Vivienne Walt

On Tuesday, the next act of the drama — and a climactic one — opened, when the ruling ANC, which took over from the National Party, began its national conference in the town of Mafekeng, about 250 miles south of Johannesburg.

The conference marks the last, short chapter of the Mandela era, an epic tale that has shaped our notion of South Africa since the 1960s. Nelson Mandela, 79, will step down as ANC leader, the penultimate step before his complete retirement in 1999. Although he remains South Africa’s president until then, the real power turns over to Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s deputy, the only candidate to succeed him as party leader. Since there’s no serious competition for the ANC’s hold on government, Mbeki, barring an accident or worse, is certain to become president in 1999.

Less certain, and more fraught with danger, is who would become Mbeki’s ANC deputy, and thus deputy South African president in two years. A hard-fought political battle has been waging behind the scenes, revolving largely around Winnie Mandela’s lunge for the job. She fought for it with awesome bravado, even through the days of damning testimony, until calls from the party’s leaders to her supporters finally nudged them into withdrawing her nomination. Her chutzpah unbowed, she opened the Winnie Mandela and Family Museum that weekend, in the Mandelas’ former Soweto house, where many of the crimes were committed, with commemorative bottles of Mandela garden soil on sale.

Further behind the scenes, other candidates for deputy party leader were quietly edged out by ANC officials, and reportedly by Mandela himself, who placed key calls to local leaders urging them to support Jacob Zuma, the only candidate for deputy.

Although much of this might sound like inside baseball, the ANC conference will craft a new generation to lead Africa’s best hope for democracy. The ANC itself realizes how much is at stake in the way it elects officials: Many weeks before the conference, it published on its Web site a document urging its members not to engage in back-door deals, which “would degenerate into debilitating contests which divide the movement and divert it from the major task of social transformation.” In all its pre-conference documents lay another anxiety — that party infighting could be “easily exploited by forces of counter-revolution.”

In all the hefty pre-conference tomes put out by the ANC, “social transformation” are probably the most critical two words. Nearly four years since Mandela’s momentous election, unemployment is estimated to be as high as 33 percent, and far higher for young blacks. The murder rate is about six times the rate of America’s; whole areas of the cities have become virtual no-go zones after dark. The rand has shrunk dramatically against major currencies since Mandela came to power. The election promise of building a million new homes within the first five years now seems an unattainable fantasy.

For all the problems, no other party seems close to threatening the ANC’s primacy. Of course, without Mandela as the country’s living inspiration, the “forces of counter-revolution” — from the left or the right — might start to look more attractive. However, paradoxical as it may seem, there is fresh hope for South Africa with Mandela’s departure. The country can now cease being the world’s favorite morality tale and get down to the brass tacks of creating a new society.

Mbeki, whose father, Govan, was Mandela’s jailmate and friend, has the reputation of a sharp operator. He has little time for those who show him less than total loyalty. But he’s also energetic and well-connected abroad, having been schooled in England and lived almost all his adult life in exile. Perhaps best of all, he can run the country as a politician, rather than a mythic historic figure, tackling head-on the immense social and economic problems without having to satisfy the world’s huge expectations.

That might make South Africa a more boring, and normal, country after Mandela leaves the scene. But for romance, you can visit Mandela’s jail cell on Robben Island, now a national landmark. Or you could buy your very own bottle of Mandela garden soil in Soweto, where the legend began.

This is Baghdad exactly 10 years after the start of the Gulf War, a city that has defiantly clung by its fingertips during a decade of Western-led sanctions and embargoes. Before the devastating bombings, Baghdad had long been the envy of the Middle East, with top-notch health care and schools. Iraqis these days have learned to live by their wits.

Ten years ago this week, Baghdad stood shattered. After 40 days of continual bombardment from American fighter jets, its bridges were bombed, its electricity stations gone, its communication tower in pieces. Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led attack that drove Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, flew 110,000 sorties over Iraq and dropped 85,000 tons of explosives. By the time the allied force of 33 countries and hundreds of thousands of soldiers finally ceased blasting the country on February 22, 1991, it had endured perhaps the heaviest bombardment anywhere on Earth since the Second World War.

In the war’s aftermath, the United Nations imposed sanctions over Iraq’s mammoth oil revenues, in the so-called “oil for food” program, requiring President Saddam Hussein to get approval for spending Iraq’s own money, and forcing most Iraqis to depend on monthly ration coupons of sugar, rice, oil and other items for their sheer survival. During a week’s travels around Iraq, my taxi driver told me stories of quitting his job as a school teacher, unable to make ends meet.

Arriving here, it’s hard at first to grasp the devastation of the city. Baghdad’s bridges have been fixed, the shell marks cemented over and roofs retiled. The electricity works almost 24 hours a day, a dramatic improvement from just a few years ago. The streets are a jumble of stalls selling everything from plugs to paper, and most kinds of food. Despite the sanctions, those who have the cash can still get luxury items. One day I buy bananas from Colombia, and that night am offered a fine French sausage for a pre-dinner snack.

Above all, one fact dominates life in Iraq. Saddam, the man President George Bush in 1991 called “Hitler revisited,” has endured the decade, too.

As the third White House administration since the Gulf War gets ready to unpack its boxes in Washington next week, the country will also see the return of key Gulf War figures Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. A nagging question looms over the administration of the man whose father prosecuted the war: If Saddam has lasted through all this, what will finally drive him out?

