Salon.com > Rob Mank

Humanitarians or terrorist supporters?

Tue, 11 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Photographs lining the walls of Abdulrahman Odeh's dark, wood-paneled office testify to the Holy Land Foundation's charitable works: handing out supplies amid the devastating earthquake in Turkey; opening the foundation's food pantry in Paterson, N.J.; building a 150-bed hospital in Gaza.

But mounted among the snapshots of charity projects are a series of stomach-churning photos. One is a close-up on the bloody, mangled flesh of victims of the 1994 Hebron massacre, when a Jewish settler gunned down 29 praying Muslims.

"They push me to work more," Odeh says of the gory pictures hanging across the room from his desk. He gestures to one particularly horrific shot of a man's head so mutilated that parts of his brain spill out: "That man sacrificed his life." The graphic photos, and the boost in motivation Odeh gleans from them, have less to do with charity than with politics.

Harlem's un-Sharpton

Thu, 06 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Praise for Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in short supply these days. Following the death of Patrick Dorismond, the fourth unarmed black man killed by New York police officers in just over a year, the mayor's popularity is in free fall.

Giuliani's decision to release Dorismond's juvenile arrest record provoked outrage in minority communities, as did his incendiary comments days after the shooting, which included the portrayal of the slain man as a violent, hotheaded criminal. Even some police officers said his aggressive rhetoric makes their job more difficult.

Two polls released in the past week show Giuliani's Senate rival Hillary Clinton with a slight edge for the first time as a result of the Dorismond uproar. Even the much-exalted drop in New York's murder rate, which Giuliani has taken credit for, has begun to reverse. Homicides rose 13 percent between January and the end of March, making his leadership even more vulnerable to attack.

Hunger strike in Jericho

Fri, 24 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

As Sister Maria Stephanopoulos stepped toward the gate of the Jericho Garden monastery to receive several visiting journalists, two armed Palestinian Authority guards pulled the gate closed and rattled the metal bars menacingly.

"Why can't they come in?" she protested.

One of the guards waved his arm dismissively: No visitors. Despite the Palestinian Authority's pledge to allow Sister Maria to receive guests inside the compound, she settled for talking through the bars.

This has been the situation for more than 60 days at this Russian Orthodox monastery, where Sister Maria Stephanopoulos has barricaded herself among the crumbling buildings to protest Yasser Arafat's decision to transfer the property to a rival church.

Sister Maria, whose brother is former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos and whose father is one of the most influential priests in the North American Greek Orthodox community, has been drawing international attention to an arcane struggle between two branches of the Russian Orthodox Church.

A visit to “no-man's land”

Wed, 26 May 1999 10:00:00 +0000

Early Wednesday morning, 200 or so weary Kosovar refugees remained under the canopy at the Macedonian border checkpoint. They were the last of 22,000 who had crossed in the previous three days. Some had been waiting outside for more than 24 hours.

Relief workers at the Blace border crossing breathed a sigh of relief.

Before heading back to Skopje, Ron Redmond, a field officer with the United Nations refugee agency, decided to make a final check of the road between the Kosovo and Macedonian borders. Called "no-man's land," the half-mile stretch resembles the entry road to a prison. Two lanes wide and lined by tall barbed-wire fences, no-man's land is the final stop for refugees before they cross into Macedonia.

The road jogs right, putting the Kosovo border and the farthest section of no-man's land out of view from Blace, in Macedonia. The most recent refugees are often held there, out of sight from journalists and relief workers on the Macedonian side, and just a few feet from Yugoslav police. With often spotty communications between Macedonian border officials and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the only way for relief workers to find out if refugees are waiting in no-man's land is to go look.

Hillary does Brazda

Fri, 14 May 1999 09:00:00 +0000

Richard Gere, Bianca Jagger, Vanessa Redgrave: They're names one might expect to find on the guest list of a swanky Hollywood party, not on the list of official visitors to a southern European backwater. Add UNICEF representative Roger Moore to the mix and it's just an average week in Macedonia.

They have all traveled to the Balkans in recent days as good will ambassadors, bringing to the refugees messages of hope and compassion. But Friday was an exceptional day at the refugee camp known as Brazda. Liridon Maliqu, a 15-year-old Kosovar refugee who volunteers with the Catholic Relief Services in the camp, was posted at the rear gate, charged with security detail. Chief among Maliqu's duties was keeping the children clear of the vehicles in the entourage of Friday's celebrity visitor -- Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Of the quarter million or so Kosovar Albanians who have fled to Macedonia since the beginning of Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" campaign, more than 82,000 continue to be housed in camps here. Young Maliqu said the mood of the camp was elevated because the refugees had gotten word about their famous visitor. He watched over a group of children, who splashed about gleefully in a stream near the gate, before Clinton arrived.

Refugees protest treatment by Macedonians

Wed, 12 May 1999 13:00:00 +0000

Aurvasi Patel was caught in an
unenviable position. In front of her, she faced an agitated crowd of
hundreds of Kosovar Albanians, angry at the alleged mistreatment at the
hands of camp police. Behind her, a phalanx of beefy Macedonian policemen,
arms folded, stood shoulder-to-shoulder in defense of their headquarters.

Intermittently, the crowd shouted "NAH-TO, NAH-TO," calling for the return
of the international military alliance that constructed and first ran the
camp. The NATO soldiers are viewed as heroes by the refugees here -- both as
their military supporters in Kosovo and as a benevolent presence as camp
stewards.

New tensions between Kosovar Albanian refugees and Macedonian police are on the rise as refugee camps reach their saturation point. The stand-off at Brazda Monday showed the Kosovo conflict in microcosm, highlighting the ethnic tension in
Macedonia, where ethnic Albanians comprise nearly one-quarter of the population, according to government figures. The recent flood of refugees has greatly increased that figure, while the government has continued to allow refugees to pour into their country. Finally last Wednesday, the Macedonian government sealed the border.

Macedonia closes border

Thu, 06 May 1999 08:45:00 +0000

The stream of refugees into Macedonia was reduced to a trickle Thursday after the Macedonian government closed its border at Blace to ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo. The few Kosovar Albanians who passed into Macedonia said several thousand more refugees just inside the province were waiting to get out.

These accounts came on the heels of Wednesday's reports by observers for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that Macedonian police had forced more than 1,000 ethnic Albanians back into Kosovo and into the hands of Serbian police.

After being pushed back to the Kosovo side of the border by Macedonian police, the refugees were forcibly removed and in some cases beaten by Serbian police, according to UNHCR and OSCE observers on hand. The refugees were taken out of sight from the border, and their status is unknown.

Macedonian government officials today denied that police forced refugees back into Kosovo, but they were not clear about the status of the border crossing at Blace. Nikola Kljusev, the minister of defense, said, "The borders are not closed; the borders are controlled." He wouldn't confirm a government policy linking the number of refugees allowed to enter at Blace to the number airlifted to third countries, as some reports have stated.