are the ones laying off people, and it's upsetting them."

Mr. Gilchrist himself went for one session at St. John's, but found the
US$100 hourly fee, a reduced rate for the unemployed, was contributing to the
very anxiety he was hoping to alleviate. "If you go for two months, that's
$800," he notes.

Until now, Mr. Gilchrist has been able to manage financially. He is single
and by Hong Kong standards his rent of US$1,000 a month is low. But his money
is running out.

He received no severance package or continuing medical insurance when he left
Chinadotcom (although he was paid for one month he didn't work.) His
Chinadotcom options are worthless because the price of the stock collapsed --
from US$78 to its current price of US$2.46. His job packages never offered
pensions, so over the past decade he put money into a mutual fund as his
retirement account. That's now worth $75,000, and it's the only savings he
has left. Even if it weren't the money he had set aside for his retirement,
"I don't want to sell a mutual fund at the bottom of the market," he says.

So he is going into debt on his credit cards, paying more than 20% interest.
When he recently bought a winter jacket, his first clothing purchase in six
months, he opted for the cheapest he could find, at US$19. "All these years
I've worked like a dog so I could save money and buy nice things," he says.
"It now all seems so pointless."

Six months ago, Mr. Gilchrist began his job search with enthusiasm,
researching companies and identifying their decision makers. Now, he is
applying for fewer jobs because the initial responses were so sparse. He
keeps hoping something will come up so he can start to pay back his debt
through frugal living. But he knows he has to think about alternatives. Going
back to school is one possibility. "I could go to law school or study for an
MBA," he says. "But this would require one year of waiting while I go through
the application process, and then two or three years putting myself deeply
into debt with the tuition and the absence of a salary. Would the payback
later make it worth it?"

He's afraid for his future. "I don't have a lot of money," Mr. Gilchrist
says. "What if this is a really long recession? What if it's akin to the
Great Depression, which lasted 11 years? I worry about that because my
savings wouldn't be enough to last.

"I have a friend who told me to do anything, even work at McDonald's," he
says. "I really don't want to do that because it's clearly not a good career
move. But I've already applied for jobs that were more junior than I had
before, like sub-editing, and I'm willing to live almost anywhere. I don't
mind; I'm open to something that puts food on the table."

* * *

Too Much Experience Is Not Enough

In the white-collar recession an impressive resume might not be enough.

I asked two of the headhunting firms working on behalf of Mark Gilchrist what
weaknesses a company could see in the resume of a young, well-educated man
with broad experience in the media business.

These headhunting firms -- Michael Page International and TMP Worldwide --
should know what they're talking about. Both firms have laid off employees
this year.

One difficulty for Mr. Gilchrist, says Anthony Thompson, a Michael Page
manager, is that his intelligence has led to previous employers using him as
a corporate strategist. "Today there's a demand for someone who can sell, who
can support the bottom line in a very short period of time," Mr. Thompson
says. "What Mark does is develop long-term strategies, and that's a problem.
To some extent he's a discretionary spend because he doesn't make anything
and he doesn't sell anything."

San Lee, divisional manager for sales and marketing of TMP, sees Mr.
Gilchrist's broad background as another potential problem. "He's been a lot
of places doing different things," she says. "It's good that he's proud of
all his areas of experience. But an employer might worry about his
commitment. They ask, 'Yes, he's great, but can we retain him after 12
months?' " (Mr. Gilchrist worked for 2 1/2 years for the Manager group in
Thailand, his longest stint, and says he would have happily continued beyond
his 22 months at Chinadotcom.)

Nor do they think that someone of Mr. Gilchrist's experience would be
acceptable for a lower-ranking job. "A company wouldn't put him in a lower
position than he's qualified for, because they fear he'll be looking for
another job as the economy picks up," Mr. Thompson says. Nevertheless, both
firms are impressed enough with Mr. Gilchrist that they say they're working
hard to find him a position. "We believe that somewhere, somehow, someone
like him will be able to get a job,'' Ms. San states.

Send comments to stan.sesser@...

--------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal
November 30, 2001

Heard in Asia

Magazine's Team Poll
Can Be Analysts' Boon

By SARAH MCBRIDE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The candidates have hit the road, wining and dining and plying voters for
their ballots. No, this isn't Saturday's election in Taiwan. For equity
analysts, it's something bigger. It's the Institutional Investor Asia
Research Team poll. And for many, it will have a direct impact on their
reputations, paychecks and self-esteem.

"Analysts live and die on [this] particular survey" says Timothy Ross, ranked
as the No. 2 aviation analyst in Asia for the past two years at UBS Warburg.
"If you could find the right person at Institutional Investor to bribe, it
would be worth every penny," he adds, tongue firmly in cheek.

Paychecks shrink and swell on the results from Institutional Investor
magazine's survey. Different variables contribute, especially the field the
analyst specializes in, but a sector or country analyst ranked in the top
three usually commands between $500,000 and $1 million in total guaranteed
compensation, says Steven Vinik of recruiting firm Huthart Mugar & Co. By
contrast, unranked analysts working at a big-name house might earn around
$250,000 to $300,000 in total guaranteed compensation.

Hopping on Planes

The big gap stems from the benefits that having a top-ranked analyst or
research team can bring: adding to bank prestige and helping win
investment-bank clients. A telecommunications company planning an initial
public offering might want to use a firm with a top-ranked telecom analyst,
because that implies a long list of brokerage clients and the clout to gain
an attractive issuing price in a deal.

Fund managers are now voting on the poll -- 14 pages of fill-in-the-blank
questions and comment areas -- although results won't appear until the May 1
edition of the magazine. That explains why so many analysts, economists and
strategists are hopping on planes. "A lot of guys typically want to show up"
and visit big clients around now, says Morgan Stanley's Andrew Xie, who was
the top-ranked economist in Asia last year. "If the fund manager cares to sit
down and fill that [survey] out, you want them to have a fresh memory of you."

He has just returned from a whirlwind tour of Asia, the U.S. and Europe -- 17
cities in three weeks. Next week, he is off to Thailand for a conference, and
then to meet with clients in Shanghai. "It's Institutional Investor season,"
he says with resignation.

Some firms don't stop with client visits. "Why I deserve your I.I. vote" was
the subject line of a Bloomberg message that Linda Csellak, a Hong Kong-based
Credit Agricole fund manager, received earlier this week. "I didn't even read
it, it ticked me off so much," Ms. Csellak says of the note from the
Tokyo-based broker.

That is exactly why some firms prefer to stick with a more subtle approach.
They might hold face-to-face meetings with selected clients whose vote they
think they can win, and at the end casually ask that the clients consider
voting for them. Or they might have sales staff send out an end-of-the-year
e-mail with a roundup of good calls an analyst has made, finishing with a
request clients keep them in mind in surveys.

Value in Feedback

Sometimes, that's all it takes to score big. "It's who do you remember most,
who do you remember fondly," says a Singapore-based fund manager. "Not
necessarily who's the best analyst. You're trying to fill the form out as
fast as you can." Other fund managers, such as Ms. Csellak at Credit
Agricole, say they fill out the forms very carefully.

Most fund management firms run internal surveys and allocate brokerage
business based on those, not the Institutional Investor poll. Some eschew the
poll altogether. "I don't see what the benefit to me is," says a Hong
Kong-based fund manager who says he would fill out the poll only if he were
paid to do so. He sees the value in feedback, but doesn't think it should go
through a survey. "We normally tell [the brokerage] what we think of them ...
if we think they're weak in Korea, whatever," he says. "We tell them that to
their face."

Still, some analysts get so desperate to do well they resort to cheating.
David Schutt, managing editor of Institutional Investor, says the magazine
had to throw out eight ballots or so from last year's Asia poll. Some were
obviously all filled in by the same writer. Three ballots that had been sent
to Asian fund managers based in Europe were hand-delivered to Institutional
Investor's Hong Kong office. The magazine couldn't confirm the original
recipients of the ballots had actually filled them out, so the ballots were
disqualified.

"We number the ballots. We know exactly who they go to," says Tucker Ewing,
the Institutional Investor editor who coordinates the Asia poll. When they
come back, "We look at each and every ballot. When we see things that look
odd, we set them aside."

Cheating "isn't as rampant yet in Asia as it was in the past in the U.S.,"
where the magazine has done a similar poll for 30 years, says Ms. Ewing. When
it comes to pulling fast ones in Asia, which is going through its ninth poll,
"they're not that good at it yet."

Write to Sarah McBride at sarah.mcbride@....

3 reports:

Fatal Blunders By U.S. Led to Massacre
- The Hierarchy of Death - No living third world body ever had the
     sums lavished on it that are being spent on DNA tests at
     Ground Zero
WP: Ex-Axis Powers Recast Foreign Military Roles;

The Guardian [UK]
December 1, 2001

Fatal errors that led to massacre

Guardian reveals blunders by US

Luke Harding in Mazar-i-Sharif, Simon Tisdall in Washington, Nicholas Watt
and Richard Norton-Taylor

A single, horrific, atrocity can provide the defining moment in a war.
America is still facing demands to apologise for the 1968 My Lai massacre in
Vietnam, and the remains of charred Iraqi soldiers on the Mutla ridge outside
Kuwait were a chilling illustration of Washington's overwhelming firepower in
the Gulf war.

As the net tightened around the Taliban leadership yesterday, questions were
being asked about whether the bloody end to this week's prison siege at the
19th-century Qala-i-Jhangi fort outside the northern Afghan city of
Mazar-i-Sharif will be the defining moment of the Afghan war. Pictures of aid
workers picking their way through the corpses of Taliban prisoners killed by
a combination of Northern Alliance fighters and American bombings, have
caused revulsion around the world. At least 175 prisoners were killed; that
is the number of bodies recovered so far by the Red Cross.

As pressure grows on Britain and the US to hold an inquiry into the killings,
the Guardian has pieced together a detailed account of this week's events.
This suggests that from the very first, when Taliban soldiers fell into the
hands of the alliance after the fall of Kunduz, a series of catastrophic
errors were made.

In an interview with the Guardian yesterday, the anti-Taliban commander who
negotiated the surrender said that things had gone wrong largely because of
American miscalculation. Amir Jan, a Pashtun commander who defected to the
anti-Taliban forces earlier this year, said that the foreign Taliban fighters
from Kunduz - mainly Arabs, Pakistanis and men from Uzbekistan - were never
supposed to go for their formal surrender to Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan's
main northern city.

The foreigners were meant to surrender at Erganak, a mountainous frontline
position 12 miles west of Kunduz. Instead, they travelled across the desert
through the night and arrived on the outskirts of Mazar, in a wilderness of
desert and telegraph poles, at 3am last Saturday.

Mullah Faizal, the Taliban's commander at Kunduz, had told the foreign
fighters to give up their weapons - but failed to tell them that they would
then be taken into custody, it emerged from Amir Jan's account: "The
foreigners thought that after surrendering to the Northern Alliance they
would be free," he said. "They didn't think they would be put in jail."

While US soldiers dressed in desert khaki set up satellite links, soldiers
loyal to the alliance warlord Rashid Dostam took up attack positions. After
three to four hours' negotiation, the Taliban fighters agreed to surrender
again - but only to Amir Jan, whom they trusted because of his Pashtun roots
and Taliban history. General Dostam's militia then began disarming the
Taliban fighters and piling their weapons into a green lorry.

Gen Dostam had arranged to take the prisoners to Mazar-i-Sharif's large
Soviet-built airfield, but American special forces vetoed the plan, saying
that the runway could be needed for military operations, Amir Jan revealed.

Heavy weaponry


Instead, Gen Dostam would take the prisoners to his personal fortress on the
muddy outskirts of Mazar - the Qala-i-Jhangi. Over the previous two weeks
several American officers had secretly spent many hours in the compound. They
knew it was full of heavy weaponry.

Nonetheless, they agreed with the impromptu Dostam scheme. By mid-afternoon,
the prisoners had been piled into five trucks. Said Kamal, Gen Dostam's head
of security, arranged for prisoners in the first three trucks to be body
searched. But with dusk approaching, the convoy set off with the last two
trucks not searched. This proved to be disastrous.

While Gen Dostam left with the bulk of his army towards Kunduz, the convoy
rolled the other way into the Qala-i-Jhangi, where a comparatively small
number of guards had been left behind. Nader Ali, Gen Dostam's chief of
police, tried again tosearch the prisoners soon after they arrived in late
afternoon. One Taliban fighter about to be frisked detonated a hidden grenade
killing himself, Ali and another Dostam aide.

While the dying Ali was carried away, soldiers then bundled the Taliban
fighters into the stable area to the north of the compound. The search was
abandoned.

That night eight of the fighters blew themselves up in a storage room in the
prisoners' compound, Amir Jan said. It soon became clear that a large
minority of the Taliban were still armed with grenades. "After that I decided
they were hardliners, that they were dangerous," the Pashtun commander added.
"We agreed it would be better to tie up their hands and put them in the
basement."

Next morning the guards prepared to implement this new order. At the same
time Simon Brooks, head of the International Committee for the Red Cross in
northern Afghanistan, swept into the Qala-i-Jhangi in his white Red Cross
vehicle. He was looking for assurances from Said Kamal, the Dostam security
chief, that the prisoners would be treated humanely. The Red Cross also
wanted to register the prisoners' names and get messages for their families.
Mr Brooks was not the only person interested in the Arab, Pakistani and
Chechen detainees.

Two CIA agents, Johnny "Mike" Spann and "Dave", had also been instructed to
screen the Taliban fighters for possible links with Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaida organisation. From a distance Dave looked Afghan. He even spoke
Uzbek, the language of Gen Dostam's soldiers, and wore a salwar kameez
beneath a long coat. But his square-cropped haircut gave the game away,
indicating he was American.

Two television crews - from Reuters and the German station ARD - had also
turned up at the fort. They were in the prisoners' compound, together with
Dave and Mike, who had begun interviewing suspects.

At 11.25am the Taliban fighters were marched to the central grassy compound
of their mini-citadel. The guards tied up the first eight prisoners, Amir Jan
said. "The prisoners suspected they were about to be shot. They attacked one
of the guards and grabbed his gun," he added. The foreign fighters also
assumed that the television journalists were American soldiers who had come
to film their execution.

Another prisoner grabbed Mike and set off a grenade, blowing him up. This
conflicts with the CIA account of his death which says that he was shot.

Escape


All hell then broke loose: the prisoners shot dead five guards and grabbed
their weapons, while the journalists ran for cover. Dave managed to escape
only by shooting dead at least one Taliban prisoner with his pistol. A
firefight blew up between the prisoners, now in charge of their own fortified
area, and soldiers sitting in Gen Dostam's headquarters building 300 metres
away, down a line of trees.

"Dave managed to reach the rooftop [of Dostam's HQ] about 15 minutes after
fighting broke out," Simon Brooks of the Red Cross said yesterday. "One of
the Taliban who had obviously been wired with explosives simply grabbed the
other American and the bomb detonated."

"I met Dave in the building. He was absolutely completely shocked and really
quite scared. I can now understand why: he witnessed his friend being blown
up. He had managed to shoot his way out and run 150 metres out of the
building."

Soon the firefight had developed into a battle, as the Taliban prisoners
broke into the arms depot and helped themselves to mortars and rocket
launchers. From the rooftop, Dave borrowed a satellite phone from the German
TV crew and phoned the American embassy in Uzbekistan.

"We have lost control of the situation. Send in helicopters and troops," he
said.

The call appeared to work. As the Red Cross vehicle blazed in the car park,
and Mr Brooks slithered down the mud battlements to safety, the Pentagon
prepared to send in the air force. Most of the eight prisoners who had been
tied up when the battle broke out were shot dead in the early minutes; the
others were able to take cover.

At 3.30pm the jets sent by the Pentagon fired nine or 10 missiles directly
into the Taliban's positions. All of them hit their target - apart from the
last one, which sank into a field more than 1km away. In the confusion, a
small group of at least 10 prisoners escaped.

The following day the remaining Taliban, some armed with rocket launchers,
held out as B-52 bombers flew repeatedly overhead. Alarmed by the resilience
of the Taliban fighters, further special forces arrived at the base on
Tuesday. They reportedly advised the alliance to flush out the remaining
Taliban by pouring oil into the basement and setting fire to it. It took a
tank and an intensification of bombings from the air to finish them off.

Confident that the way was clear, the alliance regained control of the
fortress on Wednesday. But on Thursday it emerged that a lone Talib was still
holed up in a basement, surviving on horse meat.

High above the lone survivor, the imposing figure of Gen Dostam toured the
fortress where the full horror of the siege was on display. An Associated
Press photographer saw the bodies of up to 50 Taliban fighters whose hands
had been bound by scarves, laid out in a field in the southern part of the
fort. The photographer watched as alliance fighters cut the scarves from the
hands of some of the corpses; at least one picked gold fillings from a
corpse.

As Washington tried to wash its hands of the episode, saying that the
alliance was responsible for the prisoners, human rights lawyers warned that
the Geneva convention may have been breached on two counts: the degrading
treatment of the Taliban, when they were tied up, and the huge firepower
directed at them by US warplanes.

On the first count, article 13 of the convention says: "Prisoners of war must
at all times be humanely treated." On the second count, the convention
permits the use of force against prisoners. But it says that this must be
proportionate.

Christopher Greenwood, professor of international relations at the London
School of Economics and joint editor of International Law Reports, said that
killing people with hands tied behind their backs was illegal. "If it was
heavy-handed overreaction, it was illegal", he said.

There were also questions about the conduct of the two CIA officers. Adam
Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford University and an
authority on the laws of war, described their conduct as "incredibly stupid
and unprofessional".

Angered by the death of Spann - the first American known to have died in the
conflict - the director of the CIA, George Tenet, accused the Taliban of
premeditated murder.

"Their prison uprising - which had murder as its goal - claimed many lives,
among them that of a very brave American," he said of Spann, who worked in
the directorate of operations, which analysts says is involved in
"paramilitary" activities.

As the final bodies are cleared, the battle has now moved to Britain and
America, whose governments have rejected calls by Amnesty International for
an inquiry. Amnesty said yesterday that this raised questions about their
commitment to the rule of law.

A head of steam is unlikely to build up around this issue, however. At his
weekly appearance in the Commons this week, Tony Blair faced only one
question about Afghanistan and that was about Marjan, the one-eyed lion at
Kabul zoo.

Why? Amnesty's 10 questions

· Why were the Taliban not properly disarmed?

· Was the response of the detaining powers proportionate? Was only minimum
force used, as required by the Geneva convention?

· Who ordered planes in and why?

· Could this situation have been contained without such use of force?

· Were those who were killed still bound?

· Did summary executions take place?

· Were people deliberately left in harm's way?

· Are those who desecrated bodies to be held responsible?

· Are summary executions still taking place in Afghanistan?

· Are there serious shortcomings in the holding of prisoners in Afghanistan?
Is the alliance able to perform this role?

---------------------------------------

The Guardian
November 28, 2001

The hierarchy of death

No living third world body ever had the sums lavished on it that are being
spent on DNA tests at Ground Zero

By Anne Karpf

They say death is a great leveller. They're wrong. Inequality pursues us
after life too. Consider Ground Zero. While international attention has
shifted to Afghanistan, the vast project of body-part retrieval in Lower
Manhattan is probably the most exorbitant expenditure on the dead in our
lifetime, and yet remains almost entirely exempt from criticism or debate.
Ground Zero has been cordoned off, not only physically, but also politically
and financially, though it's a provocative message to the rest of the world,
where death comes cheaper.
This is the largest attempt to identify the dead through DNA sampling. In the
application of technology to grief, up to a million tissue samples will be
examined by forensic pathologists, radiologists, anthropologists and dentists
trying to match DNA material from victims' toothbrushes or relatives' mouths
with fragments recovered from the twin towers. It's as if the scale of the
operation has had to mirror the heft and girth of those buildings. Since this
folly is in its early stages (projected time-scale: two years), it's
impossible to say what it will cost. At some point a courageous person may
call a halt, but there may be further costs, as the many professionals
involved will need post-traumatic stress counselling.

The reasons for the project are to identify who died, and to allow the
families of victims to bury at least a body part and achieve closure. Neither
is sustainable.

No amount of DNA sampling will make the fluctuating list of the dead
definitive. A register of illegal immigrants who may, or may not, have been
in the WTC won't materialise. Those whose loved ones worked there and set off
to work as usual know they're dead. And while burying a body is an important
therapeutic rite, it's psycho-babble to suggest that it necessarily ushers in
closure.

When death is sudden and a dead person's clothes still bear their smell, and
the moue of their lipstick remains on a mug of coffee, it feels like they've
only just left and might just as immediately return. And there's a particular
pain to mourning without a body or a grave, as Holocaust survivors know. But
the idea that the recovery of a small body-fragment can do more than mildly
assist grieving would be considered shamanistic if expressed by an Afghan
tribe. A collection of cells doesn't constitute a body, and after burial the
bereaved still have disbelief, rage and anguish to face.

We've been rightly harrowed and sorrowed by the loss of life in America, but
the DNA sampling has confirmed the lack of equivalence between deaths in the
northern and southern hemispheres.

How does it feel to the rest of the world to see the care lavished on the
parings of American bodies in death, such as no complete third world body
ever receives in life? What do they think in the Indian town where 20,000
died in an earthquake earlier this year? I couldn't remember Bhuj's name,
perhaps because it disappeared off our TV screens within a week.

Here's a consumer's guide to our hierarchy of death. If you want yours to
signify in the media and public debate, and your relatives to be decently
compensated, make sure you a) are white, and b) a westerner, c) die quickly,
dramatically, and spectacularly (not slowly of a disease of poverty or
occupational illness), and that d) your death is witnessed by millions,
preferably on television; e) if possible, own a mobile.

Some say it's inevitable we don't mourn each death similarly: people grieve
instinctively for those most like themselves. Our modern currency is empathy,
extended most freely to those with whom we can identify. In the Washington
Holocaust Memorial museum, visitors are issued with the personal identity
card of someone like themselves in age, profession, and gender, caught up in
the Holocaust. It's as if our capacity for empathy can only be kick-started
narcissistically, by turning everyone into versions of ourselves. This is
dangerous: those who wear the burka can't play, veiled as they are in an
empathy-barrier, indelibly marked with otherness.

The lack of equivalence between northern and southern deaths is most graphic
in compensation: $121m has been paid out of the American Red Cross's Liberty
Fund so far, averaging a $25,000 payment to 25,000 families of those bereaved
or affected by the WTC attacks.

Contrast this with the average $1,300 compensation a head for the 14,824
Indians killed by toxic gas fumes from the American-owned Union Carbide
pesticide plant in Bhopal, the site of the world's worst industrial disaster
in 1984. For several hundred thousand people still disabled and diseased, the
average payout has been $580. Last week it was announced that those who
watched on television their relatives die in the twin towers attack would
receive $20,000 compensation.

Ground Zero's DNA analysis is a meta-language. It says America may have been
grievously wounded but it's still powerful and can mobilise fabulous
resources to restore its citizens' dead bodies. The shaming message of Bhopal
is that those unvalued in life are worth just as little in death.

--------------------------------------

The Washington Post
November 30, 2001

Ex-Axis Powers Recast Foreign Military Roles

By Kathryn Tolbert and Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service

TOKYO -- Flying the Rising Sun flag, a destroyer, a minesweeper and a supply
ship left Japanese naval bases Sunday headed for the Indian Ocean.
Twenty-four hours later, a German reconnaissance unit left its home base to
help plan patrols that German warships will conduct on seas between the
Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

With these and other missions, the two major powers that went down in defeat
in World War II are accelerating their half-century-old but still highly
charged task of becoming "normal countries," states free of postwar
restrictions. This recasting of their sense of place in world affairs may
prove to rank among the more important legacies of Sept. 11.

Neither Japan nor Germany is rushing into Afghanistan. Each is cautiously
providing support, mostly logistical, from a distance. But their quick
engagement could signal the beginnings of more muscular foreign policies that
match the two countries' standing as the world's second- and third-largest
economies.

"Now the feeling is totally different," said George Hisaeda, deputy press
secretary of Japan's Foreign Ministry. "We can discuss sending our troops
openly. It will certainly help people acclimatize to the idea of a wartime
dispatch of our forces so there won't be so much allergy to it."

"We have reached the end of the postwar period in German history," said
Volkmar Schultz, a member of the foreign relations committee, in an interview
at the Reichstag Parliament building where graffiti scrawled by Soviet troops
in 1945 remain on the walls. "We cannot automatically run away from military
action. Since Sept. 11, most of the political class in Germany accepts this
as an unavoidable fact."

After quelling a parliamentary revolt by some members of the Greens party --
the junior partner in his coalition government -- German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder committed 3,900 troops to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Few if
any German soldiers are likely to see combat, but Germans still feel they've
passed old limits.

"There truly is a new historic dimension," President Johannes Rau said in an
interview. "Among Germans, there is still very, very much anxiety. . . . This
is a new reality for many."

But Schroeder appears to have pulled the public along with him. A survey by
the Wahlen research group for ZDF television showed 59 percent of Germans
favored the military deployment and 36 percent opposed it.

So with little fanfare, three German transport planes left for the U.S. air
base at Incirlik in Turkey on Monday to provide support for operations in
Afghanistan. Off the east coast of Africa, two German frigates and escort
vessels will soon patrol international waters in conjunction with the navies
of the United States and France.

In Japan on Sunday, the supply ship Towada, the minesweeper Uraga and the
destroyer Sawagiri left to join three other warships sent earlier this month
to monitor shipping lanes. The Japanese force will transport supplies to and
from bases on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and drop off
tents and blankets for Afghan refugees.

Ten years ago, neither the German nor Japanese governments could muster even
logistical support for the Persian Gulf War effort. Instead, each preferred
to write large checks as their expression of their commitment to the cause.

At that time, Oskar Lafontaine, then leader of Schroeder's Social Democratic
Party, said that asking Germans to participate in military action was "like
offering brandy chocolates to a reformed alcoholic."

That remark captured the legacy of World War II in the psyche of the first
postwar generation. Forty-five years after the war, despite real democratic
advances and close security ties with the United States, the former Axis
powers were not to be fully trusted.

But Germany, in the decade since it reunited, has slowly reconciled itself to
military responsibilities, first in a peacekeeping role in the Balkans and
then, critically, during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. German warplanes,
however, dropped no ordnance and instead flew reconnaissance missions in
support of allied air operations. Its neighbors have generally welcomed this
new assertiveness.

In Japan, the mere discussion of sending forces to the Persian Gulf 10 years
ago was taboo. The Japanese legislature rejected a bill that would have
allowed a very limited mobilization of the military for non-combat operations.

The national consensus that backs the current Indian Ocean deployment marks a
new stage for Japan, whose post-World War II constitution rejects the threat
or use of force to settle international disputes. It also says that air, sea
and land forces "will never be maintained."

But Japan has slowly been stretching its interpretation of the constitution
since 1950, when the United States, motivated by fears of communism, approved
its rearming after the outbreak of the Korean War. Japan's cautious role in
U.N. peacekeeping missions during the past 10 years also helped change public
opinion toward the use of the military.

After Sept. 11, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi pushed for and won passage
of an anti-terrorism law permitting Japan to transport fuel and supplies,
provide medical services and help with search-and-rescue operations in the
Afghan conflict. This new law again pushes the limits of the constitution;
under its authority, the three vessels sailed on Sunday.

Only a few dozens protesters gathered at the Japanese ports with anti-war
banners as the ships departed following patriotic speeches from politicians
and tearful families waving goodbye.

But in a demonstration that not all of the old restrictions have been cast
off, Japan decided against deploying a destroyer with an Aegis
missile-hunting system after some lawmakers argued that to do so would
violate the constitution.

The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Howard H. Baker Jr., expressed disappointment
that Japan decided not to send the destroyer, but said, "We can get along
without it. It does not diminish my admiration for taking such a
forward-leaning position . . . given their background."

Former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto said at a recent news conference that
"in looking at the Japanese constitution, it does spell out clearly that
Japan is not to resort to military power in any kind of conflict between two
nations. However, the Japanese constitution never assumed that the day would
come when we have to fight against terrorism."

The public has let the constitutional issues slide as it welcomes Japan's
assertiveness. Politicians and officials cite a Japanese form of Gulf War
trauma as one of the reasons for that change.

The fact that Japan contributed $13 billion to that campaign but was not
formally thanked is a still bitter memory. "We were treated almost like
dirt," said a former diplomat.

As in Germany, there is a generation shift, with many of those people who had
an aversion to anything military having retired or died.

While other European countries have generally supported Germany's changing
role, Japan's Asian neighbors have been quick to detect rising militarism in
Tokyo or insufficient reflection on the past. But after Sept. 11, they did
not object to the new role for the Self-Defense Forces. Still, many Japanese
say the country's ability to act remains more constrained than Germany's.