The Republican Party campaign platform last year promised “a comprehensive plan for the removal of Saddam Hussein.” And last month, Powell declared that Saddam was “sitting on a failed regime,” and was “not going to be around in a few years’ time.” As secretary of state, Powell said he would “re-energize” the international embargoes, he said.

Judging from a week in Iraq, Powell has an extremely tough task ahead.

International compliance with the sanctions has steadily weakened, and many countries, especially Jordan and Syria, have reopened major trade connections with Iraq in recent months. Meanwhile, countries such as France and Russia have long pressured the U.N. to end the sanctions, saying they only serve to deprive ordinary Iraqis of food and medicine and do nothing to weaken Saddam.

In fact, top Iraqi officials and diplomats say Saddam enjoys greater support within his country than he did before the war. Some of this is because he uses his vast wealth to buy favors. But Saddam has also gained stature as the figure who could face down Western attacks — and live to tell the tale. “He is as popular now as he has been at any time in the past,” Nizar Hamdoon, undersecretary of the Foreign Ministry, who served as ambassador to Washington during the 1980s and to the United Nations in New York during the 1990s, tells me from his office. “When a country feels pressures economically and from outside, they gather around the central figure. And in Iraq, the central figure has always been the president.”

Travel around Iraq, and there is little doubt who is in charge. The 350-mile drive linking Baghdad to the old Gulf War frontline on the Kuwait border meanders past numerous military posts, some with their tanks pointed outward in all directions, and their walls decorated with Saddam’s portrait.

Baghdad is plastered with the many faces of the man in bronze, oil, plaster, and mosaic, on horses and off, waving, smiling, tenderly visiting poor traditional families, typing, sipping tea, bending over sick patients, and even hovering in the sky over a rural village scene, in a Chagall-like panorama I spy in a wing of the Saddam Art Gallery. “He is often portrayed as a symbol for all of Iraq,” explains my government “guide,” who is required to accompany me during all interviews, even in a gallery.

In one room, artist Mejdi Ahmed, 32, shows me his three modern paintings on sale, all abstract modern works. But like all of Baghdad’s artists’ community, Ahmed’s real income for the past decade has come from painting Saddam portraits — about 30 of them since 1990. “It pays well,” he says. “Many are in the government offices.”

In fact, the only non-Saddam portrait I see all week is that of George Bush. After the Gulf War Bush’s face was installed in mosaic tiles into the entrance floor of the Al-Rasheed Hotel, the country’s top lodging which is, of course, government-owned. For nearly 10 years, every journalist, businessman and politician in Baghdad has stomped on Bush’s blue eyes. The caption: “Bush is Criminal.”

Tales of Saddam’s ruthlessness and profligacy abound, and the slightest hint of dissent is instantly punished; thousands have been executed or jailed. Most of the Iraq opposition, which the U.S. counted on to rise up after the war and depose Saddam, has been driven out of the country or destroyed.

Saddam himself is more ubiquitous than ever. A Western diplomatic internal memo late last year estimated Saddam had built about 46 new palaces since 1990. They include a sprawling complex near the airport, more Las Vegas than Baghdad, with an artificial lake and a golden bust of Saddam on one corner. You can see it all from the revolving rooftop restaurant of the Saddam Tower of Challenge, the former communication tower that U.S. bombers obliterated in 1991. Outside the tower, a huge Saddam statue features the leader triumphantly standing over the bomb shrapnel.

Iraqis might chafe at Saddam’s stranglehold, but both ordinary Iraqis and top officials I interview say life has improved markedly in the past few years, and that international sanctions are withering. Syria, for instance, recently announced the reopening of its oil pipeline with Iraq. “Practically, the sanctions regime is crumbling,” says Hamdoon. “People and businesses are doing business with Iraq, regardless.”

In fact, years of sanctions have bred wealth from those smuggling hard-to-get goods into the country, skirting the West’s rules. At Sardar’s car dealership in Baghdad last Sunday, two workers washed down a brand-new blue-green Dodge Durango sports-utility vehicle, which still had its American yellow warning label hanging from the air-bag cover. “That will go for about $35,000. It is the only one in all of Iraq,” says Sardar Hussein Hassan, 32, a Rolex on his wrist, in his showroom filled mostly with Mercedes Benzes.

After years of being eerily empty, Baghdad’s giant Saddam International Airport — the Middle East’s biggest airport when it was built in 1982 — has been dusted off in the past two months, for flights around the Middle East. Commercial airline service between Iraq and Jordan has resumed.

On my 10-hour drive from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, the 600-mile stretch of highway was jammed with trucks carrying goods into Iraq, away from the prying eyes of United Nations officials. Streaming toward Iraq in front of us were three trailers, loaded with factory-new Mercedes Benz sedans. The traffic headed out of Iraq shows why: tankers loaded with cut-rate oil from the second biggest oil fields in the world, after Saudi Arabia.

