Yet Darfur is arguably a greater catastrophe than Ethiopia was when Live Aid held its fundraising concerts 20 years ago. In Ethiopia massive famine coincided with civil war, but the famine was caused by drought. War complicated the relief effort but was not the primary problem. In Sudan's western region of Darfur the crisis is man-made: Civil war has created famine. As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan pointed out on a visit to refugee camps last week, 2 million of the region's 6 million people have fled their homes because of attacks.

Even if they felt safe to go home, there is nothing there to eat. Less than a third of the arable land was planted this season. Vast quantities of food will be needed for at least a year, for people both in the camps and in the villages, if they return. The food can only come from donations. Of course, it is still too dangerous for most people to leave the camps. Rape and pillage go on unabated, as horseback raiders known as Janjaweed continue their ethnic cleansing. The Sudanese government has consistently denied responsibility, claiming the militias are beyond its control.

Continue Reading...

Let us take Blair's position at face value. Has he not noticed that in Basra and the other two southeastern provinces where British forces are based the insurgency barely exists? It is true that another British soldier died last week in Amara, a traditionally difficult town, but Basra has been quiet for months. Suicide bombers are conspicuous by their absence. Attacks on British forces are rare, and fatalities even rarer. On Iraq's election day in January there was almost no violence.

The reasons are varied, the main one being that the Shiite political groups that control Basra are taking the long view. They form the backbone of Iraq's new government in Baghdad and have no particular complaint with the current drift of Iraqi politics nationally. Although they are Islamists, the conservative stamp they have put on the city has not been opposed by the British.

Continue Reading...

Girls as young as 8 are abducted and forced to live with armed groups. Some carry weapons; others serve as porters, cleaners and cooks. Almost all are forced to be sex slaves or "wives" of commanders, Save the Children says in the report, titled "Forgotten Casualties of War: Girls in Armed Conflict."

While the horror of child soldiers is well known, the report says the focus of international concern is usually on boys. But out of roughly 300,000 children estimated to be living with armed groups, about 40 percent are girls.

Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs are usually initiated after a conflict by the United Nations and the World Bank, but the report says they often ignore the special problems girls face. Their homecoming is often as depressing as their departure. They are ostracized by their family and community because of their "immoral" experiences. As a result, they are trapped between recrimination from the armed group if they leave and from the community if they return home.

Continue Reading...

For most Iraqis, with the exception of the Kurds, Washington's "liberation" never was. Wounded national pride was greater than relief at Saddam's departure. Iraqis were angered by the failure to get power and water supplies repaired, the brutality of U.S. Army tactics, and the disappearance of their country's precious oil revenues into inadequately supervised accounts, handed to foreigners under contracts that produced no benefits for Iraqis.

From last autumn's disastrous attack on Fallujah to the huge increase in detention without trial, the casualties go on rising. After an amnesty last summer, the number of "security detainees" has gone up again, reaching a record 17,000.

Continue Reading...

Addressing a three-day conference that included about 20 heads of state and government as well as terrorism experts, lawyers and journalists, Annan laid out five elements in what he called a "principled, comprehensive strategy" to fight terrorism. He proposed a U.N. special envoy to monitor whether governments' counterterrorism measures conformed to international human rights law. "Compromising human rights cannot serve the struggle against terrorism," he said. "On the contrary, it facilitates the achievement of the terrorists' objectives by provoking tension, hatred and mistrust of governments among precisely those parts of the population where he is most likely to find recruits."

Continue Reading...

If Sunday night's early indications of support for the incumbent, Ayad Allawi, in the largely Shiite southern provinces is confirmed in Baghdad and even those Sunni areas that voted, he will be assured of staying in the job. He took a risk in standing on his own ticket rather than seeking to ally himself with the Kurds and Shiites with whom he is in coalition in the present government.

But he decided to put his own reputation to the test, a that which appears to have paid off. He had the advantage of incumbency, and in recent days many Iraqis interviewed by reporters praised him for raising pensions and salaries for teachers and other government workers as well as the police.

Continue Reading...

The invading British expropriated the park, and put it inside a no man's land overlooked by gun turrets, when they took over the palace complex that Saddam Hussein built a little farther along the waterfront. Now the dictator's compound is a smaller version of Baghdad's Green Zone, housing the British and American consulates and loads of portable toilets for security guards and other contractors. Iraqi workers are busy digging the ground for a swimming pool.

The British Consulate must surely be the most secluded, and the most bizarre, in the world -- a sprawling sandstone villa behind 12-foot-high concrete walls and three rows of razor wire strung through the water.

Two tugboats proceed down the river, pushing what appear to be empty barges. "Oil smugglers," says a diplomat as two British patrol boats speed past in the opposite direction, taking no notice. "There are probably a thousand tons in each one."

Continue Reading...

"Charlie has left Iraq," an intelligence official said yesterday. "In terms of the weapons hunt in a proactive sense, it has concluded, and the report is being tweaked a bit but it will be largely unchanged." But he added: "There is a considerable amount of document exploitation to be done that will continue to occur, and leads that come out of the exploitation will be followed up."

Continue Reading...

Forty years on from the age of decolonization, Yasser Arafat is the last man who can claim that status. In many ways his title is even more deserved. He had to win recognition of the fact that there was such a thing as a Palestinian nation at all. For decades, the Arab states and the British, who initially had the mandate to run Palestine, and the Israelis, who moved into the land, refused to accept there were Palestinian people, let alone a nation.

Continue Reading...

Their cases cannot be compared to that of British engineer Kenneth Bigley or the other foreigners kidnapped by fundamentalist groups. The circumstances are different. The motivations are different. Their treatment is different. Public humiliation by video, repeated threats of imminent death and filmed beheadings are bestial. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the presumed perpetrator of this cruelty, claims to be acting in the name of the Iraqi resistance. In fact, he is a parasite on the occupation, seeking its cover to advance the goal of an extreme theocratic state, which few Iraqis share.

Continue Reading...

Those words were amplified Sunday on a Web site that is connected to Shamil Basayev, the most extreme Chechen commander, whom Russian officials think was the mastermind behind the Beslan atrocity. "However many children in that school were held hostage, however many of them will die (and have already died) ... it is incomparably less than the 42,000 Chechen children of school age who have been killed by Russian invaders," said the statement.

Continue Reading...

He told the Guardian that people who call for talks with Chechen leaders have no conscience. "Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? Why don't you do that?" he said with searing sarcasm. "You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child killers? "No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to child killers," he added.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but Margaret Thatcher, whom I've met more than once, said: 'A man who comes out into the street to kill other people must himself be killed,'" he told the Guardian.

At times grim-faced, but always calm, Putin made his comments in the midst of an extraordinary three-and-a-half-hour meeting with a group of foreign journalists and academics with long experience in Russia, invited for a special conference. Held in Putin's country house outside Moscow, the question-and-answer session ended after midnight. It was his first meeting with foreigners since the Beslan catastrophe.

Continue Reading...

Under the headline "The Silence of the State Broadcasters," Irina Petrovskaya said the state channels panicked when the shooting started last Friday and failed to give live coverage like CNN, BBC and the independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy. They had to wait for instructions on what to show and what to say, she said. This was the approach that dominated the coverage from that moment, and it would continue.

"I'm sure that when the official version of what happened is worked out and approved on high, we'll be showered with more lies and muck. I'm also sure that those who used their own understanding of professionalism and reported things which they should not have done will be reprimanded," Petrovskaya wrote.

Continue Reading...

The ingredients are well-known: sexed-up intelligence material that puts the target country in the worst possible light; moves to get the U.N. to declare it in "noncompliance," thereby claiming justification for going in unilaterally even if the U.N. gives no support for an invasion; and at the back of the whole brouhaha, a clique of American neoconservatives whose real agenda is regime change.

The immediate focus for action against Iran is the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has produced five reports on Iran in the past 14 months. Part of the U.N., with an international board that acts like a mini-Security Council, the IAEA's reports have raised questions about Iran's professedly civilian nuclear program and its desire to create its own fuel cycle, which could eventually be used to produce bombs.

Continue Reading...

Now the stage is reversed. A plethora of hot wars over the last decade has turned people cold on diplomacy. The Churchillian adage that jaw-jaw is better than war-war is forgotten in favour of the faulty notion that applying superior military power is the best way to handle stubborn political conflicts.

One reason is television, which increasingly sets the agenda for newspapers as well as governments. If there is no image there is no message, so political negotiations are condemned as inherently dull, if not irrelevant, compared to the visual drama of war. The other is the cult of impatience, caused by the new craze for humanitarian intervention and the excessive injection of morality into international disputes. If a conflict is projected as a struggle against evil-doers, then there is not a moment to lose. Delay itself becomes a form of moral appeasement and wickedness. When military action is crowned with rapid results and the bad guys' defeat, as in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the illusion is created that a solution has been reached.

Continue Reading...

When a young house doctor writes out a chit for more plastic bottles of saline solution or more disposable needles, one of the family rushes off to the hospital pharmacy to get the supplies. More often, the huddle of jostling people is a nuisance and - with the danger of grief that can suddenly turn to rage - a threat.

An evening in the Yarmuk hospital in western Baghdad is like a microcosm of Iraq's tense, no-holds-barred society; aggression, corruption, shortages and courageous efforts by a few people to improvise solutions.

It is also a window on the random violence which faces the capital's residents from bombs, street gangs and kidnappers.

In one bed lies a young man shot in the back in a quarrel between two families. Two police officers sit on another bed. One is bleeding from the mouth, the other has gashes on his forehead. They were attacked while arresting a street gang.

Continue Reading...

The package of measures will also allow him to appoint military governors to take charge of cities or provinces, close Iraq's borders, seize the assets of suspects and monitor their phone calls and emails.

The national security law, passed unanimously by the cabinet, was unveiled by ministers in the heavily guarded "green zone" in central Baghdad as masked fighters battled Iraqi police and US troops less than a mile away.

Although car bombs and mortar attacks have become a regular feature in the capital, it was the first time running gun battles have taken place in daylight so close to the centre.

The emergency law has several built-in safeguards to prevent the risk of another one-man dictatorship. Article 12 states that it cannot be used to delay the national elections set for January. Article 11 says it cannot abrogate the interim constitution agreed in March.

This constitution point was demanded by Kurdish ministers who were upset last month when the UN security council approved the transfer of sovereignty but failed to mention the constitution, which protects Kurdish autonomy and gives Kurds certain veto rights.

Continue Reading...