"Germany is a member of NATO, so that when the America is attacked, Germany
acts in the name of collective defense," said governing party lawmaker
Shigeru Ishiba."Under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, America protects Japan
but Japan does not protect America."

The leader of Japan's opposition Liberal Party, Ichiro Ozawa, said the
government should change the constitution and codify Japan's right to fight
alongside its allies. But he fell back on the past to make his point.

"But why hasn't the government done this?" he asked in an interview with the
Asahi Shimbun newspaper. "Obviously, nobody wants to take responsibility. The
Koizumi administration took full advantage of the global anti-terrorism
sentiment to sneak . . . deployment through the back door and set a
precedent. This mentality and strategy are an exact echo of the situation in
Japan before World War II."

Finn reported from Berlin.

---------------------------------------

50,000 Christians driven from homes on Indonesian island: Vatican

ROME, Dec 1 (AFP) - Muslim paramilitary groups have driven more than 50,000
Christian villagers from their homes on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a
local Catholic bishop said in a report from the island published by the
Vatican's Fides news agency Saturday.

The report said the villagers had fled their homes, mostly near the town of
Poso in the centre of the island, after being attacked by paramilitaries
equipped with firearms, grenades and even bulldozers.

Monsignor Josef Suwatan, the bishop of the town of Manado in northern
Sulawesi, was appealing to the Indonesian authorities to send security forces
to the region immediately, Fides said.

The people had been forced to flee because "their houses were burned down and
the police arrived too late," he was quoted as saying.

He said many of the villagers were sheltering in public buildings and
churches.

Fides said another local church official had accused the Indonesian
authorities of tolerating the attacks.

The United Nations has expressed concern about violence in the centre of
Sulawesi, a large island in the north of the archipelagic country, formerly
known as Celebes.

Poso has been the scene of almost two years of sectarian fighting which has
left more than 300 people dead.

On Tuesday Michael Elmquist, deputy United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator,
said up to 7,000 members of Laskar Jihad -- a Java-based armed Islamic group
which has waged a "jihad" (holy war) against Christians in the Malukus -- may
have moved to Poso to continue their battle.

also: FT: Indonesia intervenes in Semen Gresik row

AFX - Asia
November 30, 2001

Megawati appoints 5 deputy ministers for State Enterprise

JAKARTA

     President Megawati Sukarnoputri said she has appointed
five deputy ministers of State Enterprise to assist the minister in
overseeing state-owned companies.

     The five are Roes Aryawijaya, who will oversee firms operating in the
mining, energy and telecommunication sectors; Mahmudin Yasin, responsible for
restructuring and privatisation; Fuad Husnan, overseeing banking, financial
services, construction and other services; Ferdinan Nainggolan, overseeing
logistics and tourism; and Muwardi P Simatupang, overseeing agro-industry,
forestry, pulp, printing and publication.

     The appointments are part of State Enterprise Minister Laksamana
Sukardi's
efforts to restructure his office.

     Sukardi said at a ceremony installing the deputy ministers that the role
of
state companies is becoming more crucial, particularly in helping the
government by contributing revenue to fill budget needs.

     "Therefore it is highly important for state companies to improve their
performance and implement good corporate governance," he said.

-------------------------

Financial Times [UK]
December 1, 2001

Indonesia intervenes in Semen Gresik row

CEMENT MEXICAN PRODUCER HAS RUN INTO DIFFICULTIES
WITH PROPOSED ACQUISITIONS IN BOTH THAILAND AND INDONESIA:

By TOM MCCAWLEY

Indonesia yesterday moved to break a deadlock between Cemex, the Mexican
cement company, and local governments over the disposal of a 51 per cent
stake in Semen Gresik, the state-owned cement company, that has alarmed
foreign investors and international donors.

Laksamana Sukardi, state enterprise minister, said Indonesia would still sell
the stake in Semen Gresik to Cemex, but it would use part of the proceeds
from the sale to buy back shares in two subsidiaries - preventing Cemex from
acquiring a controlling stake. Indonesia was forced into the compromise after
legislators in Sumatra and Sulawesi, two islands where some of the cement
operations are based, opposed the sale.

They claimedforeigners should not control Indonesian assets.

Cemex executives refused to comment on yesterday's deal and may not agree to
the plan.

The two units in Sumatra and Sulawesi account for half of Semen Gresik's
total annual output. Cemex purchased a 25 per cent stake in Semen Gresik in
1998.

Mr Sukardi said the government hoped the deal would provide Dollars 200m -
far less than the planned Dollars 520m before the compromise.

The government will own 51 per cent of Semen Padang - seen as the group's
jewel in the crown - and Semen Tonasa.

The other 49 per cent will be controlled by Semen Gresik, which in turn will
be 23.5 per cent owned by the public and 76.5 per cent by Cemex, according to
a government statement.

International donors and investors have repeatedly complained about the slow
pace of both buying Indonesian assets and of Indonesia's economic reform
programme.

The government is under pressure to begin a 2001 privatisation programme to
raise funds to plug a growing hole in the budget deficit.

Investors are seeking reassurance that the country is capable of navigating
interests opposed to the sale.

As part of its asset sale programme, Indonesia agreed to sell a 30 per cent
stake in a plantation group to a Belgian company.

In the Dollars 45m deal, Belgium's Nord-Sumatra plantations will increase its
Socfindo stake to 90 per cent from 60 per cent.

The government will keep the outstanding 10 per cent.

4 Articles:

- Weak Leaders, Not Poverty, the Root of All Terrorism
- New Statesman: Britain has traded with just about every dictator
     with a homoerotic military uniform and a pair of bad sunglasses
- WT: Taliban's defeat, TV images boost support for war; Bin Laden
     ridiculed in Arab press
- Time: The Women Of Islam: The Taliban perfected subjugation.
     But nowhere in the Muslim world are women treated as equals

The Advertiser
December  1, 2001

Opinion

Weak leaders, not poverty, the root of all terrorism

By Dr Jose RAMOS-HORTA

     THEY say it is poverty that leads to terrorism. I dispute that. If that
was
the case, then the region of the Sahara in Africa would be a nest of
terrorism.

     It is one of the poorest, most neglected, exploited and abused places, but
not one single, home-grown terrorist group is based there.

     The Middle East is one of the better-off regions of the world. There is
also
poverty but it is definitely far better than Africa, with its oilfields and so
much wealth.

     Why is the Middle East one of the regions chosen by terrorists?

     Yes, there are historical and legitimate grievances. The injustice today
towards the Palestinians is one reason for the resentment and violence there.

     But injustices and poverty are never synonymous with terrorism.

     What you need to avoid terrorism is strong leadership that teaches
non-violence and preaches tolerance. This is why we don't have violence in
East
Timor.

     If poverty was the cause, we would be killing each other or would have
resorted to terrorism. East Timor is one of the most victimised nations in
history, yet we never resort to terrorism. Not one single Indonesian civilian
was killed in East Timor. We have had very strong leadership for a quarter of
a
century. Our fight is not a religious one, nor are we fighting the Indonesian
people - we should not confuse the Indonesian people with the Suharto regime.

     Hatred is all-consuming. It's unhealthy for your mind and body. It stops
you
from moving forward.

     Success and independence is the best way to avenge the deaths of my three
brothers and a sister. I use speech, the word, which hurts the Indonesians
more
than the bullet.

     But my visits to Australia have led me to believe that we should not try
to
teach anything to Australia. If all the problems in the world were like
Australia's, the world would be a paradise.

     Yes, Australia still has problems with its Aboriginal population, with the
original inhabitants of this country. They have had a very rough deal for
generations but, at the same time, there is an extraordinary growing awareness
in support of the Aboriginal claim for reconciliation and justice. If
anything,
Australia itself can show much of the region that it is a very open, tolerant
country.

     I was happy to meet with the Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Alfred Huang, who is
an
ethnic Chinese man speaking English with a very heavy Chinese accent.

     I haven't met too many mayors in Asia who are not Asian. I haven't met any
Irish, Scottish or Anglo-Saxon mayors in  Indonesia,  Malaysia or Hong Kong.

     The Chinese would never consider a non-Chinese for mayor, no matter how
many
generations he has been there. The Japanese still discriminate against Koreans
who have lived there for generations.

     When Asian countries criticise Australia and label it racist, they should
be
more careful, because  Indonesia  has slaughtered thousands of its ethnic
Chinese.

     So in this regard, despite all its shortcomings, I think Australia has
much
more to educate the region than vice versa.

     *  An extract of an interview by Advertiser  journalist Rebekah Devlin
with
East Timor Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta.

-------------------------

New Statesman [UK]
December 3, 2001

Britain has traded with just about every dictator with a homoerotic
military uniform and a pair of bad sunglasses

By Mark Thomas

     Britain's record for arming dictators, political psychopaths and murderous
bastards is well known and long established. Basically, if you can sit
through a
Rorschach test and see butchered corpses in every card held up, Britain will
sell you weapons. This is not just the case with the more recent examples,
such
as Indonesia's President Suharto or Iraq's Saddam Hussein; even back in the
First World War, British arms manufacturers managed to sell to both sides.

     I would not be surprised to discover that Britain had done business with
Napoleon and the Spanish conquistadors, nor that King Harold was killed by an
arrow with 'Made in the UK' on the shaft. Had he won the Battle of Hastings,
the
first thing King Harold would have done was set up a high-profile 'crossbows
to
Normandy inquiry', resulting in no one being found responsible or losing their
job. The Anglo-Saxons would then have boasted proudly of an 'ethical dimension
to bow and arrow sales', only to be caught later flogging siege catapults to
  Indonesia.  In fact, though I have absolutely no proof, I am willing to bet a
fiver that Britain did a roaring trade in flints to Cro-Magnon man.

     Over the years, British politicians have had plenty of chances to practise
their excuses for trading with just about every single dictator with a
homoerotic military uniform and a pair of bad Seventies sunglasses. So far the
best argument that the Foreign Office and the Department of Trade and Industry
have managed to muster is the policy of 'critical engagement'. The idea of
'critical engagement' is that by establishing trade and diplomatic links* with
countries with appalling records of human rights abuse, they will become more
'civilised'. Strangely enough, neither the DTI nor the FO can explain just how
selling huge quantities of weapons to torturing states improves civil
liberties.

     People who have highly prioritised their interest in guns tend not to be
that concerned with human rights. If this were not the case, the Countryside
Alliance march would have been full of people with green wellies and
Labradors,
waving shotguns and wearing Amnesty International T-shirts. Maybe I am wrong
and
on the glorious 12th a bunch of corporate hoorays spend the day blasting birds
out of the air, only to dash back home, down a quick Glenmorangie and spend
the
evening writing to prisoners of conscience in Burma.

     Surely, if you buy shed loads of tear gas, truncheons, tanks, assault
rifles, mortars and the like, you are under enormous pressure to use them - if
only to find out what they do. No one, not even Mahatma Gandhi, could spend
hundreds of millions on arms and think: 'Let's just keep them in the cupboard
for a rainy day.' So when Britain sold GBP188m of arms to Turkey in 1999, the
Turks must have been itching to use them. A year later, presumably after the
Turks had 'tried out' their new weapons, Britain received nearly 4,000
asylum-seekers from Turkey. Many of those refugees were likely to have been on
the receiving end of 'critical engagement'.

     That this policy is not only a failure but a PR shame morally to justify
trade with torturing states is well highlighted by the case of Turkey. In late
1999, Turkey was made a candidate for membership of the European Union.
Obviously, the EU cannot include among its members a country that still uses
the
death penalty, discriminates in the most racist and oppressive manner against
the Kurdish minority, boasts a terrible track record for banning freedom of
expression and easily tops the league for torturing states in Nato. This is
the
time, argue the proponents of 'critical engagement', when Turkey will be
forced
to change.

     How wrong they are. The latest EU progress report on Turkey, published on
13
November, states that Turkey has not improved 'the situation as regards
torture
and mistreatment', giving the EU 'serious grounds for concern'. In fact, the
report goes on to state that the torture rate has increased in the first nine
months of this year. A week after the publication of this report, the Human
Rights Association in Ankara confirmed that the annual number of complaints of
torture and humiliating treatment in custody has nearly doubled since 1999,
from 472 to 762.

     For all the talk of dialogue and engagement, Turkey has not only failed to
improve on its human rights record, it has got worse.

     Indeed, Turkey has increased its attacks on those who defend civil
liberties. The MP Sema Piskinsut was the head of the Turkish Parliamentary
Commission on Human Rights. During an unannounced inspection of a Turkish
police
station at three in the morning, she found a locked door. The police refused
to
open it. Eventually she 'pushed the door panel in' to discover 'a frame on
which
people were hung up'. In her efforts to show how widespread torture is,
Piskinsut has taken torture equipment from more than 30 police stations in 14
different provinces, including electro-shock equipment, high-pressure hoses,
hooks and truncheons. For this, she has been sacked and arrested on trumped-up
charges.

     If we are to accept Labour's assertions that trade and diplomacy have an
effect on a country's human rights, then it follows that the worsening of
Turkey's torture rate is in part due to Britain trading with that country. In
which case, if Britain is genuine about wanting to improve civil liberties
there, it will stop selling arms to our Turkish coalition allies against
terror.
Until that happens, Blair will remain another one of the new world order's
pious
apologists for torture.

     * Yes, I know they are the same thing

----------------------------------

The Washington Times
November  30, 2001

Taliban's defeat, TV images boost support for war;
Bin Laden ridiculed in Arab press

By Ben Barber; THE WASHINGTON TIMES

    Moderate Arab leaders say they got a big boost in public support in their
own
countries from the rout of the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies in Afghanistan.

    Osama bin Laden, who had been gaining heroic stature in many Arab eyes
through his defiance of the United States, has been ridiculed in some Arab
newspapers since the Taliban collapsed and the suspected terror kingpin went
into hiding in the past two weeks.

    "The quicker the war, the more positive the impact" on U.S.-Arab relations,
said Tunisian Ambassador Hatem Atallah during an interview at The Washington
Times this week.

    British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others had warned a few weeks ago
that
the West was losing the "propaganda war" for the support of the Arab and
Islamic
public.

    But with widespread scenes of Afghans celebrating their liberation from the
Taliban being televised around the world, "people could feel more
comfortable,"
the ambassador said.

    "The message was that the war was not against Muslims but against
terrorism,
al Qaeda and the regime that harbored it," he said.

    Other Arab visitors to Washington have made the same point in recent days.

    Hamed Fahmy, vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt,
said yesterday that Cairo newspapers recently published photographs of
American
soldiers surrounded by happy, smiling children.

    Jafar Hassan, deputy chief of mission at the Jordanian Embassy in
Washington,
said, "Actual hostilities are coming to an end and that will diminish civilian
suffering.  That's a good beginning because collateral damage is a major
source
of domestic pressure."

    Another Washington-based Arab diplomat, who asked not to be identified,
said
the Bush administration had helped make its case by sending a negotiating team
headed by retired U.S.  Marine Corps Gen.  Anthony Zinni to the Middle East
this
week.

    "The timing showed genius - at the same time as the United States defeated
the Taliban, it declared an initiative in the Middle East.  That proved that
the
war was not against Islam," the diplomat said.

    Other analysts and academics following Middle East affairs said hard-line
activists in the region are on the defensive.

    "I could see the change in the cartoons in newspapers - there is much more
willingness to poke fun at bin Laden," said one analyst with close ties to the
Bush administration.

    But the diplomats and specialists said it will be hard for Arab nations to
support any extension of the war on terrorism to other countries, such as
Iraq,
unless there is clear evidence of a link to the September 11 attacks and
progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process.

    Hassan Abdel Rahman, the Washington representative of the Palestinian
Authority, said the defeat of the Taliban and al Qaeda "gives more
credibility"
to U.S.  peace efforts in the Middle East.

    The victory in Afghanistan could lead to a broad rejection of anti-Western
extremists in the Muslim world "if the United States uses the capital it
achieved to solve other problems important to the Arab world," he said.

    Several Arabs diplomats said the Afghan campaign has shown how shallow
support is for Islamic extremism in the Muslim world.

    After the U.S.  bombing began Oct.  7, about a dozen anti-American
demonstrations took place in Pakistan,  Indonesia  and the Middle East. Within
three weeks, street protests had essentially ended.

    "No one will shed tears over bin Laden or al Qaeda," said the Middle East
specialist with administration ties.  "Obviously, Allah is not with them or
they
would not have suffered such a great defeat."

    More moderate regimes are now willing to go after their own fundamentalists
and confront them, he said.

    But there is also a bitter aftertaste.  Once again Muslims are getting
beaten
by a Western power.  So efforts to revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace
process
are needed to counter that image, he said.

--------------------------------

Time
December 3, 2001

The Women Of Islam;

The Taliban perfected subjugation. But nowhere in the Muslim world are women
treated as equals

By Lisa Beyer, Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Amanda Bower/New York,
Andrew Finkel/Istanbul, Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi, Scott MacLeod/Riyadh,
Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran, Amany Radwan/Cairo, Matt Rees/Amman and Simon
Robinson/Sana'a

    For his day, the Prophet Muhammad was a feminist. The doctrine he laid out
as
the revealed word of God considerably improved the status of women in 7th
century Arabia. In local pagan society, it was the custom to bury alive
unwanted
female newborns; Islam prohibited the practice. Women had been treated as
possessions of their husbands; Islamic law made the education of girls a
sacred duty and gave women the right to own and inherit property. Muhammad
even
decreed that sexual satisfaction was a woman's entitlement. He was a liberal
at
home as well as in the pulpit. The Prophet darned his own garments and among
his
wives and concubines had a trader, a warrior, a leatherworker and an imam.

    Of course, ancient advances do not mean that much to women 14 centuries
later
if reform is, rather than a process, a historical blip subject to reversal.
While it is impossible, given their diversity, to paint one picture of women
living under Islam today, it is clear that the religion has been used in most
Muslim countries not to liberate but to entrench inequality. The Taliban, with
its fanatical subjugation of the female sex, occupies an extreme, but it
nevertheless belongs on a continuum that includes, not so far down the line,
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and the relatively moderate states of Egypt and
Jordan. Where Muslims have afforded women the greatest degree of equality--in
Turkey--they have done so by overthrowing Islamic precepts in favor of secular
rule. As Riffat Hassan, professor of religious studies at the University of
Louisville, puts it, "The way Islam has been practiced in most Muslim
societies
for centuries has left millions of Muslim women with battered bodies, minds
and
souls."

    Part of the problem dates to Muhammad. Even as he proclaimed new rights for
women, he enshrined their inequality in immutable law, passed down as God's
commandments and eventually recorded in scripture. The Koran allots daughters
half the inheritance of sons. It decrees that a woman's testimony in court, at
least in financial matters, is worth half that of a man's. Under Shari'a, or
Muslim law, compensation for the murder of a woman is half the going rate for
men. In many Muslim countries, these directives are incorporated into
contemporary law. For a woman to prove rape in Pakistan, for example, four
adult
males of "impeccable" character must witness the penetration, in accordance
with
Shari'a.

    Family law in Islamic countries generally follows the prescriptions of
scripture. This is so even in a country like Egypt, where much of the legal
code
has been secularized. In Islam, women can have only one spouse, while men are
permitted four. The legal age for girls to marry tends to be very young.
Muhammad's favorite wife, A'isha, according to her biographer, was six when
they
wed, nine when the marriage was consummated. In Iran the legal age for
marriage
is nine for girls, 14 for boys. The law has occasionally been exploited by
pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then
abandon
them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls
to
14, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional
clerics
vetoed the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen's legal minimum
age of 15 for girls failed, but local experts say it is rarely enforced
anyway.
(The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a marriage to be
consummated.)

    Wives in Islamic societies face great difficulty in suing for divorce, but
husbands can be released from their vows virtually on demand, in some places
merely by saying "I divorce you" three times. Though in most Muslim states,
divorces are entitled to alimony, in Pakistan it lasts only three months, long
enough to ensure the woman isn't pregnant. The same three-month rule applies
even to the Muslim minority in India. There, a national law provides for
long-term alimony, but to appease Islamic conservatives, authorities exempted
Muslims.

    Fear of poverty keeps many Muslim women locked in bad marriages, as does
the
prospect of losing their children. Typically, fathers win custody of boys over
the age of six and girls after the onset of puberty. Maryam, an Iranian woman,
says she has stayed married for 20 years to a philandering opium addict she
does
not love because she fears losing guardianship of her teenage daughter. "Islam
supposedly gives me the right to divorce," she says. "But what about my rights
afterward?"

    Women's rights are compromised further by a section in the Koran, sura
4:34,
that has been interpreted to say that men have "pre-eminence" over women or
that
they are "overseers" of women. The verse goes on to say that the husband of an
insubordinate wife should first admonish her, then leave her to sleep alone
and
finally beat her. Wife beating is so prevalent in the Muslim world that social
workers who assist battered women in Egypt, for example, spend much of their
time trying to convince victims that their husbands' violent acts are
unacceptable.

    Beatings are not the worst of female suffering. Each year hundreds of
Muslim
women die in "honor killings"--murders by husbands or male relatives of women
suspected of disobedience, usually a sexual indiscretion or marriage against
the
family's wishes. Typically, the killers are punished lightly, if at all. In
Jordan a man who slays his wife or a close relative after catching her in the
act of adultery is exempt from punishment. If the situation only suggests
illicit sex, he gets a reduced sentence. The Jordanian royal family has made
the
rare move of condemning honor killings, but the government, fearful of
offending conservatives, has not put its weight behind a proposal to repeal
laws
that grant leniency for killers. Jordan's Islamic Action Front, a powerful
political party, has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying the proposal
would "destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their
humanity when they surprise their wives or female relatives committing
adultery."

    Honor killings are an example of a practice that is commonly associated
with
Islam but actually has broader roots. It is based in medieval tribal culture,
in
which a family's authority, and ultimately its survival, was tightly linked to
its honor. Arab Christians have been known to carry out honor killings.
However,
Muslim perpetrators often claim their crimes are justified by harsh Islamic
penalties, including death for adultery. And so religious and cultural customs
become confused.

    Female circumcision, also called female genital mutilation, is another case
in point. It involves removing part or all of a girl's clitoris and labia in
an
effort to reduce female sexual desire and thereby preserve chastity. FGM is
widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and in Egypt, with scattered cases in Asia
and
other parts of the Middle East. The World Health Organization estimates that
up
to 140 million girls and women have undergone the procedure. Some Muslims
believe it is mandated by Islam, but the practice predates Muhammad and is
also
common among some Christian communities.

    Sexual anxiety lies at the heart of many Islamic strictures on women. They
are required to cover their bodies--in varying degrees in different
places--for
fear they might arouse the lust of men other than their husbands. The Koran
instructs women to "guard their modesty," not to "display their beauty and
ornaments" and to "draw their veils." Saudi women typically don a billowy
black
cloak called an abaya, along with a black scarf and veil over the face;
morality
police enforce the dress code by striking errant women with sticks. The women
of
Iran and Sudan can expose the face but must cover the hair and the neck.

    In most Islamic countries, coverings are technically optional. Some women,
including some feminists, wear them because they like them. They find that the
veil liberates them from unwanted gazes and hassles from men. But many Muslim
women feel cultural and family pressure to cover themselves. Recently a Muslim
fundamentalist group in the Indian province of Kashmir demanded that women
start
wearing veils. When the call was ignored, hooligans threw acid in the faces of
uncovered women.

    Limits placed on the movement of Muslim women, the jobs they can hold and
their interactions with men are also rooted in fears of unchaste behavior. The
Taliban took these controls to an extreme, but the Saudis are also harsh,
imposing on women some of the tightest restrictions on personal and civil
freedoms anywhere in the world. Saudi women are not allowed to drive. They are
effectively forbidden education in fields such as engineering and law. They
can
teach and provide medical care to other women but are denied almost all other
government jobs. Thousands have entered private business, but they must work
segregated from men and in practice are barred from advancement.

    Though Iran is remembered in the West mostly for its repressive ayatullahs,
women there enjoy a relatively high degree of liberty. Iranian women drive
cars,
buy and sell property, run their own businesses, vote and hold public office.
In most Muslim countries tradition keeps ordinary women at home and off the
street, but Iran's avenues are crowded with women day and night. They make up
25% of the work force, a third of all government employees and 54% of college
students. Still, Iranian women are--like women in much of the Arab
world--forbidden to travel overseas without the permission of their husband or
father, though the rule is rarely enforced in Iran.

    Gender reforms are slow and hard-fought. In 1999 the Emir of Kuwait, Sheik
Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, issued a decree for the first time giving women the
right to vote in and stand for election to the Kuwaiti parliament, the only
lively Arab legislature in the Persian Gulf. Conservatives in parliament,
however, blocked its implementation. In addition, the legislature has voted to
segregate the sexes at Kuwait University. Morocco's government has proposed
giving women more marriage and property rights and a primary role in
developmental efforts, but fundamentalists are resisting the measures.

    Muslim women are starting to score political victories, including election
to
office. In Syria 26 of the 250 members of parliament are female. In Iraq the
numbers are 19 out of 250. Four Muslim countries have been or are currently
led
by women. In Pakistan, Bangladesh and  Indonesia,  they rose to prominence on
the coattails of deceased fathers or husbands. But Turkey's Tansu Ciller,
Prime
Minister from 1993 to 1995, won entirely on her own.

    Turkey is an exception to many rules. Women in Turkey are the most
liberated
in the Muslim world, though Malaysia and  Indonesia  come close, having hosted
relatively progressive cultures before Islam came to Southeast Asia in the 9th
century. In Turkish professional life women enjoy a level of importance that
is impressive not only by the standards of other Islamic countries but also by
European lights. Turkey's liberalism is a legacy of the republic's founder,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, an aggressive secularist who gave women rights
unprecedented in the Muslim world (even if he found it hard to accept women as
equals in his own life). Last week the Turkish parliament went a step further
by
reforming family law. Previously, a man was the head of the household, able to
make unilateral decisions concerning children. No more. The law also
establishes
community property in marriages and raises the marriageable age of girls from
15
to 18.

    Around the Islamic world, women are scoring other victories, small and
large.
Iran's parliament recently compromised with conservative clerics to allow a
single young woman to study abroad, albeit with her father's permission.
Bangladesh passed legislation increasing the punishments for crimes against
women, including rape, kidnapping and acid attacks. Egypt has banned female
circumcision and made it easier for women to sue for divorce. In Qatar women
have the right to participate in municipal elections and are promised the same
rights in first-ever parliamentary balloting scheduled to take place by 2003.
Bahrain has assured women voters and candidates that they will be included in
new elections for its suspended parliament.

    Saudi Arabia, the chief holdout, has at least pledged to start issuing ID
cards to women. Today the only legal evidence of a Saudi woman's existence is
the appearance of her name on her husband's card. If she gets divorced, her
name
goes on her father's card; if he's dead, her brother's; and if she has no
brother, the card of her closest male relative, even if she scarcely knows
him.
Manar, 35, a Riyadh translator, thinks ID cards for women will make a real
difference. "As long as you are a follower, you cannot have a separate
opinion,
you cannot be outspoken," she says. "Once you have a separate identity, then
other things will come." For most Muslim women, there are many things left to
come.