Officially, Iraq pumps about 2 million barrels a day. Even with the sanctions in place, about 40 percent of that is consumed by gas-guzzling American consumers. But oil sources last month estimated Saddam was earning about $1 billion extra, trucking oil overland to Jordan and Syria, where it disappears on the world market, with its profits going straight to Baghdad, bypassing nosey international officials. At the end of 1999, too, the U.N. Security Council finally lifted the quotas on how much oil Iraq was permitted to sell. For Saddam, the timing was extraordinary. Oil prices soared last year to their highest level since 1990, leaving Saddam with a huge windfall of billions of dollars.

In meetings with reporters this week, officials boasted about their success in smuggling out oil. “Our economy isn’t linked to the Security Council,” oil minister General Amer Muhammad Rashid said when I asked about the smuggling estimates. “We have our own bilateral trade relations, and we have full rights to manage this.”

Despite the top-level money making, most Iraqis continue to endure dramatic poverty. U.S. and British officials point out that Saddam has squandered billions of government money bolstering a tiny elite, while Iraqis say the West has deliberately impoverished their country’s people through sanctions.

The statistics of the poverty, however, are not disputed. Healthcare has plummeted in 10 years. UNICEF believes about 500,000 children die every year from various diseases that they would not have died of if sanctions weren’t in place. Hospitals say they are chronically short of medicines and equipment, all of which have to be approved for purchase by U.N. officials. “In the 1980s, I would teach my students about tuberculosis and malnutrition theoretically, from books,” Sami Delami, 62, a pediatrics consultant, tells me in his office at the Saddam Children’s Hospital. “Now we have many cases here.”

One day, I step inside a tiny house that backs onto a bus lot. Inside, Gulperi Abdul Beg, 45, invites me to sit on a mat on the floor of the main room, whose windows are plastic sheeting. The glass shattered in the 1991 bombing, and Beg has not had the money to replace them since. “I’m sorry you are sitting on the floor,” she says, handing me a glass of water for refreshment. “We have sold all the furniture.”

When the bombs began dropping in 1991, middle-class Iraqis were among the highest paid groups in the Middle East. A civil servant earned about $2,000 a month, and a university professor made about $5,000 a month. One dollar bought 1.5 Iraqi dinars a decade ago. Now, civil servants earn less than $25 a month, and when I change $50 — at 1,800 dinars per dollar — I am given a large shopping bag in which to lug the piles of notes.

“You will not believe it, but we used to go on holiday in Europe, and return with money still in our pockets,” one Iraqi photographer tells me. “We felt like kings.” And so, professional Iraqis have fled in droves: about 2 million now live outside, including hundreds of thousands in the United States, many of whom are “the cream of our country,” says Nizar Hamdoon, the Foreign Ministry undersecretary.

In a vague attempt to staunch Iraq’s intellectual starvation, the government finally tiptoed into the Internet age last summer, opening two “Internet cafes” in Baghdad, hooked to Iraq’s sole server — which is government-controlled. It was the first glimpse Iraqis had of the technology to which even African villages had been hooked to for a few years.

In one of the government-run cafes, 18 terminals on two floors offer one hour of service to each user, for about a dollar — not a small sum for Iraqis these days. In front of one terminal, Qabas Awad, 28, tells me she had traveled four hours by taxi from her home in Mosul, simply to log on to a site about British taxation law. “I’m a student,” she said, her hair hidden by a scarf. “The books we are using are at least 10 years old.”

Sexual sites are blocked, and users probably suppress any thought of logging on to exiled Iraq opposition group sites while the staff prowl the floors. Downstairs are four terminals reserved for those who already have paid e-mail subscriptions, typically government departments and companies. No one had heard of a single private citizen with e-mail. “I went there and said I wanted to check my Hotmail,” one Iraqi television producer told me later. “They told me it was illegal.”

Despite all that, there is a constant line of people waiting for a free computer, and Sana al-Ukabi, 24, a staff member, says she is so busy teaching people how to use the Internet that she has no time to log on herself.

So, what are the popular sites for users? She laughed, and said: “Anything that is different from here.”

And that, despite sanctions fraying at the edges, is still a lot better than here.

By the time the Khmer Rouge launched its brutal assault in 1975, soft-spoken, dimpled Meas was a seasoned fighter. And by the time he quit the organization in the early 1990s, he had climbed through the ranks to become the head of a regiment, and a colonel in the army of Pol Pot, one of the most eccentric and brutal dictators in modern history. Meas was even summoned to Pol Pot’s jungle hideout in 1993, only a few miles from where we are now sitting eating dinner, to hear an address by the revered Brother Number One, about the internationally brokered Paris agreement that ended Cambodia’s decades of war.

Culturally, Cambodians have focused their efforts on reconciliation with former enemies, and there is a widespread fear that a war-crimes trial would disrupt that process. But the horrific past lives on in this country, in piles of skeletons dug up from mass graves and made into shrines and in the stories of the regime’s survivors. And pressure from the United States is mounting, meaning the process of justice might soon be underway.

In just 44 months between April 1975 and January 1979, the Khmer Rouge executed, tortured to death or effectively starved between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians — nearly 1 in every 4 people — in killing fields across the country. Clocks, radios, televisions, all Western medicines, books, hospitals, stores and schools were banned during the Khmer Rouge genocide years. Teachers, doctors, even classical dancers, were forbidden to practice and thousands of them were executed. Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed thousands of wooden buildings in Cambodia’s gracious old colonial capital of Phnom Penh, to sell the wood to the Vietnamese.

