He arrived to find five inmates locked up 22 hours a day and a tribunal haunted by the prospect of failure. Now he guards 62 detainees from the Balkans, each of them with a laptop and a coffee machine, satellite TV and access to a gym. They are allowed out of their individual cells for most of their waking hours and take turns in the kitchen, where some of them have gained reputations as gourmet cooks.

More war crimes suspects are arriving in the Hague every month as the tribunal finally reaches critical mass after years of struggle and controversy. A further 18 have been released pending trial, while 56 have served or are serving jail terms elsewhere. "It's quite a complicated place because of the different problems it generates," says MacFadden.

Continue Reading...

Inspectors at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency have been investigating the worst nuclear-smuggling racket ever uncovered, headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. The operation was discovered two years ago to be selling sensitive nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.

A senior official said several sets of blueprints for uranium centrifuges -- the so-called P-1 and more advanced P-2 systems that were peddled by the Khan network -- have gone missing. "We know there were several sets of them prepared," said the official. "So who got those electronic drawings? We have only actually got to the one full set from Libya. So who got the rest, the copies? We have no evidence they were destroyed. One possibility is another client. We just don't know where they are."

Continue Reading...

In talks in Geneva involving senior Iranian officials and the foreign ministers of Britain, Germany and France, a two-month breathing space was agreed to, meaning that Tehran would continue to keep its nuclear fuel enrichment program frozen while the three E.U. states prepare an offer meant to obtain a halt to its enrichment activities.

The prospects for a settlement that will satisfy all parties look slim, but the make-or-break talks in Geneva salvaged a dialogue that was heading for collapse. Deadlock Wednesday could have paved the way for a more dangerous showdown between Iran and the West.

The agreement -- if it sticks, and according to Western diplomats the Iranians are notoriously tricky negotiators, regularly "reinterpreting" what had been agreed to -- means that Tehran should avoid being referred to the Security Council when the International Atomic Energy Agency has a board meeting in Vienna next month. In return, according to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Tehran will maintain a freeze on all aspects of uranium enrichment.

Continue Reading...

"This is all very disingenuous of the Iranians. But they are playing this perfectly," said a diplomat who has been following the two-year-old crisis.

Wednesday night, a senior Iranian envoy flew to Vienna, Austria, home of the International Atomic Energy Agency, with a letter from his government that diplomats anticipated to be formal notification that Iran was reneging on the agreement to freeze its uranium enrichment activities. The Iranian leadership was reported to have met Wednesday in Tehran.

Diplomats said Iran could start breaking U.N. seals on nuclear technology as early as Thursday. Tehran has told the IAEA it will promptly inform the agency of the decision and a letter is expected by the end of the week.

Continue Reading...

The report denounces the U.N. administration of the southern province of Kosovo, calling for the Albanian-majority territory to be granted a form of independence. The loose union of Serbia and Montenegro in the common state helped into being two years ago by E.U. policymakers is also a failure and should be scrapped, the report says.

Criticizing most of the pillars of international policy in former Yugoslavia since the end of the Bosnia and Kosovo wars, the report calls on the E.U. to come up with a strategy to bring all the countries into the E.U. within a decade. "The international community and the E.U. in particular have been engaged in the Balkans to an extent which is unprecedented," says the report, by the International Commission on the Balkans. "But despite the scale of the assistance effort, the international community has failed to offer a convincing political perspective to the societies in the region.

Continue Reading...

Their arrival in Rome over the next 48 hours will place the city, its police, and transport and accommodation systems under even more strain in hosting the largest event in its long history. As many as 2 million Italians are also expected, as are representatives from many other nationalities.

Achille Serra, the prefect of Rome, said last Tuesday: "The funeral of the pope is the greatest event ever to have taken place in Rome -- multiplied by 10. The biggest difficulty comes from not knowing who will be arriving, when and where."

Tuesday night an estimated 600,000 people were queuing up to 12 hours to see the body of Pope John Paul II, lying in state in St. Peter's Basilica for a second day. On the first day more than 500,000 people are thought to have filed past the body, hustled at a brisk pace by officious stewards allowing no time to pause or say more than the briefest prayer.

Continue Reading...

Thursday's ceremonies at Auschwitz and at the nearby city of Krakow kick off a year of events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. These 12 months will in many respects also be a year of closure, since the various events will be the last to be attended by direct witnesses of the war years.

"We are on the brink of that moment when this terrible event will change -- from memory to history," Silvan Shalom, the Israeli foreign minister, said in New York on Monday at the U.N.'s first special General Assembly session dedicated to recalling the liberation of the Nazi death camps. "The number of survivors shrinks all the time," Shalom added.

Continue Reading...

But Putin is likely to be less than pleased with the naming of Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister. The charismatic and blunt-speaking Tymoshenko is, temperamentally, the opposite of the mild-mannered Yushchenko. She played a key role in the "orange revolution" that toppled the regime of Leonid Kuchma last month, but it remains to be seen whether her fiery nationalist rhetoric will be appropriate to the demands of running a country riven by the tumult of the past two months.

Continue Reading...

The 50-year-old former prime minister and national bank chief was sworn in as Ukraine's third president since the collapse of the Soviet Union 13 years ago, capping a bitter but joyous campaign for office and for democracy that erupted in November when the outgoing regime of Leonid Kuchma tried to steal the presidential election. In scenes reminiscent of the popular ferment of 1989 that ended the Kremlin's rule over half of Europe, Yushchenko Sunday addressed more than 100,000 supporters who braved subzero temperatures in Kiev's central square to mark the birth of a new era. "This is a victory of freedom over tyranny, of law over lawlessness," Yushchenko declared.

Former dissident heroes from the east European revolutions of 1989 were on hand with senior officials from the E.U., NATO and the United States, including Colin Powell, the outgoing U.S. secretary of state, to witness what Yushchenko and many others believe is the delayed onset of genuine Ukrainian independence.

Continue Reading...

Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations with Iran, and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections is unenforceable and will collapse in months. Only the credible threat, and if necessary the use, of air and special operations attacks against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities will stop the ruling clerics in Tehran from acquiring warheads, many in the administration argue.

Moderates, who are far fewer in the second Bush administration than the first, insist that if Iran does have a secret weapons program, it is likely to be dispersed and buried in places almost certainly unknown to U.S. intelligence. The potential for Iranian retaliation inside Iraq and elsewhere is so great, the argument runs, that there is in effect no military option.

Continue Reading...

But a backlash is predicted.

The schism opened during the writing of the new Constitution. Despite the protests of at least eight of the 25 member states and lobbying by the Vatican, the text finds no place for Christianity and its role in shaping Europe, just a bland formula referring to the "cultural, religious and humanist inheritance." This is one of several successes chalked up by secularism, indicators perhaps of the cultural divide between the new Europe and George W. Bush's America, where religious and moral values are seen to have played a key role in the Republican election victory.

Michael Mertes, a speechwriter for Helmut Kohl when he was chancellor of Germany, and a former editor of the liberal Catholic Rhineland newspaper Rheinischer Merkur, says: "Given the different national traditions in the E.U., rigid secularism has become a lowest common denominator."

Continue Reading...

The truce in the 18-month dispute between Iran and the West buys time for both sides -- for Iran to perfect its techniques in readiness for switching the machines back on should its pact with the E.U. break down, and for the nuclear inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Western governments to keep probing the Iranian operations and learn more about a 20-year-old program.

The threat of nuclear weapons spreading to hostile regimes is one of the most formidable challenges confronting President Bush as he enters his second and final term. While Bush went to war in Iraq to destroy, among other aims, a nuclear weapons program that had already been destroyed, more advanced nuclear programs have been making headway elsewhere.

From the dusty Iranian towns of Isfahan and Natanz to the poorly guarded stockpiles of plutonium and uranium scattered across Russia, from the closed complexes in North Korea to the military laboratories outside Islamabad, Pakistan, that a rogue Pakistani engineer turned into the offices of the world's first private nuclear shopping mall, the risks and threats posed by nuclear proliferation are now palpable.

Continue Reading...

While the Europeans are guardedly optimistic that they can reach a broader agreement with Tehran to end the nuclear row and defuse a potentially bigger crisis, early noises from the second-term Bush administration have been more belligerent over the past week. The U.S. insists that Iran is on a surreptitious nuclear weapons drive and is experimenting with matching its missiles with designs for nuclear warheads. Reacting to the news of a freeze during a visit to Colombia, George W. Bush said: "Let's say I hope it's true." He added, "I think the definition of truth is the willingness of the Iranian regime to allow for verification."

Nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency were at Iranian facilities Monday to verify Iran's uranium freeze.

Continue Reading...

People in western Europe and the Middle East were particularly gloomy about the prospects for their children, believing they faced less safe and less prosperous lives, offering an apparent thumbs-down to the Bush administration's declared mission of spreading liberty, democracy and prosperity by toppling regimes such as the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

The annual survey, claiming to represent the views of 1.2 billion people, was conducted last summer by Gallup International for the World Economic Forum, based in Davos, Switzerland. Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the forum, described the results as a wake-up call for leaders. "The findings of this comprehensive global survey send a strong message to the world's leaders. People around the world expect and demand a lot more from their leaders than they receive. They want leaders who are capable of courageous and long-term decisions, acting in the best interests of a global citizenry," he said.

Continue Reading...

Several more arson attacks on schools, churches and mosques were reported across the country Thursday, bringing to more than 20 the number of incidents of racial and religious violence since controversial Dutch filmmaker and Muslim-basher Theo van Gogh was killed 10 days ago in Amsterdam. A Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent is the prime suspect. The murder has triggered a spiral of tit-for-tat attacks on mosques and churches and a national mood of alarm.

In raids this week in the Hague, Amsterdam and Amersfoort -- including a 14-hour standoff with armed Muslims -- anti-terrorist units have arrested seven alleged Islamist terrorists. This is in addition to the arrest of Mohammed Bouyeri, charged with the murder of van Gogh, and a further five arrests connected to the killing.

Continue Reading...

"I know one Turkish bloke," said the Viennese social worker. "He's got two wives. Neither of them can speak a word of German. He beats them up. He's got two sons as well. They're terrified of him. They're just different from us. We're Christians. They're Muslims. And these Muslims are getting more and more extreme. It's time to make a choice. I'm against it."

What Helmut is against, like two out of three Austrians, is Turkey's joining the European Union. Gerhard, the landlord serving him his wine, joined in eagerly. "This is Europe, and we're in danger of losing our identity with all these people from Turkey and Africa. We Christians are losing our faith while the Muslims are getting more fundamentalist."

Neither man wanted to give his full name. Both were keen to dwell on history. The place they were sitting, a hillside northeast of Vienna, was where 321 years ago last week the Polish king, John III, after a plea from the Vatican, marshaled a huge Roman Catholic army and went galloping down the mountain to save Christendom, Europe and Austria, routing the Turks, raising the 61-day Ottoman siege of Vienna, and halting the Turkish advance into the European heartland.

Continue Reading...