    --Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Amanda Bower/New York, Andrew
Finkel/Istanbul, Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi, Scott MacLeod/Riyadh, Azadeh
Moaveni/Tehran, Amany Radwan/Cairo, Matt Rees/Amman and Simon Robinson/Sana'a

A SECULAR MODEL, TURKEY, Turkish women, the most liberated in the Muslim
world, had their own version of Ms.--the title bayan--by the 1930s, long
before Americans. Here, students of a military medical academy march in a
ceremony celebrating the founding of the modern republic by Kemal Ataturk;
COLOR PHOTO: SCOTT PETERSON--GETTY IMAGES,

MODERATE CULTURE, IRAN, Though women's legal rights have been curtailed since
the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iranian society remains more progressive than
its law. Near a ski lift in the Alborz Mountains, a woman lets her hair slip
from the confines of her scarf. The ski resort no longer segregates the
sexes; COLOR PHOTO: STEVE RAYMER--ASIA IMAGES,

MOVING AHEAD, MALAYSIA, Malaysian women, who make up half
that country's university students, are entering the professions in rising
numbers. Women hold the offices of attorney general, central bank governor and
trade minister. In two states ruled by fundamentalists, though, head coverings
are required by law; COLOR PHOTO: BARRY IVERSON FOR TIME,

MIX OF CUSTOMS, EGYPT, Women in Egypt range from traditional to Westernized,
though with the resurgence of Islam in recent decades, veils have become more
common. A new law has made it easier for a woman to get a divorce, but she
still cannot leave the country without her husband's permission; COLOR PHOTO:
ROBERT NICKELSBERG--GETTY IMAGES,

LEGAL SETBACKS, PAKISTAN, Laws passed during an Islamization drive favor
rapists and equate the testimony of one man to that of two women. Although
Islam
encourages education, most females are illiterate. Even within the confines
of a
women's university in Rawalpindi, these women continue to veil themselves;
COLOR

PHOTO: AMI VITALE--GETTY IMAGES, VIOLENT THREATS, KASHMIR, When Muslim women
in Kashmir ignored a fundamentalist group's demand that they veil themselves
from head to toe, radicals began throwing acid in the faces of uncovered
women. Local women quickly began covering themselves when out in public, at
least for a time;

COLOR PHOTO: SCOTT PETERSON--GETTY IMAGES, SEXUAL APARTHEID, SAUDI ARABIA, In
the official subjugation of women, it took the Taliban to outdo the Saudis.
Women here are not allowed to drive cars or fly anywhere without permission.
They can work only in segregation from men and must cover themselves when in
public or in the presence of the opposite sex

also: Slash and Burn

Inter Press Service
November 30, 2001

ENVIRONMENT: ASIA FACES $ 30 BILLION FINANCIAL GAP A YEAR

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

PHNOM PENH,

    Asia-Pacific countries need an extra $ 30 billion annually in order to
adequately fund the development and environmental needs of a region already
strapped for resources, officials meeting here say.

    To raise these funds, the developing countries in the region - - home to
the
bulk of the world's poor -- will have to turn to external and internal
resources, environment officials from 48 countries said in a three-day meeting
to shape a regional position for the World Summit on Sustainable Development
next year.

    This task will not be easy, given the dip in overseas development
assistance
in recent years and the difficulties poorer economies face in trying to raise
local resources during the current global economic downturn, difficult terms
of
trade and risk-wary private capital.

    Thus, while the role of developed countries is key to bridging this
financial
gap, the Asian officials said these nations have yet to honor commitments made
10 years ago at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to provide "official
development assistance to meet the target of 0.7 percent of GNP (gross
national
product) as soon as possible."

    For decades, the 0.7 percent target has the international standard for the
amount of aid industrialized countries are supposed to give to poorer nations.
But only five countries -- Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and
Sweden
-- have met this target.

    Aid funds have also been stagnant or falling over the last decade and a
hike
is unlikely. Since 1992, 14 of 21 donor countries have seen their aid budgets
decline. Japan cut its aid budget by 3 percent in the last fiscal year.

    But apart from looking at external funds, Asia-Pacific governments from
Iran
to the Pacific island nations also have to shoulder responsibility in meeting
the shortfall of environment and development funds, the draft platform says.

    "We stress the primary role of domestic mobilization and efforts at the
national level in financing sustainable development," the document added.

    "Domestic resource mobilization is very critical now," says Cielito
Habito, a
Filipino economist who chaired a discussion on the document yesterday.
"Governments cannot be let off the hook."

    At the same time, Habito, a former economics and planning minister in the
Philippines, says Asian governments should look beyond government action. He
pointed to the pivotal role that the business sector plays in the
Asia-Pacific's
goal of attaining sustainable development.

    "The current trends bear this out. Private financial flows have grown
rapidly
while overseas development aid has decreased," he explained.

    However, activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were not
impressed by the document being given its final touches by the region's
governments.

    "Financing sustainable development calls for a profound change in global
and
regional economic transactions," stated a critique of the Asia-Pacific
regional
platform by a coalition of local and regional NGOs, the Asia-Pacific People's
Forum on Sustainable Development.

    "Two critical issues here are the crippling debt burdens and deteriorating
terms of trade faced by developing countries," said a statement by the forum,
which met a few days ago in order to submit proposals to the government
delegations at the meeting.

    Some Asian countries, including those hit hard by the 1997 crisis, continue
to juggle foreign debt problems. In  Indonesia,  for instance, the per capita
debt burden stands at $ 700.

    While global trade volume has been rising, prices of commodities --
important
foreign exchange earners for many developing countries -- have been falling
since the mid-1990s.

    Prices of manufactured goods have also been declining and the global
slowdown
has cut export growth rates among a good number of Asian economies, from Iran
to
Taiwan. The International Monetary Fund sees export growth rates falling from
13
percent in Hong Kong last year to 11.5 percent this year

    "The present global economic and financial governance structures are
detrimental to the interest and needs of developing countries," the group
added,
saying that the region's environment officials are not looking into deeper
structural problems beyond the lack of funds.

    "Unless the structures are reformed and alternative financial and
governance
structures established, financing for sustainable development will remain
beyond
the reach of countries in the region," it explained.

    The text is woefully short of clear "actions that can be pursued by
governments at the national level," said Shalmali Guttal, of the Bangkok-based
independent research body Focus on the Global South. "It lacks being specific
about sustainable forms of financing, like capital controls and
progressive taxation."

    Capital controls emerged as a proposal after the 1997 Asian economic crisis
as a way of protecting economies from the damage that can be caused by
volatile
capital movements.

    "Governments need to move away from accepting the current order, where
development aid comes with strings attached and conditions," she added,
referring to what activists consider the downside of foreign assistance.

    "We are also concerned at the way the business sector is being involved.
What
matters is to encourage the local private sector, not create conditions for
multinational companies to have bigger roles in Asia's developing countries,"
Guttal explained.

    Joseph Weinstock, senior environment specialist at the Manila- based Asian
Development Bank (AsDB), conceded: "The NGOs have a point in being concerned
about multinational companies."

    "But NGOs and civil society activists have the capacity to challenge
multinationals. They can campaign against products, call for a boycott, expose
multinationals that are damaging the environment," he added. "More companies
have realized it is good public relations to be green-friendly."

    The Asia-Pacific region faces increasing pressure on the environment, with
problems such as deteriorating water resources, the effects of global warming,
pollution, congested cities, and over-exploitation of natural resources.

    "Most countries in the Asian and the Pacific region are currently
characterized by high to very high pressure on land as indicated by the levels
of per capita availability," according to a report jointly published by the
AsDB
and the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

    Already, some 851 million hectares or 25 percent of the region's land has
been degraded, says the State of the Environment in Asia and the Pacific
report
for 2000.

    Half of the region's forest area has already vanished and another 750,000
hectares are being lost each year.

---------------------------

New Scientist
December 1, 2001

Slash and burn

By Charlie Pye-Smith

If we want more mahogany, we need to mimic hurricanes and fire


     EFFORTS to re-establish the world's mahogany trees are misfiring. "Green"
forestry practices, such as selective logging, are not helping saplings as
much
as clearing large patches of rainforest.

     "Forest departments around the world have invested millions of dollars
doing
something that doesn't work," says Laura Snook of the Indonesia -based Center
for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). Snook and her team in Central
America have found that planting mahogany under the forest canopy - a practice
known as enrichment - is futile.

     Mahogany is the most valuable Amazonian hardwood on the international
market, and the rapid loss of the tree over much of its range in Central
America
and Amazonia reflects not just the intensity of logging activities, but also
mahogany's failure to regrow successfully in logged areas.

     Part of the reason is that mahogany thrives on natural catastrophes.
Snook's
team has found that it needs events such as hurricanes and fires to survive.
"If
we are to encourage the regeneration of mahogany," she says, "we need to learn
how to mimic nature."

     To reproduce and prosper, mahogany needs plenty of sunlight. This is a
rare
commodity in both primary rainforest and selectively logged forests, but is
readily available when forests are struck by hurricanes, which are often
followed by fires. Because mahogany can withstand strong winds and fire, it is
often the sole species to survive and set seed, and its saplings get a head
start on other species. By the time they catch up, its crown is already at the
top of the canopy.

     Five years ago, Snook and Patricia Negreros-Castillo of Iowa State
University set up a series of experimental plots in Mexico to work out the
best
way to encourage mahogany to regrow. They used various techniques to clear 24
separate 5000-square-metre patches of forest, and planted 20 mahogany
in each. They also planted seedlings under closed canopy.

     After five years, 49 per cent of the seedlings had survived in plots
subjected to slash-and-burn - which is a good approximation of a hurricane
followed by fire. Meanwhile, 31 per cent survived in plots that had been
clear-felled, and only 5 per cent survived under closed canopy. Seedling
growth
was strongest on slash-and-burn plots, averaging 3.73 metres, compared with
2.69
metres after clear-felling and just 14 centimetres under closed canopy. With
green foresting practices, such as selective logging, much of the canopy
remains
closed. Similar experiments in Belize suggested that mahogany seedlings fare
better in clearings of 5000 rather than 500 square metres.

     The findings are influencing forestry practice. In Mexico's Yucatan
peninsula, Mayan Indians who harvest mahogany are now being encouraged to
plant
seedlings in their slash-and-burn fields.

Yang terhormat Milist Milist Berita-bhinneka!

Apakah anda telah melihat solusi Renald Kasali di AN TV pada tanggal 29 Nov 2001
malam Jam 20.30

Kami berikan e-books gratis buat anda mengenai solusi tersebut.

Download segera di http://club.i8.com/solusi.zip

Salam Sukses

Two suspected rebels, one civilian killed in Indonesia's Aceh province

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, Nov 30 (AFP) - Two suspected separatist rebels and a
woman civilian have been killed in the latest violence in the troubled
Indonesian province of Aceh, police said Friday.

Police shot dead Munirwan bin Ali Basyah during a search for Free Aceh
Movement (GAM) rebels at a market in Pidie district on Thursday, said the
local police chief, Assistant Senior Commissioner Sunardi.

GAM spokesman Abu Razak said Munirwan was not a rebel.

A guerrilla fighter and a woman were killed in a gunfight Thursday between
rebels and police in Seuneubok Baro village in East Aceh, local police chief
Commissioner Gaguk Sumartono said.

He said the woman, a civilian, might have been caught in the crossfire.

A GAM spokesman, Ishak Daud, said police also killed a civilian in a search
for GAM hideouts in a neighboring village.

In another incident, rebels ambushed a military truck and wounded two
soldiers in the Lam Paya area of Aceh Besar district late Wednesday, said
local military spokesman Captain Suharto.

Aceh, an oil- and gas-rich province on the north of Sumatra island, has been
wracked by violence between separatist rebels and security forces. More than
1,600 people have died this year alone.

GAM has waged a guerrilla war for an independent state in Aceh since 1976.

5 articles:

- Why Few Will Mourn Enron's Demise
- WSJ: Enron's friends in high places: President George W.
     Bush's biggest backer
- NYT Editorial: The Rise and Fall of Enron;
- Slate: Enron's Unfortunate Employee Owners
- How The Darling of The White House Ended Up As 'Junk'

The Guardian [UK]
November 30, 2001

A bad business

It was once America's seventh largest company, but today Enron is about to go
bust. John Vidal explains why few will mourn its demise

John Vidal
Guardian

At 5am on June 3 1997, Indian police officers burst into the home of Sugandha
Vasudev Bhalekar, a three-month pregnant, 24-year-old housewife living in the
village of Veldur in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. She was dragged
into a waiting police van, beaten with sticks and arrested. Her crimes, it
transpired, were to be married to a man who was a leading objector to India's
largest ever development - a $2.8bn natural-gas plant being built by the
world's biggest gas company - and to have taken part in one of the
demonstrations herself.

Enron, the company, denied any role in the arrests or beatings, and stated
that its subsidiary, the Dabhol Power Company, did not employ, second or
subcontract police officers at the site. It's a moot point, said the
company's critics. Following dozens of other beatings and arrests of people
who objected peacefully to the clearance of their communities for the mammoth
plant, the American Human Rights Watch group investigated.

It found categorical evidence, it said, that Enron was paying the government
directly to specifically police the protests, and were also lending the
police its helicopters: "The Dabhol Power Corporation and its parent company,
Enron, are complicit in these human rights violations. Enron's local entity,
the Dabhol Power Corp, benefited directly from an official policy of
suppressing dissent through misuse of the law, harassment of anti-Enron
protest leaders and prominent environmental activists, and police practices
ranging from arbitrary to brutal," states the Human Rights Watch report.

Enron denied it, but then Amnesty investigated. It found "suppression of
local protests" and said that people who protested against Enron, however
peacefully, were liable to "harassment, arbitrary arrest, preventive
detention under the ordinary criminal law and ill-treatment".

All this has helped put Enron's name near the top of the anti-globalisers'
"evil empire" list, alongside the likes of Monsanto, Shell, McDonald's, Gap,
Nike and Exxon. But it is the organisation's sheer scale, business methods,
manipulation of the international political process and extremely tight links
with those in power that have caused outrage on at least three continents.

On Wednesday this much-loathed company was forced to the brink of bankruptcy
(it's likely to go bust this weekend) after rival energy firm Dynegy pulled
out of a life-saving merger. Earlier, Enron's stock had collapsed after
irregularities were discovered in the company's books. It is now poised to
become the biggest bankruptcy in history.

Just a year ago, however, the company was one of the great corporate success
stories. For more than a decade it spread the gospel of gas as a clean energy
throughout the world, building new pipelines and power plants in countries
such as Brazil, India, Mozambique, the Philippines, Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Indonesia and China. Its empire strode over gas, wind power and other
electricity generation, but lately it moved into "bandwidth" capacity for the
internet, making it one of the world's largest internet-based trading
companies, buying and selling a dizzying array of products ranging from pulp
and paper to petrochemicals and plastics. It was, at its height, America's
seventh largest business.

Like Monsanto and McDonald's, outsiders said it had a corporate culture that
was almost evangelical in its conviction: it believed that what it was doing
was not just right, but good for the world. Wherever it went, its executives
would say that Enron brought wealth and peace and efficiency to poor people.
It espoused competition, the free market, world trade, globalisation and
deregulation.

But its huge financial success was largely due to old-fashioned muscle and
political clout. Enron was a Texan company and its links with both Presidents
Bush have been long and deep. Over the years, the company and its employees
have given the Bushes more money than any other organisation. Thanks largely
to Enron, they ran two campaigns for governor, and two White House campaigns.
During the 2000 election, it gave $2.3m to federal candidates and the
political parties, more than double its $1.1m in 1998 and more than any other
energy company.

Enron, it may be said, grew on the back of the Bushes. When it won the
massive contract to replace one of Kuwait's power plants after the Gulf war,
critics pointed to the fact that Bush (senior) had visited Kuwait along with
former US secretary of state James Baker. It just so happened that Baker,
former commerce secretary Robert Mosbacher, and Thomas Kelly, the director of
operations for Bush's joint chiefs of staff during the Gulf war, were all on
the Enron payroll, according to US reporter Seymour Hersh in a 1993 New
Yorker magazine article.

Enron's price for supplying the power was 11 cents a kilowatt hour. A rival
bid put forward by the German company, Deutsche Babcock, was six cents, while
the state-subsidised rate was half-a-cent a kilowatt hour. Despite the large
price differences, Enron won the contract.

But in the end, political connections were not enough. Almost everywhere
Enron went, it left a trail of cash, accusations and angry communities. This
August, two people died at Enron's plant in Redcar, Teeside in an explosion.
When it was buying up Wessex water in Britain five years ago, it was accused
of lobbing Labour £30,000 over two years. There were accusations in Panama
that it was abusing its influence with energy minister Luis Carlos Valenzuela
to force the state oil company to sign a "sweetheart deal" with them to
export natural gas to Central American countries.

In the Philippines and Argentina, Enron was accused of putting massive
pressure on the local authorities through powerful figures in the US
government. Only a blunt threat by the US national security council to cut
off future aid to the country is said to have saved its plan to develop
Mozambique's Pande natural gas field.

Enron has always beaten the community- friendly drum - it has given
generously to schools and regularly picks up environment awards. The
environmentalists, however, are withering. Pratap Chatterjee, a former
Guardian contributor now working for Corporate Watch in the US, says: "The
Enron methanol plant in Texas won special concessions from Bush when he was
governor, allowing the company to pollute without a permit." Bush also gave
the company immunity from prosecution for violating some pollution laws. In
1997 alone, says Chatterjee, Enron's plant emitted 3,500 tonnes of nitrogen
oxides, a key ingredient of smog, and only 7% of the emissions would normally
be classed as legal.

Although Enron has now finally come unstuck, it's deeply disturbingly how
easily it sailed through most of its battles, brushing off its critics with
disdain and using power to batter them down. In 1997 it was accused by a
coalition of western and indigenous groups of taking US government cash to
open up pristine forest areas in the Bolivian Amazon. Friends of the Earth
and Amazon Watch called on the government to terminate its financing deal
with Enron on the grounds that it was violating the loan conditions and
systematically failing to adhere to the environmental and social safeguards.
No one listened and the pipeline went through. "They just stitched it up with
government," says Friends of the Earth campaigner Jonathan Sohn. "But I think
everyone is better off now without a giant bully rampaging around."

-------------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal
November 30, 2001

Enron's friends in high places: President George W. Bush's biggest
backer

By Bob Davis

    For years, Enron Corp. chairman Ken Lay has been George W. Bush's best
friend
in the boardrooms of America's top corporations. Since 1993, Mr. Lay and Enron
have donated nearly US$2-million to Mr. Bush's political career, making them
the
President's biggest backers.

    When Mr. Bush was Texas governor, Mr. Lay, a Houston resident, helped him
win
passage of a state education reform plan that brought Mr. Bush national
acclaim.
During that fight, Mr. Lay got to know aides who became power players in the
Bush White House.

    Still, as Enron faces its greatest crisis, Mr. Lay's influence and personal
relationships with the administration have amounted to little. There appears
to
be no effort by the White House or Congress to bail Enron out of its
difficulties. The White House had no comment on Mr. Lay's predicament, a
spokeswoman said. Indeed, short of an actual bailout to help Enron meet its
obligations there is little Washington can do to help the company. Nor is
there
likely to be a bailout, since Enron has burned many bridges on Capitol Hill
with
its history of strong-arm lobbying tactics.

    That may reassure a cynical public, says Robert Mosbacher, commerce
secretary
in the first Bush administration and a longtime friend of the current
president
and Mr. Lay. 'I don't see anybody being let off the hook,' he said. Still,
Andrew Wheat, research director for Texans for Public Justice, which tracks
political giving in that state, says Mr. Lay's friends in high places may have
given Enron a false sense of security. 'Part of their hubris had to do with
the
fact that this is a corporation with U.S. presidents at its beck and call,' he
says.

    Mr. Mosbacher says he introduced Mr. Lay to the Bush family around 1987
when
he persuaded Mr. Lay to help raise money for the senior George Bush's
successful
presidential bid in 1988. Several years later, Mr. Lay helped organize and
raise funds for an international economic summit in Houston, where Enron is
based, and made sure to include George W. Bush, then an executive with the
Texas
Rangers baseball team, in the planning.

    Mr. Lay contributed US$461,000 to the younger Mr. Bush's two successful
gubernatorial campaigns. He also made Enron's fleet of corporate jets
available
to Mr. Bush and won his help in lobbying officials in other states considering
Enron projects.

    Mr. Lay was one of the state's leading business executives and deeply
involved in Texas politics. Under Mr. Bush's predecessor, Democrat Ann
Richards,
Mr. Lay headed the Governor's Business Council, a state advisory board. Mr.
Bush
asked him to stay on the job to help develop an educational reform plan.

    Unabashedly a Republican, Mr. Lay courted Democrats and was courted by
them,
too. During Bill Clinton's first year in office, he invited Mr. Lay to play
golf. Mr. Clinton's ambassador to India pressed New Delhi on behalf of a huge
power plant Enron wanted to build in that country. The project was approved.
When California's energy problems exploded last year, the Clinton team turned
to
Mr. Lay for advice.

    Politicians in both parties admired how Enron grew in deregulated energy
markets. Along with Wall Street, they were wowed by how Enron turned itself
from
a gas-pipeline operator into the nation's largest trader of gas and
electricity.

    Against this backdrop, Mr. Lay was widely considered a top candidate for
Treasury Secretary in the younger Bush's administration. Ultimately though, he
was disqualified, Bush insiders say, as too closely identified with Mr. Bush,
Dick Cheney and others who worked in the Texas energy business.

    Early on, Mr. Lay had unrivalled access to the administration. When the
President's advisers debated a new energy policy in the spring, Mr. Lay was
the
only energy executive to be invited for a one-on-one session with Mr. Cheney.
Mr. Lay also pushed successfully for appointments to the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, which oversees much of Enron's business.

    As Enron's problems multiplied, however, the White House was silent. In an
interview this spring, Mr. Lay mused that his Bush connections could boomerang
someday. 'It could hurt, from the standpoint that, at some point, they lean in
the other direction to make sure they don't face criticism,' he said.

    ENRON ON THE EDGE:

    A slow steady rise, then the catastrophic collapse (in U.S. dollars):

    NOVEMBER 1986: HNG/InterNorth changes its name to Enron Corp.

    DECEMBER 1986: Company moves from Omaha to Houston

    OCTOBER 1987: Enron hit with US$85-million charge because of large losses
on
secret unauthorized trading at its international oil-trading unit

    JULY 1988: Stock dips with company's failure to sell oil-and-gas subsidiary
for US$2-billion

    MAY 1989: Enron and El Paso Natural Gas get permission to build pipeline to
California's oil fields

    FEBRUARY 1990: Says it has more than doubled its net income, largely
because
of profits from the sale of stock in its oil and gas subsidiary

    FEBRUARY 1991: Reports eightfold increase in fourth-quarter operating
profits

    NOVEMBER 1991: Tenneco sells gas liquids line to Enron for US$632-million

    NOVEMBER 1992: Reports a 29% increase in per-share profits in third quarter

    SEPTEMBER 1993: Agreement with Techtel Enterprises and GE Capital to build
a
US$2.5-billion power plant in India beginss of trouble-plagued chapter

    OCTOBER 1993: Big gains in natural gas and power generation businesses
boost
earnings 83% for quarter

    JULY 1994: Wins pipeline deal to build US$1.5-billion pipeline to export
Bolivian natural gas to Brazil

    DECEMBER 1994: Amoco and Enron will built a solar farm in the Nevada desert

    JANUARY 1995: A US$4-billion deal with Qatar gives access to the world's
largest natural-gas field

    NOVEMBER 1995: Enron will sell off US$846-million of its stock and use
money
to reduce debt load

    AUGUST 1996: Acquisition of Portland General Electric. through
US$2.1-billion
stock deal

    AUGUST 1997: First commodity trade using weather derivatives

    NOVEMBER 1999: EnronOnline, a Web-based commodity trading site, launches

    AUGUST 2000: Sporadic blackouts in California cause prices to soar

    AUGUST 2001: CEO Jeffrey Skilling is replaced by founder Ken Lay

    OCTOBER 2001: Third-quarter losses reported of US$618-million; SEC begins
investigation into intra-company transactions

    NOVEMBER 2001: Dynegy pulls out of deal to buy Enron for $9-billion

    YESTERDAY 2001: Enron announces bankruptcy overseas; stock closes at US36
cents


The New York Times
November 29, 2001

Editorial

The Rise and Fall of Enron

Earlier this year, most companies would have loved to have Enron's problems.
Californians resented the energy trading company's huge profits during their
energy crisis, and Democrats in Washington raised questions about Enron's
influence within the White House and about the cozy relationship between
Enron's chairman, Kenneth Lay, and Vice President Dick Cheney. Nobody seemed
better positioned to thrive during the Bush presidency than this
Houston-based apostle of deregulation.

Wall Street was impressed with Enron's strategy of swooping into formerly
regulated markets to broker contracts for natural gas, electricity or unused
telecom bandwidth. The company was celebrated as a paragon of American
ingenuity, a stodgy gas pipeline company that had reinvented itself as a
high-tech clearinghouse in an ever-expanding roster of markets. Enron's push
to force utilities into the Internet age with its online trading systems, at
a seemingly handsome profit, became an epic tale of the dot-com revolution.

It now appears that Enron's tale may be more cautionary than epic. Enron envy
has crashed, along with the company's stock price, as serious questions
emerge about its bookkeeping. Enron disclosed earlier this month that $1.2
billion in market value had vanished as a result of a controversial deal it
entered into with private partnerships run by its chief financial officer,
Andrew Fastow.

Most alarming was Enron's reluctance to shed light on management's wheeling
and dealing. "Related-party transactions," as the accountants call them, are
fraught with conflicts of interest. Though much remains to be learned about
these transactions, their scope and lack of transparency suggest that Enron
may have in effect created its own private hedge fund to assume some of the
risk and mask the losses of its complex trading. The extent to which company
insiders profited from the partnerships is not yet clear.

Enron has scrambled to dampen Wall Street's concerns, acknowledging its
credibility problem while insisting on the health of its core businesses. On
Wednesday it brought in William Powers, the dean of the University of Texas
School of Law, to review the transactions. The Securities and Exchange
Commission has launched its own formal investigation. Mr. Fastow was forced
to resign, following Jeffrey Skilling, the man credited with driving Enron
into new cutting-edge businesses, out the door.

Enron's former admirers on Wall Street, mindful of recent scandals involving
high-profile companies doctoring their earnings, and of the spectacular
collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998, are alarmed.
Carole Coale of Prudential Securities summed up the prevailing sentiment when
she told The Times: "The bottom line is, it's really difficult to recommend
an investment when management does not disclose facts." Analysts, as well as
the media, are not entirely blameless. Enron did mention, albeit in passing,
the troubling related-party deals as early as March 2000. But few analysts
bothered to raise questions at a time when the company's revenues, profits
and stock price were soaring.

Harvey Pitt, the new Securities and Exchange Commissioner, must pursue the
Enron inquiry aggressively in order to assure investors that he will be as
vigilant as his predecessor, Arthur Levitt, when it comes to protecting the
integrity of financial markets. Indeed, even if Enron is cleared of any
wrongdoing and regains some of its past luster, as it well might, the company
that preaches the merits of self-regulating marketplaces has reminded us all
of the need for a strong regulator on Wall Street.

-------------------------------

Slate, November 29, 2001

Enron's Unfortunate Employee Owners

By Rob Walker

The breathtakingly swift implosion of Enron leaves many losers in its wake,
not least among them those employees who held big chunks of ENE shares in
their company retirement accounts. That stock has completely cratered, from a
52-week high of about $84 to less than $1 at the end of trading yesterday.
Maybe you saw some of these unfortunates on news broadcasts last night,
looking shattered as they explained the vaporization of their retirement
dreams. Listening to these awful tales, it's hard to remember that such a
short time ago the conventional wisdom held that employee ownership was a
great thing. But then, Enron's troubles were already playing a key role in
building a fresh backlash against that wisdom even before yesterday.


Apparently the 401(k) plans offered by Enron were structured in such a way
that participating workers have ended up stuck with unwisely high allocations
of the company's stock. Lawsuits have already been filed. No one would deny
that what's happened to those Enron employees is very bad. But what about
employee ownership as a general concept? Is that bad, too?

On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story headlined,
"Corporate Stock-Based Pay, 401(k) Plans Leave Many Employees Holding the
Bag." The emerging Enron debacle was the hook, but the piece made it clear
that plenty of companies have indulged in similar 401(k) practices. What's
more, "they're still doing it," the Journal said ominously, going on to
explain how some workers remain "shackled" to company shares. How can these
firms possibly defend such a horrible practice! A spokesman for Gillette, one
of the offenders, told the Journal that his company "believes it is important
that employee interests be aligned with company interests."

A couple of years ago that quote would have been used to support the idea
that Main Street and Wall Street are on the same team. In the current
context, it has exactly the opposite effect: Some big companies are forcing
employees to own shares! Employees don't want shares! Who the hell wants
shares?

Well, a few years ago everybody wanted shares. My point is not to pick on the
business press because if you consulted any mainstream personal finance
publication (including the Journal's own market section) on this question,
you would find someone advising you that putting a big percentage of your
nest egg in one stock is a risky proposition. I'm referring to water-cooler
and cocktail-party chatter through the late 1990s and into the early part of
this decade, when people routinely complained how unfair it was that the
bigwigs got stock and the little guy had to settle for boring old cash.

And there was a subsegment of the stock commentariat that pushed the idea
that, well, that it's important that employee interests be aligned with
company interests. You want employees to "buy in," literally, since they'll
no doubt do a better job if there is as little distinction as possible
between their firm's future and their own. If it's a good idea for managers
and executives, it's a good idea for everybody, right down to the assembly
line, or the reception desk, or whatever.