But ask Meas Tung what he did during the genocide of Cambodians and you are not likely to learn much. “I was taught to repair trucks, and guarded a yard where trucks were kept,” he says, watching every word. “Later, I patrolled a big road.”

Like hundreds of former Khmer Rouge soldiers, Meas has not only blended into Cambodia’s new society but has been scrubbed clean of the past. He now heads the agricultural program for the district of Samlot, which runs along Thailand’s border. On this day, his task is to escort two foreign journalists around the area, to show them the land on which thousands of refugees and demobilized soldiers are now living and farming.

More than 25 years after the Khmer Rouge routed Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and began its mass murder campaign, United Nations and American officials are nearing a deal to try some of those culpable. After more than two years of negotiations, delays and objections, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen has promised to pass a law within the next month clearing the way for a war-crimes trial. There are hitches, however: Contrary to the original international plan, the trial will take place on Cambodian soil, in Phnom Penh, and involve both Cambodian and foreign prosecutors and judges. Even then, the foreign jurists will have to be approved by Hun Sen’s government. The deal is a slippery slope, one which many human rights groups believe will water down the impact of the trials.

The very mention of Cambodia has for years evoked images of genocide in the minds of Westerners, whose vision of the Khmer Rouge was immortalized in Roland Jaffe’s movie “The Killing Fields.” Then in the 1990s the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda arrived to match those ghoulish associations. Yet there remains one crucial difference to set Cambodia apart: Both the Balkans and Rwandan wars have resulted in war-crimes tribunals, with Serbs on trial in The Hague and Rwandans in Arusha, Tanzania. Cambodia, by contrast, has yet to try a single official.

Only two Khmer Rouge officials have been arrested: military chief Ta Mok, nicknamed “the butcher,” and Duch, or Kang Kek Ieu, who ran the infamous Tuol Sleng S-21 prison, a torture and death center in Phnom Penh, where about 18,000 people died. Hundreds of other Khmer Rouge officials have slipped comfortably back into society. Duch himself had been working for an international aid organization near the Thai border until journalists spotted him, having recognized his face from the old days. And Pol Pot died suddenly — perhaps by suicide — in April 1998, maddeningly on the verge of being arrested.

Cambodian officials have long balked at putting the nation’s history on trial. Partly, they recoil from the idea of foreigners snooping into their affairs. More importantly, there are real fears that any trial could expose present-day officials, several of whom were active in the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s. Hun Sen himself, now 48, spent years as a Khmer Rouge fighter, even losing an eye during the 1975 invasion of Phnom Penh. And Pol Pot’s own deputy, Ieng Sary, keeps a low profile at home in Phnom Penh. Other key Khmer Rouge leaders live in Pailin, an old stronghold near the Thai border. And in remote areas like the villages of Samlot, where I share dinner with Meas Tung, the district’s agricultural chief, almost everyone owes old allegiances to Pol Pot’s fighters. “We have a saying in Cambodian: ‘When the water clears, you can see the small fish,’” a Phnom Penh journalist tells me. “So, a trial can point to a lot of people.”

It might seem surprising that a veteran Khmer Rouge soldier like Meas would want a trial. He seems to believe the process would finally distinguish the communist ideals of the Khmer Rouge — ideals that seduced many Cambodians — from the horrors that were committed in the name of the cause. He says many of his old comrades “killed their own people,” and for that, should be convicted. But, he says, “Many people around here think differently.”

Despite international pressure, few in Phnom Penh have believed that a trial would ever come to pass. Then came President Clinton’s trip to Vietnam last month, with its promise of American aid and closer diplomatic ties. The visit was downplayed in the jittery Vietnamese press, but the full pomp and ceremony played big on CNN and was watched by officials in Phnom Penh. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, traveling in Clinton’s Vietnam entourage, seized the moment. He made the quick side trip to the Cambodian capital to meet Hun Sen, and told the prime minister that if he ever wanted to welcome an American president to Phnom Penh, he had to put the Khmer Rouge on trial.

American representatives have set out to show the Cambodian government that they’re serious about justice. The U.S. government has funded the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University to investigate Khmer Rouge crimes. “We’ve collected thousands of documents,” a Democratic staffer of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tells me on the telephone from Washington. “We had to make it clear to the Cambodians that we were not just doing this as an academic exercise,” he says. “There are Khmer Rouge leaders walking around with impunity.”

At stake for Hun Sen is desperately needed foreign aid. Cambodia’s average annual income is less than $300. Outside Phnom Penh, most roads crumble into muddy, rutted passes that have barely seen a dollop of tar for 25 years. It takes nearly four hours to drive a pickup truck over about 30 miles of dirt road between Cambodia’s second city, Battambang, to Samlot, along what used to be the major trade route to Thailand.

Around Phnom Penh, there are few signs of the devastation. The markets are teeming with traders selling fruits, batik textiles, cheap Korean toys, electronics and luggage with wheels. The traffic is thick with Honda motorbikes that buzz around town offering rides anywhere in the capital for 50 cents, along the old French colonial boulevards with wide islands that run along the gracious yellow-and-blue buildings. Most Cambodians are now too young to have any personal memories of the genocide. And astonishingly, there is no mention of it in Cambodian schoolbooks. Human-rights groups are only now raising money to produce children’s books telling them what their parents endured.

But travel Cambodia, and you will still hear countless tales of horror. “My father was a French teacher, so we were sent to a farm to work in the rice paddies,” says my translator, adding that several of his siblings died of starvation after the family was evacuated from their home in Battambang. One of Cambodia’s best known classical dancers, Proeung Chhieng, tells me he survived the genocide partly by hiding for months in the forests and not telling anyone that he had danced in the royal palace in Phnom Penh since he was 8 years old.

Outside the capital, several villages have simply gathered their skulls and bones into small shrines. People used to pay homage to the dead once a year on the date the government had designated “Hatred Day,” the anniversary of the Khmer Rouge’s ban on family meals. The day was officially abandoned a few years ago, but the shrines remain. In Phnom Udong, about an hour’s drive outside Phnom Penh, a glassed-in memorial shows a pile of bones and skulls that stare out at villages in the middle of the marketplace. And alongside a Buddhist temple in a community in Kompong Speu, a wooden shed shelters a small mound of skeletons dug up from mass graves in the village.

Yuok Chhang, 40, who runs Cambodia’s Documentation Center set up by Yale University’s genocide project in 1995, tries to list for me the victims among his own family. “Let’s see, there was one sister and her two children, one brother-in-law, one aunt, four uncles,” he says, and then adds, “You know, it’s easier for me to count those who are alive than all the ones who were killed.” Chhang travels between Phnom Penh and Dallas, to where to his parents emigrated while he was a teenager. Amid the Dallas Cowboys knickknacks in his office, walls of filing cabinets now hold about 600,000 documents, statements and photographs that could be used in war-crimes trials. Sitting in the center’s conference room surrounded by 25-year-old photographs of genocide victims, Chhang says the country is still reeling psychologically from the aftereffects. “We all look fine, we’re wearing nice clothes, but mentally we are still living in the past,” he says.

In fact, Cambodians are still counting the cost of the Khmer Rouge’s destruction. On the wall of a room in the Tuol Sleng prison, which now serves as the country’s genocide museum, there is a handwritten list of what was obliterated: 3,314,768 killed or disappeared; 635,522 buildings destroyed; 1,200 communes, or villages, “completely effaced.”

On the prison walls, thousands of blank faces of Cambodians stare out at the next generation. Photographed by the Khmer Rouge with macabre precision moments before their execution, they are the closest thing to a witness list that prosecutors could use to try to convict Ta Mok, Duch and others. “I wanted to see the real pictures in here, because my parents used to tell me what happened to them,” Sim Kamsan, a 20-year-old computer teacher visiting the museum on a Sunday afternoon, tells me there. To his generation, raised with MTV and direct-dialing to the West from mobile telephones, “it seems impossible that this will ever happen again.”

Perhaps so. But whether those responsible will be convicted and sentenced is another matter.

For days, Russians have waited for each scrap of news, glued to their television sets at home. Taxi drivers kept a close eye on their watches, raising the volume on the dial at the top of each hour, to hear the latest grim details. When the climax came, the bland words offered little relief. “There is no hope of finding survivors in the submarine Kursk,” said a Norwegian statement on Russian television.

With that sentence, the rescue operation was over. Now comes the morbid attempt to extract the bodies from the hull and bring them to the surface, where hundreds of relatives have gathered to grieve their dead and to vent their fury at the government.

Russian officials insist they will have the bodies out within a month, ready for proper burial. Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said Monday he wanted international help to hoist the submarine out of the water. “Not a single country on its own can handle such an operation,” he said on Russian television.

Certainly, the operation is far beyond the technical abilities and budget of the Russian military, both of which have been exposed as seriously strained, since a massive explosion sank the Kursk.

Even dry, the submarine is a monstrous vessel. At about 500 feet long, it looks like a skyscraper lying prone. With its compartments waterlogged, it could weigh about 24,000 tons, experts said Monday. Beyond that, some fear that budging the submarine from the ocean floor could cause it to rupture or crack, risking a possible leak from the two nuclear reactors that powered it.

Divers on Monday found normal radiation levels both in the water and in the inside hatch they opened. But Norwegian officials say they were wary of sending their divers in to extract bodies from the murky tomb until they do further tests.

Russian military officials have insisted from the start that there were no nuclear weapons aboard the Kursk. And for now, they seem to have dodged another Chernobyl-style disaster.

But the fallout above ground, among Russia’s political leaders, has already begun.

Having just passed his golden 100-day mark, President Vladimir Putin seems to have come to a shattering end of his honeymoon with voters.

Away on summer vacation in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin uttered his first public words about the crisis Wednesday — more than three days after the Kursk sank — appearing on television in a white, open-neck golf shirt, looking suntanned and relaxed. For anguished Russians, the contrast grated.

In fact, the first whiff of anything wrong came only Aug. 14, two days after the sinking, in a small media report that a submarine had run into problems. It was not until Wednesday that officials conceded a full-scale disaster — and only then, it seemed, because Western journalists had turned it into a round-the-clock, made-for-television drama. Now, analysts in Moscow are wondering whether the old-guard military rulers might have even hidden the details from Putin himself.

Indeed, for many Russians, the government’s handling of the disaster has seemed an all-too-familiar throwback to Soviet times, when Moscow’s leaders used obfuscation and denial to downplay disaster, including the Chernobyl nuclear leak. Worst still for many Russians was the government’s refusal to seek or accept help from the West.

Across the street from Moscow’s Gorky Park on Sunday, many Russians were basking in the late-summer sun in a sculpture garden filled with the city’s statues of Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. Lolling on the park benches, many said they sensed the old Communist ghosts suddenly springing back to life, as they watched the submarine disaster unfold.

“Every day we have been waiting for better news, but it seems to me that the government is to blame, since they did not ask for help right away,” said Tatyana, 77, a retired researcher. She began spelling out her last name, and then stopped, too fearful to have it published. “In recent years, our tongues have become untied,” she said. “Now, we are worried that maybe Putin is taking us back to the past, when we didn’t know anything and when our mouths were shut.”

Near a large granite statue of Stalin, Mikhail Pronnin, 56, said he had lit a candle in church that morning and said a prayer for the seamen, even though he was certain they were all dead.

“The military leaders and the government put secrecy above the people. Even now, we don’t have any information,” said Pronnin, who said he had served in the Soviet army during the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, and now worked for the Moscow telephone company. He wondered whether Putin’s silence had been an outcome of his own grief or because he himself found the disaster “hard to digest.”

The Russian press has been far more merciless in its lashing of Putin and the military.

On the front page of Monday’s Moskovski Komsomolets newspaper, the acerbic headline said: “THEY DON’T DROWN.” Below were photographs of Putin, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and Russian Navy Commander Vladimir Kuroyedov. The article suggested that perhaps the leaders had deliberately stalled calling for foreign rescue teams to ensure that no sailor would be left to tell the world how the Kursk sank.

For now, officials have no answer to that question.

Russian military brass at first insisted the vessel collided with something, perhaps a NATO submarine. But Western intelligence reports quickly picked up two underwater explosions, suggesting that perhaps an onboard torpedo had misfired.

What has jolted both Westerners and Russians this week are the risks of an overstretched Russian military, operating a large-scale force on a budget of barely $6 billion.

The Kursk, in fact, was one of Russia’s newest submarines and a jewel in the country’s Northern Fleet. Monday’s Wall Street Journal said a recent Russian military report last December estimated that maintenance and repairs for the country’s fleet had dropped to about 10 percent of what was needed.

Down a narrow side street in central Moscow, the anger and grief over the Kursk disaster has endured for days at the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, a human-rights group established by mothers of Chechnya war veterans.

There, in a smoke-filled room up a dark staircase, no one doubted who was to blame Monday, after Russian officials admitted the entire crew was dead.

“It is very clear that the government doesn’t want to uncover the real reasons for what went wrong,” said Ida Kuklina, a member of the group’s coordinating committee. “The government is estranged from the people. And now, the people are estranged from the government.”

The conflict comes a time when Zimbabweans face a heavy decision about the future of their nation: whether or not to reject the leader who gave them their independence, but who also, many say, has been a party to its degradation.

Reuben Gwatidzo doesn’t look like a man who bears grudges. When I greet him in an elevator downtown, he is wearing a dark suit and silk tie and carrying a briefcase. The vice chairman of this capital’s chamber of commerce, he has just come from a meeting about opening up Zimbabwe’s telecommunications.

But within a few minutes, standing on the landing, we are deep in a discussion about Zimbabwe’s powder-keg politics. That’s when he tells me his grandparents — still alive, and nearly 100 — had taught him, from when he was small, the key tale of the Gwatidzo family: how they lost their land.

Sometime during the 1920′s, they had said, a group of white men, working for the government of the then-British colony of Southern Rhodesia, arrived at the gate of the couple’s farm. They packed all the couple’s belongings and moved them out to a scrap of land that was a lot less fertile. They were barred from returning, and never quite recovered. “They still have very vivid memories” of that day, Gwatidzo says.

In Zimbabwe, land has transformed every life. Acres, not dollars, have long been the real measure of a person’s wealth.

Since the farm invasions began this year, about 12 people — including two white farmers — have been killed. Almost all of the dead were known supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which is trying to oust President Robert Mugabe in elections that are to be held sometime before August.

The current violence threatens to topple Zimbabwe into anarchy and economic collapse. Three cabinet ministers flew to London Thursday to press British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to buy white land to redistribute among millions of landless blacks. It is a hugely expensive plan, but it would not be the first time the British government loaned millions for land repatriation in Zimbabwe. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government is alarmed enough to consider loaning about $57 million, on condition that Mugabe runs a clean election and evicts the invaders. Right now, that seems about as likely as snowfall on this steaming countryside.

Exactly 20 years after Mugabe’s guerrillas finally routed the whites from power, millions of blacks are now unemployed and desperate for money. Added to that, Zimbabwe now has one of the world’s highest AIDS infection rates: about one in four adults, further crippling the economy. Meanwhile, whites — less than 1 percent of Zimbabweans — own at least 40 percent of the productive farmland, and earn almost the entire commercial agricultural revenues.

With incredible cunning, Mugabe has managed to deflect the anger of millions of blacks, conveniently placing it squarely with the tiny minority. But observers say the leader clearly shares the blame for his country’s sad state. Early on in his presidency, Mugabe gave hundreds of farms to close associates and party faithfuls, who knew almost nothing about agriculture. From there, inefficiency, cronyism and simple intransigence has kept the status quo in place.

In all this melee, what’s been drowned out is a sense of how blacks lost their land in the first place.

Through decades of white rule, millions of blacks were stripped of their farmland, mostly without compensation. Now, many of their children and grandchildren earn minimum wages working on the large white farms, while others are eking out precarious livings in the cities. Some, like Gwatidzo, 36, have made it good. But that’s rare.

When I ask an ex-guerrilla near Harare what the violence is all about, he shouts at me: “We went to war for land. What did they think we wanted? A country in the air?” “They” are the whites, not Mugabe’s officials.

Drive in any direction out of Harare, and you quickly see why whites are the target. On either side of the road, corn, soy and tobacco crops stretch on, sometimes for a mile. Cows graze in sumptuous pastures. Swimming pools glitter in the heat.

One estate is big enough for its name to appear in giant white letters on the lush hill behind it. At the entrance to the dirt tracks off the road, neat boards display the owners’ English names. In many places the paint has faded: The owners have lived here for three generations.

Malcolm Norvall, who manages a 300-cow dairy farm outside Harare, tells me his father was 20 when he moved up from South Africa. Norvall’s father bought a chunk of farming land during the 1920′s (right around the time that Reuben Gwatidzo’s grandparents were thrown off their farm). That land was owned by the concession set up by colonial founder Cecil Rhodes. But Norvall’s payment was a forgettable token, since white settlement, not money, was the aim of the company.

“My dad knew nothing about farming, but he got a few cows and began,” says Malcolm Norvall, 53. He built a thriving business. Eventually, Malcolm and his two brothers took it over, and expanded further, before selling it after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1982.

Drive further down the road from the Norvall land and you reach Porter Farm, named for the white family who have long since cleared out. It is now state-owned land, and the site of the country’s largest shantytown.

How Robson Machauda and 7,000 other blacks came to live here with no electricity or running water is a story that demonstrates the complexity of the current conflict. When Queen Elizabeth II came to visit Zimbabwe in 1991, Mugabe ordered a cleanup of the city, which by that stage had become a public-relations disaster. And so hundreds of shanties were dismantled, their residents trucked out of town to a vacant plot of land, miles from any source of employment.

“I just sell some bags of meal to survive here,” says Robson, 30, who found himself unable to move back to Harare. He has married and had two children in the squatter camp, and doubts he will ever be able to leave. “Even if there were land for us, we have no money to buy it,” he says.

Mugabe’s supporters in Porter Farm have been busily organizing invasions of the sprawling white estates which surround the squatter camp. Matthew Chadambuka, 54, runs the local branch of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, and like Robson, was dumped at Porter Farm the week before the Queen arrived nine years ago. Having finally given up waiting for land, he has grouped together people from the camp to occupy chunks of farm land nearby.

Who should pay the farmers for their land, I ask? “The government has no money to buy farms,” says Chadambuka. And anyway, why should they? “The land was grabbed from us free of charge in the first place.”

Those of us who were born and raised in Africa will never forget the day exactly 20 years ago, when Mugabe’s guerrillas won their independence, and dismantled 90 years of white rule. The euphoria was dizzying. Not only had the Zimbabwean battle been grueling, its end also foretold the inevitable demise of white rule next door, in South Africa.

It took another 14 years for Nelson Mandela to come to power. But the path to that moment began in 1980, here on the streets of Harare.

Twenty years later, land — the promise for which thousands of black Zimbabweans died fighting — is still unfulfilled. Mugabe has resettled about 70,000 families, a tiny fraction of those whose land was seized, and well short of his own target of distributing land to 162,000 families by 1985.

Down South, there are growing anxieties in South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki flew to Zimbabwe on Easter weekend to try defend Mugabe’s actions to a baffled world press.

Indeed, Mbeki faces the prospect that his own voters might finally invade the plush white farmlands of South Africa. Of the millions of blacks who lost land under apartheid, only 13,500 families have so far received restitution from South Africa’s land court.

Amazingly, only one copycat invasion has taken place in South Africa since February. But if a similar revolt began in a country immensely more powerful and better-armed than Zimbabwe, the entire region could catapult into chaos.

In both countries, history has entangled blacks and whites in a battle over their future.

In Porter Farm, Chadambuka says they have no intention of leaving the white farms, despite a court order for them to evict, and despite Robin Cook’s demand in London on Thursday that Mugabe force them off the farms before Britain lends Zimbabwe money to buy land for its people.

“We’ll wait for the whites to finish harvesting their crops, and then we’ll begin tilling the land,” says Chadambuka. Last week, he began handing out parcels of land on the white farms to his group of invaders.

When I visited Malcolm Norvell last week, he had just watched the squatters, next to his milking shed, as they began to stake out bits of land on the farm for themselves. His brothers have left for South Africa. His daughter has emigrated to Texas.

But Norvell, like most whites, says he’s not going anywhere. He fought Mugabe’s guerrillas for 12 years before independence, and despite the fact that his side lost, he says: “This is my country. I have nowhere to go.”

“Some parents sat in trees for days,” says Alda Macuacua, a Roman Catholic nun from Xai-Xai, the capital of the stricken Gaza Province. “They might have fallen down from hunger.” Last week, Macuacua made it to this village to help. Since then, she has found 58 children wandering alone in the camp, having lost their parents in the frantic scramble to safety.

In the devastated flood areas of southern Mozambique, there are countless such tales of heartbreak and loss. From the helicopters crisscrossing the huge terrain, one can see the destruction stretching in all directions. Tiny groups of cows stand dazed and marooned on tiny patches of mud, unable to reach any grazing land. Fields of crops have turned into lakes, wiped out just weeks before the late-summer harvest. The grids of town maps have vanished. From the air, only the tips of electric poles and the red roof tiles offer clues to what lies underneath. There are bridges whose spans have disappeared underwater, and roads and rail lines that have been chopped in pieces.

Until two weeks ago, Cheaquelane was a thriving community, linked by a main national road to the capital, Maputo, 100 miles south. Now, it is an island surrounded by water, the road having been cut in four. The village has become the country’s biggest relief center, most of its victims having come from flood-soaked Chokwe, about 30 miles east. Tens of thousands of people have camped on open ground here for a week, having trudged for miles through shoulder-high water and mud to find the nearest dry land.

In Chokwe, where about 15,000 people normally live, there hasn’t been a drop of clean water to drink or bathe in since Feb. 26, when the pounding floodwaters came roaring through the Limpopo River Valley, “sounding like a train coming,” as one local man put it. Repairing the shattered water pumps would be useless, since the electricity to run them has likewise collapsed. Instead, the few hundred people remaining in the town are drinking increasingly contaminated floodwater, some of it mixed with chlorine in an attempt to kill the germs.

When I visited Chokwe’s Catholic mission hospital on Monday, flood survivors looking for help had jammed the dark hall. The sole nurse on duty, Gloria Rivez, a Spanish volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, had arrived just that morning.

First, Rivez organized a group to scour the town and pick up the corpses that began to surface as the floodwaters receded. A group of men collected six bodies, removing them to the back of a pickup truck. Then, she dispatched others to try to scrub the mud off the infirmary’s supplies, in a vain effort to save its small stock of bandages and antibiotics. “We have to prepare ourselves for people coming back to the town in a week or so,” she said. “At the moment, people know there’s no food or water in town.”

Cyclones and floods are a regular event in Mozambique. But the staggering damage of the latest one caught both the government and aid organizations off-guard. Pounding rains began early in February. Then, on Feb. 22, the cyclone Eline hit Zimbabwe and South Africa. It burst the banks of the giant Limpopo River, the artery that links those two countries to the Indian Ocean, through the vast Limpopo Valley in Mozambique.

Within days, Mozambique’s valley communities were drowning in floodwater. Neither aid workers nor the government has an accurate tally of the death and destruction. Aid workers think about 350 people have died, and that about 600,000 people have lost crops and animals. About 250,000 people are now being fed with donations from the United Nations’ World Food Program.

The disaster has become an international showcase for relief. For weeks after the floods began, a small group of South African helicopter pilots flew rescue missions over the south. And Maputo’s airport, usually a tiny operation with a one-room traffic control department, has been transformed into an international staging post. Tents and hangars serve as strategy rooms for at least six military forces.

On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Air Force finally rolled into town, in the first of five huge C-130 Hercules cargo planes. But it had been beaten to the relief operation by Spanish, German, French, British and even Libyan military forces, which have sent two cargo planes to offload food and medicine. Maj. Gen. Joe Wehrle, task force commander, described the U.S. operation as “large”: By week’s end, there will be more than 500 American military personnel in the region.

“I don’t remember any operation that has been so dependent on helicopters,” says Brenda Barton, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program who has worked in African disasters for years. “It’s very, very costly and gives very little bang for the buck.”

In fact, no one has yet tried to tally the cost of this giant operation. And while many aid workers have done so privately, no one has officially computed the cost against the relatively low loss of life — compared, for example, with the average Bangladeshi monsoon that kills thousands of people.

Privately, aid workers admit that the huge response is partly a factor of Mozambique’s welcoming features. Maputo, a port city with stunning white beaches, a palm-lined seafront and excellent prawns and lobsters, is a 45-minute flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, and for decades was a beach playground for South Africans.

Most Mozambicans are crushingly poor — the average household income is about $200 — and the country faces major malaria and AIDS epidemics. About 1.8 million people are infected with HIV, according to the United Nations.

The country of 17 million has become a darling of Western governments. Since signing a peace treaty with the South African-funded Renamo guerrillas in 1992, it has never returned to battle. After dismantling a bungled socialist system, essentially under orders from international financial institutions, Mozambique now has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Its average annual growth rate was about 10 percent between 1996 and 1998. “The country will do just fine,” says Sherri Archondo, deputy resident representative for the World Bank in Mozambique.

Millions of rural farmers have seen none of the boom, however; even before the floods they were struggling to survive.

Ironically, the current disaster may turn out to be a blessing for the average person. A casual glance at the congested tarmac at Maputo Airport reveals that many Mozambicans may actually get some benefits from the calamity. Helicopters shuttling into the interior are stocking rural warehouses with sacks of donated grain and remote clinics with boxes of medicines.

“A lot of stuff has come into the country,” says Brian MacMahon, an executive of Goal, an Irish relief organization that has run projects in Mozambique for more than a decade. “If anything, it’s focused attention on this place. It looks like many organizations will follow the emergency with a rebuilding program.”