Israel Evicts Palestinians From Homes

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Israeli security forces evicted two Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem early Sunday after the families lost a long legal battle to remain in the contested properties, furthering a plan for Jewish settlement in the predominantly Arab area.

The move, days after senior American officials visited Jerusalem to press for a settlement freeze, prompted sharp international criticism.

Later Sunday, the Israeli police said they had evidence to support indicting Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on charges including taking bribes, laundering money and committing fraud.

Mr. Lieberman, who denied wrongdoing, has been the subject of various police investigations for 13 years. The police said they had passed their conclusions to the attorney general, who will decide whether to press charges. If Mr. Lieberman is indicted, he will be forced to resign.

Mr. Lieberman has become increasingly powerful in recent years as the leader of the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, an important partner in the governing coalition. He has gained some notoriety at home and abroad, particularly for the contentious positions he has taken on Israel’s Arab citizens.

Responding to the police announcement, Mr. Lieberman said he was the victim of police persecution. “As much as my political strength and the strength of Yisrael Beiteinu rise,” he said in a statement, so the police campaign “intensifies.”

In East Jerusalem, the evictions stemmed from a drawn-out legal dispute over the ownership of a site in the wealthy Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, near the Old City. But the location of the neighborhood and competing Israeli and Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem make nearly every move on the ground politically charged.

As soon as the Palestinians had been forcibly removed from the houses, Jewish nationalists moved in, witnesses said.

Israel took the eastern part of Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war, but the Palestinians demand that East Jerusalem be the capital of a future state for them. Continued Jewish settlement, especially in the heart of Arab neighborhoods, is seen by the Palestinians and many countries and international groups as anticipating a result of negotiations over the status of the city and strengthening Israel’s hold on it.

The police cordoned off the road leading to the disputed houses, stopping journalists from reaching them. Orthodox Jews were allowed through to visit a nearby site believed by Jews to be the ancient tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, or Simeon the Just, a Jewish high priest.

Nasser Ghawi, one of the evicted Palestinians, said his family had been living in its house for 53 years. Maher Hanoun, the head of the other evicted family, was out on the street like Mr. Ghawi.

“I do not need a tent or rice,” Mr. Hanoun said. “What I need is to return to my house, where I and my children were born.”

Thirty-eight members of the Ghawi family were removed from six apartments that made up one of the houses. There are 17 people in the Hanoun family.

The houses were built in the 1950s by a United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees when the area was under Jordanian control. Jordan gave the families ownership of the houses but had not formally registered the buildings in their names by the time the 1967 war broke out, according to the families’ lawyer, Hosni Abu Hussein.

In the early 1970s, a Jewish association claimed ownership of the land around the tomb, based on property deeds from Ottoman times. At first the Palestinian families agreed to pay rent to the association to continue living there as protected tenants. Mr. Abu Hussein said they stopped paying when he learned that the Jewish deeds had been forged.

Eviction orders were issued, though the authenticity of the property deeds is still debated in Israeli courts.

Robert H. Serry, the United Nations special Middle East coordinator, who visited the Hanoun home in the spring, said in a statement that he deplored the evictions, which he described as “totally unacceptable actions by Israel.”

The British Consulate, in Sheikh Jarrah, said in a statement that its officials were “appalled” by the evictions.

In a visit in March, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned against threatened evictions and demolitions in East Jerusalem.

Countering criticism of another Jewish building project planned for Sheikh Jarrah, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said recently that Jerusalem residents had the right to live anywhere in the city and that Israel’s sovereignty over the capital “cannot be challenged.”

Separately, in Tel Aviv, the police continued hunting for a gunman who fled a gay community center after killing 2 Israelis and wounding at least 10 others on Saturday night. The shock over the attack jolted a society that largely values tolerance and has hardly been exposed to the specter of hate crimes. Both Mr. Netanyahu and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, strongly condemned the attack.

Cambodia Court Cases Mount Against Opposition

By SETH MYDANS

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia’s courts have been busy in recent weeks with cases of defamation, disinformation and incitement brought by the government in what critics say is part of a broad assault on civil liberties.

“If you’re just walking into the situation, it seems like a series of ridiculous lawsuits,” said Sara Colm, a senior researcher for the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch, who said at least nine lawsuits have recently been filed against critics and political opponents by Prime Minister Hun Sen and his supporters.

But she and other analysts say the targets seem carefully chosen to send a chill through the free press, independent judiciary, political opposition and civic organizations that were introduced by the United Nations in the early 1990s.

The surge in lawsuits amounts to “a serious threat to democratic development, which may undermine the efforts of the past 16 years to rebuild a tolerant and pluralistic environment in Cambodia,” the United Nations human rights office in Cambodia said in a statement in June.

In the most prominent cases, two opposition politicians have been stripped of their parliamentary immunity and sued for libel by Mr. Hun Sen and his associates. Threatened with a lawsuit and disbarment, their lawyer has abandoned the case, apologized to the prime minister and pledged allegiance to the ruling party.

The editor of one of the country’s last opposition newspapers was sent to prison in June for articles he had published, and another, soon afterward, apologized and agreed to shut down his newspaper to avoid court action.

A young political activist was convicted of defamation in June and jailed for spray-painting slogans critical of the government on the walls of his house.

“The court has always been used as a political tool,” said Theary C. Seng, whose leadership of a human rights group, the Center for Social Development, is being challenged in what she says is a politically motivated court case. “But recently, there is a concentration of cases which seem to be very political and which seem to use the court as a political tool to silence opposition voices.”

Mr. Hun Sen dismisses, and even appears to parody, his critics, declaring earlier this month that he was acting in the interests of democracy by stripping the two lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity so that they could face prosecution in the courts.

“From now on we are strengthening democracy and the rule of law,” he said. “This is not an anarchic democracy. Democracy must have the rule of law.”

Together with land seizures that are driving tens of thousands of people from their homes, analysts say these actions demonstrate a sense of impunity in a government that has resisted efforts to strengthen the rule of law in Cambodia.

In the most recent evictions, about 150 poor families were forced from their homes on prime land in Phnom Penh on Thursday and Friday, part of what the World Bank called “a major problem” in Cambodia’s fast-growing cities.

The court cases come at a time when countries in the region are looking increasingly toward China as a political and economic model and questioning the democratic and humanitarian values of the West.

In recent years, China has become a major donor and investor in Cambodia in projects that do not place the kinds of demands on governing and management that generally accompany assistance from Western nations and aid organizations.

“We have been fearing all along that Cambodia’s government is looking eastward toward China and Vietnam as models,” with their strong central governments and intolerance of dissent, said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights.

“Now there are a lot of activities recently that confirm our fear, and so it’s pretty scary,” he said. “What they are trying to do is to have only one strong party, and ultimately probably only one party.”

The aggressiveness of the government has been matched by what appears to be resigned acquiescence among many of its opponents to the dominance of Mr. Hun Sen and his ruling elite in the Cambodian People’s Party.

Nothing demonstrates this more sharply than the apologies that Mr. Hun Sen apparently requires as the price of leniency.

“I ask permission to demonstrate deep respect and bow down to apologize,” said Dam Sith, editor in chief of Moneaksekar Khmer, a pro-opposition newspaper, as he promised earlier this month to cease publication of his 10-year-old newspaper.

“I have in the past committed inappropriate acts again and again,” he said, adding that his only hope to avoid a defamation conviction is the “compassion and forgiveness” of Mr. Hun Sen — which he duly received.