The flaw in this is illustrated by the Enron situation. Whatever went wrong
at the company, it was not the fault of the rank-and-file workers, who would
have been powerless to fix it in any case. Unfortunately for the rank and
file-and the Journal story is very good on this valid point-they play by
different rules from executives and top managers. Yes, those honchos may
participate in a 401(k) plan whose allocation of company stock might be hard
to control. But honchos don't really rely on such things for their
retirement-they rely on big option packages, unrestricted stock grants,
bonuses, guaranteed severance deals, plus a host of hedging strategies that
mitigate their risks.

At Enron, the now-disgruntled employees ended up with a lot of ENE shares
largely because that's what the company used to match worker contributions to
401(k) plans. (Company stock is also on the menu of options employees could
choose from when deciding how to allocate their own investments in that
plan.) Enron's 401(k) rules apparently mean that employees can't diversify
their way out of their company stock until after age 50. Moreover, the
lawsuits say Enron instituted a "lock down" period between Oct. 17 and Nov.
19, which happens to coincide with a period when ENE shares were melting
down. (They were at about $35 on Oct. 17.) But it seems that the core of
these suits-as is usually true in such cases-is the contention that the firm
didn't adequately warn workers of the stock's riskiness, knew there was
trouble on the horizon, and intentionally hid this knowledge. Even if all
that's true, it would be pretty hard to prove.

The arguments for the benefits of employee stock ownership are not less true
than they used to be. What's different is that the downside is no longer
abstract. And after all there's a perfectly legitimate school of thought that
holds that if you really want to make big money through the markets, you
don't diversify; you make a concentrated bet. Bill Gates and Michael Dell,
for instance, did not build their fortunes on a diversified portfolio. The
difference is that a line employee who ties up a huge chunk of his or her
retirement fund in the company stock has a lot less influence over the firm's
ultimate fate. This may mean the employee, good or bad, enjoys the fruits of
the company's success or that the employee pays a price for the company's
failure. All of that was just as true when the employee-owner idea was at the
height of its popularity. It's just more apparent now.

Rob Walker (robwalker.net), a journalist living in New Orleans, writes
Slate's Moneybox. You can e-mail him at moneybox@....

-----------------------------------

The Independent (London)
November  29, 2001

HOW THE DARLING OF THE WHITE HOUSE ENDED UP AS 'JUNK'

By Andrew Gumbel In Los Angeles

     IF EVER there was a company that reflected the buoyancy and boundless self
-confidence of George Bush as he embarked on his presidency last January, it
was
the Enron Corporation of Houston.

     Like the new president, Enron was focussed squarely on oil, Texas and
reaping the spoils of the long economic boom of the 1990s. The one-time oil
and
gas pipeline company had branched into a field of apparently limitless profit
opportunities - energy trading - and continued to enjoy dizzyingly rapid
growth, as well as the adulation of the stock market, long after the dot.coms
had started to crash and burn. Its various assets in the UK include Wessex
Water, run by Sir Nicholas Hood.

     George Bush's accession to the White House held the promise of further
riches, as well as considerable influence.

     Kenneth Lay, Enron's chairman, was one of Mr Bush's oldest friends and the
single biggest contributor to his political campaigns. Having been a pioneer
of
electricity deregulation around the country, Mr Lay was now all set to push
his
new policy priorities: corporate tax cuts and the aggressive pursuit of new
energy exploration, particularly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in
Alaska. In Washington, Mr Lay was regarded as a de facto energy secretary,
much
to the irritation of the man actually appointed to that post, the former
Michigan senator, Spencer Abraham.

     What could possibly go wrong with such a cosy arrangement? As it turns
out,
just about everything. Over the past month, Enron, where Mr Lay shared control
with the chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, was forced to acknowledge a number
of gaping holes in its accounting procedures - holes that led to an
overstatement of its profits over the past four years of $ 586m (pounds 413m).
The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened investigations into Enron's
book-keeping, in particular its relationship with a number of
limited-partnership companies headed by former Enron executives. The share
price
has plummeted so far that the company's capitalisation has been all but wiped
out. A $ 60bn company, as it was valued a year ago, is now worth less than $
3bn, with assets vanishing all the time. Yesterday, Enron stock was at $ 1.20
when trading was suspended, down from a 12-month high of $ 84.88 last
December.

     That, in turn, has had a knock-on effect on servicing company debt, which
stands at well over $ 10bn. Enron disclosed two weeks ago that it was facing
an
imminent payment of $ 690m, which it could not meet; the deadline has now been
postponed until next month pending frantic negotiations to find a buyer to
bail
out the company.

     For a while, it looked as though that buyer would be Enron's erstwhile
Houston rival, Dynegy. A deal was actually on the table a couple of weeks ago,
with Dynegy offering $ 9bn for a plan that would retain the core energy
trading
activities and strip out just about everything else. But that was before the
most serious accounting problems came to light and the share price, which had
already fallen to about $ 6, plummeted further.

     At first Dynegy tried to renegotiate the deal, cutting the offer by more
than half in the belief that there was still something worth salvaging. But it
became increasingly clear that it would take months to unravel Enron's
accounting mysteries, by which time the mounting debt and the rapidly
evaporating confidence of the market would have sapped remaining enthusiasm.

     As Dynegy pulled the plug yesterday, Enron's bonds were downgraded to
"junk"
status and its future looked grim. If the US had not been at war, one would
have
to assume Enron's "death spiral", as one analyst described it, would have
taken
on the proportions of a major scandal. As it is, lawsuits are flying, and the
behaviour of Enron's leading officials, many of whom have left or been fired,
has raised troubling questions.

     Enron's employees are furious because half of the assets in their
retirement
plans were made up of company stock, and because those assets were frozen by
Enron management in mid-October, just before the flurry of bad news became
public. Thus, they were forced to stand by helplessly for several weeks as the
value of their pensions plummeted. Lawyers now suing the company say Enron
violated its fiduciary duty by promoting its own shares at a time when it knew
them to be overvalued. It has not helped company morale that Mr Lay made $
20.7m
(pounds 14.5m) from the exercise of company stock options in the first seven
months of this year, on top of more than $ 180m he has cashed in over the past
three years.

     Others have different reasons to be concerned. Enron was deeply involved
in
California's botched electricity deregulation four years ago, and has since
profited from the power crunch that came close to causing rolling blackouts
across the Golden State earlier this year. California's attorney general was
already eyeing the Enron -Dynegy merger with suspicion, and will now have to
wonder whether the state can do anything to secure the rebate money it has
been
negotiating for the past several months.

     The first result of the company meltdown is likely to be a field-day for
accountancy regulators as they seek to understand how loss-making trades were
kept off the books or funnelled into subsidiary companies. Even Mr Lay
admitted
recently his company's books were "opaque and difficult to understand".

     Stock traders, meanwhile, will be forced to reflect how they continued to
boost shares when they could not entirely understand the balance sheets. Enron
was not part of the dot.com bubble, but the misplaced enthusiasm in its
performance was certainly related to the same mindset.

The Jakarta Post [online]
December 1, 2001

RI, ASEAN discuss terrorism issue with U.S.

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia and other ASEAN member countries have held talks with
the United States on the terrorism issue in an effort to reach a consensus on
how to build cooperation in combating the problem, an Indonesian official
said in New York on Friday (Saturday in Jakarta).

Director-general for foreign economic relations at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Makarim Wibisono, who led the country's delegation to the meeting,
said the discussions were held in Washington DC on Thursday.

"The discussions were directed toward seeking practical measures that could
be implemented directly to combat terrorism," Makarim was quoted by Antara as
saying.

The talks, he said, touched on three points -- cooperation on the exchange of
intelligence information, improving each country's capacities for dealing
with the terrorism question, and cooperation on how to protect each country's
territory againstterrorism.

Makarim said other ASEAN member countries had asked Indonesia to take note of
all the issues related to terrorism that had been discussed in the meeting
and encouraged it to hold dialogs with the U.S.

Senior ASEAN officials on the sidelines of the meeting also held discussions
with U.S. President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza
Rice.

Makarim pointed out that Rice had hailed the ASEAN effort to enhance its
security cooperation with the U.S.

"At least, she showed no hesitation in responding to the wish of the ASEAN
countries to enhance security cooperation (with the U.S.)," he said.

Rice, however, asserted in the meeting that increased security in a given
region could not only be achieved through military means.

Improving the people's welfare in the area concerned was an alternative way
to improve the security situation, he quoted Rice as saying.

The discussion also covered such issues as controlling drug abuse,
development cooperation between ASEAN members and the U.S., environmental
issues and global economic problems.

Makarim further said that the ASEAN delegates hailed the meeting because the
U.S. administration of former president Bill Clinton had not paid much
attention to the Southeast Asian region.

It was the first meeting in seven years between ASEAN and the U.S., Makarim
added.

ASEAN groups Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar,
the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Jakarta Post [online]
December 1, 2001

Tutut, Mamiek denied access to brother Tommy

JAKARTA (JP): Two sisters of Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra were denied access
to their brother, a suspect in the murder of Justice Syafiuddin Kartasasmita,
as he was being questioned by police investigators, a report said on Saturday.

"Mbak Tutut and Mbak Mamiek were not allowed to see Tommy today as he was
being questioned by investigators," Jakarta Police Spokesman Sr. Comr. Anton
Bachrul Alam said as quoted by Indosiar television.

He was referring to Tommy's older sister Siti Hardijanti Rukmana and his
younger sister Siti Hutami Endang Adiningsih.

Tommy was arrested in the Bintaro area of Tangerang regency on Wednesday
after fleeing the capital in November last year and escaping an 18 month
prison sentence handed down by the Supreme Court over a 1995 graft case.

Despite subsequently being cleared of all charges relating to the case by a
different panel of Supreme Court justices, Tommy was wanted in relation to a
series of crimes, including the murder of justice Syafiuddin, one of the
justices who had imposed the 18 month sentence on him.

Meanwhile, Jakarta Police Chief Insp. Gen. Sofjan Jacoeb dismissed on
Saturday reports that Tommy had been ill since his arrest last Wednesday.

"There are no physical or psychological problems affecting Tommy," he was
quoted by the television station as saying.

Separately, Tommy's lawyer Nudirman Munir said the police should consider
questioning former president Abdurrahman Wahid as the latter was widely
believed to have met and made deals with Tommy before his escape.

"The court has brought former president Soeharto to trial, why can't they do
the same thing with Gus Dur," he said, referring to Abdurrahman by his
popular nickname.

Sunstar (Philippines)
December 2, 2001

Davao: Malaysian youth wants Nur out

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has asked Indonesian Foreign
Minister Dr. Nur Hassan Wirajuda to convene the Ministerial Committee of
Eight to consider the case of suspended governor Nur Misuari.

The youth wing of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohamad's party has also
urged the Philippine government to deport Misuari immediately while
Malacanang appeals for sobriety in Zamboanga City.

The secretary-general of OIC asked Wirajuda to convene an "extraordinary
meeting" to "consider the latest grave developments in the Southern
Philippines And submit a report to the 29th Islamic Conference of Foreign
Ministers next year for appropriate decision." Indonesia chairs the committee.

The letter, stamped with reference number 3541 and bearing the seal of thr
Secretary-General beside his name (Dr. Abdelouahed Belkeziz), was dated
November 24, the same day Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) chairman and
suspended Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao governor was reported
arrested in Jampiras Island, off Sabah in Malaysia.

"That is proof that when Misuari arrived in Malaysia, he was recognized as
MNLF leader by the OIC," Macapanton Abbas, Jr., a legal adviser of the MNLF,
told MindaNews by phone from Marawi City.

The letter, bore Belkeziz' name but contained no signature, just the seal of
the Secretary-General beside his name.

Quoting MNLF spiritual adviser Sharif Zain Jali, Abbas said "the English
translation (of the letter) is not signed, only the original Arabic text."

In the same letter, Belkeziz urged Wirajuda to urge the Philippine government
"to abandon its decision and postpone the local elections set for 25 November
2001."

The election in the five-province of Armm was set last November 26, two days
after the Belkeziz letter.

Belkeziz said the Philippine government "has unilaterally fixed a timetable
to conduct a plebiscite (in the Armm) on August 14" and also "unilaterally
set the date of November 25 without taking into account the resolutions of
the Islamic Conference appealing to the Government of the Philippines not to
unilaterally conduct the plebiscite and to extend the deadline for the
elections of the Autonomous Region to 2003."

Belkeziz urged Wirajuda in the letter to "consider the possibility of
convening an extraordinary meeting of the Ministerial Committee of Eight next
November with the participation of the Moro National Liberation Front under
the chairmanship of Professor Nur Misuari" and representatives from the
Philippine government."

Belkeziz said the meeting should "consider the latest grave developments in
the Southern Philippines and submit a report to the 29th ICFM next year for
appropriate decision."

The Committee of Eight brokered the peace negotiations between the Philippine
government and the MNLF from 1992 to 1996 and has representatives in the
Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC) which monitors the implementation of the
1996 peace pact.

The committee, composed of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Saudi Arabia, Libya,
Senegal, Somalia and Bangladesh, is tasked by the OIC to look into the
"Southern Philippine Question."

Libya and Malaysia, along with Malacanang have thrown their support behind
the MNLF Executive Council of 15 which unseated Misuari as MNLF chairman in
early May and assumed the functions of the chairman.

Misuari, however, continued to be recognized as MNLF leader by the OIC.

The MNLF holds an observer status in the OIC and has been represented there
for over two decades by Misuari.

Since his reported arrest on November 24, Malaysian and Philippine officials
have not divulged Misuari's whereabouts in Malaysia, citing security reasons.

There has been no photograph, too, of Misuari in detention since November 24.

Reports earlier said Misuari is being "detained" in a palace in Sabah, where
Misuari was once conferred the title, Datu Seri Panglima Dargjat Kinabalo.

The latest reports say Misuari is still in the palace but is held
incommunicado or advised not to issue any statement.

Fr. Eliseo Mercado, Jr., Notre Dame University President, told MindaNews he
also heard the same report. Abbas said he received similar reports Misuari.

Deport Nur

In Kuala Lumpur, the youth wing of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's party
has urged the government to deport Misuari immediately.

Hishamuddin Hussein, youth chief of the United Malays National Organization
said Misuari should not be held in Malaysia for long.

"I hope a decision will be made soon (to deport Misuari). There is no reason
to delay it," Bernama news agency quoted him as saying Saturday in the
central state of Pahang.

But the opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia has pressed for the conviction of
Misuari for illegal entry into Malaysia.

"Charge him in court first," Fadzil Mohamad Noor, PAS president told AFP.

Misuari, who was arrested last Saturday off an island in Malaysia's Sabah
state on Borneo island, is facing rebellion charges in connection with an
armed revolt last week in the southern Philippines.

Misuari reportedly staged the revolt after Philippine President Gloria Arroyo
backed a rival faction in his Moro National Liberation Front in polls for the
post of governor of the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao.

Mahathir had earlier said Misuari would not be granted asylum by
Muslim-majority Malaysia, which gave him and his guerrillas sanctuary in the
early 1970s.

Mahathir had criticized Misuari's faction for failing to develop their
region, where he had been governor since signing a treaty with Manila in
1996.

President Arroyo's spokesman, Rigoberto Tiglao said in Manila that if Misuari
was deported back to the Philippines he would get a fair trial, but that the
Malaysians were still investigating him for violating their laws on illegal
entry.

He said that if Misuari returned "we could ask him to tell his followers to
stop these bloody offensives."

The Misuari renegades had no political demands but were merely "reacting very
emotionally about their leader," Tiglao said.

Sobriety

Malacanang at the same time appealed for sobriety to all Zamboanga residents
and not take the law into their hands amid reports that a civil war is
brewing due to the continued threats in the area.

Malacanang's appeal came as six more followers of Misuari were killed, while
nine soldiers and a civilian were wounded in separate clashes as the military
stepped up its hunt for the rebels, officials said Saturday.

Tiglao said President Arroyo called on residents to be calm as the military
and the PNP gave their assurance that they are in control of the situation.

Tiglao assured the people of Zamboanga that the administration is doing
everything to ensure their safety.

Majority of the civilians in Zamboanga are reportedly openly carrying
firearms after more than 80 civilians from Kabatangan were earlier kidnapped
by fleeing rebels loyal to suspended Misuari.

The civilians' decision to carry weapons was allegedly triggered by the
latest attempt of rebels to seize another batch of civilian hostages in Upper
Pasonanca on Thursday.

The (MNLF) breakaway group started abducting civilians last week following
the arrest of Misuari in Sabah, Malaysia.

Soldiers were searching for followers of suspended governor Misuari when they
encountered about a hundred of his men on the island of Jolo late Friday and
a gunfight ensued, assistant operations chief Colonel Roland Detabali said.

The bodies of five fighters were later recovered. Intercepted radio messages
from the rebels indicated they suffered high casualties and some bodies were
dragged off by their comrades.

A camp of Misuari's men was later captured by the military on Saturday
without any resistance, Detabali said.

On Saturday troops and police clashed with other Misuari followers in the
Pasonanca district of this southern city, killing one of the rebels. A
civilian was also wounded in the incident, police desk officer Noel
Falcasantos said.

An elite anti-terror unit along with three F-5 fighter jets were also
dispatched to the south to deal with any future actions of the Misuari
renegades, air force spokesman Colonel Horacio Lapinid said.

Although most of the Misuari forces have left Zamboanga City, groups of
stragglers have remained on the outskirts and have had violent encounters
with pursuing police, military forces and even angry civilians who are
reportedly arming themselves against any return of Misuari's men.

Among those who took part in the latest battle in Jolo were members of the
Abu Sayyaf Muslim group who were working with Misuari's forces, Detabali
said.

The government is looking into alleged links between Misuari and the Abu
Sayyaf who have been kidnapping people and holding them for ransom for years.

The Abu Sayyaf are still holding two Americans and a Filipino nurse hostage
in the nearby island of Basilan, the last remaining captives from their
latest kidnapping spree which was launched in May.

Officials also said they are looking into allegations that Misuari misused
government funds that were allocated to his office, possibly even using the
money to buy arms for his followers.

also: Rights group accuses Kopassus over killing

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
December 1, 2001
-transcript-

Anti-Jakarta sentiment runs high after killing of independence leader in West
Papua

In Indonesia’s troubled Papua province, separatists have vowed to avoid
clashes with police and soldiers today as they mark the fortieth anniversary
of their independence struggle.

Transcript:

HAMISH ROBERTSON: In Indonesia’s troubled Papua province, separatists have
vowed to avoid clashes with police and soldiers today as they mark the
fortieth anniversary of their independence struggle.

Anti-Jakarta sentiment is running high in the province after the killing of
independence leader Chief Theys Eluay three weeks ago. Separatist leaders
have accused the Indonesian military of ordering his murder, while police
have been criticised for the slow pace of carrying out an investigation. And
there are concerns they may never get to the bottom of the case.

Mark Bowling now reports from Jakarta:

MARK BOWLING: On Saturday night November 10, Theys Eluay attended a reception
in the Papuan capital Jayapura. It was held at the base of the Indonesian
Special Forces’ unit, known as Kopassus. On the drive home he went missing.
But his driver had managed to tell Eluay’s family in a brief mobile telephone
call that they had been abducted by a group he described as non-Papuans.

Theys Eluay’s body was found the following day in a crashed car. An autopsy
showed he died suspiciously due to strangulation.

The driver, Aristotle Musok, would be a key witness, if police could find
him. But he’s never been found.

According to an investigation released by the Jayapura-based Institute for
Human Rights Study and Advocacy, the driver is in Kopassus hands.

John Rumbiak from the institute says that conclusion is based on creditable
accounts:

JOHN RUMBIAK: I witnessed this, that we interviewed, at the headquarters of
the Kopassus, all the Nari civilians who were involved in organising the
reception that night confirmed to us that they saw the driver was taken in by
the Kopassus members that night. The key eyewitness, Aristotle, he is still
alive and in the hands of the Kopassus.

MARK BOWLING: Police have interviewed 37 witnesses, and claim, among those
witnesses, several might have been behind the killing of Theys Eluay.

But police have admitted their investigation was being hampered by another
institution, and that they were coming up against a brick wall following up
statements made by witnesses.

John RumbiaK again:

JOHN RUMBIAK: The police acknowledged to us that they are so scared to
conduct this investigation because they say that it has enforced what they
call us (in quotes) ‘professional people’, which we believe what they mean
here as Kopassus.

MARK BOWLING: This would make it very difficult, would it not, to ever get to
the bottom of the case?

JOHN RUMBIAK: The police are obliged to protect the eyewitnesses.

MARK BOWLING: Human rights groups have called for the Indonesian government
to appoint an independent investigation team.

Emotions in Papua province are running high over Theys Eluay’s killing. Many
believe the death of their independence leader signals the start of another
Indonesian military crackdown to try and wipe out the separatist movement
after a four-decade struggle.

This is Mark Bowling in Jakarta for Saturday AM.

--------------------------------

Courier Mail
December 1, 2001

Rights group accuses Kopassus over killing

By Chris McCall

     WEST Papua's leading human rights group yesterday has indirectly accused
the
Indonesian army's notorious Kopassus special forces of abducting and killing
veteran pro-independence leader Theys Eluay.

    Citing the results of its own inquiry into the killing three weeks ago,
Els-Ham cited several pieces of evidence that pointed to the involvement of
Kopassus, although it stopped short of directly stating that Mr Eluay was
killed
by the force.

    Mr Eluay was abducted on the night of November 10. His body was found the
next day near the Papua New Guinea border. An autopsy concluded that he had
died
through lack of air.

     Els-Ham said it had further concluded that he died suspiciously through
"strangulation/swelling", although people who watched the autopsy say the
precise cause of death was very hard to deduce.

    Kopassus has denied its men killed Mr Eluay.

     Els-Ham said the evidence included witness reports that the key witness in
the case, Mr Eluay's driver Aristoteles Masoka, was still alive and currently
in
Kopassus hands.

    In its statement, timed to coincide with today's anniversary of an
independence declaration in 1961, Els-Ham also said that three other senior
members of the Papuan Presidium Council had been invited by Kopassus that
night
along with Mr Eluay.

     Papuan Presidium secretary-general Thaha Alhamid, mediator Willy Mandowen
and the Rev Herman Awom did not turn up. Mr Eluay was abducted as he was
driving to his home in Sentani, 30km west of Jayapura.

    "Theys was believed to have attended the reception because the commander of
Kopassus, Colonel Hartomo, came to pick Theys up at Theys' residence in
Sentani
on November 10 at around 10.30am," the report said.

     Mr Masoka is considered a key witness because he saw Mr Eluay kidnapped
and
managed to call Mr Eluay's wife, Yanneke Ohee, a few minutes later. In his
brief
call, Mr Masoka said the abductors were "amber" people, a local term for
non-Papuans.

    Mr Masoka's whereabouts have been unclear since the abduction, with reports
and rumours suggesting he may be in hiding, or in Kopassus hands.

    Els-Ham alleged a secret government operation was under way to neutralise
the
independence movement in West Papua, which Indonesia calls Irian Jaya. In
1963, Irian Jaya was transferred to  Indonesia,  which legitimised its rule in
1969 through a vote among 1025 tribal chiefs. The transfer was marred by
violence and intimidation, yet accepted by the UN.

    In Brisbane yesterday about 30 people marched to the Department of Foreign
Affairs demanding justice in West Papua and presented details of Eluays'
murder.

     Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri received a similar petition
from members of the US Congress last week.

-1 of 3-

4 reports:

- NYTimes: Ashcroft Seeking to Free F.B.I. to Spy on Groups
- NYTimes: It Can Happen Here
- Slate: Should You Be Afraid of John Ashcroft?
- Propaganda Hall of Fame: Newsweek's puff piece on Bush

The New York Times
December 1, 2001
-front page-

Excerpt: In a series of recent interviews, several senior career
officials at the F.B.I. said it would be a serious mistake to
weaken the guidelines, and they were upset that the department
had not clearly described the proposed changes. "People are
furious right now - very, very angry," one of them said.

LIBERTY AND SECURITY

Ashcroft Seeking to Free F.B.I. to Spy on Groups

By DAVID JOHNSTON and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 - Attorney General John Ashcroft is considering a plan to
relax restrictions on the F.B.I.'s spying on religious and political
organizations in the United States, senior government officials said today.

The proposal would loosen one of the most fundamental restrictions on the
conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and would be another step by
the Bush administration to modify civil-liberties protections as a means of
defending the country against terrorists, the senior officials said.

The attorney general's surveillance guidelines were imposed on the F.B.I. in
the 1970's after the death of J. Edgar Hoover and the disclosures that the
F.B.I. had run a widespread domestic surveillance program, called Cointelpro,
to monitor antiwar militants, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among others, while Mr. Hoover was director.

Since then, the guidelines have defined the F.B.I.'s operational conduct in
investigations of domestic and overseas groups that operate in the United
States.

Some officials who oppose the change said the rules had largely kept the
F.B.I. out of politically motivated investigations, protecting the bureau
from embarrassment and lawsuits. But others, including senior Justice
Department officials, said the rules were outmoded and geared to obsolete
investigative methods and had at times hobbled F.B.I. counterterrorism
efforts.

Mr. Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, favor the
change, the officials said. Most of the opposition comes from career
officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said today that no final decision had been
reached on the revised guidelines.

"As part of the attorney general's reorganization," said Susan Dryden, the
spokeswoman, "we are conducting a comprehensive review of all guidelines,
policies and procedures. All of these are still under review."

An F.B.I. spokesman said the bureau's approach to terrorism was also under
review.

"Director Mueller's view is that everything should be on the table for
review," the spokesman, John Collingwood, said. "He is more than willing to
embrace change when doing so makes us a more effective component. A healthy
review process doesn't come at the expense of the historic protections
inherent in our system."

The attorney general is free to revise the guidelines, but Justice Department
officials said it was unclear how heavily they would be revised. There are
two sets of guidelines, for domestic and foreign groups, and most of the
discussion has centered on the largely classified rules for investigations of
foreign groups.

The relaxation of the guidelines would follow administration measures to
establish military tribunals to try foreigners accused of terrorism; to seek
out and question 5,000 immigrants, most of them Muslims, who have entered the
United States since January 2000; and to arrest more than 1,200 people,
nearly all of whom are unconnected to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and
hold hundreds of them in jail.

Today, Mr. Ashcroft defended his initiatives in an impassioned speech to
United States attorneys.

"Our efforts have been deliberate, they've been coordinated, they've been
carefully crafted to not only protect America but to respect the Constitution
and the rights enshrined therein," Mr. Ashcroft said.

"Still," he added, "there have been a few voices who have criticized. Some
have sought to condemn us with faulty facts or without facts at all. Others
have simply rushed to judgment, almost eagerly assuming the worst of their
government before they've had a chance to understand it at its best."

Under the current surveillance guidelines, the F.B.I. cannot send undercover
agents to investigate groups that gather at places like mosques or churches
unless investigators first find probable cause, or evidence leading them to
believe that someone in the group may have broken the law. Full
investigations of this sort cannot take place without the attorney general's
consent.

Since Sept. 11, investigators have said, Islamic militants have sometimes met
at mosques - apparently knowing that the religious institutions are usually
off limits to F.B.I. surveillance squads. Some officials are now saying they
need broader authority to conduct surveillance of potential terrorists, no
matter where they are.

Senior career F.B.I. officials complained that they had not been consulted
about the proposed change - a criticism they have expressed about other Bush
administration counterterrorism measures. When the Justice Department decided
to use military tribunals to try accused terrorists, and to interview
thousands of Muslim men in the United States, the officials said they were
not consulted.

Justice Department officials noted that Mr. Mueller had endorsed the
administration's proposals, adding that the complaints were largely from
older F.B.I. officials who were resistant to change and unwilling to take the
aggressive steps needed to root out terror in the United States. Other
officials said the Justice Department had consulted with F.B.I. lawyers and
some operational managers about the change.

But in a series of recent interviews, several senior career officials at the
F.B.I. said it would be a serious mistake to weaken the guidelines, and they
were upset that the department had not clearly described the proposed changes.

"People are furious right now - very, very angry," one of them said. "They
just assume they know everything. When you don't consult with anybody, it
sends the message that you assume you know everything. And they don't know
everything."

Still, some complaints seem to stem from the F.B.I.'s shifting status under
Mr. Ashcroft. Weakened by a series of problems that predated the Sept. 11
attacks, the F.B.I. has been forced to follow orders from the Justice
Department - a change that many law enforcement experts thought was long
overdue. In the past, the bureau leadership had far more independence and
authority to make its own decisions.

Several senior officials are leaving the F.B.I., including Thomas J. Pickard,
the deputy director. He was the senior official in charge of the
investigation of the attacks and was among top F.B.I. officials who were
opposed to another decision of the Bush administration, the public
announcements of Oct. 12 and Oct. 29 that placed the country on the highest
state of alert in response to vague but credible threats of a possible second
terrorist attack. Mr. Pickard is said to have been opposed to publicizing
threats that were too vague to provide any precautionary advice.

Many F.B.I. officials regard the administration's plan to establish military
tribunals as an extreme step that diminishes the F.B.I.'s role because it
creates a separate prosecutorial system run by the military.

"The only thing I have seen about the tribunals is what I have seen in the
newspapers," a senior official complained.

Another official said many senior law enforcement officials shared his
concern about the tribunals. "I believe in the rule of law, and I believe if
we have a case to make against someone, we should make it in a federal
courtroom in the United States," he said.

Several senior F.B.I. officials said the tribunal system should be reserved
for senior Al Qaeda members apprehended by the military in Afghanistan or
other foreign countries.

Few were involved in deliberations that led to the directive Mr. Ashcroft
issued this month to interview immigrant men living legally in the United
States. F.B.I. officials have complained that the interview plan was begun
before its ramifications were fully understood.

"None of this was thought through, a senior official said. "They just
announced it, and left it to others to figure out how to do it."

The arrests and detentions of more than 1,200 people since Sept. 11 have also
aroused concerns at the F.B.I. Officials noted that the investigations had
found no conspirators in the United States who aided the hijackers in the
Sept. 11 attacks and only a handful of people who were considered Al Qaeda
members.

"This came out of the White House, and Ashcroft's office," a senior official
said. "There are tons of things coming out of there these days where there is
absolutely no consultation with the bureau."

Some at the F.B.I. have been openly skeptical about claims that some of the
1,200 people arrested were Al Qaeda members and that the strategy of making
widespread arrests had disrupted or thwarted planned attacks.

"It's just not the case," an official said. "We have 10 or 12 people we think
are Al Qaeda people, and that's it. And for some of them, it's based only on
conjecture and suspicion."

---------------------------------

The New York Times
December 1, 2001

Op-Ed

ABROAD AT HOME

It Can Happen Here

By ANTHONY LEWIS

BOSTON

On the basis of secret evidence, the government accuses a non-citizen of
connections to terrorism, and holds him in prison for three years. Then a
judge conducts a full trial and rejects the terrorism charges. He releases
the prisoner. A year later government agents rearrest the man, hold him in
solitary confinement and state as facts the terrorism charges that the judge
found untrue.

Could that happen in America? In John Ashcroft's America it has happened.

Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian, came to the United States in 1984 as a
graduate student and stayed to teach at a university. The Immigration Service
moved to deport him for overstaying his visa - and asked an immigration
judge, R. Kevin McHugh, to imprison him. Secret evidence, the government
lawyers said, showed that Mr. Al-Najjar had raised funds for a terrorist
organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In June 1997 Judge McHugh issued the
detention order.

Mr. Al-Najjar's lawyers went to federal court and challenged the use of
secret evidence against him. The court held that he must at least be told
enough about the evidence to have a fair chance of responding to it.

Judge McHugh then reopened the case in his immigration court. In a two-week
trial the government's lead witness, an Immigration agent, admitted that
there was no evidence of Mr. Al-Najjar contributing to a terrorist
organization or ever advocating terrorism. At the end Judge McHugh found that
there were no "bona fide reasons to conclude that [Mr. Al- Najjar] is a
threat to national security."

Judge McHugh, a former U.S. marine, wrote a 56-page decision that evidently
carried much legal weight. The Board of Immigration Appeals rejected a
government appeal. And Attorney General Janet Reno, who had the right to step
in, refused to do so. A year ago Mr. Al-Najjar rejoined his wife and three
daughters.

Last Saturday immigration agents arrested Mr. Al-Najjar again. The Justice
Department issued a triumphant press release saying that the case
"underscores the department's commitment to address terrorism by using all
legal authorities available." Mr. Al-Najjar, it said, "had established ties
to terrorist organizations."

That flat, conclusory statement was in direct contradiction to the findings
made by Judge McHugh after a full trial. And the department did not claim,
this time, to be relying on undisclosed information. It said the detention
was "not based on classified evidence."

It seems to me shocking that the United States Department of Justice should
state as a fact something that a judge has found to be untrue. The whole
press release had the ring not of law but of political propaganda. That is
not the department of respected lawyers that I have known over many years.

Mr. Al-Najjar is not only back in prison, he is being treated with
exceptional severity, indeed cruelty. He is in solitary confinement 23 hours
a day. He is not allowed to make telephone calls, and he may not see his
family. Only his lawyer is permitted to visit him.

Because Mr. Al-Najjar is stateless and no country will accept him, he
probably cannot be deported. So if the Justice Department view that he is a
security risk prevails - in the teeth of the judge's finding - he could spend
the rest of his life in prison.

Why is Attorney General Ashcroft using his office to punish this man so
severely? At a time of national anxiety about Arabs and Muslims, Mr.
Al-Najjar is a useful target: a Palestinian Muslim. More broadly, Mr.
Ashcroft has claimed power to detain non-citizens even when immigration
judges order them released.

It could be, too, that Mr. Ashcroft wants to use this case to establish the
right to use secret evidence against aliens. The practice had been all but
abandoned by the Justice Department after several judges frowned on it and
more than 100 members of the House co-sponsored legislation to prohibit it.

With all the extreme measures taken by the administration in recent days -
detaining hundreds of people, ordering thousands questioned, establishing
military tribunals - Mr. Ashcroft and President Bush have assured the country
that they will enforce the measures with care, and with concern for civil
liberties. Their motto is, "Trust us."

The Al-Najjar case shows that there is no basis for trust.

--------------------------

Slate, November 28, 2001

Taking Liberties [column]

Should You Be Afraid of John Ashcroft?

By Jacob Weisberg

We've heard two dominant reactions to the Bush's administration's legal steps
to fight terrorism at home. The first is the hue and cry of civil
libertarians who declare such measures inimical to our constitutional
freedoms and privacy. The second is the equally automatic tendency of many
conservatives to remind us that civil liberties necessarily suffer in wartime
and to justify whatever Attorney General John Ashcroft wants. Perhaps the
only interesting thing about the argument thus far has been its mild
strange-bedfellow aspect. A band of right-wing libertarians objects to some
proposals more strongly than do liberal Democrats in Congress and the ACLU.

This rather sterile debate, largely familiar from before Sept. 11, provides
little guidance to those prepared to re-examine the balance our society
strikes between freedom and security but disinclined to tip the scale more
than we need to. If American history teaches us that freedom often suffers in
wartime, it also teaches that it often suffers gratuitously. Military
censorship during World War II was sensible and justified; imprisoning
American citizens of Japanese descent was neither. The former action was
reasonably tailored to deal with a genuine security risk. The latter was a
hysterical and xenophobic overreaction. Which category do the various actions
of the Bush administration fall into? I see no alternative to evaluating the
six biggest, one at a time.

1. The continuing detention of more than 600 foreign nationals on immigration
charges.

Official Justification: John Ashcroft, the attorney general, says that the
detainees, who previously numbered more than 1,000, include al-Qaida members
and that arrests have probably stopped additional terrorist attacks. The
attorney general has also attempted to defend his decision to withhold
information about the suspects. On Nov. 26, Ashcroft said that to give out
their names would violate their privacy and create a "blacklist." On Nov. 27,
he announced federal charges against 104 detainees. Releasing the names of
the 548 others, he asserted, would aid Osama Bin Laden.

Discussion: Foreigners who violate the terms of their visas can be legally
held without a bail hearing or even formal charges because they're
noncitizens with minimal rights under the Constitution. But Ashcroft's
excuses for not revealing the names of the detainees are transparent. The
giveaway is his sudden solicitousness for a privacy right that doesn't even
exist as a legal matter and his subsequent move to the stronger "aiding Bin
Laden" justification. If he's so concerned about the privacy of detainees,
why not at least ask them if they want their names withheld and release those
who don't mind? As for tipping off al-Qaida, the detainees do have a right to
counsel, and their lawyers can contact friends or family members or announce
through the press that they're being held.

Why is release of the names such a big issue? Because without more
information about the suspects, it's impossible to know whether the
detentions are reasonable or not. Press reports about of some of the
detainees are cause for concern. For example, the New York Times has reported
that as many 11 harmless-sounding Israelis were held for several weeks. Given
the circumstances, Justice can be forgiven for erring on the side of caution
in releasing people it believes to be dangerous. But absent more disclosure,
there's no way for Congress, the press, or the public to assess what Ashcroft
is doing.

Verdict: Mixed. When it comes to detaining foreigners who are suspected
terrorists and terrorist-helpers, we have no choice but to trust the Justice
Department and the INS to some extent. But Ashcroft's superfluous secrecy
requires us to take more on faith than we should have to.

2. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, signed by President Bush on Oct. 26, which grants
the government broader powers to wiretap and detain noncitizen suspects, to
conduct secret searches in which a target is not notified, and to share
intelligence among agencies.

Justification: As Bush said at the signing ceremony, the bill "takes account
of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists. It will help law
enforcement to identify, to dismantle, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists
before they strike."

Discussion: The bill has many components, all of which give the executive
branch more power. On electronic surveillance, for example, it prescribes
treatment for Internet wiretaps parallel to existing law on telephone
communications. Another provision gives the CIA greater latitude to gather
intelligence within the United States. How you feel about this stuff depends
on whether you lose sleep over law enforcement authorities having too much
power or not enough. Though the specifics are too many and too specific to go
into here, I think advocates of the bill make a strong case that it makes
life easier for law enforcement in prudent, measured ways. The final
legislation was developed through bipartisan compromise, which added, among
other things, a sunset provision that will cause provisions to expire in four
years unless Congress acts to renew them.

Verdict: Thumbs up, despite the newspeak title. Even some doctrinaire civil
libertarians found it hard to take issue with this bill in its final form.
The sunset provision goes a long way toward satisfying concerns about
potential abuse.

3. An Oct. 31 executive order allowing federal authorities to monitor
communications between federal prisoners and their lawyers without first
obtaining a judicial warrant.

Justification: A Justice Department spokesperson says this power is necessary
to prevent terrorist attacks planned under cover of lawyer-client privilege.
She says it intends to use information it obtains in this way only for
prevention, not prosecution.


Discussion: The familiar analogy here is to mafia lawyers who are in effect
part of the family. In cases where the government suspects that lawyers are
abetting a criminal conspiracy, it can apply to a judge for a warrant to
listen in on their conversations with clients. Why can't the Justice
Department follow the same procedure in terrorism cases? There may be a
reason, but Ashcroft hasn't given one.

Verdict: I agree with my colleague Dahlia Lithwick: To infringe on such a
basic procedural right as the right to counsel, the government needs a damn
good reason. So far, it hasn't presented any real reason beyond saying it
needs this new power.

4. Bush's order authorizing the use of military tribunals to try suspected
terrorists.

Justification: The Bush administration points to a World War II precedent for
prosecuting foreign nationals engaged in war with the United States in this
way. To try military combatants in civilian courts, officials argue, would
run the risk of provoking additional terrorist attacks and of disclosing
classified intelligence information at trial.

Discussion: What's Ashcroft's basis for believing that civilian trials of
terrorists inevitably create unsupportable security and confidentiality
problems? The recent embassy bombing trial in New York seems to have
successfully avoided both pitfalls. In terms of the risk of additional
attacks, the notion that al-Qaida members are waiting for some additional
provocation before striking again appears increasingly faulty. And why is
al-Qaida likely to strike again to protest a civilian terrorist trial but not
a military one-unless the military trial is held in such secrecy that no one
even knows one is happening? In terms of protecting classified information in
court, prosecutors already have an effective weapon in CIPA, the Classified
Information Procedures Act. This law allows the government to disclose
information to a judge without sharing it with the other side. If this law
didn't work, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen would have blackmailed the
government into letting them walk instead of pleading guilty to espionage.

At the same time, I'm not certain that criminal trials are a sensible option
for terrorists we may take as prisoners in Afghanistan. This is a tough
problem we might not ever face, but imagine if we capture several thousand
al-Qaida fighters alive, including Bin Laden and other top leaders. Do we
really want to fly these terrorists to Cleveland for a criminal prosecution
that could take years? Civil libertarian William Safire deals with the
problem by saying we should kill Bin Laden even if he tries to surrender to
avoid having to give him a civilian trial. I'd rather we take Bin Laden dead,
too, but if he and other al-Qaida get captured alive, a quick military trail
would be our best legal and practical option.

Why civilian trials for suicide bombers who make it through customs and
military tribunals for those we pick up outside Kandahar? One reason for the
distinction is that military trials create obvious political and public
relations headaches. Some of our European allies have already said they won't
deport terrorist suspects who face military justice to the United States.
Another reason is the practicality of deploying various systems of justice.
In Afghanistan, where there is no functioning government or system of
justice, any suspected terrorist could count himself lucky to be tried by an
American military tribunal. In the territorial United States, we can do
better.

Verdict: No to military tribunals for prisoners in custody here; yes to
courts martial for war criminals captured in Afghanistan. In any case, Bush
should seek congressional approval for his decision, if only to lend
legitimacy to any military proceedings.

5. Questioning 5,000 students from Islamic countries admitted to the United
States since Jan. 1, 2000.

Justification: These people might know something about past or future
terrorist attacks. Ashcroft says that it's their responsibility to assist the
FBI's investigation.

Discussion: Let's not pretend that this is anything other than racial
profiling. But it's a case where, as Michael Kinsley has argued with regard
to airport searches, discrimination of a kind we ordinarily detest is
warranted. We're looking for Islamic terrorists-do we have to interview
Catholic nuns as well just to be fair? In this case, the imposition is not
only justifiable but also extremely minor. On the other hand, I'm not sure
the sweep proposed by the Justice Department is a wise use of investigative
resources. If we're looking for al-Qaida "sleepers," an arbitrary cut-off
date covering only those who entered the country in the last 23 months seems
indefensible. And based on my experience with FBI background checks, I can't
say I have much confidence in the ability of low-level agents to find out
anything useful from friendly interviews.

Verdict: Acceptable but possibly pointless.

6. Bush's executive order giving the government power to detain a foreigner
even after an immigration judge has ordered his release.

Justification: "To prevent the release of aliens who may pose a threat to
national security." The Justice Department says the INS may be too busy to
present all its evidence against a prisoner in court or appeal the release of
one in a timely fashion.

Discussion: Immigration judges are executive branch employees who work for
the INS but have some degree of autonomy. This order-promulgated secretly a
month ago-eliminates any meaningful judicial review for foreigners in
custody. If the INS doesn't like an immigration judge's ruling that someone
should be let out of jail, it can simply ignore it. So what's the point of
having a judge rule at all?

Verdict: Foreigners may not have the same right to judicial review as
citizens, but let's not make the limited rights they do enjoy into a complete
sham. Like the breach of lawyer-client confidentiality, this one seems a
significant infringement offered with no outside consultation and minimal
genuine rationale. If INS lawyers are too busy to make their cases in court,
the INS should hire more lawyers.

In sum, the Bush-Ashcroft approach to the problem of rights in wartime leaves
much to be desired. Only in the one case where Congress got involved has
there been any real sense of striking a balance between liberty and privacy
on the one hand and public safety on the other. Where the administration acts
unilaterally, the result often seems skewed in favor of security, with
constitutional rights as an annoyed afterthought. On the bright side, Bush,
unlike such liberal heroes as Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, has yet to grossly
infringe the rights of Americans. For that he deserves a small bit
of-provisional-credit.

Jacob Weisberg is Slate's chief political correspondent. You can e-mail him
at ballotbox@....

-------------------------------

FAIR [Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting]
November 30, 2001

ACTION ALERT:

Newsweek: Hail to the Chief

If there's a propaganda hall of fame, Newsweek has surely earned a place in
it with its interview with George W. and Laura Bush (12/3/01).

Written by Newsweek senior editor Howard Fineman and White House
correspondent Martha Brant, the profile of the Bushes focuses relentlessly
positive attention on the "First Couple's" emotional responses to the
September 11 attacks.  New details about atrocities by U.S.-backed forces in
Afghanistan are emerging daily, but the central question in the Newsweek
exclusive was: "From where does George W. Bush-- or Laura, for that matter--
draw the strength for this grand mission, the ambitious aim of which is
nothing less than to 'rid the world of evildoers'?"

Faith, prayer, and love of family are the article's main themes, with almost
no space devoted to political questions. "The First Team has been exemplary
in the eyes of the American people," declared Newsweek. Bush "has been a
model of unblinking, eyes-on-the-prize decisiveness. His basic military
strategy... has proved astute. He has been eloquent in public, commanding in
private. He had survived the first blows, made the right calls and exceeded
expectations-- again."

Bush isn't just a man of the mind, though. "Another source of strength,"
noted the magazine, "is physical conditioning." According to Newsweek, Bush
"is in the best shape of his life, a fighting machine who has dropped 15
pounds and cut his time in the mile to seven minutes.... He feels destined
to win-- and to serve."

The magazine was also thorough in addressing-- and dismissing-- facts about
Bush that might be perceived as flaws. The president doesn't read many
books, Newsweek explained, because "he's busy making history, but doesn't
look back at his own, or the world's.... Bush would rather look forward than
backward. It's the way he's built."

The toughest questions were philosophical. "Do you think that Saddam Hussein
is evil and that we should expand this to Iraq?," asked Newsweek. Noting
that Bush answered without using the word evil, the magazine followed up
with, "Why wouldn't you say he's evil then?", to which Bush replied simply:
"He ain't good." Showing a diligence unmatched elsewhere in the interview,
the reporters asked once again why he stopped short of using the word. A
beleaguered Bush gave in, saying, "maybe because you're trying to force me
to say it, and I'm stubborn.... He is evil. Saddam's evil."

Newsweek says that the White House spin machine had nothing to do with their
portrayal of Bush. In this interview, wrote Newsweek, "there were few
mangled sentences. The handlers at the table were listening, not handling."
Maybe that's because Newsweek was doing their job for them.

In times of war and crisis, it is doubly important that media aggressively
seek truth and report it to the public. For a major newsweekly to turn an
exclusive interview with the president into a puff piece would be
disappointing under any circumstances, but it is particularly so at a time
when the U.S. government is taking extreme measures to cloak controversial
military and law enforcement actions in secrecy, both at home and abroad.

ACTION: Please ask Newsweek to provide critical and independent coverage of
the Bush administration.

CONTACT:
Newsweek
Washington Bureau
Phone: (202) 626-2000
Fax: (202) 626-2011
mailto:letters@...

To send feedback using Newsweek's web form, go to:
http://www.msnbc.com/modules/Newsweek/feedback/nwfeedback.asp?cp1=1

To read the Newsweek article and interview, see:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/662694.asp
http://www.msnbc.com/news/662706.asp

-2 of 2-

also: Why Congress Must Curb Bush's Military Courts [by Laurence
Tribe, the Tyler professor of constitutional law at Harvard]

The Washington Post
December 1, 2001
-front page-

U.S. Wants Custody Of Enemy Leaders

Interrogation, Trials of al Qaeda, Taliban Eyed

By Vernon Loeb and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that the United States
has told opposition commanders in Afghanistan that it wants any senior
Taliban or al Qaeda members captured by rebel forces turned over for
interrogation by U.S. personnel and -- if ordered by President Bush -- trial
by the U.S. military.

"We're here to get these people," Rumsfeld said. "That's why we came. Then
we're leaving."

With more than 1,000 Marines and hundreds of Army Special Forces troops on
the ground in Afghanistan searching for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and
airstrikes focused on cave and tunnel complexes where he may be hiding, U.S.
military commanders have made it clear that they want bin Laden and his
lieutenants dead or alive.

But the capture by Northern Alliance rebels of thousands of prisoners in
northern Afghanistan and the advance by Pashtun forces on the southern city
of Kandahar -- the last Taliban holdout -- have focused the attention of
Pentagon officials on how to identify the prisoners and gain control over
those believed to be senior Taliban or al Qaeda members.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said U.S. military officials
have told opposition commanders in Afghanistan "unambiguously" that the
United States wants to take possession of bin Laden, Taliban leader Mohammad
Omar or any other senior leaders who may be captured. Rumsfeld said the
United States has not taken custody of any prisoner, though he said American
military and intelligence personnel have taken part in the interrogations of
some captives.

"Without getting into individual names, the United States has, from the
beginning, and continues to seek out opportunities to interview, interrogate,
question -- whatever the proper word may be -- al Qaeda and senior Taliban
leaders who are detained, captured, imprisoned -- whatever the definition may
be -- by the forces that have been opposing the Taliban in Afghanistan,"
Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld said that in the event that some senior al Qaeda or Taliban leaders
are turned over to the United States, the Defense Department was drawing up
procedures that would govern a military tribunal if Bush orders one.

"At that point where we end up being assigned an individual by the president,
obviously we would hope that we would have completed this work and been able
to then deal with it appropriately," Rumsfeld said.

Although Omar's exact whereabouts are uncertain, it is widely believed the
Taliban leader is holed up with his forces in Kandahar, the Taliban's
spiritual home, where he has vowed to fight to the death. By contrast,
Pentagon officials have said, bin Laden is on the run. The U.S. government
has offered a $25 million reward for his capture.

Vice President Cheney, in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, said the
United States believes bin Laden has probably gone "to ground" in a
mountainous region in eastern Afghanistan north of Kandahar near a
cave-complex redoubt called Tora Bora.

"He's got what he believes to be fairly secure facilities, caves
underground," Cheney said. "It's an area he's familiar with. He operated
there back during the war against the Soviets in the '80s."

Cheney said U.S. military forces have "an active campaign underway" to bomb
the cave complexes where they suspect bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders
are hiding. "We've had considerable success hitting particular facilities
where we thought there were leaders of al Qaeda, and we've clearly been able
to hit a number of them," he said.

William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department's general counsel, said
yesterday his staff is still working to define the guidelines for how the
military justice system would operate. Responding to criticism by some
members of Congress and civil liberties groups that the tribunals would
trample civil liberties, Haynes said he is confident that the tribunals would
withstand court challenge.

"If and when a court of the United States reviewed the actions of the
president and the secretary of defense in this matter," Haynes said in an
interview, "I am confident that they would find this an appropriate, lawful
and constitutional exercise of the president's responsibilities."

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales gave the same assurance in remarks to
a national security law conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

Gonzales said "we fully contemplate" that prisoners would be able to
challenge their detentions, adding that critics who have claimed such trials
would be kangaroo courts "insult our military justice system."

"We fully contemplate habeas review will be available for any defendant with
a U.S. nexus," he said. But, he added, terror suspects captured abroad would
have no such right.

The Defense Department general counsel's office has been formulating a
military justice system. Rumsfeld has yet to decide any of the specifics,
from where the trials would be held to who would sit in judgment of
defendants, officials said.

Gonzales said the White House is considering a range of options to deal with
captured terrorists. In addition to military commissions and civilian courts,
defendants could be taken before international tribunals with judges from
countries allied in the war.

"This order doesn't include that or foreclose that," he said. He did note,
though, that the country might want its own commissions because international
tribunals would bar imposition of the death penalty.

The military tribunals also provide greater physical security than civilian
trials, Gonzales said, and can be fashioned to protect intelligence-gathering
methods from disclosure. He added that the president's order does not call
for commission trials to be conducted in secret, as critics have said they
fear.

Gonzales described as "unfounded" fears expressed by one lawyer at
yesterday's bar association gathering that ordinary green card holders in the
United States could be hauled before military tribunals. Those subject to
trial before commissions, he said, must have been found by the president to
have been engaged in terrorism or have been harboring terrorists.

"It applies only to noncitizen enemy belligerents," Gonzales said. Leaders of
al Qaeda are stateless "unlawful combatants" under the rules of war, he said.
As such, they are not subject to the rules of the Geneva Convention, Gonzales
said, though the president could decide to offer them that protection.

Among the sites mentioned as possible venues for military trials are the
Pacific island of Guam; the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba;
Pakistan; or aboard an aircraft carrier.

Rumsfeld said the Pentagon has no indication that any senior Taliban or al
Qaeda leaders have been captured by the Northern Alliance or Pashtun
opposition forces.

But with thousands of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters being held, Rumsfeld
said, U.S. officials have started interrogating them to determine their rank
and importance because it is unlikely that any will step forward and identify
themselves as important figures.

------------------------------------

New Republic
issue cover dated December 10, 2001

WHY CONGRESS MUST CURB BUSH'S MILITARY COURTS.

Trial by Fury

by Laurence H. Tribe

President Bush's order establishing military tribunals for noncitizen
terrorist suspects is riddled with flaws. First, to justify the order, the
president acts as though Congress has declared war, when all it has really
done is authorize him to "use all necessary and appropriate force against
those nations, organizations, or persons [involved in the September 11
attacks] ... to prevent any future [such] acts of international terrorism
against the United States." Lacking the ritualistic solemnity of a
declaration of war, that hasty authorization does not justify the same
domestic deprivations that a formal declaration of war might--particularly
since our enemy in this war is amorphous, and the war may never reach a
decisive, public end. Second, the order's reach is so sweeping that it could
ensnare not just terrorist leaders captured overseas, but any ordinary,
lawful resident alien who may once have "knowingly harbored" a present or
former member of Al Qaeda or who might be "believe[d]" to have "aided or
abetted ... acts in preparation" for international terrorism. Third, the
order provides no definition of "international terrorism"--and the definition
of "terrorism" recently provided by Congress in the USA Patriot Act is broad
enough to encompass, for instance, a doctor in the Netherlands prescribing
lethal medication for a terminally ill Oregon patient to "influence the
policy of" the attorney general regarding Oregon doctors by "intimidat[ing]"
him into backing down. This is certainly not to suggest that Attorney General
John Ashcroft would extend his personal war on physician-assisted suicide so
far as to drag the Dutch doctor before a military tribunal. But therein lies
the problem: Using so amorphous and elastic a term without pinning it down
invites arbitrary and potentially discriminatory decisions of whom to submit
to a military trial and whom to spare that burden. Fourth, the tribunal's
jurisdiction extends beyond "violations of the laws of war" to encompass
violations of all "other applicable laws," which in turn invites the use of
military tribunals for ordinary state or federal crimes that bear no relation
to the wartime rationale for circumventing the safeguards of the civilian
courts. Fifth, the order gives the president and secretary of defense
unbridled discretion to conduct all proceedings in complete secrecy, and to
reach whatever "final decision" the president deems proper, perhaps even
convicting and sentencing to death someone the tribunal has acquitted. And
these are just the most obvious excesses.

But just because the order is flawed doesn't mean it can't be mended. The
crucial question--given the many other steps the executive branch is taking
that blur the boundary between making war and doing justice--is who can best
repair it. The standard answer is the Supreme Court. Because they assume the
Court should step in, critics worry that Bush's order appears to preclude
judicial review, and thus may prevent the Court from playing its vital role
in this drama. But that worry is misdirected; in fact, the order probably
does allow judicial review. The problem is that the Court's review would
likely be a rubber stamp. Historically, the judiciary has been so deferential
to the executive in wartime as to provide virtually no meaningful check. That
problem might be compounded this time by the fact that courts are necessarily
limited to reviewing one challenged government measure at a time. As a
result, they fall prey to the familiar tyranny of small decisions; they are
institutionally unable to assess these measures' interlocking totality-- a
totality that might entail far more profound compromises of constitutional
principle than piecemeal judicial review can reveal. And, in blessing dubious
executive wartime measures, the Supreme Court might actually make things
worse--establishing precedents for even more frightening government actions
in ordinary times.

That is why Congress must step in. The Constitution grants the legislative
branch the responsibility to "declare war," "grant letters of marque and
reprisal" (as in the $25 million reward for Osama bin Laden), "define and
punish ... offenses against the law of nations," and make all other laws
"necessary and proper" for executing any of the national government's
enumerated powers. If Congress uses those prerogatives appropriately to trim
the order's sails, then President Bush's extraordinary tribunals may be a
permissible response to an extraordinary war.

Given common assumptions about the constitutional division of power, the
federal judiciary might seem the logical place to check executive
overreaching of the sort found in the president's order. After all, in
analogous circumstances during World War II (Ex Parte Quirin) and as recently
as this year (INS v. St. Cyr), the Court elbowed its way onto the doorstep of
what the president declared unreviewable executive affairs--finding a hook
for judicial review that the president and Congress thought they had
precluded. But it would be a terrible mistake for those who worry about civil
rights and liberties to pin too much hope on the judiciary in times of
crisis. Even assuming general agreement in hindsight that a government
practice violated the Constitution, the likelihood that the Supreme Court
would say so in the face of strong opposition by Congress, the president, and
a public caught in the fog of war is very low indeed. And the odds that
judges will second-guess a determination by the nation's commander in chief
that a given measure is truly demanded by military necessity are particularly
slim.

The boldness with which a bare Court majority intervened in the recounting of
Florida's ballots in the last presidential election--despite the Twelfth
Amendment's allocation of the relevant decision (which electors to count) to
Congress, and despite the absence of reason to doubt that Congress could have
and would have done its job without the Court's help--has led some to assume
that, in a genuine crisis, the Court would similarly seize the prerogative.
But that assumption misreads the current Court. In Bush v. Gore, five of the
justices displayed their disdain for the messy processes of democracy and
their devotion to decorum and the appearance of order even in the inherently
indecorous context of choosing a president. That is very different from the
courage it would take to stand up to a president who claims, with an approval
rating hovering around 90 percent, that he is acting to prevent another
disaster. Indeed, Justice Antonin Scalia's famous worry about a "cloud" over
the legitimacy of the Bush presidency suggests a judicial attitude that would
be accepting rather than skeptical of the president's need to invoke the
extraordinary powers of military tribunals.

In this regard, the current Court is no different from its predecessors, all
of whom--when confronting the "blood-swollen god" of war--nearly always
deferred to the president in trading liberty for security. According to the
memoirs of Franklin Roosevelt's attorney general, some nasty
behind-the-scenes arm-twisting by the executive may have spurred a unanimous
Supreme Court in Ex Parte Quirin to approve military tribunals for citizens
and noncitizens alike accused of wartime sabotage on American soil. And even
without improper executive pressure, when thousands of anarchists, pacifists,
and Communists were convicted and imprisoned for expressing their opposition
to U.S. military policy during World War I, the Supreme Court consistently
upheld their convictions. Those rulings diminished the force of the First
Amendment for half a century, fulfilling Charles Dickens's prophecy that
"traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those
who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves."

Not even after military hostilities have ceased has the Supreme Court been
capable, despite its theoretical independence from public passions, of
striking down such excesses as FDR's shameful internment of more than 70,000
American citizens of Japanese ancestry. On the contrary, in a series of now
infamous decisions culminating in 1944 in Korematsu v. United States, the
Court feared second-guessing the military and "availing [itself] of the calm
perspective of hindsight." So it caved in to puffed-up claims of military
necessity.

It would have been far better had the Supreme Court in these cases exercised
what Alexander Bickel described as the "passive virtues" of ducking
decision--by finding a matter nonjusticiable, or simply by declining
discretionary review--rather than setting one unfortunate precedent after
another, each lying about, as Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his Korematsu
dissent, "like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can
bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need." Noting that a "military
order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military
emergency," Justice Jackson argued that, even if courts should not actively
interfere with a military order that strains the Constitution but whose
necessity no court can properly second-guess, they should refrain from
upholding any such order. For "once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an
order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes
the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, ...
[a] passing incident becomes" a constitutional doctrine with "a generative
power of its own."

That is the danger again today. The current Court seems insufficiently modest
to worry that circumstances might lead it to distort enduring constitutional
principles. And that makes it all the more essential for Congress to play an
active role--more active and thoughtful, certainly, than the role it played
in essentially rubber-stamping without even fully reading the sweeping USA
Patriot Act in October--by curtailing the military tribunal order's clear
excesses. In fact, it is only Congress, through its powers of investigation,
that can turn a spotlight on just what the administration is doing to the
many people it has detained and interrogated in secret, in anticipation of
the excessive secrecy of the tribunals themselves. Only Congress can expose
the racial profiling that appears, despite repeated administration denials,
to be at play in the interrogation of some 5,000 Middle Eastern immigrants.
Only Congress can investigate the array of other apparent incursions on
traditional liberties and privileges (such as attorney-client
confidentiality) that Attorney General Ashcroft has instituted. Above all,
only Congress can determine whether the totality of the executive branch's
domestic anti-terrorism program--which no court could ever assess in one
individual case and which might more severely distort basic constitutional
principles than we could surmise by simply adding its separate
parts--ultimately crosses the line of what the Constitution permits. And only
Congress, through its appropriations and lawmaking powers, can set different
and more fitting parameters and procedures for the military tribunals and for
the web of related institutions and practices--all of those strictures, of
course, being subject to judicial review to ensure that Congress does not
exceed its constitutionally enumerated powers.

That said, there remains the fundamental question of whether the core of the
executive order, its gratuitous branches pruned, is consistent with the
Constitution. I think it may well be. We are engaged in a real war, not a
metaphorical one akin to the "wars" on drugs or poverty. And terrorist
attacks of the sort launched on September 11 differ from "ordinary" mass
murders of as many innocents in that they target Americans and their allies
simply for who they are: citizens of nations that do not accept the
terrorists' twisted views. Just as Kristallnacht represented terrorism
against the Jews of Germany and not simply the breaking of Jewish
shopkeepers' windows, and just as the lynching of African Americans is a form
of terrorism beyond the sum total of the individuals killed, so targeting
Americans for murder throughout the world is more than mere crime. It is war,
and the Constitution cannot prevent its treatment as such.

In wartime, "due process of law," both linguistically and historically,
permits trying unlawful combatants for violation of the laws of war, without
a jury or many of the other safeguards of the Bill of Rights--provided the
trials are conducted by tribunals impartial enough to render fair verdicts,
and provided each accused may hear the case against him and receives a fair
opportunity to contest it through competent counsel. Against this
proposition, critics note that aliens in the United States, even enemy
aliens, are "persons" protected by due process. True enough, but that just
begs the question of what process is "due" under the circumstances.

It is said that martial law and military tribunals have been held
unconstitutional for civilians residing in the United States so long as the
civil courts were open (in Ex Parte Milligan in 1866 and 80 years later in
Duncan v. Kahanamoku). But those cases involved either gardenvariety offenses
like assault or embezzlement, or activities wholly unconnected with any armed
attack or rebellion against the United States.

It is said that military tribunals will be biased against anyone accused by
the president or secretary of defense. But wouldn't any civilian jury be just
as biased? Wouldn't even Supreme Court justices themselves--exposed to the
possible effects of terrorism when they had to vacate their historic quarters
because of an anthrax scare--be less than perfectly impartial? We consider
military tribunals sufficiently impartial to judge our own military personnel
accused of crime. Why should members of Al Qaeda and those who aid them enjoy
a constitutional right to a theoretically purer form of justice than our own
soldiers?

It is said that military tribunals, by not requiring unanimity or proof
beyond a reasonable doubt, would deprive those subject to them of liberty,
and perhaps even life, without due process of law. But due process requires
such safeguards, the Supreme Court has held for at least two decades, only
when "it is much better for [the defendant] to go free" as a result of error
than for the defendant to be erroneously detained. In the 1979 case
establishing that principle, Addington v. Texas, the Court suggested that
even a standard requiring the government to prove merely that its charges are
probably correct would constitute due process when "the possible injury to
the [accused] individual" is not "significantly greater than any possible
harm to the state." The old adage that it is better to free 100 guilty men
than to imprison one innocent describes a calculus that our
Constitution--which is no suicide pact--does not impose on government when
the 100 who are freed belong to terrorist cells that slaughter innocent
civilians, and may well have access to chemical, biological, or nuclear
weapons.

It is said that ordinary civilian trials--like those arising from the 1993
World Trade Center bombing, or proceedings in foreign or international
tribunals like the trial under Scottish law of two Libyans accused of the
1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103--can preserve the secrecy of our
intelligence sources and methods, and the anonymity of potentially endangered
witnesses and jurors. Perhaps--but even if these other fora can be strained
to accommodate the pressing need for occasional secrecy, it does not follow
that they are best-suited for the task. And such nonmilitary trials grant an
extended pulpit to an accused bent on claiming martyrdom and capable of
stirring others to further acts of international terror.

Finally, it is said that using ordinary civilian tribunals, instead of those
the president has proposed, would enable us to put our system of justice on
global display and to demonstrate, by conforming our deeds to our words, the
long-held attachment to a philosophy of universal law that marks the great
divide between our enemies and ourselves. Military tribunals might thus
sacrifice a potentially crucial chance to score a victory in the propaganda
war, and to overcome the resistance of nations like Spain that will not
extradite suspects unless they are tried in civilian courts (and not subject
to the death penalty). These are real benefits, and there are others as
well--and Congress should consider them. But that doesn't mean the
Constitution makes civilian courts mandatory in this wartime context.

In sum, President Bush's order establishing military tribunals goes too far.
It should be cut back by Congress, which must not pass the buck to a Supreme
Court that is unlikely, if history is our guide, to vindicate constitutional
principles in this setting. But this is not to suggest that those tribunals,
at their core, offend any fundamental constitutional precept. Congress, and
all of us as citizens, must try to view such tribunals, and each related
measure the government takes, in their totality--lest by imperceptible steps
we gradually make ourselves into an alarmingly different kind of society. But
as we resist measures that make us no better than those we seek to disarm and
defeat, we must not bind ourselves too tightly to a mast suited only for
navigating peaceful seas.

Laurence H. Tribe is the Tyler professor of constitutional law at Harvard.

--------------------------------------

-3 of 3-

also: NYTimes front page: Groups Gird for Long Legal Fight on New
Bush Anti-Terror Powers; and [The Independent]: We are the war
criminals now

Columbia Journalism Review
November/December 2001

OVER HERE

We're All War Correspondents Now

By CHRISTOPHER HANSON [a CIR contributing editor, covered
the Pentagon and two wars as a newspaper reporter]

    Not long ago, U.S. war correspondents seemed like an endangered breed,
often
failing to make the paper or get on the air because distant wars had so little
seeming relevance in our insular post-cold war society.  The issues of wartime
information control and media self-censorship were largely academic.

    Today those issues are exploding around the world.  The suicide jetliner
attacks of September 11 sent reporters scrambling to distant staging areas for
the U.S. counter-attack.  There they struggled to pry even small scraps of
information from security-conscious brass, who stressed that much of this new
war would be top secret, carried out by shadow warriors far from the eyes of
any
reporter.

    Back home, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon turned
America
itself into a combat zone and domestic journalists by the hundreds into
instant
war correspondents, with some subjected to anthrax attacks by mail right in
their own offices.  Reporters struggled to dig out information, as White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer cautioned the media to "be careful what you say."
Nearly
every domestic news area was soon a kind of war beat -- from police and fire,
to
health care and the FBI, even to such specializations as food (On October 3,
The
Washington Post ran a piece on what food to stockpile in your basement).

    The stakes in this dangerous new reporting environment could scarcely be
higher.  American journalists must now grapple with a severe and paradoxical
challenge.  On the one hand, they must be more cautious because news judgment
can quite literally be a matter of life and death.  On the other hand, they
must
be more aggressively independent in the face of huge pressure to pull punches,
subdue criticism, and do the American government's work in a ferocious
propaganda war with Islamic terrorists.

    First to the question of restraint.  As veteran war correspondents already
know, information is a weapon of war.  One has to assume that terrorists have
constant access to the Internet and CNN.  Premature disclosure of a U.S.
operation or other reporting missteps could cost the lives of American combat
troops overseas, which is why The Washington Post and other papers say they
have
muted a few of their own scoops, holding back certain details of American war
preparations at the request of the government.

    It is now clear that the reporting risks are no less serious on the
domestic
front, where one must assume that the news audience consists not only of
concerned citizens but also terrorists seeking insight on how best to sow
death
on our front porch.  This is a grave situation, requiring even the staunchest
supporters of press prerogatives to think about news in a new way.  U.S.-based
journalists -- whose first impulse has always been getting news out fast --
now
need to pause and filter it like any other war correspondent.  No matter what
the topic, they must ask: Does the public's need to know this information
outweigh the harm that it might cause in the hands of a Mohamed Atta?  This
question might well influence how much detail to include when news outlets
break
stories about, say, oil tanker construction, Amtrak procedures, building
ventilation, pesticide factories.

    But it is not an easy question to answer.  The Wall Street Journal, for
instance, ran a massive piece on September 28 detailing inconsistencies in
security precautions at airports across the country.  The piece disclosed
that a
frequent traveler had seen no bags inspected at the Portland, Oregon, airport,
that no passengers were seen being frisked in Detroit, that it is still
possible
to park within walking distance of the Miami and Pittsburgh terminals, that
only
about 10 percent of the passengers at Boston were inspected with security
wands
(compared with 75 percent in San Francisco.) The piece reported that a box of
knives confiscated from passengers was left unattended at Chicago O'Hare.
Accompanying the article was a reader-friendly chart that summarized the
relative levels of security at twenty U.S. airports.

    Should they have printed such a story in such detail?  Many editors say the
Journal performed a public service.  The story certainly could have put useful
pressure on the FAA and airport authorities to make the security more
stringent
and consistent.  The problem, of course, is that one man's public service
article is another man's tip sheet for murder.  We are living in a world in
which a terrorist might have exploited the airport security loopholes before
the
powers that be got around to closing them.  Suppose a terrorist had used the
article to plan an attack -- planting a bomb in the parking garage near the
terminal or slipping through security at the airport with minimal wanding.
Suppose a heavily marked copy of the Journal article was found among the
terrorist's personal effects.  In that case, the Journal would probably not be
up for a public service award.

    On the other hand, suppose that the Journal chooses not to report its
story.
And suppose that terrorists -- constantly checking airports on their own --
see
or hear about the loopholes themselves.  And then make their move before
authorities are pressed by the newspaper to close those loopholes.  Hard
choices.

    One could face similar choices about reports that many trucks were not
being
searched as they entered Manhattan and that inspection of large trucks
carrying
hazardous materials was hit or miss in some western states.  One also has to
wonder about the wisdom of running an NBC segment showing sections of the
Canada-U.S. border where someone could easily cross undetected by boat.

    Even more striking were reports that included details on how a terror
attack
could be launched.  Ted Koppel, for instance, rebroadcast on October 5 a
three-year-old Nightline report that showed how terrorists might use a subway
tunnel to spread anthrax with great lethal effect.  The report was presumably
intended to put pressure on the authorities to beef up security and Koppel,
appearing live, assured the audience that terrorists were already well aware
of
the technique.  If so -- a big assumption -- we can't rule out the possibility
that they learned the technique by watching Nightline three years before.
When
The Washington Post ran a piece detailing how crop duster nozzles of a certain
size can be used to spread biological weapons, the paper's Outlook editor,
Steven Luxenberg, printed an unusual rebuke.  "Readers don't need an education
in nozzle technology," he wrote in a September 30 op-ed piece.  Luxenberg
quoted
an e-mail from a reader, who declared: "I am in a state of shock that anyone
who
values human life would publish this information."

    While reporters have been too zealous in disclosing potentially endangering
details, they have at times not been zealous enough in guarding their
independence, autonomous judgment, and role as verifiers of fact.  At the
outset
of any war, the government p.r. apparatus attempts to co-opt news media to
channel the official version.  Such efforts may have been particularly hard to
resist in the current conflict, given that some 5,000 civilians were
slaughtered
on U.S. soil.  The attacks drove Bush's approval ratings into the
stratosphere,
drew party leaders together, and rallied the country.  Perhaps not since World
War II had there been such strong pressure on the media to join the team.

    That pressure was evident on October 10 when national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice convened an unusual teleconference with TV news executives.
She urged them to stop airing live or unedited video statements from top
terrorist Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, who had unleashed anti-American
diatribes after Washington launched its bombing campaign against them in
Afghanistan.

    Rice gave two reasons for making her request.

    One was that the terrorist leaders might use such statements to send coded
messages to terror cells.  This claim might have been compelling, if backed up
by hard evidence.  But as The New York Times reported, Rice's warning did not
seem believable to several of the news executives.  With good reason.  After
all, undercover terrorists could still find transcripts of Al Qaeda messages
online and could download video clips from the Internet.

    Even so, CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, and CBS agreed among themselves that, in
order to allow them to make appropriate editorial judgments, they would not
broadcast live such statements from bin Laden or other Al Qaeda spokesmen.
They
were responding largely to the second reason Rice gave for caution: that
running
al Qaeda statements in full bolstered bin Laden's propaganda punch, and could
increase anti-American sentiment, not just among Muslims in the United States
but those in the Philippines, Malaysia,  Indonesia,  and other countries that
received CNN or other American networks.  When Al Qaeda released its next
video
message on October 12, much of the TV coverage stuck to excerpts and quoted
U.S. officials dismissing the statement as propaganda.

    "We are giving the government the benefit of the doubt; the propaganda
issue
is a legitimate issue," CBS president Andrew Heyward told The Washington Post.
It was a "patriotic" decision, one TV exec told The New York Times.

    The administration indeed faced a serious problem.  It was not faring well
in
its propaganda war with Al Qaeda.  The U.S. bombing in Afghanistan was
inflaming
already deep anti-American sentiment among Muslims, and bin Laden was
exploiting
that resentment.  America's propaganda beachhead in the Islamic world was
tenuous at best.

    Pressing American networks into self-censorship was no solution, however.
Al
Qaeda statements were being carried worldwide by non-American news outlets, so
people overseas and some in the U.S. would be getting them anyway.  Curtailing
the U.S. TV network version would be like bandaging the finger of a patient
bleeding from a hundred wounds.  It is also important to keep in mind that
America's poor showing in the propaganda conflict was not the U.S. media's
responsibility, but did stem in part from American government policies --
among
them U.S. support for regimes widely considered corrupt (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait)
and negligible U.S. propaganda efforts in the Islamic world.  The sensible
solution is not for the Bush administration to conscript the independent media
in a feeble attempt to filter out Osama, but rather to launch effective
propaganda of its own.

    The networks responded to pressure nonetheless, depriving the American
audience of a chance to know and understand its enemy more fully.  Faced with
a
choice between covering a propaganda war and participating in one, they seemed
to slide toward participation.  This was a popular decision with the U.S.
audience in the short term, perhaps, but one that could undermine the key role
of network news as a detached observer, believable because it maintains a
staunch independence from government.

    Consider also the coverage of Bush as commander-in-chief in the days
following the attack.  Bush had been seen by many as a green and somewhat
shaky
leader.  So after September 11, the White House p.r. crew leaked juicy
"insider"
anecdotes casting Bush as cool, decisive, and well-informed.  The Washington
Post, in a front-page September 23 article, depicted Bush as the man in the
driver's seat, setting a tight deadline for his crucial crisis speech to
Congress.  The New York Times (September 23) depicted Bush dictating a line of
policy decisions to national security adviser Rice, who was reported to be
taking extensive notes.

    Some reporters might have lapped up the anecdotes because they were
desperate
to tell some kind of inside story, while others, like many in the news
audience
who observed White House decisions during the early weeks of the crisis, might
have believed that Bush was in fact rising to the occasion, displaying
increasing confidence after his speech to Congress on September 20.

    But one suspects that something more deep-seated was animating the
coverage.
In times of national crisis, the media generally fall back on one of two
generic
story lines.  If the president is seasoned, the story is about a tested leader
swinging into crisis mode (FDR after Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower dealing with
Korea.) If the president is unseasoned, the story is about a man tapping as
yet
unseen inner strengths, and rising to the challenge (Lincoln in 1861, Truman
succeeding FDR, JFK in the missile crisis, Reagan after the assassination
attempt.) There is generally no option three at the outset of a crisis,
because,
in our prevailing national faith, America and its leaders flourish in
adversity.  The bigger the crisis, the more intensely we believe.  Only the
most
spectacular failures (Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis) can puncture the myth.

    So it was that some TV pundits, commentators, and columnists were tempted
to
overstate the case that Bush had suddenly grown into the presidency a mere
nine
days after the suicide planes hit their targets.  So it was that, when Bush
gave
the first prime-time press conference of his presidency on October 12, The New
York Times discerned a "new gravitas." The Times reported that Bush had
reassured the world by the "bold move" of coming before the cameras, testing
himself by answering reporters' questions.  The evident theory behind this
report was that a president brave enough to face the press can also face down
bin Laden.

    It might turn out that this president is eventually transformed by fire
from
Prince Hal into Henry V, as CNN's Jeff Greenfield put it.  But at this point
that is wishful thinking, and real news is more than a wish list.  It is an
aggressive search for verified facts.

    Today that search is especially important because American media might well
be facing their toughest challenge, covering the murkiest war in U.S. history.
At times we do not even know if some horrific incident is actually part of the
new war -- as witness the anthrax-by-mail attacks of October.  We will
probably
not know when this war has ended, if it ever does.  (As Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld noted, there will be no surrender ceremony.) And, given the emphasis
on
secret operations, reporters will be hard-pressed to chronicle the war's key
developments, from commando raids to intelligence operations to cyber attacks.

    One can only hope that journalists, too, can rise to the occasion, dig out
the story, report the victories and unflinchingly expose the blunders as they
go
once more into the breach.

GRAPHIC: Picture, Osama bin Laden's tapes were a cause for concern, AP
WIDEWORLD/AL JAZEERA

---------------------------------------

The New York Times
November 30, 2001
-front page-

Groups Gird for Long Legal Fight on New Bush Anti-Terror Powers

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

The Bush administration's aggressive expansion of the government's powers to
arrest and prosecute people in fighting terrorism has stirred a legal battle
that could last many years and redefine the powers of the executive branch,
lawyers and leaders of civil liberties groups say.

The groups, which range across the political spectrum, say they have found
serious constitutional flaws in President Bush's actions and are preparing a
variety of legal challenges.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has maintained that civil rights have never
been threatened by the administration's actions, which include the arrests
and interrogations of hundreds of people after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, the authorization of military tribunals to try terrorism suspects
and efforts to interview 5,000 young Muslim men about their possible
knowledge of terrorism.

"I have yet to be informed of a single lawsuit filed against the government
charging a violation of someone's civil rights as a result of this
investigation," Mr. Ashcroft said on Tuesday.

But such lawsuits are coming soon, lawyers and leaders of some of the groups
said. In several interviews, they outlined a process, now beginning across
the country, in which the political debate about the administration's actions
is being transformed into precise legal arguments.

photo: President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft defended their
proposals and offered incentives for immigrants to provide information.
Photo: NYT

Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New
York, said that his group, which grew out of legal efforts to defend civil
rights protesters in the 1960's, is planning to challenge the executive order
signed by President Bush on Nov. 13 allowing special military tribunals to
try foreigners charged with terrorism. Mr. Goodman said he was discussing the
possible challenge with lawyers representing some of those likely to face
charges.

Mr. Bush's order, he said, has effectively suspended the writ of habeas
corpus, a centuries-old legal procedure protecting citizens from being held
illegally by the government. No president has the right to do that without
the approval of Congress, the center's lawyers argue.

"My job is to defend the Constitution from its enemies," Mr. Goodman said.
"Its main enemies right now are the Justice Department and the White House."

Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project of the Cato
Institute, a group often associated with conservative causes, said he was
particularly concerned with the power the president's order gave officials to
detain noncitizens without court approval.

"If the president can suspend one constitutional principle today," Mr. Lynch
said, "the danger is he can suspend others tomorrow." He said Cato would most
likely file friend-of- the-court briefs siding with those challenging the
military tribunals. The Cato briefs would emphasize its concern with the
power to detain noncitizens.

Mindy Tucker, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said such legal
challenges would very likely fail. "We do not believe our system of justice
prevents us from protecting people's constitutional rights and protecting
American lives," Ms. Tucker said.


In the interviews, lawyers said they were studying century-old Supreme Court
rulings and materials dealing with the drafting of the Constitution as they
formed arguments, and outlined a broad range of legal strategies to attack
many actions by the administration since Sept. 11. Elliot M. Mincberg, legal
director of the People for the American Way Foundation, a Washington-based
liberal group, said that one possible tactic would be lawsuits under the
Freedom of Information Act to press for more disclosure by the government
about the people it has detained.

Irwin H. Schwartz, a Seattle lawyer who is president of the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his organization of 30,000
lawyers was developing a strategy for expected challenges to Mr. Ashcroft's
policy permitting the monitoring of some conversations between lawyers and
their clients.

"What the attorney general has done here is the equivalent of putting an
F.B.I. agent's ear to the confessional," Mr. Schwartz said. Officials have
argued that they have many safeguards to ensure that monitoring does not
violate any rights.

Several lawyers said they were focusing on the president's order establishing
the military tribunals, which would give defendants many fewer rights than
are available in civilian trials.

Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said
the group had concluded the president was, in effect, making law by
authorizing the military tribunals and providing the procedures for trials in
them. Mr. Shapiro said the lawmaking role was reserved for Congress under the
Constitution and argued the president's action was a violation of the
principle of separation of powers.

"They are circumventing Congress," he said. Government officials have argued
that the president was authorized to take the action because of his powers
under the Constitution as commander in chief. Lawsuits could compel the
courts to balance those powers against that reserved to the Congress.

As they are planning challenges to the military tribunals, several lawyers
said they have begun to focus on the president's effort to limit the rights
of appeals in the tribunals.

Michael Ratner, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who is
working on legal strategies, said he had focused on whether, by trying to
limit appeals' rights, the president had effectively repealed the
constitutional guarantee of the right to bring habeas corpus proceedings.

Such proceedings are suits that force the government to explain whether
people are being held lawfully. A person contesting the power of a military
tribunal would do so by filing such a proceeding.

The Constitution grants the right to such proceedings, but permits them to be
suspended "in cases of rebellion or invasion."

The language of the president's order says that people coming before military
tribunals "shall not be privileged to seek any remedy or maintain any
proceeding" in any court.

But the order did not explicitly suspend habeas corpus, and it is not clear
whether the president meant to do so. If he meant to do so, it is not clear
whether he had the power.

The constitutional provision permitting the suspension of habeas corpus
appears in Article I, which defines the power of Congress. Some lawyers argue
that this means only Congress can suspend the right. The Constitution does
not clarify which branch of government has the power.

There is a precedent for suspension of habeas corpus - Lincoln did so during
the Civil War - but the Supreme Court has not definitively decided whether
the president has the power acting alone.

Mr. Ratner said he was marshaling an argument to try to convince a court that
President Bush had overstepped his powers. "We don't believe in one-man rule
in this country," he said.

-----------------------------

Independent (London)
29 November 2001

We are the war criminals now

By Robert Fisk

We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan. The US Air Force bombs
Mazar-i-Sharif for the Northern Alliance, and our heroic Afghan allies - who
slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between 1992 and 1996 - move into the city
and execute up to 300 Taliban fighters. The report is a footnote on the
television satellite channels, a "nib" in journalistic parlance. Perfectly
normal, it seems. The Afghans have a "tradition" of revenge. So, with the
strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed.

Now we have the Mazar-i-Sharif prison "revolt", in which Taliban inmates
opened fire on their Alliance jailers. US Special Forces - and, it has
emerged, British troops - helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and,
sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were "executed" trying to escape. It
is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes. Within days,
The Independent's Justin Huggler has found more executed Taliban members in
Kunduz.

The Americans have even less excuse for this massacre. For the US Secretary
of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of
the city that US air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop "if the
Northern Alliance requested it". Leaving aside the revelation that the thugs
and murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting as air controllers to
the USAF in its battle with the thugs and murderers of the Taliban, Mr
Rumsfeld's incriminating remark places Washington in the witness box of any
war-crimes trial over Kunduz. The US were acting in full military
co-operation with the Northern Alliance militia.

Most television journalists, to their shame, have shown little or no interest
in these disgraceful crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to
the American troops, most have done little more than mention the war crimes
against prisoners in the midst of their reports. What on earth has gone wrong
with our moral compass since 11 September?

Perhaps I can suggest an answer. After both the First and Second World Wars,
we - the "West" - grew a forest of legislation to prevent further war crimes.
The very first Anglo-French-Russian attempt to formulate such laws was
provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks in 1915; The
Entente said it would hold personally responsible "all members of the
(Turkish) Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in
such massacres". After the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in
1945, article 6 (C) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the UN
Convention on genocide referred to "crimes against humanity". Each new
post-1945 war produced a raft of legislation and the creation of evermore
human rights groups to lobby the world on liberal, humanistic Western values.
Over the past 50 years, we sat on our moral pedestal and lectured the Chinese
and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We
pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs. We
put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at Nuremberg.
Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing - in nauseous detail - the
secret courts and death squads and torture and extra judicial executions
carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too.

Yet suddenly, after 11 September, we went mad. We bombed Afghan villages into
rubble, along with their inhabitants - blaming the insane Taliban and Osama
bin Laden for our slaughter - and now we have allowed our gruesome militia
allies to execute their prisoners. President George Bush has signed into law
a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to
be a "terrorist murderer" in the eyes of America's awesomely inefficient
intelligence services. And make no mistake about it, we are talking here
about legally sanctioned American government death squads. They have been
created, of course, so that Osama bin Laden and his men should they be caught
rather than killed, will have no public defence; just a pseudo trial and a
firing squad.

It's quite clear what has happened. When people with yellow or black or
brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or Nationalist credentials, murder
their prisoners or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death
squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the European
Union, the United Nations and the "civilised" world. We are the masters of
human rights, the Liberals, the great and good who can preach to the
impoverished masses. But when our people are murdered - when our glittering
buildings are destroyed - then we tear up every piece of human rights
legislation, send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses
and set out to murder our enemies.

Winston Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945, he preferred
the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact
that Hitler's monsters were responsible for at least 50 million deaths -
10,000 times greater than the victims of 11 September - the Nazi murderers
were given a trial at Nuremberg because US President Truman made a remarkable
decision. "Undiscriminating executions or punishments," he said, "without
definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily on the
American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."

No one should be surprised that Mr Bush - a small-time Texas
Governor-Executioner - should fail to understand the morality of a statesman
in the Whitehouse. What is so shocking is that the Blairs, Schröders, Chiracs
and all the television boys should have remained so gutlessly silent in the
face of the Afghan executions and East European-style legislation sanctified
since 11 September.

There are ghostly shadows around to remind us of the consequences of state
murder. In France, a general goes on trial after admitting to torture and
murder in the 1954-62 Algerian war, because he referred to his deeds as
"justifiable acts of duty performed without pleasure or remorse". And in
Brussels, a judge will decide if the Israeli Prime Minister, Arial Sharon,
can be prosecuted for his "personal responsibility" for the 1982 massacre in
Sabra and Chatila.

Yes, I know the Taliban were a cruel bunch of bastards. They committed most
of their massacres outside Mazar-i-Sharif in the late 1990s. They executed
women in the Kabul football stadium. And yes, lets remember that 11 September
was a crime against humanity.

But I have a problem with all this. George Bush says that "you are either for
us or against us" in the war for civilisation against evil. Well, I'm sure
not for bin Laden. But I'm not for Bush. I'm actively against the brutal,
cynical, lying "war of civilisation" that he has begun so mendaciously in our
name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Centre mass
murder.

At this moment, I can't help remembering my dad. He was old enough to have
fought in the First World War. In the third Battle of Arras. And as great age
overwhelmed him near the end of the century, he raged against the waste and
murder of the 1914-1918 war. When he died in 1992, I inherited the campaign
medal of which he was once so proud, proof that he had survived a war he had
come to hate and loathe and despise. On the back, it says: "The Great War for
Civilisation." Maybe I should send it to George Bush.

----------------------

The Jakarta Post [online]
December 1, 2001

Golkar to set up "rival" Special Committee on Bulog scandal

JAKARTA (JP): Legislators from the Golkar Party raised on Saturday the
possibility of establishing a "rival" Special Committee at the House of
Representatives (DPR) if other parties insisted on setting up a Special
Committee to investigate thealleged misuse of Rp 40 billion (US$4 million) in
nonbudgetary funds of the State Logistics Agency (Bulog) by Golkar.

"We may set up a similar committee if other parties proceed with their
attempts to set up the Special Committee over the alleged misuse of the Rp 40
billion Bulog funds. The Bulog funds were also used by other parties during
the 1999 general election," Golkar legislator Yahya Zaini said as quoted by
Indosiar television.

Golkar found itself in hot water after the media published copies of receipts
for Rp 20 billion of Bulog funds, which were signed by two party treasurers
Fadel Muhammad and Muhammad Sulaeman Hidayat.

Yahya said the alleged misuse of the funds should beinvestigated by the
Attorney General's Office only, and that the case did not need to go before a
special House committee.

Similarly, Fahmi Idris of the Golkar Party referred to the possible
establishment of a rival special committee.

Meanwhile, a United Development Party (PPP) legislator Zein Badjeber said the
party supported the establishment of the special committee.

"They (critics) should find out whether there were any PPP legislators
included in the list of 50 legislators who proposed the establishment of the
special committee. Indeed, there were several PPP legislators on the list,"
he was quoted by thetelevision station as saying.

The PPP, which finished third behind Golkar in the 1999 election, has been
criticized for adopting a passive stance toward the establishment of the
special committee.

Jakarta Post
Sunday, December 2, 2001

Tommy hullabaloo taking the spotlight off Buloggate II

JAKARTA (JP): The latest installment in the high-profile detention of Hutomo
"Tommy" Mandala Putra centered on Saturday on the visit of his two elder
sisters to Jakarta Police Headquarters and efforts by his lawyers to drag
former president Abdurrahman Wahid into the drama.

Wearing a brown head scarf, Siti Hardijanti "Tutut" Indra Rukmana and her
younger sister Siti Hutami "Mamiek" Adiningsih, in dark green attire, went to
the Jakarta Police Headquarters to seek permission to visit Tommy.

But they were denied access to their brother, a suspect in the murder of
Justice Syafiuddin Kartasasmita.

"We hope police will allow us to visit him next week," Tutut told reporters
after meeting Jakarta Police chief of detectives Sr. Comr. Adang Rochjana.

Police said Tommy could not be visited, even by his family members, as he was
being questioned by police investigators.

Tommy was taken from his cell for his fourth session of questioning on
Saturday at 9:30 a.m. His lawyer Elza Syarif arrived at 10:15.

Elza was reluctant to provide details of the questioning.

She, nevertheless, confirmed that the questions posed by investigators
centered around her client's meetings with former President Abdurrahman Wahid
at The Regent Hotel and Borobudur Hotel.

Another of Tommy's lawyers, Nurdirman Munir, separately said that the police
should consider questioning former president Abdurrahman Wahid as the latter
was believed to have met Tommy and made a deal with him prior to his escape.

"The court has brought former president Soeharto to trial, why can't they do
the same with Gus Dur," he said, referring to Abdurrahman.

Tommy reportedly met Gus Dur to discuss the possibility of a presidential
pardon over his conviction in the land-swap case involving his Goro Batara
Sakti retail chain and the State Logistics Agency (Bulog).

Rumors had it that Tommy had bribed the former president for Rp 15 billion,
but Abdurrahman denied the allegations.

Meanwhile, Jakarta Police chief Insp. Gen. Sofjan Jacoeb said that
Abdurrahman would be summoned for clarification once the investigation into
the murder of Justice Syafiuddin was completed.

"Sure, we'll be summoning him," Sofjan told reporters.

Meanwhile, communications expert Tjipta Lesmana warned that the media fanfare
over Tommy's arrest and questioning would only benefit former ruling party
Golkar and its chairman Akbar Tandjung, allegedly involved in the misuse of
Rp 40 billion in Bulog funds.

The Tommy case, Tjipta said, could overshadow investigations into the Bulog
graft case, dubbed as Buloggate II.

"This might be a scenario setup. I just want to say that there are some
coincidences. When the Bulog case and the change of police chief were in the
spotlight, then came this arrest," he said.

also: City museum offers tantalizing clues to former glory

Jakarta Post
Sunday, December 2, 2001

Seeking the onetime 'Venice of the East'

Zulkifli Mohamad, Contributor, Palembang, South Sumatra

"Why Palembang?" a colleague asked when I told of my plans to spend a weekend
in the capital of South Sumatra.

My obvious comeback was to look for the remnants of Sri Wijaya, the famous
maritime kingdom of Southeast Asia, which led to its being called the "Venice
of the East" from the 7th century to the 9th century.

Although he helped me get the information I needed to travel to the city, he
warned me that there was little left to see of the glory of Sri Wijaya, now
most frequently spelled Sriwijaya, which had once spanned across Southeast
Asia.

"It's not like Majapahit, with temples scattered all around," he said of the
country's other great kingdom.

So, I set off for Palembang, stopping at a small hotel listed in the Lonely
Planet guide. I then made my first trip out onto Jl. Sudirman, one of the
city's main streets, to get some food as the city slipped into the darkness
of the evening.

I tasted my first empek-empek, the Palembang food speciality, cakes made of
fish and flour, fried and served with a sauce made from chili, garlic and
brown sugar, very much in the same style as the Chinese yong tau foo, for a
light dinner.

Then it was back to my gloomy hotel room, where I read up on old research
papers published in the 1970s about Sri Wijaya's origins. Historians are
still debating about the actual site of the kingdom; one theory has it that
Palembang was the island capital and Chaiya in Thailand the mainland capital.
Another theory suggested that the capital was in Chih Tu (presently Kelantan
of northeast peninsular Malaysia) or even Lang-Ya-Shiu or Langkasuka (now
Pattani in the southern part of Thailand).

But perhaps the center of the administration shifted from one place to
another following the power of the king and family. Even in Palembang, the
researchers are still working on the actual site of Sri Wijaya. The only Sri
Wijaya writing is from the journal of I Tsing, a Chinese trader who traveled
from Canton to Palembang in 671 before continuing his journey to India in
672.

Accompanied by a guide, my first destination to visit was Bukit Seguntang,
about seven kilometers from the city center, which was considered the holy
hill for the people at the time, mainly Buddhist Mahayana. Archeological
excavations have uncovered building bricks and roof tiles (believed to be the
remnants of a vihara (temple) on top of the hill, which stands 27 meters
above sea level), as well as a Buddhist statue in the style of the Sri Wijaya
kingdom (the statue is now at the National Museum in Jakarta).

Bukit Seguntang is still considered a sacred place, protected by guardians of
the many cemeteries on the hill, believed to be the princesses and warriors
of the Sri Wijaya kingdom. My guide, who told me that he was the descendent
of the Palembang sultanate with Javanese royal blood, took me to the
Archaeology Park of the Sri Wijaya Kingdom.

There is an inscription that symbolizes the birth of the Sri Wijaya Kingdom
written in Pallava, an old Malay language. It says the king and his 20,000
soldiers built a settlement known as Sri Wijaya in 683 AD around the foot of
Bukit Seguntang. One of the displays is a brick structure excavated from
Pulau Cempaka (Cempaka Island), with interconnected canals found in the park,
which can be navigated toward the Musi River, the famous waterway that cuts
through Palembang.

In my mind I was thinking, "But what's left to be found of Sri Wijaya?" We
went onto the Museum of South Sumatra, the state museum. Indeed, it is a
must-visit museum, if you would like to know more about Palembang and not
just about Sri Wijaya. It houses some of the most recent archaeological
findings, as the most important ones are in the National Museum. Still, its
stories about the region's history are very useful because they points out
how to discover the Palembang sultanate's history, the arts and crafts, incl.

At the back of the museum, there's a "rumah limas", traditional house,
synonymous with Palembang, although, unfortunately, it was closed on the day
I visited. I walked around and looked at some of the traditional houses still
in use in the area.

It is said that the special character comes from the shape of the roof, which
is pyramidal or trapezoidal-shaped. Another interesting identity is the three
tilted ends of the roof, a characteristic that bears some resemblance to
Chinese temples and houses of the nobility.

The house of a well-known weaver, known as the "House of Zainal", though
newly constructed, attempts to reconstruct the Palembang house, and it is a
charming new addition in the middle of the old houses. Zainal also created a
small arts and crafts exhibition in one of the rooms, styled with Palembang
wedding decorations and songket, the traditional textile of the area.

The next day I went in search of the wet market. That led me along the end of
the little alleyways at the edge of the riverbank. Rakit houses float by on
bamboos underneath, people with their baskets and boxes wait for the boat to
cross the river to the village. The village is an idyllic picture, featuring
old houses, large and small, with clay roof tiles.

Certainly, it made for a peaceful morning to sit down, sip my Sumatran coffee
and breakfast on Padang food while watching the water life of Palembang pass
by along the Musi, all 80 kilometers of it, as the Ampera Bridge, built in
the 1960s, stands strongly over it. This 1.77-kilometer-long bridge was built
in honor of the sacrifices made for the independence fight.

I later walked to the site of Mesjid Besar (the Grand Mosque), which is going
through massive renovation to return it to the old design of the Palembang
sultanate. The mosque is a hodgepodge of various designs from construction
carried out in 1897, 1930, 1952 and the 1960s, but I could not enter it
because work was under way.

The street behind the mosque was such a delight for me as it was full of
shops and workshops selling Palembang's famous furniture and lacquerware.
Along the street I found three little shops selling antiques, from ceramics
to old brassware. The last shop on the street was a real treasure trove --
with a collection from Sri Wijaya, Palembang, Lampung and other places.

I found two krises believed to be from Sri Wijaya and another from a smaller
kingdom upriver from Musi. It brought my trip to a satisfying end, but I told
myself that I would return to Palembang, more interesting than my friend had
said it would be, especially for a cruise along the Musi.

-------------------

Jakarta Post
Sunday, December 2, 2001

City museum offers tantalizing clues to former glory

Zulkifli Mohamad, Contributor, Palembang

The caretaker-cum-guide at Sultan Machmud Badaruddin II Museum kept on
apologizing about the poor state of the museum and its collection as he took
me around.

The city museum, named after the sultan who was arrested by the Dutch and
sent into exile in distant Ternate in July 1821, was formerly the Palembang
Sultan's Palace and part of the Keraton Kuto Besar.

Later, when the Dutch took over, it became the Kuto Besar Fortress. The
museum has a few cannons pointing toward the riverfront facing the newly
built red gate, with a lotus flower design on top of the gate and a naga
(dragon) design, a symbol of the importance of water to this former maritime
kingdom.

This gave the impression of an ancient kingdom, juxtaposed with the
red-roof-tile and white concrete tropical colonial building. The building is
believed to have been extended and renovated on several occasions since the
reign of Sultan Machmud Badaruddin II.

There were three recently discovered statues of Buddha and Ganesha, god of
knowledge, in the museum grounds, and examples of the area's famous songket
textiles and lacquerware inside. The museum caretaker has his own way of
interpreting the history and arts of Palembang and the ancient kingdom of Sri
Wijaya. He pointed out that the wood carving of the lotus flower has been
incorporated into Islamic design although the lotus is integral to Buddhist
symbolism.

Through my guide I acquired three photocopied books on Palembang's history,
arts and culture. He later showed me to antique and craft shops as well as
textiles and costumes from Palembang's heyday at the Pasar Illir 16 Market.
Before he left me in the middle of the market craziness, he pointed out that
I should come in the future during "Sri Wijaya Day" in June when all things
about Palembang are put on show, especially the rare royal court performance
of "Genta Seri Wijaya".

All the time, he had kept repeating his apologies, and also announced his
hope that someday someone would help redevelop and preserve the collection.
And he has a good point.

With the fame of Sri Wijaya in Southeast Asia, this museum could easily
attract visitors from the region and further afield. Exhibitions about
Palembang as an important Malay kingdom up to the 19th century could be
developed by incorporating its port and waterways in telling how trading led
to the collection of cultural wealth. This high-potential museum could
contribute to history reconstruction and cultural revival as well as tourism
development.

What it needs is an awareness of its importance, plus management and
networking not only from the municipality, but also from the business
community, education and cultural experts and activists. One can only wonder
what others could do when someone like a museum caretaker was able to
construct the history and tales from a very poor collection of exhibits and
make it interesting to me.

Jakarta Post
Sunday, December 2, 2001

Marchers urge public to avoid threat of AIDS

Fabiola Desy Unidjaja, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

This year's observance of International AIDS Day in Jakarta was marked by
revelry, parades and music on Saturday.

Students carrying banners paraded through the capital, the President released
white balloons into the air at the National Monument (Monas) and young people
played music -- with anti-AIDS messages.

Never experiment with drugs, avoid promiscuity and unprotected sex were some
of the messages conveyed to the public about the danger of AIDS, which first
became a national issue in 1987 in Indonesia.

President Megawati Soekarnoputri, accompanied by Coordinating Minister for
Social Welfare Yusuf Kalla and Minister of Health Achmad Sujudi, saw off the
parade from the National Monument complex, after releasing hundreds of white
balloons.

The parade, starting from Monas and ending at Senayan Sports Stadium, was
enlivened by pop and marching bands, along with traditional music
performances.

Wearing white t-shirts with a red ribbon as the symbol of their concern for
AIDS, the students carried posters reminding the public of the danger of
AIDS.

"This year's AIDS Day observance focused on increasing male, especially
teenagers', participation in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS," Sujudi said.

The theme was chosen based on the fact that men largely neglect to practice
safe sex.

"This habit of engaging in unprotected sex endangers the health of both men
and women. Men should have greater concern because they put their family's
health at risk, too," Sujudi added.

Official data shows that 120,000 people in Indonesia are infected with
HIV/AIDS. Activists say that the actual number could be much higher as many
cases are undetected. The number has risen along with the increasing number
of drug users.

Almost half the sufferers have died. AIDS/HIV mostly affects people of
productive age, from 20 to 39, who account for 73.27 percent of the
sufferers.

HIV/AIDS sufferers are found in 23 of the 30 provinces in the country, with
Jakarta and Irian Jaya topping the list with 239 and 210 cases respectively
as of Sept. 30, 2001.

In Surabaya, dozens of university students marked AIDS Day with rallies and
displayed posters and banners along the city's main streets to warn the
public of the danger of AIDS.

"AIDS could affect anybody... that is why we have to be alert to its spread,"
one of the participants, Haris Sianturi, said as quoted by Antara.

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
30 Nov 2001

Indonesia - OCHA consolidated situation report No. 52

23 - 30 November 2001

1. NATURAL DISASTERS

Media reports said that hundreds of some 3,000 flood victims in southern
Bandung who have been staying in public buildings for the past two weeks were
suffering from diarrhoea, eye infections, and skin irritation.

Rain-induced floods washed away 60 villages and destroyed hundreds of
hectares of farming lands in Lhoksukon sub-district of North Aceh district
last week. Hundreds of families have been displaced, and some 600 telephones
lines cut. Floods also occurred in Pidie and East Aceh districts. In East
Aceh, thousands of homes and hundreds of hectares of farmland were inundated
when the Krueng Langsa River overflowed.

2. ACEH (Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam)

General Situation

GAM released Ghazali Usman, a member of the East Aceh district legislature,
on Monday (26 Nov.) after holding him for 98 days. He was handed over to a
local NGO "Bandar Khalifah" in a palm oil plantation area. It was reported
that he would leave the country soon.

A group of armed men has abducted nine people, including a local radio
reporter, who were travelling in two public buses in the Sungai Raya area of
East Aceh on Sunday (25 Nov.), according to Muhammad Yusuf Puteh, a local
human rights activist. Puteh said the bus company indicated that the victims
were not from Aceh because they could not speak the local language.

Violence continued during the week and more than half a dozen people were
reported killed. There are fears that the security situation might worsen on
the eve of GAM's 25th anniversary on 4 December.

Assessments

OCHA carried out a fact-finding mission (21-24 Nov) in North Sumatra to
assess the condition of IDPs from Aceh in the province. The IDPs are
primarily Javanese trans-migrants who have lived for more than 20 years in
different districts of Aceh. According to Satkorlak (provincial coordinating
body for disaster management and IDPs), 18,387 displaced people have already
settled in the province and over 49,000 people are still scattered throughout
North Sumatra in camps, rented houses and host communities. Most displaced
children cannot attend school due to high tuition fees. Water, sanitation and
health services are in critical condition and need urgent attention. The
government assistance is reportedly limited and no international humanitarian
agency is present there.

A two-day security assessment mission by UN security officers to Banda Aceh
and Sabang was completed on Tuesday (27 Nov.).

CARDI went on a water and sanitation assessment mission to Southeast Aceh on
28-30 November.

Health

The health office of West Aceh district reported that three people had died
from diarrhoea in Setia Bakti sub-district. The health authorities sent a
team to this remote area to prevent the spread of the disease.

Other

UNICEF organised a one-day workshop on child protection at the UN Resource
Centre in Banda Aceh. The workshop was attended by NGOs, including SC US, the
Child Protection Body (LPA) of Aceh, and Yayasan Anak Bangsa (YAB). A follow
up meeting is scheduled for January 2002.

3. CENTRAL SULAWESI

General Situation

Fighting between Muslims and Christians reportedly killed seven people and
destroyed hundreds of houses this week. Complete and unbiased reports from
the area are difficult to get, but local sources reported the following:

Monday (26 Nov.): The Bethany Church in Poso Town was burned down. No
casualties were reported. Christians had abandoned the town four months ago.
Tuesday: Three Christian villages in Poso Pesisir sub-district were attacked:
Betalemba, Patiwunga, and Tangkura. Five people died. The Christians fled to
Napu and Tentena.

Wednesday: Another Christian village, Sulewana, in North Pamona sub-district,
was attacked.

Thursday: Two Christian villages, Sangginora and Dewua, in North Pamona, were
attacked. In the afternoon, two other Christian villages in Lage
sub-district, Sepe and Silanca, were attacked. Christians living in nearby
villages were reported to have started evacuating to Tentena.

Later reports claimed that the villages of Betalemba, Patiwunga, Tangkura,
Sulewana, Sangginora, and Dewua had been completely destroyed. The Jakarta
Post reported that the dozens of troops and police deployed in these areas
were powerless to halt the violence, which involved a thousand armed
civilians, although both military and police chiefs on Thursday morning said
they had the situation under control. The Post reported that Laskar Jihad
members admitted on Thursday that their fighters had initiated the attack on
Tangkura after being allegedly provoked by the Christians. "We will never
stop our attacks," he said as quoted by the daily.
Food Security

The head of the Social Welfare office in Poso said the distribution of food
and side-dish money to IDPs was delayed due to the uncertain security
situation in the district.

Health and Sanitation

ICRC distributed medicines to Poso IDPs through the Poso General Hospital and
the Tentena General Hospital. The medicines included water purifying tablets,
plasma substitute, infusions, renewable supplies and dressing material.

4. MADURA

Health

During a mission on Tuesday (27 Nov.), WHO met with district health
authorities to discuss developments for the forthcoming health surveillance
training to take place in the first week of December.

Water and Sanitation

During the above mentioned mission WHO supervised the drilling of a well in
Buntan Barat village, where 50% of its 11,000 population are IDPs. The
construction of the well, by the villagers themselves, is to be completed by
mid December. The initiative is part of the WHO project in Sampang, carried
out in cooperation with the national NGO Nurani Dunia. WHO also reported that
the construction of a well providing 7 litres of water/second using a
tap-tower system had been completed in Bira Barat, Sampang, a village with a
population of 22,000 people (of whom 50% are IDPs).

Shelter

WVI called for a household survey to assess the living conditions of host
families. It is reported that there is an urgent need for temporary shelters.

5. MALUKU

General Situation

There was a notable reduction of tension in the overall security situation in
Ambon and elsewhere in Maluku. The new barricades set up by the Christians on
roads in the city were removed soon after the end of the 3-day mourning
period called by the Christians last week.

On Saturday (24 Nov.) four people were injured by an accidental bomb
explosion in the Muslim sector of Batu Merah, Ambon.

Heavy gunfire, believed to be from the military, was heard in the Kebun
Cengkeh area in Ambon on Tuesday (27 Nov.) night. No further details are
available.

IMC reports that Waymusing, a Muslim village in Buru, was attacked by hill
tribesmen last Friday (23 Nov.). The attack left two people dead and two
injured. There were later reports that one tribesman was killed in
retaliation.

Population Movements

Reports were received that almost 85% of the population of Waimulang have
returned to their village. The government confirmed that the attack on 1
November caused substantial damage to houses and other buildings and that it
would assist in the rehabilitation of the village. A local NGO reported that
there is a need for medicines, shelter materials and clothing. Efforts will
be made by aid agencies to verify the situation there in the coming days.

Assessments

An AcF mission to TNS sub-district in Seram returned to Ambon to report that
IDPs who initially fled to Taniwel in Seram had returned. The NGO will return
to TNS next week to follow up on the assessment.

Mercy Corps sent an assessment team this week to Kasui and Teor islands to
assess the situation and the possibilities of IDPs returning. The team
comprised representatives from a local NGO, the Tual district office of the
Social Welfare ministry, the sub-district head of Kei Kecil, several leaders
of local communities, and IDP representatives from Teor and Kasui.

IMC conducted an assessment at Namlea and determined that the General
Hospital there was in need of a surgeon.

WFP performed an assessment mission in Ambon during the course of the week to
assess food needs among IDPs in the city and identify room for WFP
participation in providing humanitarian assistance in the coming year. WFP is
particularly interested in identifying a local NGO as its implementing
partner for that area.

Food Security and Agriculture

AcF distributed seed and tool kits in North West Buru to 1,238 households.
Beneficiaries are mostly returnees.

Health

Five new doctors recruited by IMC arrived in Ambon this week. They will be
temporarily assigned to Wahaii in North Seram and Masohi in Central Seram.
Before proceeding on their new assignments, they will attend the workshop
'Health as a Bridge for Peace', which will be conducted by WHO next week.

IMC reported that a medical team that had moved to Wamsisi, Buru early this
month has organised basic restoration of the Puskesmas (local public health
centre). Four rooms were prepared with beds for inpatients. The pharmacy and
equipment stock rooms were also organised and restocked. The NGO has also
established a temporary office with a field logistician in Namlea. A VHF base
station in the Puskesmas allows communication with the Namlea office.
However, the IMC doctor who was assigned to Wamsisi had to be temporarily
moved to Namlea on Saturday (24 Nov.) due to some reports of militia activity
in the mountain areas.

IMC has also conducted mobile clinic visits for the last 2 weeks in the
villages surrounding Leksula, including Waimulang, Buru.

IMC this week has also arranged with the head of the Maluku health office to
have one of the TNI anaesthetic nurses attached to the Tual General Hospital
to assist their general surgeon there. The IMC surgeon has been operating
without an anaesthetic nurse for the last one month.

Water and Sanitation

Mercy Corps held a meeting with about 20 local NGOs on Wednesday (28 Nov.) to
discuss water and sanitation-related issues for areas outside of Ambon
Island.

Shelter and Non-food Items

Mercy Corps has approved a project to repair the roofing for 94 families at
an IDP camp in Halong Naval Base. The roof of these barracks was made out of
sago leaves shingles, which are now leaking. These will be replaced with
galvanized corrugated sheets.

Mercy Corps is also working with a local NGO, Yayasan Batera Keke, to support
33 families who have returned to their village in U'at Reyean, Southeast
Maluku, with non-food items.

Education

SC UK had a meeting with UNICEF and the head of the Maluku Education Office.
Issues discussed were the pilot areas for implementing Save the Children
programmes, and the setting up of a working group to tackle education-related
issues.

Other

International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) is in Ambon to conduct a
capacity building training course with their partners. While ICMC does not
have a permanent presence in Ambon, they conduct training programmes for
their six partners in Maluku.

ECHO and USAID teams were also in Ambon this week to inspect their projects
and meet their implementing partners.

6. NORTH MALUKU

Assessments

AcF monitored the progress of the reconstruction programme they have been
supporting in East Gane sub-district, and carried out an assessment of needs
in the sectors of reconstruction and rehabilitation in Jailolo sub-district.

A joint SC UK and WVI team did a "Classroom Resources" needs assessment in
schools in the areas in which WVI is currently involved (Galela, Tobelo, Kao
and Malifut sub-districts). The mission findings are not immediately
available.

A WHO and OCHA team (comprising national medical officers, psychologists, and
psychiatrists) carried out a field survey during a one-week mission to Bacan,
Kao, Malifut and Tobelo, to test a Rapid Mental Health Assessment Tool. This
tool was developed internationally to better understand the mental condition
and needs of communities and people affected by conflict. WHO will make the
report available for use by any interested organisation.

Food Security and Agriculture

ICRC is distributing seeds and agricultural tools to selected vulnerable
communities in Weda sub-district of Central Halmahera district.

Health

WVI provided health training to 676 displaced mothers with children under 12
who are residing in 28 camps in Ternate City. Hygiene kits were also
distributed to 502 vulnerable families in these camps.

ICRC is distributing Family and Hygiene Kits to 130 vulnerable people in Weda
sub-district, Central Halmahera district, and school uniforms to children at
elementary school.

MDM continues to provide health services in the sub-districts of Jailolo,
Sahu and Ibu. This week 30 health cadres received training on malaria
treatment.

IMC assistance for health services continues at all health centres in Tobelo,
Galela, Kao, and Daruba & Posi-Posi Rao of South Morotai and Bere-Bere of
North Morotai sub-districts. Common illnesses reported during the week
include malaria, diarrhoea and respiratory tract infection.

Water and Sanitation

WVI supported the cleaning of 38 wells in 6 villages in Malifut, Kao, Tobelo
and Galela sub-districts. Essential building materials (bricks, zinc plates,
iron, and closets) for the construction and rehabilitation of MCK (combined
bathing, latrine, and washing facilities) in these villages were also
provided.

Housing Reconstruction and Rehabilitation

AcF distributed construction kits for 290 houses in 3 villages of Loloda
sub-district in North Maluku district.

WVI distributed roofing kits in Mamuya village (midway between Galela and
Tobelo sub-district). So far WVI has distributed 2,810 roofing kits under
this programme in target villages in Galela, Tobelo, Kao and Malifut
sub-districts. It is expected that a total of 1,000 roofing kits will be
distributed by January 2002.

7. PAPUA

General Situation

Jayapura police spokesman Janner HR said the police shot two alleged rebels
to death when around 100 people attacked a police post in Kimaam, Merauke
district, on Wednesday (28 Nov.).

Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono said on Wednesday (28 Nov.) that the government had formed a joint
team of police and military to investigate the murder of Theys Hiyo Eluay,
the leader of the Papua Council Presidium (PDP). Earlier on Monday (26 Nov.),
Papuan Christian and Muslim leaders wrote a letter to the National Commission
on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) asking for an independent investigation into
Theys' death. They said they would not accept any investigation involving
elements of the military or the police because they doubted their
objectivity. Kopassus (the Army's Special Force) Commander Maj. Gen. Amirul
Isnaini has denied allegations that his troops were involved in the murder.
Komnas HAM has announced its plan to conduct its own investigation.

Around 30 Papuans, some wearing tribal costumes, rallied peacefully outside
the UN building in Jakarta on Thursday (Nov. 29). They accused the military
and the government of conspiracy behind the murder of Theys Hiyo Eluay.

Members of the PDP have been invited by the Supreme Advisory Council (DPA) to
visit Jakarta on Thursday (29 Nov.) to discuss the latest developments in
Papua.

Health

The Cendrawasih Pos reported on Saturday (24 Nov.) that five persons died of
diarrhoea in Sentani last week. The Head of the Puskesmas in Sentani, Niko
Barends, said medicine has been distributed to the people living in the areas
where diarrhoea cases have been reported.

A Jayapura health official, Teberima, reported that 10 cases of dengue fever
have been found. Fogging is being conducted.

Water and Sanitation

The Cendrawasih Pos reported on Monday (26 Nov.) that according to the Head
of Manokwari district, Dominggus Mandacan, the district has experienced a
shortage of clean water for over a month. Most of the water reservoirs and
pipes, inherited from the Dutch administration, are no longer functioning.
Most of the people in Manokwari are using well water for the time being.

Education

Teachers from the Christian Diaspora Primary School in Kotaraja, Jayapura,
went on strike on Saturday (24 Nov.), demanding retroactive payment of their
salaries for 6 months from the government.

8. SOUTHEAST SULAWESI

Assessments

A joint UN-NGO mission, facilitated by the local office of SC UK, went to
Buton Island for a needs assessment from 19 to 23 November. The team,
consisting of IMC, OXFAM-GB, CWS, FAO and OCHA, and accompanied by SC UK, met
with government officials and local NGOs and visited several IDP sites.
According to the government, there are more than 170,000 IDPs in Buton
district but an exhaustive NGO survey detected only half this number. The
team found that the situation of the IDPs varied greatly and that a thorough
and detailed assessment would be needed before an effective and carefully
targeted aid programme could be initiated. Some of the IDPs make a living by
providing services and live near urban areas as market traders, food sellers,
becak (pedicab) drivers, etc. Many of them would need start-up capital.
Others are farmers who need farming plots, seeds and tools. Some of the IDPs
are very poor and have left their homes in the Malukus with almost nothing.
But many of them managed to bring with them their possessions and are quite
well off. Most of the IDPs met by the team indicated that they preferred to
stay in Buton rather than return. It is clear that any future aid programme
should not sharply differentiate between the IDPs and the host communities,
since there is hardly any difference in their livelihood. Moreover, despite
some clashes in the district capital Bau-Bau, most of the IDPs seem to be
well integrated into the host communities.

9. WEST KALIMANTAN

Population Movements

The government has stated that IDPs who move into relocation sites will be
given Rp2.5 million (US$250), in addition to a house and a plot of land, and
those leaving for other areas Rp5 million (US$500). All IDPs must register
for either option by 31 December. There are fears among the NGOs working in
the area that the IDP camps will be flooded by IDPs who have been living in
other areas, i.e. Madura, wanting to register and receive the money the
government has promised.

IDP movements remain fluid with IDPs moving back and forth between the
relocation sites and the camps in Pontianak. Approximately 780 houses in
relocation sites are occupied.

Health and Sanitation

IMC has treated a total of 764 patients in the relocation sites, of whom
22.59% are suffering from skin problems (scabies, dermatitis, impetigo).

IMC has delivered 1500L water tanks to 235 households, 114 sets of plastic
guttering and 834 jerry cans to the relocation sites. The sites have been
difficult to access over the past few weeks due to heavy rainfall.

Non-Food Items

IMC distributed 990 bars of body soap this week.

10. WEST TIMOR

General Situation

A clash erupted last Friday (23 Nov.) between the youths of Bansone and
Peboko villages in Kefamenanu, North Central Timor (TTU) district. Two
vehicles and three houses were vandalised in the incident.

Belu District Military Commander Lt. Col. Didi Sudiana closed down five
military posts located along the road of Atambua and Lamaknen following
protests from the people of Belu over money extortion by military personnel.

East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao began a reconciliation visit in Kupang on
Monday (26 Nov.) under tight security. With him were an East Timor foreign
ministry official, David Ximenes, the Dili director of the IOM, Christopher
Gaslon, and the Chief of Staff of UNTAET, N. Parameswaran. During his
four-day visit, Xanana met with the governor of East Nusa Tenggara, Piet A.
Talo, the provincial Police Chief, Brig. Gen. Jacky Uly, as well as the
speaker of the provincial legislature, Daniel Woda Pale. On Tuesday (27 Nov.)
Xanana held talks with a hard line pro-integration leader, Joao Tavares, and
later with Archbishop Mgr. Petrus Turang. On Wednesday (28 Nov.) he held
talks with at least 1,000 refugees from camps in Kupang and the districts of
South Central Timor (TTS) and North Central Timor. He asked the refugees to
return home. He ended his visit with a call for closer ties between East
Timor and NTT province.

WFP-Dili was invited to join a number of meetings in Jakarta covering issues
related to the GoI's plans to repatriation refugees in West Timor. As a
consequence of those meetings, WFP-Dili agreed to substantially increase the
food package for returning refugees.

Population Movements/Repatriation

The government Taskforce for Refugee Affairs (Satgas PMP) from Atambua
reported Thursday (29 Nov.) that it had assisted in the repatriation of 276
families (882 persons) to East Timor from 19 to 29 November.

According to UNHCR statistics, a total of 1,560 refugees repatriated to East
Timor during the month of November, bringing to 190,375 the number of
refugees who have returned to their homeland since 8 October 1999.

11. OTHER

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Indonesia, Bo Asplund, launched the
Consolidated Inter-Agency Appeal for IDPs in Indonesia and the Joint
Government/UN Appeal on East Timorese Refugees on 27 November in Jakarta.
Seven UN Agencies and 10 international NGOs are appealing to the
international community for a total of US$40,795,472 to cover the provinces
of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, Central Sulawesi, Papua, Maluku, North Maluku,
and West Kalimantan, while the government of Indonesia, eight UN agencies and
IOM are jointly appealing for US$43,250,412 to find durable solutions for the
East Timorese refugees in Indonesia.

Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono said Thursday (29 Nov.) that the government would stop once and for
the separatist movements in Aceh and Papua. He said that 51 battalions of the
military and police are deployed in restive areas, including Aceh, Papua,
Maluku, North Maluku, Kalimantan, and Atambua. Each battalion of the military
normally comprises 700 soldiers. Military spokesman Vice-Marshall Graito
Usodo told Reuters the 50 battalions would be rotated in the provinces, and
not stationed at the same time.

This report and all previous ones can be found on OCHA's website at
www.reliefweb.int.

Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
UN Building 4th Floor
Jl. MH Thamrin 14
P.O. Box 2238, Indonesia
FAX: (62-21) 319-00-003
PHONE: ( 62-21) 314-1308
Ext. 215, 151, 125

Agence France-Presse
December 2, 2001

Tommy Suharto's SMS to girlfriend gave him away: police

A series of mobile phone SMS (Short Message Service) messages from Tommy
Suharto to a girlfriend helped police track down the fugitive son of former
president Suharto, who was arrested on Wednesday after a year on the run.

Police questioned Lanny Banjararanti, a woman known to have been close to
Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, in October, and then monitored her mobile
phone, Jakarta Police Chief Inspector General Sofyan Jacub was quoted by the
Kompas daily as saying.

Jacub said several SMS messages were exchanged between the two, enabling
police to pinpoint the runaway.

Banjaranti, Jacub said, was a girlfriend of Tommy from high school and the
two had remained good friends since.

She is currently pregnant and speculation is rife that Tommy is the father.

Tommy, who is suspected of murder and bombing, was arrested at a rented home
in Bintaro, a residential district in South Jakarta, on Wednesday.

Police have named him as a suspect in the drive-by murder in July of
Syafiuddin Kartasasmita, the judge who convicted him of graft, and have
fingered him for a spate of bombings in Jakarta in recent years.

Both crimes are punishable by death.

Police continue to question Tommy, cross-checking his statements with those
made by witnesses.

Tommy failed to turn himself in on November 3 last year to serve an 18-month
jail sentence for corruption. On October 1 this year the Supreme Court caused
a storm of controversy by quashing the corruption conviction.

Since Suharto senior stepped down in May 1998 his family has come under
scrutiny for the fortunes they acquired during his 32-year rule. Tommy,
Suharto's youngest son, is the only family member to face trial for
corruption.

Time magazine, in a report in June 1998, estimated Tommy's wealth at some 800
million dollars.

The New York Times
December 2, 2001

Tourism in Asia Shifts Ground

By JAMES BROOKE

THE largely Hindu island of Bali is advertising itself in capital letters,
shrinking into fine print the name of the world's largest Muslim country,
Indonesia. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad ordered a police
escort for a car rally in November by 200 Rolls-Royce enthusiasts from
Britain in an effort to combat the perception that the country was unsafe. At
Thai beach resorts like Phuket, where American, European and Japanese
bookings are down by as much as 50 percent, hotels are slashing rates to get
some cash for their perishable commodity: rooms.

Across Asia, countries are struggling with falling trans-Pacific air travel,
which in some areas has taken stomach-churning drops of 30 percent or more.
Round-trip fares for flights on major airlines between Japan and New York can
be found in the $500 range, half the normal price. Cebu Pacific Air, which
began operations this fall, is offering round-trip flights between Hong Kong
and the Philippine resort island of Cebu for $130.

"These are unprecedented rates," Carlos Chua, commercial director for the
Association of Asia Pacific Airlines, said from his office in Kuala Lumpur.
Reviewing passenger loads for the 18 Asian airlines in his trade group, Mr.
Chua said that since the September attacks, air traffic in Asia and between
Asia and Europe was down by 4 percent. But with some Americans afraid to fly
and some Asians afraid to fly to the United States, traffic across the
Pacific plunged 30 percent. Moving to reroute empty planes to Asia or
European destinations, Asian airlines have dropped 81 trans-Pacific weekly
flights since mid-September.

Last Sunday Qantas, the leading Australian airline, dropped its Sydney-New
York flights, part of a restructuring that is to cost 2,000 jobs. With
American bookings to Australia and New Zealand down by about 20 percent in
October from October of last year, Ansett Australia, the nation's second
airline, was pushed into bankruptcy this fall.

In Japan, where Americans account for 15 percent of tourists, second only to
visitors from the Philippines, the downturn in trans-Pacific travel has
forced Japan Airlines to cut its flights to the United States by one quarter.
This fall's crisis is expected to convert the airline's profit last year of
$330 million into a loss of $330 million this year, and has prompted the
merger, announced this month, of JAL with Japan Air System, the nation's
third carrier. The big American lines have all cut flights between the United
States and Japan.

Although some Pacific island nations, such as Fiji and Tonga, are hurting
because of their heavy dependence on American visitors arriving by air, in
much of Asia, Asian tourists predominate, and a shortage of Americans has not
caused major ripples. Hong Kong's 25 percent drop in North American arrivals
was neatly balanced by a 25 percent jump in arrivals from mainland China,
although Chinese tourists spend far less than Americans. To spur Chinese
tourism, the city's chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, announced in October that
he was ending the city's policy of restricting to 1,500 a day the number of
visitors from the neighboring Chinese province of Guangdong.

In Japan, the loss in American visitors has been offset by a surge in
Japanese tourism, as Japanese tourists have rerouted $1 billion worth of
travel spending this fall from Hawaii and California to Japanese or other
close-by Asian destinations.

"The Japanese are afraid to go overseas, so they are visiting their own
country," said Ignatius Cronin, spokesman for the elegant Imperial Hotel in
Tokyo. "It is very difficult to get a room now."

Reflecting on the skittishness of Japanese travelers, which has led to winter
beach resort discounts in Bali, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Australia but packed
hotels in Tokyo, Mr. Cronin said: "Japanese are like minnows — you drop a
pebble, and, whoosh! They all go to the other side."

JAMES BROOKE is a correspondent in the Tokyo bureau of The New York Times.

Religious Violence in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP, Dec. 2, 2001) - Dozens of houses were torched and
four soldiers were shot on Sunday in fresh fighting between Muslims and
Christians on Indonesia's Sulawesi Island, witnesses and hospital officials
said.

The clashes cap a week of sectarian violence on the island that has killed at
least seven people and caused thousands to flee their homes.

Witnesses in the coastal town of Poso in central Sulawesi province reported
hearing gunfire and explosions until dawn Sunday. A doctor at Poso's hospital
said four soldiers were being treated for bullet wounds.

Fighting between Muslim and Christian villagers in Sulawesi, about 1,000
miles northeast of Jakarta, has killed at least 1,000 people in the last two
years.

The recent violence has been blamed on the arrival of hundreds of fighters
belonging to the Laskar Jihad, a paramilitary Muslim group accused of stoking
a sectarian conflict in neighboring Maluku province. About 9,000 have died in
Maluku since 1999.

The Laskar Jihad group is based on Indonesia's main island of Java.

Police said Sunday they had arrested 30 of its members and confiscated
weapons, including a pistol, in the eastern Javanese town of Ngawi.

Police spokesman Maj. Peni Handayani said the group was believed to be
preparing to attack local political activists, but he gave no further
details.

In Indonesia's westernmost province of Aceh, security forces shot and killed
three suspected rebels on Saturday, military spokesman Maj. Edi Sulistiadi
said.

Guerillas in the predominantly Muslim province have been fighting since 1975
for the independence of their gas- and oil-rich homeland. More than 6,000
people have died in the conflict.

also: White Australia legacy shackles a nation to the past

Australia Labor Party Signals Immigration Policy Change

CANBERRA, Dec. 1 (AP) -- The opposition Labor Party signaled Sunday it will
break from the government on immigration policy and called for a national
debate on population policy.

Labor's immigration spokeswoman, Julia Gillard, said too much attention was
being paid to short-term issues like asylum seekers without debating targets
for long-term population growth.

"We've started with the refugee-processing bit of the agenda, and that's
really the most emotive and difficult part and we're doing that without any
goal posts in terms of any population policy or immigration," Gillard said.

The Nov. 10 election was dominated by the issue of asylum seekers after Prime
Minister John Howard's conservative government in August adopted a tough
policy of turning away all unauthorized arrivals.

Last year some 4,100 asylum seekers, mostly from the Middle East and South
Asia, came to Australia by boat from Indonesia with the help of people
smuggling gangs.

Those who defy navy patrols are picked up and shipped to detention camps
built by Australia on the Pacific island nations of Papua New Guinea and
Nauru - both major recipients of Australian aid - where their applications
for asylum are processed.

The policy, known as the Pacific Solution, was condemned internationally but
boosted the government's poll ratings, and is seen by most commentators as a
key reason it won a third term in last month's election. Labor supported the
policy because it feared a voter backlash.

Gillard said the government would be forced to ditch its so-called Pacific
Solution when it ran out of Pacific island nations willing to accept asylum
seekers on behalf of Australia and the costs became public.

Gillard also foreshadowed a break with the government on immigration policy,
traditionally an area of bipartisan agreement.

"Ultimately Labor will look different to the Liberals on the question of
population policy and having a vision for building this nation, and Labor
will look different to the Liberals on the question of immigration," she said.

She said it was too early to say if Labor would abandon its support for the
government's hard line on asylum seekers, although the policy is under review.

-----------------------

White Australia legacy shackles a nation to the past

SYDNEY, Dec 2 (AFP) - The legacy of the White Australia immigration policy
and lingering unease over the displacement of the original inhabitants of
this continent has created a modern nation that doubts its own legitimacy.

So say those who attribute a sharp shift to the political right here on the
issue of race to cultural cowardice. Others cite a sense of racial insecurity
that has become as divisive as an old splinter infecting the national
metabolism.

Many on Australia's political left agree that the occupation of a continent
at the southern-most tip of Asia by a white tribe presaged the anti-asylum
seeker rhetoric of the recently-decided election outcome.

The relatively few prominent voices to speak against Prime Minister John
Howard's ruling conservative coalition government have little doubt that
Australia's November 10 election was decided by a politically expedient
tapping of this national security obsession.

But the country's own Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission is now
investigating the incarceration of almost 600 children in detention centres
for illegal immigrants.

Some of those children who arrived here after fleeing sanction-impoverished
Iraq and the battlefield-come-basketcase of Afghanistan were not accompanied
by parents or relatives. At least one eight-year-old falls into this
category, but he too was held behind razor wire alongside adult "illegal
immigrants".

Opponents of Australia's current 'Pacific Solution' of shipping asylum
seekers intercepted by the navy to impoverished South Pacific nations for
"processing" include former stalwarts of the political right.

Malcolm Fraser, a former prime minister who was once a torch-bearer for the
the modern political right, was among those who voiced dismay at this shift
in national sentiment towards refugees who, quite simply, are not white.

Even the announcement of the inquiry last week into the detention of 582
mainly Middle Eastern children -- 53 of whom are effectively imprisoned alone
-- did little to soften the Howard government's stance.

Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock described such children as Trojan horses,
deliberately despatched on risky ocean voyages from Indonesia to improve the
prospects of other family members lodging successful claims for asylum here.

"In the main they come unaccompanied because people believe that if they can
get their children out here it is a bolthole, then ultimately under the
Convention of the Rights of the Child adults will be able to say we have to
be reunited with them because they have been settled in Australia," Ruddock
said in an interview.

A lecturer in international politics at Adelaide University, Anthony Burke,
argues in a new book, In Fear of Security -- Australia's Invasion Anxiety,
that Howard's pitch resonated among Australian voters because "he was drawing
on an anxiety that has run through Australian culture for 200 years".

Burke told AFP that the politics of exclusion has become a leitmotif for
secure borders around a predominantly white country surrounded by the brown
faces of its neighbours.

"We were anxious about our legitimacy on a coloured continent," he said.

"We have always purchased our security at the expense of another. In 1786 the
British chose to colonise Australia to secure their ruling classes from the
threat of what they saw as a growing wave of crime in England.

"Once that colony was established, the first serious threat to its security
came from the traditional owners of this country.

"In the 1880s and 90s it was the fear of Asian immigration and Japan."

The White Australia Policy, which screened potential immigrants on the basis
of race and remained in force up until a few decades ago, had its genesis in
this fear of non-white invasion, Burke said.

Indeed, he cites former government minister and High Court judge Sir Garfield
Barwick's 1962 warning as Australia prepared to send troops in support of US
military aims in Indochina that "Vietnam is our present frontier".

Australian political life has thus cast Aborigines, Asian neighbours and
Afghan refugees alike as "others" ever since British prime minister William
Pitt decided to send England's unwanted convicts here, Burke says.

Today, with Howard returned to office with an increased majority, it is
virtually indisputable that his refusal to allow any more asylum seekers to
set foot on Australian soil (including 433 Afghans stranded at sea for more
than a week aboard the Norwegian cargo ship Tampa in August) struck a cord
with voters.

However, some of the most outspoken opposition to Howard has emanated from
the ranks of the nominally conservative.

Included among those voices was retired Brigadier Adrian D'Hage , who won the
Military Cross as a combat platoon commander during Australia's involvement
in the Vietnam War.

D'Hage spoke at the launch of Burke's book last week, and was scathing in his
assessment of modern Australia's capitulation to its old fears.

"Why is it when Australians are faced with the need for deeper collective
courage, we fail the test," D'Hage said.

"In August ... when a few hundred desperate Afghans hove into view, we were
suddenly fearful they would lock up our women, make beards and burqas
compulsory and somehow imperil the family barbecue.

"What followed has caused many of us to question what sort of country we live
in."

The Observer [UK]
December 2, 2001

Secret US plan for Iraq war

Bush orders backing for rebels to topple Saddam

Peter Beaumont, Ed Vulliamy and Paul Beaver

America intends to depose Saddam Hussein by giving armed support to Iraqi
opposition forces across the country, The Observer has learnt.

President George W. Bush has ordered the CIA and his senior military
commanders to draw up detailed plans for a military operation that could
begin within months.

The plan, opposed by Tony Blair and other European Union leaders, threatens
to blow apart the increasingly shaky international consensus behind the
US-led 'war on terrorism'.

It envisages a combined operation with US bombers targeting key military
installations while US forces assist opposition groups in the North and South
of the country in a stage-managed uprising. One version of the plan would
have US forces fighting on the ground.

Despite US suspicions of Iraqi involvement in the 11 September attacks, the
trigger for any attack, sources say, would be the anticipated refusal of Iraq
to resubmit to inspections for weapons of mass destruction under the United
Nations sanctions imposed after the Gulf war.

According to the sources, the planning is being undertaken under the auspices
of a the US Central Command at McDill air force base in Tampa, Florida,
commanded by General Tommy Franks, who is leading the war against
Afghanistan.

Another key player is understood to be former CIA director James Woolsey.
Sources say Woolsey was sent to London by the hawkish Deputy Defence
Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, soon after 11 September to ask Iraqi opposition
groups if they would participate in an uprising if there was US military
support.

The New York Times yesterday quoted a senior administration official who
admitted that Bush's aides were looking at options that involved
strengthening groups that opposed Saddam. Richard Armitage, the Deputy
Secretary of State, said that action against Iraq was not imminent, but would
come at a 'place and time of our choosing'.

Washington has been told by its allies that evidence it has presented of an
Iraqi link to 11 September is at best circumstantial. However, US proponents
of extending the war believe they can make the case for hitting Saddam's
regime over its plan to produce weapons of mass destruction.

A European diplomat said last week: 'In the past week the Americans have shut
up about Iraqi links to 11 September and have been talking a lot more about
their weapons programme.'

The US is believed to be planning to exploit existing UN resolutions on Iraqi
weapons programmes to set the action off.

Under the pre-existing 'red lines' for military action against Iraq - set
down by Washington and London after the Gulf War - evidence of any credible
threat from weapons of mass destruction would be regarded as sufficient to
launch military strikes along the lines of Operation Desert Fox in 1998, when
allied planes made large-scale strikes against suspected Iraqi weapons
complexes.

Opposition by Blair and French President Jacques Chirac may not be enough to
dissuade the Americans. One European military source who recently returned
from General Franks's headquarters in Florida said: 'The Americans are
walking on water. They think they can do anything at the moment and there is
bloody nothing Tony [Blair] can do about it.'

Bush is said to have issued instructions about the proposals, which are now
at a detailed stage, to his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, three weeks
ago. But Pentagon sources say that a plan for attacking Iraq was developed by
the time Bush's order was sent to the Pentagon, drawn up by Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, chairman of the joint chiefs General Richard Myers, and Franks.

The plan is to work with a combination of three political forces: Kurdish
rebels in the north of Iraq, radical Sunni Muslim groups in and around
Baghdad, and, most controversially, the Shia opposition in the south.

The most adventurous ingredient in the anti-Iraqi proposal is the use of US
ground troops, Pentagon sources say. 'Significant numbers' of ground troops
could also be called on in the early stages of any rebellion to guard oil
fields around the Shia port of Basra in southern Iraq.

------------------------------------

The Observer [UK]
December 2, 2001

Will Iraq be next? What the experts say

Will the "war on terrorism" extend beyond Afghanistan? The Observer asked
Lawrence Freedman, David Clark, Ivo Daalder and more foreign policy analysts
from Britain and America read the runes

Sunder Katwala

"Will Iraq be next? Many inside and out of the Bush administration say: Yes.
But the risks of going to war against Iraq are huge. Unless Saddam Hussein is
linked to Sept. 11 or subsequent terrorism, the U.S. would have to act alone.
Nor would it be easy. Iraq is not Afghanistan - the opposition is weaker and
the regime stronger.
Instead, Washington must revitalize containment. To avoid war, Europeans must
agree to strengthen sanctions, back the return of inspectors (by threatening
or using force), and support clear red lines for Saddam: no force against his
people or neighbors; no support for terrorism of any kind; no possession,
transfer or use of mass destruction weapons."
Ivo H. Daalder
Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

"A full-scale military assault on Iraq is unlikely for the time being. In
Afghanistan, the US had allies, the legal authority of self-defence and a
proxy army in the form of the Northern Alliance. Against Iraq, they will have
none of those things. A limited campaign to enforce UN resolutions combined
with covert action to destabalise the regime is more plausible. If Bush is
wise, he will seek to offset moves against Iraq with decisive action to
secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. This will be difficult as long
as Ariel Sharon remains in power."
David Clark
Former special adviser to Robin Cook at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

"The United States has made it clear that it expects to take its 'war on
terrorism' to other countries, but it has not committed itself to any course
of action and it has yet to finish off the current campaign in a definitive
way. Of the countries mentioned as possibly knowingly harbouring terrorists,
Yemen and Sudan are working quite hard on their relationship with the US, and
so any action in those countries may be with consent. Somalia is more
problematic, especially given the history of US intervention in that country,
and it is not obvious that the Americans have decent enough intelligence.
That leaves Iraq where it is hard to see what more could be done other than a
punitive and probably ineffectual bombing campaign. There is no Northern
Alliance or KLA to support in a position to overthrow Saddam. The allies are
all lukewarm about further action, especially without evident movement on the
Arab-Palestinian front to counter the inevitable criticism of an anti-Arab
bias. I would guess that the next stage with Iraq will be largely diplomatic,
in an effort to get a consensus on a new sanctions regime, and that any build
up to military action will be gradual."
Lawrence Freedman
Professor of War Studies, King's College, London

"US ground operations in Afghanistan will last well into next year. At the
same time the US will apply pressure to all states of concern. Some, such as
Somalia will be asked to allow intrusive US activity to check on terrorist
activity. In the major case of Iraq, the US will build international pressure
using the original UN resolutions of the 1990s as a basis. European and Arab
opposition may be countered by possible strong support from Russia. US -
Russian action on Iraq may produce the desired changes in Iraqi policy
without necessarily changing the regime. Fear of Russian support in Iraq will
persuade Europeans to be more supportive of the US."
Dan Plesch
Royal United Services Institute

"The war may go on through the winter, but an extension to other countries
such as Somalia is likely, mainly in the form of raids on presumed
paramilitary centres. Iraq is firmly in the sights for much more intensive
military action but not for some time, not least because of a temporary
shortage of munitions. The "war on terrorism" is likely to last several
years, into a (presumed) Bush second term. US unilateralism has been
re-inforced by recent events and European influence on future US actions will
be weak.
Paul Rogers
Professor of Peace Studies, Bradford University

"It now seems probable that some sort of military action will be taken
against Al-Qaeda facilities in other countries. Somalia is beginning to
emerge as the most obvious candidate. Action might well involve special
forces as well as bombing raids. European governments support military action
directed against the groups that are linked to the 11 September atrocities.
If bases in other countries are also connected to groups linked to the
September 11 atrocities, European governments are also likely, in the end, to
support action against them.

But - in the absence of new information - an attempt to overthrow the Iraqi
regime by force could not be justified on this basis - and further bombings
without such an attempt would simply be gesture warfare. Demands for the
return of UN inspectors have nothing to do with the war against the
terrorists responsible for the WTC. Despite this, there is now a real
possibility that the US will launch such an attack - if only to avoid being
seen as weak when an escalating rhetoric from Washington fails to produce
results. If the attack on Iraq involves a protracted ground campaign - with
all the buildup in neighbouring countries this would involve - the political
fallout in Europe and the Middle East would be very serious indeed.

The UK has a real opportunity to support the moderates in Washington - but
only if Blair draws his own 'line in the sand' - making it clear that Britain
would join other European governments in publicly opposing a major military
campaign against Iraq if the Americans ignored his advice. If there is clear
evidence of an Iraqi hand in September 11 - evidence which has not so far
been produced - things would be different."
Professor Malcolm Chalmers
Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford.