Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO

Cover of Ukraine: A History

Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO

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Gaza & the Israeli Peace Movement: One Year Later

by David Shulman

A demonstrator dressed as a clown being arrested by Israeli police during a protest against the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, December 18, 2009. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

The fact that Gaza is still under siege has hardly infiltrated Israeli awareness. The first anniversary of Israel’s military intervention in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, has of course been noted in the Israeli press. The predominant tone, even in Haaretz, supposedly the voice of the liberal left, is almost smug. The rain of Qassam missiles on Israeli cities and villages has more or less halted; in recent months housing prices in Sderot, which is less than a mile from Gaza, have soared, and demand for plots of land in the moshavim close to the Gaza border far outstrips supply. So for Israelis the campaign was clearly a success, despite the 1,400 Palestinian dead, the 3,540 houses destroyed in Gaza, the devastation of the civilian infrastructure there, and the international outcry about possible Israeli war crimes.

Israeli Leader's Defiance of U.S. on Settlement Issue Wins Support at Home

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 19, 2009

JERUSALEM, Aug. 18 -- For five months, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been fending off U.S. pressure to halt the expansion of West Bank settlements. Now he is reaping dividends for his defiance.

Although Israeli leaders have historically been reluctant to publicly break with the United States for fear of paying a price in domestic support, polls show that Netanyahu's strategy is working. And that means that after months of diplomacy, the quick breakthrough that President Obama had hoped would restart peace talks has instead turned into a familiar stalemate.

Arab states largely have rebuffed Obama's request for an overture to Israel until the settlement issue is resolved -- a stand that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak emphasized in a meeting with Obama on Tuesday -- and the Palestinians have said a settlement freeze is a precondition for resuming negotiations. Meanwhile, the Israeli public seems to have rallied around Netanyahu's refusal to halt all settlement construction, a backlash that intensified when the Obama administration made clear that it wanted Israel to stop building Jewish homes in some parts of Jerusalem as well as in the occupied West Bank.

In Israel, the dynamic seems to have shifted further from any dramatic concessions. Netanyahu "scored points" for standing up to Obama, said Yoel Hasson, a member of parliament from the opposition Kadima party. In contrast to the United States' public demands for a settlement freeze, signaled early in the relationship between the two new governments, "I think the U.S. understands that it is better for them to do everything with Netanyahu more quietly," Hasson said.

Noting that the Palestinians had negotiated with Israel until late last year despite ongoing construction in the West Bank, Dan Meridor, Israel's intelligence minister, said he found it "strange" that the issue became a precondition for talks after the White House made public demands on Israel.

"I don't think it was intentional, but the result is that this became an obstacle for restarting negotiations," Meridor said in an interview.

The most recent War and Peace Index poll, conducted monthly by Tel Aviv University, showed overwhelming support for Netanyahu's decision to oppose the White House on settlement construction and particularly on building in East Jerusalem. In recent weeks, organizations that favor building houses for Jews in all parts of Jerusalem and the West Bank have steadily become more vocal.

Four members of Netanyahu's cabinet visited unauthorized Jewish outposts in the West Bank on Monday as a show of support, with Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, considered part of the prime minister's inner circle, saying that a reduction of Israel's presence in the West Bank would "bolster terror."

Ateret Cohanim, an organization active in promoting Jewish construction in Jerusalem's contested neighborhoods, this week hosted former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on a tour of projects -- including a cocktail party at the site of a proposed Jerusalem apartment complex that the Obama administration has singled out for criticism. Huckabee said the trip was arranged in recent weeks as part of a developing response to Obama's demands on Israel.

Members of Congress praised Netanyahu's first months in office on a recent tour of Israel, and even Obama allies such as House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) suggested that the onus was on the Palestinians to open talks with or without a settlement freeze.

"There have been some very positive things that have happened under Netanyahu, and I think that [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas ought to take the opportunity to engage," Hoyer said in an interview last week with the Jerusalem Post while on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group. Despite the administration's concern that construction of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem neighborhoods could prejudge the future boundaries of a city that both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital, Hoyer said Jerusalem "is a whole," adding: "My view is that it will remain whole."

"From the point of view of Israeli public opinion, so far Netanyahu has maneuvered quite successfully," said Tel Aviv University professor Ephraim Yaar. His surveys have showed support for Netanyahu in his clash with Obama and distrust of the U.S. president. In his July poll of 512 Israelis, 60 percent said they did not trust Obama "to safeguard Israel's interests," and 46 percent said he favors the Palestinians, compared with 7 percent who think he favors Israel. The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

In a June speech, Netanyahu endorsed for the first time the idea of a limited Palestinian state, a position crafted as a response to Obama's call in Cairo for renewed peace efforts in the region.

But so far he has largely pursued the path spelled out when he took office in March -- gradual steps to ease the Israeli military presence in the West Bank, a lifting of some roadblocks and a focus on improving the West Bank economy. He has said he is prepared to resume peace talks with the Palestinians "without preconditions," but he has made clear that he is hesitant to make major concessions while the Gaza Strip remains in the hands of the Islamist Hamas group and while uncertainty persists over Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Israel agreed to a freeze on settlement construction as part of the "road map" agreement signed in 2003. Since then the Jewish population in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, has increased from about 224,000 to about 290,000. The Palestinians and Arab states in the region regard a settlement freeze as a critical step -- an acknowledgment that the Palestinian Authority has improved security in the West Bank, as required under the agreement, and a sign that Israel is serious about allowing the area to become part of a Palestinian state.

On Tuesday, Israeli government officials and anti-settlement activists confirmed that no new bids for government construction had been issued for the West Bank since November -- predating Netanyahu's election by several months. But anti-settlement group Peace Now said government-backed construction accounts for less than half the Jewish building in the West Bank. About 1,000 houses and apartments remain under construction, and there is a backlog of approved projects, the group said.

Opposing Obama's demand for a settlement freeze carried some risk. Israelis generally expect their leaders to maintain good relations with the United States and have punished prime ministers who do not do so -- including Netanyahu during his first term, in the late 1990s, when he clashed with President Bill Clinton.

The two sides are still expected to reach some kind of compromise on the issue, though short of the initial demands made by the White House. Netanyahu is meeting U.S. special envoy George J. Mitchell in London this month, and he expects to meet with Obama when he visits the United States for a U.N. General Assembly meeting in September. Discussion has centered on freezing settlement activity for six months to a year.

A Technocrat Shakes Up the Afghan Campaign

By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Whether wrapped in a shawl for a televised debate, sitting on a dirt floor with a shopkeeper, or thundering over speakers in a dust storm, Ashraf Ghani, the most educated and Westernized of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates, is shaking up the campaign before Thursday’s election in unusual ways.

A former finance minister with a background in American academia and at the World Bank, Mr. Ghani, 60, says he is trying to change politics in Afghanistan. Using television and radio, Internet donations and student volunteers, as well as traditional networks like religious councils, he is seeking to reach out to young people, women and the poor, and do the unexpected: defeat President Hamid Karzai.

Mr. Ghani’s national support is hard to gauge — one recent poll put it at just 4 percent — and he probably remains an outsider in the race, trailing Mr. Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom have much larger power bases.

Yet Mr. Ghani is elevating the debate with a focus on policy and a detailed plan for reform, challenging the Afghan electorate to think beyond the status quo.

“The people, the nature of mobilization, the talk has changed, anyplace I go,” he said in an early morning interview at his home in Kabul before setting off by helicopter to campaign in the provinces. “Afghans have a very different expectation of leadership today than they have ever had.”

A two-hour live television and radio debate between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah on July 23, watched and heard by over 10 million people, has created a huge change in thinking, Mr. Ghani said. Mr. Karzai declined to participate, something his two opponents have used against him.

Since the debate, a flow of student volunteers has come forward to work for his campaign, Mr. Ghani said, and people from all walks — pilots, merchants, professors — have engaged him in detailed discussion of his ideas.

Articulate in several languages, Mr. Ghani has written two books, one titled “Fixing Failed States,” and the other a detailed plan on how to lift Afghanistan out of poverty and instability within 10 years, which is essentially his election manifesto.

Mr. Ghani has been one of the most influential figures involved in building the current Afghan state. Appointed finance minister in 2002, he instituted a centralized revenue collection scheme, and oversaw the flow of billions of dollars of foreign assistance into the war-torn country.

Yet his scrupulousness made him enemies and, disillusioned with official corruption and Mr. Karzai’s leadership, he left the cabinet in 2004.

Such is his experience, and his support in Washington, that Mr. Ghani is among the contenders mentioned to fill a strong executive position under the president that is being proposed by American officials to strengthen the government’s performance should Mr. Karzai win another term.

Mr. Ghani, whose campaign has hired the political strategist James Carville as a consultant, says it is too early to discuss post-election scenarios. He was once a close adviser to the president, but his distaste for Mr. Karzai’s way of running things is deep-seated, and he has been an outspoken critic of the way politics have been conducted in Afghanistan.

He has been the most vociferous of any candidate in challenging Mr. Karzai’s overstaying his constitutional mandate, which was extended in order to hold the election on Aug. 20, and also in accusing the president of using government resources and officials to promote his campaign. And he has castigated the election organizers, both foreign and Afghan, for allowing fraud and manipulation to occur unchecked.

He has also rejected the backroom deal-making for which Mr. Karzai has been strongly criticized, and has refused overtures from Mr. Karzai to give up his candidacy and join his campaign, something a number of other prospective candidates have done.

At election rallies, he vows to curb government corruption and so find the revenue to create a million jobs and a million houses.

He promises better education for the young, by increasing the number of mosques and madrasas to provide a general education at the village level. He also proposes adding universities and women’s colleges, as there are thousands more students than universities can accommodate.

And he lays out how to develop Afghanistan’s natural resources and create economic growth with Afghan labor, and bring justice and peace through local structures.

He makes gibes that Mr. Karzai has to block streets when he travels through the city, or hide behind the palace walls, and suggested at one rally that Mr. Karzai and his entire cabinet go to live in the Pul-i-Charki jail. He accuses him of losing the trust of the people by lying to them.

He also promises to return sovereignty to Afghanistan, by closing the detention center at Bagram, the United States air base outside Kabul, within three years. And he advocates negotiating a cease-fire with the Taliban, prior to a process of reconciliation. “Afghan blood is being spilt,” he said at a rally in a Kabul suburb. “We want to stop it and douse the fire.”

His main drawback is his aloofness. When serving in the cabinet, he came under criticism that after 24 years living away from Afghanistan, nearly half his life, he was out of touch with the people and too abrasive in his dealings with his fellow Afghans.

He left the country in the 1970s to study at the American University of Beirut, went on to earn a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia in 1982, and taught at Johns Hopkins University. In 1991, he joined the World Bank.

Like other Western-educated technocrats, he encountered on his return the resentment of those Afghans who had had no chance to leave and had suffered 30 years of war and privation.

But he says that is changing. He has sought to get closer to the Afghan people by holding an open house for the last 18 months and says he has received over 100,000 people from all over the country, which has informed the development of his policies.

“It has been the largest seminar in my life and I have been the sole student,” he said. “I connect back to the people because I have heard them, and I have heard some very harsh things. It’s been a relationship.”

Critically, ethnic Pashtuns who make up the largest ethnic group and have traditionally ruled Afghanistan, now see that there is a strong alternative to Mr. Karzai, he said. Mr. Ghani, like Mr. Karzai, is Pashtun.

“Pashtuns in the north have reassessed and I think they are going to abandon Karzai,” Mr. Ghani said.

He claimed, too, that groups in the western province of Herat and in the southern provinces, where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, were also moving away from the president. “There’s a swing,” Mr. Ghani predicted, with election day fast approaching. “There’s a massive swing.”

Bombs Kill 14 Civilians

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Two explosions in southern Afghanistan killed 14 people, including 3 children at play, Afghan officials said Thursday, as mounting violence before next week’s elections exacts an increasing toll on civilians caught up in the broadening war with the Taliban.

Dawoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial authorities, said a roadside bomb exploded next to a van carrying civilians, killing 11, including 2 women, in the province’s Gereshk district. “The Taliban have planted mines everywhere,” Mr. Ahmadi said. “That’s why most of the time, civilians are the targets.”

The Taliban offered no immediate comment on that explosion or another in Mirwais Mina, near Kandahar, that killed the three children. Some reports said the children, ages 8 to 12, were playing with a bomb they had found on the side of a road. Abdul Ahmad, a police official, said that it seemed that the bomb had been planted recently “in an area where children and people are walking freely.”

An American serving with NATO forces in the south was also killed Thursday, The Associated Press reported, quoting a military news release that attributed the death to “a direct fire attack.”

Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting.

Clinton Has Praise and Criticism for Nigeria

by Jeffrey Gettleman

ABUJA, Nigeria — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a message of tough love to Nigeria on Wednesday, praising the country’s strong military and showing public appreciation for its huge oil industry, but also harshly criticizing the government for being corrupt.

Mrs. Clinton thanked Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and typically its biggest oil producer, for its help in resolving wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone and for providing peacekeepers to Sudan.

“The people in Liberia owe their freedom to you,” she said. “People across Africa owe so much to you.”

But when it came to the topic of corruption — and Nigeria is notoriously corrupt, from top ministers in the government to the plump police officers on the street — Mrs. Clinton took a decidedly different tone.

She told a crowd of civic leaders that the reason so many millions of Nigerians were desperately poor, despite the nation’s having so much oil, was “a failure of government at the federal, state and local level.”

She also spoke of flawed elections and a lack of public trust that has seriously eroded the credibility of the Nigerian government.

“Nigeria is at a crossroads,” she said.

America’s ties to Nigeria are a crucial piece of the reinvigorated relationship that the Obama administration is trying to strike with Africa. It has 150 million people and is the world’s fifth largest supplier of crude oil to the United States. It could supply even more, but heavily armed insurgents in the oil producing areas have hampered drilling operations by blowing up pipelines and kidnapping oil workers, seemingly at will.

There is some hope that this problem, which has been raging for years, may finally be easing. The Nigerian government recently offered an amnesty program to rebel fighters, and despite ample skepticism from experts and the rebels themselves, Nigerian officials said that many combatants had indicated that they were willing to surrender.

“There was a need to be bold and imaginative,” said Nigeria’s foreign minister, Ojo Maduekwe, who met with Mrs. Clinton for more than an hour on Wednesday. “Old methods were not going to be good enough.”

The United States and Nigeria already cooperate closely on military affairs, with many of Nigeria’s top officers having passed through American military academies. Mrs. Clinton said that the Nigerian defense minister asked her on Wednesday for specific American military help to quash the remaining rebels in the oil producing areas, and that the American government would look closely at the request.

Nigeria is the fifth stop on Mrs. Clinton’s 11-day, seven-nation African tour. Next she will go to Liberia and Cape Verde, then head home on Friday.

Earlier on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton struck a more conciliatory tone with Nigeria’s leaders. At a news conference with Mr. Maduekwe, she said, “We strongly support and encourage the government of Nigeria’s efforts to increase transparency, reduce corruption” and prepare for a clean national election in 2011, after a deeply flawed one in 2007.

Mrs. Clinton avoided answering a question about the Nigerian government’s recent crackdown on an extremist Islamic group. According to some reports, more than 700 people were killed a few weeks ago, many of them civilians, and the rebel leader was widely believed to have been executed in police custody.

Mrs. Clinton said she did not have enough information to comment on the operation. The group at the heart of the government’s assault — Boko Haram, a Hausa expression meaning “Western education is prohibited” — has no known links to any broader organizations. Still, Mrs. Clinton said that “we have no doubt that Al Qaeda has a presence in North Africa” and that terrorists would “seek a foothold wherever they can.”

Movie Review: 'Burma VJ': Documentary on Brutal Repression of Protesters in 2007

By Desson Thomson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, July 31, 2009

It was pitchforks at the Bastille, muskets at Concord, Mass., and rocks at the Intifada. But in this age of instant dissemination, the cellphone video has become the revolutionary weapon of choice.

We see this most palpably in "Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country," a documentary that uses a mixture of real and fictional footage to revisit Burma's brutal reprisals against its own people in 2007. In August and September of that year, many Burmese rose in protest against the government's sudden hiking of gasoline prices. Those public demonstrations were spontaneous and scattered. And the government dealt harshly with them. But when Burmese monks -- considered sacrosanct in this culture -- joined the growing ranks, the conflict was drawn more sharply. The stakes got higher for both sides. And the cellphones started recording.

"I decided that whatever happened to me, I would do it," says "Joshua," the narrator of Anders Ostergaard's movie, justifying the dangerous decision to film as much as he could, and show it to the world. Joshua is the movie's only fictional element, a composite character meant to represent all the unnamed people who risked their lives to hold their government morally accountable.

Filmed by members of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a collective of underground video journalists (the VJ in the title), these scenes were smuggled to the outside world, processed in a studio in Oslo, transmitted around the world and -- significantly -- shown to the people of Burma (renamed Myanmar by the ruling junta).

"Joshua" may be made up, but the footage we see is indisputably real. Some of it is poignantly subtle, like the taxi driver who states he'll support this growing revolution if it takes off. In the context of these dangerous times, when government informers are everywhere, such a public declaration amounts to bravado. More obviously courageous is the spectacle of emboldened, head-shaven monks in red robes as they defy curfew orders and march in numbers through the streets as armed troops mass.

There is, of course, bravery from the unseen people behind the lens who could be killed merely for owning recording devices. Thanks to them, we can patch together the heartbreaking chronicle of popular demonstration and government brutality during those significant months. Fragmentary images -- filmed surreptitiously from hidden vantage points or concealed within clothes -- show palpable fear in the streets. They show beatings. And we realize we are sitting in the jittery eye of an evil, gathering storm.

The movie also provides a momentary, grainy glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning, pro-democracy activist. There she is, standing in the doorway of the house that has famously become her prison on and off since 1989. She is expressing solidarity for the demonstrators who have just marched to her home. It's a moving scene because we know that even today she faces indefinite home detention. The following day, the violence begins in earnest, and the video journalists -- nameless but unified in their determination -- are there to film it.

Of course, we have seen this kind of electronic activism more recently in Iran. But for the cellphone journalists of Tehran, we'd know little about the popular uprising that followed the country's disputed election. And we'd know nothing of Neda, the young woman whose videotaped -- and eternally replayed -- death has become the movement's most iconic moment.

As we watch "Burma VJ," and other documentaries like it, we can sense the beginnings of a paradigm shift in the way history is written, and the way the meekest can become empowered. Citizens no longer need to tell their sad stories to their children and grandchildren over a generation. They can inform the world immediately. Thanks to the new guerrilla narrative, the world has a constant flow of images to file in its collective consciousness. And that camera-testable accountability slowly becomes a global civic right that fulfills the noblest purpose of journalism -- to bring truth to power.

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (84 minutes, at Landmark's E Street) is not rated and contains real images of brutal repression. In Burmese and accented English with subtitles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003914.html

Reports of Prison Abuse and Deaths Anger Iranians

By ROBERT F. WORTH

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to death by guards in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others say they had their fingernails ripped off or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls.

The accounts of prison abuse in Iran’s postelection crackdown — relayed by relatives and on opposition Web sites — have set off growing outrage among Iranians, including some prominent conservatives. More bruised corpses have been returned to families in recent days, and some hospital officials have told human rights workers that they have seen evidence that well over 100 protesters have died since the vote.

On Tuesday, the government released 140 prisoners in one of several conciliatory gestures aimed at deflecting further criticism. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a letter urging the head of the judiciary to show “Islamic mercy” to the detainees, and on Monday Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally intervened and closed an especially notorious detention center.

But there are signs that widespread public anger persists, and that it is not confined to those who took to the streets crying fraud after Mr. Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory last month. Several conservatives have said the abuse suggests a troubling lack of accountability, and they have hinted at a link with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s recent willingness to defy even the venerated Ayatollah Khamenei.

“Why did things have to go so far as to require the personal intervention of the supreme leader?” said Ali Mottahari, a conservative Parliament member. “If we are satisfied just to close one detention center, these people will continue to do what they have done elsewhere and nothing will change.”

Although the government has played down the scale of the prison abuses, some detainees’ relatives have come forward recently to confirm them, mostly to opposition-linked Web sites that have provided credible information in the past, including roozonline.com and gooya.com.

Some deaths have been further documented with photographs or videotapes. Hospital officials have described receiving bodies of those killed in protests, with the total far in excess of 20, the government’s initial figure. It is difficult to confirm such reports independently, given the restrictions on reporting in Iran.

The anger has spread from opposition supporters into Iran’s hard-line camp in part because of the case of Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of an adviser to the conservative presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai, who died in prison after a severe beating. A bitter political dispute among conservatives over Mr. Ahmadinejad’s cabinet decisions may also have helped fuel the issue.

The prison abuses have also galvanized the opposition movement, whose leaders asked for permission to hold a mass mourning ceremony on Thursday in honor of those killed since the election. The Interior Ministry on Tuesday refused permission for the gathering, but the main opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, said they would hold a public ceremony anyway, several Web sites reported.

Thursday is a day of unusual symbolic importance because it will be 40 days since the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman whose death during a demonstration was captured on video and ignited outrage across the globe. The 40th day marks an important Shiite mourning ritual; similar commemorations for dead protesters fueled the demonstrations that led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Questions about the prison abuse have gained more importance in recent days, not only because of the opposition’s public protests but also because the stories have multiplied. One young man posted an account on Tuesday of his ordeal at the Kahrizak camp, which was ordered closed on Monday by Ayatollah Khamenei.

“We were all standing so close to each other that no one could move,” he wrote in a narrative posted online. “The plainclothes guards came into the room and broke all the light bulbs, and in the pitch dark started beating us, whoever they could.” By morning, at least four detainees were dead, he added.

In another account posted online, a former detainee describes being made to lie facedown on the floor of a police station bathroom, where an officer would step on his neck and force him to lick the toilet bowl as the officer cursed reformist politicians.

A woman described having her hair pulled as interrogators demanded that she confess to having sex with political figures. When she was finally released, she was forced — like many others — to sign a paper saying she had never been mistreated.

Mr. Moussavi spoke out Monday in unusually strong and angry terms, accusing the government of brutality and irreligion, and warning that its conduct toward the detainees could set off a much greater reaction.

“They cannot turn this nation into a prison of 70 million people,” Mr. Moussavi said, adding later that “the more people they arrest, the more widespread the movement will become.”

The prisoner release on Tuesday appeared to be the act of a government desperate to defuse the issue, coming just one day after the head of Iran’s judiciary promised that the detainees’ cases would be expedited. Government officials say that of at least 2,500 people arrested in the postelection crackdown, about 150 remain in prison.

In announcing the release, Saeed Jalili, the secretary of the National Security Council of Iran, sounded a defensive note, saying that those still in jail “are people for whom there are documents stating they were in possession of firebombs and weapons, including firearms, and who had caused serious damage to public property.”

But Mr. Mottahari, the lawmaker, said Tuesday that those responsible for the deaths of detainees must also be identified and punished. Others have gone further, saying the prison abuses suggest a government lurching dangerously out of control.

“Those who have turned this society into a police state and have ordered the use of force have to be held accountable,” said Hamid-Reza Katouzian, a hard-line member of Parliament. “The police and the Ministry of Intelligence have told us that they are on the sidelines, and we do not know who is responsible or accountable.”

Mr. Katouzian is a close friend of Mr. Ruholamini’s family, and his comments appeared to reflect personal outrage over that case. But his remarks also echoed a broader, longstanding concern about the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia taking over law enforcement functions and acting beyond the knowledge of legislators.

Senior clerics have also weighed in, warning that tolerating such injustices could endanger Iran’s theocracy.

“The shameful recent events have distressed everyone and been a source of worry for all those who love their country and the Islamic republic,” said Grand Ayatollah Abdul-Karim Mousavi Ardebili, adding a plea for the government to release detainees.

The number of those killed since the election is impossible to determine, and it includes at least a few members of the Basij militia as well as protesters. One human rights group, International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said it spoke to doctors in three Tehran hospitals who registered the bodies of 34 protesters on June 20 alone. Other doctors have provided similar accounts and have estimated a death toll of at least 150 based on corpses they saw.

Earlier this month, family members of missing demonstrators were taken to a morgue in southwest Tehran where they reported seeing “hundreds of corpses” and were not allowed to retrieve bodies unless they certified that the deaths were of natural causes, according to accounts relayed on Web sites and to human rights workers.

Robert F. Worth reported from Dubai, and Sharon Otterman from New York.

New Strategy Urged in Mexico

By William Booth and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón is under growing pressure to overhaul a U.S.-backed anti-narcotics strategy that many political leaders and analysts said is failing amid spectacular drug cartel assaults against the government.

There are now sustained calls in Mexico for a change in tactics, even from allies within Calderón's political party, who say the deployment of 45,000 soldiers to fight the cartels is a flawed plan that relies too heavily on the blunt force of the military to stem soaring violence and lawlessness.

"The people of Mexico are losing hope, and it is urgent that Congress, the political parties and the president reconsider this strategy," said Ramón Galindo, a senator and Calderón supporter who is a former mayor of Ciudad Juarez, a border city where more than 1,100 people have been killed this year.

U.S. officials said they now believe Mexico faces a longer and bloodier campaign than anticipated and is likely to require more American aid. U.S. and Mexican officials increasingly draw comparisons to Colombia, where from 2000 to 2006 the United States spent $6 billion to help neutralize the cartels that once dominated the drug trade. While violence is sharply down in Colombia, cocaine production is up.

Mexico, nearly twice Colombia's size, faces a more daunting challenge, many officials and analysts said , in part because it sits adjacent to the United States, the largest illegal drug market in the world. In addition, at least seven major cartels are able to recruit from Mexico's swelling ranks of impoverished youth and thousands of disenfranchised soldiers and police officers.

"The question is whether the country can withstand another three years of this, with violence that undermines the credibility of the government," said Carlos Flores, who has studied the drug war extensively for Mexico City's Center for Investigations and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology. "I'd like to be more optimistic, but what I see is more of the same polarizing and failed strategy."

U.S. and Mexican government officials say the military strategy, while difficult, is working. Since Calderón took office in December 2006, authorities have arrested 76,765 suspected drug traffickers at all levels and have extradited 187 cartel members to the United States. Calderón's security advisers said they have few options besides the army -- as they just begin to vet and retrain the police forces they say will ultimately take over the fight.

"No one has told us what alternative we have," said Interior Minister Fernando Gómez Mont, gently slapping his palm on a table during an interview. "We are committed to enduring this wave of violence. We are strengthening our ability to protect the innocent victims of this process, which is the most important thing. We will not look the other way."

Drug-related deaths during the 2 1/2 years of Calderon's administration passed 12,000 this month. Rather than shrinking or growing weaker, the Mexican cartels are using their wealth and increasing power to expand into Central America, cocaine-producing regions of the Andes and maritime trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific, according to law enforcement authorities.

In Mexico, neither high-profile arrests nor mass troop deployments have stopped the cartels from unleashing spectacular acts of violence. This month, the cartel called La Familia launched three days of coordinated attacks in eight cities in the western state of Michoacan. Responding to the arrest of one its leaders, La Familia abducted, tortured and killed a dozen federal agents; their corpses were found piled up beside a highway.

In Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Calderón flooded the city with 10,000 troops and federal police officers in February in an effort to stem runaway violence. After a two-month lull, drug-related homicides surged 307 percent, to nearly eight killings a day in June. On Wednesday, a man eating lunch at a Denny's restaurant across the street from the U.S. Consulate was shot six times in the head by a trio of gunmen.

Lawmakers in Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located, debated this month whether Calderón's surge was "a total failure." Antonio Andreu, president of the state legislature's commission on security, said it appears that drug gangs have infiltrated the military's intelligence networks and figured out how to circumvent the gauntlet of security forces in Juarez.

Héctor Hawley Morelos, the state forensics chief for Juarez, said he expects this year to be bloodier than the last. He said the soldiers don't help solve crime cases and often get in the way of investigations.

But Calderón has no intention of changing course, according to senior Mexican officials. In some respects, the government has become more combative. After a La Familia leader called a television station and said the cartel was "open to dialogue," Gómez Mont vowed that the government would never strike a deal with the traffickers.

"We're waiting for you," he warned La Familia.

In the interview, Gómez Mont said that to ease up now would be to sanction criminal behavior and its corrupting influence on Mexican society.

"We have to do this while we are strong enough to do it," he said. "We know we are right. Do I have to accept corruption as a way of stabilizing our society? No. I have to act."

"This battle is a full frontal assault," Monte Alejandro Rubido, Calderon's senior adviser on drug policy on Mexico's National Security Council, said in an interview. "There are no alternatives."

Calderón is highly regarded in U.S. law enforcement circles for declaring war on the traffickers and increasing cooperation between the two governments. Asked whether he would make any changes to the Mexican president's strategy, Anthony Placido, chief of intelligence for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, replied: "None."

But Placido said he was concerned that Calderón was fighting not only well-entrenched criminal organizations. "He's also fighting the clock," Placido said. "Public support for this can't remain high forever. He's really got to deliver a death blow, or significant body blow, in the short term to keep the public engaged."

Calderón appears to be increasingly isolated in Mexico, weakened by his party's defeat in recent mid-term elections and by the relentless carnage. The cover of the influential news magazine Proceso this week featured a photo of the 12 federal agents, their bound and mutilated corpses in a pile, beneath the headline: "Calderón's War."

"The president feels alone, and he told me that personally," said Galindo, the senator, who belongs to Calderón's conservative National Action Party.

Galindo said he urged Calderón to change course. Instead of relying on the army to destroy the cartels, he said, the federal government should work to strengthen local communities that are most vulnerable to the traffickers.

"Every day that we delay making these communities more self-sufficient, it is going to become more difficult to find good people prepared to serve as mayor in any city -- no matter how large or small -- because it's like a death sentence," he said.

Dan Lund, president of the MUND Group polling organization, said public support for Calderón's strategy appears to be weakest in the places where the federal government needs it most. "In a series of national surveys, polls consistently have found a reasonable but cautious level of support for using the military in the front lines against the cartels," he said. "But in all the states where the military is actually deployed, the support goes down, sometimes dramatically."

The situation has been exacerbated by the global economic crisis, which has cast millions of Mexicans into poverty. José Luis Piñeyro, a Mexican military analyst who maintains close ties with the armed forces, said rising unemployment and poverty "is creating what I call an 'army in reserve,' " for the traffickers.

In Michoacan, La Familia has used the media to try to align itself with the disenfranchised. After the recent attacks, one of its leaders, Servando Gómez, called a local television station and told viewers: "I want to say to all Michoacanans, we love them and respect them."

"Everyone here has known us since we were kids," said Gómez, who is known as "La Tuta." "We are with the people of Michoacan."

Carlos Heredia, a former Michoacan official who now works as an analyst at a Mexico City think tank, said the government's iron-fisted approach is a recipe for failure in regions where mistrust of the government is high.

"You don't have the hearts and minds of the local population," Heredia said. "And if the local drug lords play Robin Hood, then you are lost. Because the people are ultimately going to say, 'What do those officials in Mexico City care about us? They despise us. And these drug guys, at least they give us something.' "

Opposition Seeks Shift in Power as Iraqi Kurds Vote; High Turnout Reported

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 26, 2009

SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq, July 25 -- An opposition party promising to break the grip of the two ruling parties in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region made a surprisingly strong showing in elections Saturday that appeared certain to shift the region's political arithmetic, opposition and government officials said.

Officials stressed that the results were preliminary and that a more accurate picture might not emerge until Sunday or later. Final results, to be announced in Baghdad, could take a week. But as early returns came in late Saturday, dramatically different moods descended over the opposing camps' headquarters.

Opposition officials said they were outpolling the ruling parties 2 to 1 in some parts of the crucial battlefield of Sulaymaniyah. Government and opposition officials said the opposition also did unexpectedly well in the other key province of Irbil.

"Early results from some of the locations in Sulaymaniyah and some in Irbil are not good," said Barham Salih, a veteran politician who was the ruling parties' candidate for prime minister of the Kurdish region. "It's anxious moments. We will see."

Overall, Salih said, the early results were "surprising."

Voters were choosing a president and a 111-member parliament for the Kurdish region, which has a remarkable degree of independence from Baghdad and is widely seen as a success story in an otherwise turbulent country. Polls were kept open an extra hour across the region's three provinces, and the electoral commission, citing preliminary figures at a news conference in Irbil, said turnout was 78.5 percent.

More than 500 candidates were running for parliamentary seats. Massoud Barzani, the incumbent president and head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two parties that have ruled the region for a generation, faced five challengers. In parliament, Barzani's list of candidates had agreed on a joint slate with the other ruling party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Hardly anyone here Saturday expected Barzani to lose the presidency, and the joint list still seemed likely to capture a majority in parliament. But it faced a spirited challenge by dissidents from Talabani's party running as the Change List, particularly in Sulaymaniyah. Many observers were watching how many seats Change won as a barometer of the ruling parties' staying power and the discontent they must now reckon with. More than 15 seats would be considered a victory for the opposition, analysts and officials said.

Late Saturday, the challengers appeared to be polling far better than that, in what was shaping up as a protest vote that crossed lines of class, party and clan.

"It will certainly change the political landscape in Kurdistan," said Hiwa Osman, an editor and former spokesman for Talabani. "However many seats Change gets, Kurdish politics have changed. It heralds a new era that's going to dictate its own logic."

Nosherwan Mustafa, a founder of Talabani's party and now the head of the Change List, added: "We don't want to change just the faces and the persons. We want to change the political system. We want to separate the political parties from public life."

The two parties have run the Kurdish region since former president Saddam Hussein withdrew Iraqi troops after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and a Kurdish uprising. They fought a bloody civil war in the decade that followed, reconciled and have ruled the region jointly since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, despite lingering tensions.

Over those years, the parties hewed to a formula that exchanged political plurality for stability, bringing prosperity to the Kurdish region and turning Irbil, its capital, into a Middle Eastern boomtown. Success, though, came at a cost. Under a relentless sun Saturday, many voters accused the parties of an almost complete lack of accountability in the control they exerted over most aspects of life, from appointments to lowly government jobs to multibillion-dollar deals.

Corruption was rife, they said, and jobs were few.

The disenchantment has overshadowed the growing battle with the federal government in Baghdad over the disputed boundaries between Kurdish and Arab Iraq and a law on sharing oil revenue and management of the country's sprawling reserves.

"I want a better life," Shwan Khalid, a 60-year-old voting in Irbil, said simply.

Within the parties, there were signs of a growing sense that, even with an electoral victory Saturday, they must make their rule more transparent.

"This is truly a new phase in Kurdish politics," Salih said, as he left the polling station. "It shows that Kurdish politicians can no longer take their voters for granted."

After Arrest, Cambridge Reflects on Racial Rift

By Krissah Thompson and Cheryl W. Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 26, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The town where a white police officer and a black scholar ignited a national conversation on race and law enforcement has begun to open the dialogue that President Obama invited.

Before summer's end, the mayor, district attorney and police officials will convene a forum to grapple with the controversy over the arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Sgt. James Crowley -- which exploded into a divisive debate that drew in the president.

Obama, who spoke to both men last week, called it a "teachable moment" for the nation on a "troubling aspect of our society." Gates said in an e-mail statement that he accepts Obama's invitation to begin talking and wants to work with the Cambridge Police Department. Crowley has not publicly responded to the invitation.

Residents of Gates's neighborhood, mostly upper-middle-class whites and a transient but diverse group of students in university housing, have begun pondering the meaning of the incident. Other questions also have emerged: What does it mean to have the nation's first black president involved? Will the discourse have lasting impact on the relationships between police and blacks and Latinos?

"It's disappointing," said Lawrence Neely, a 33-year-old doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who lives in a university-owned apartment building next-door to Gates's yellow wood-frame house. "We're in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We have an African American mayor. We have an African American governor. We have an African American president, and just looking at the situation strictly at face value -- without getting into who is right and who is wrong -- we are now having a conversation about the question of whether one of the most influential African American scholars in the country has been racially profiled. It all makes it clear that this is still a reality."

Although others have been critical of Obama's role, Neely, who is black, said he was glad that the president weighed in and hopes the conversation on race will not go back underground.

People in the neighborhood are friendly and speak to one another, Neely said, but he added that the horde of reporters and television cameras outside Gates's home in the days after the arrest served as a reminder that the deeper issues of race are still little discussed.

Much is known about Gates's arrest on the charge of disorderly conduct, which was later dropped, but the folks who live here acknowledge that the incident did not happen in a vacuum.

Demographically, Cambridge is a liberal college town of about 100,000 people -- 65 percent white, 11.5 percent black, 12 percent Asian and about 7 percent Hispanic. The divide between the intellectual university affiliates and the rest of the mostly working-class residents is "from time to time quite tense," said Priscilla McMillian, a civic activist and historian who is white.

Merritt Harrison, a 75-year-old white man who lives around the corner from Gates, said that he understands why the police feel defensive, but that he probably would have had the same reaction as Gates if a police officer had showed up at his home and suspected him of being a burglar.

"I'm white, so I probably wouldn't have been arrested," said the part-time Episcopalian pastor, real-estate agent and counselor who has called the community home for 25 years. "I don't know. Was it racial profiling? I don't think anyone will ever know. But plenty of people think it was. The thing to do is to use it as an occasion to look at the issue. People need to talk."

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard who lives next-door to McMillian, said the moment provides an opening to look at "a real paradox persisting in the nation."

"You have a country that has pretty well come to accept blacks in the public domain: in politics, in the media, in sports, in religion," said Patterson, who is black. "But there is still persistent segregation and indeed some areas where there is not much progress, such as integration in the schools. There is a complete mismatch between the world of blacks in the public domain and the world of blacks in their personal relationships."

Patterson, author of "The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's Racial Crisis," is convinced that race and class influenced the interaction between Gates and Crowley.

Not lost on Neely: The irony that all the research on race and socialization gathered in this academic town did not result in greater understanding. "The police officer made a judgment," he said. "Gates made a judgment. The challenge is the subjective assessments of one another."

'Moving From Fear'

In Cambridge this time last year, a young black man was removing a lock from a bike on campus when a Harvard police officer pulled a gun and demanded identification, according to a six-member committee report on the practices of the police department ordered by Harvard President Drew Faust. The youth showed the officer his Boston Public Library card, began crying and said he was a high school student working at the university. (Harvard police were also called to Gates's home.)

Such incidents have prompted Charles Ogletree to convene meetings of police and community members over the years. Ogletree is a Harvard law professor and Gates's attorney, and he is now helping to map out the citywide forum. Gates is going to participate, he said.

"The goal is for people to speak candidly and have the difficult conversation," he said. "The constant factor in all of this fear. Police fear that they are encountering a situation that is dangerous, and suspects fear that police don't care who they are and what they are doing. So, it is moving from fear to a sense of tolerance and a level of acceptance."

The Cambridge Police Department is gathering law enforcement and policing experts to study the case as it looks for its own lessons, said Commissioner Robert Haas, though he added that his own review found that race played no role in the arrest.

Law enforcement experts nationwide are watching as the city and the incident become an important, if imperfect, petri dish for discussing racial profiling.

"My suspicion is that this was not about race, this was about power," said Richard Weinblatt, director of the Institute for Public Safety at Central Ohio Technical College. "In the old days, we used to call this 'contempt of cop.' This person was charged with 'contempt of cop' because they kept pushing and pushing. But it has opened up a very powerful national dialogue on race, and it's something that police need to address."

In the 1990s, after high-profile cases such as the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York, departments began requiring officers to document whom they stopped as a way of monitoring their work. Others beefed up cultural diversity training, formed partnerships with the community and, more recently, began using video cameras and other technology to record interactions.

"I'm not saying racial profiling doesn't exist, but I don't think we get as many complaints as we did 10 or 20 years ago," said Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington, adding that what happened to Gates was not a case of racial profiling because Crowley received a call of a possible crime in progress. "It's not like he was walking through the neighborhood, saw Gates and demanded to see his identification. That's racial profiling."

Gates wrote in a 1995 New Yorker magazine article: "Blacks -- in particular, black men -- swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories."

Saturday, he said in an e-mail statement: "I have spent my entire career as an academic attempting to bridge differences and promote understanding among all Americans. To that end, I have pledged to do all that I can to help us learn from this unfortunate incident. This could and should be a profound teaching moment in the history of race relations in America. I sincerely hope that the Cambridge police department will choose to work with me toward that goal."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Shortages of Capable Afghan Forces in South Complicates U.S. Mission

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 25, 2009

GARMSIR, Afghanistan -- "Six, you've got six," Marine 1st Lt. Justin Grieco told his military police training team, counting the handful of Afghan police officers present for a patrol in this volatile region of southern Afghanistan.

The men filed out of the dusty compound gate into the baking afternoon sun. On the patrol, U.S. military police officers outnumbered the Afghans two to one -- a reflection of the severe shortfall in Afghan security forces working with Marines in Helmand province.

President Obama's strategy for Afghanistan is heavily dependent upon raising more capable local security forces, but the myriad challenges faced by mentors such as Grieco underscore just how limiting a factor that is -- especially in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan.

The extent of the push by 4,500 Marines into Taliban strongholds of southern Helmand will be determined, to a degree, by whether there are enough qualified Afghan forces to partner with and eventually leave behind to protect Afghan civilians. Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, commander of the Marine forces here, said urgent efforts are underway to dispatch additional Afghan forces to Helmand.

But here in Helmand's Garmsir district -- as in much of the south -- Afghan forces remain few in number, as well as short of training, equipment and basic supplies such as fuel and ammunition. Some Afghans quit because they are reluctant to work in the violent south; others are expelled because of drug use. The Afghan troops here, heavily dependent on Western forces, are hesitating to take on greater responsibilities -- and, in some cases, are simply refusing to do so.

The Afghan National Police officers mentored by Grieco's team, for example, are resisting a U.S. military effort to have them expand to checkpoints in villages outside the town center of Garmsir as the Marines push farther south, taking with them the Afghan Border Police officers, who currently man some of those stations.

"Without the Marines, we cannot secure the stations," said Mohammed Agha, deputy commander of the roughly 80 Garmsir police officers. "We can't go to other villages because of the mines, and some people have weapons hidden in their houses. We can't go out of Garmsir, or we will be killed."

The border police, too, have resisted taking up new positions. Col. Gula Agha Amiri, executive officer of the 7th Afghan Border Police, complained of his unit's lack of body armor and chronic shortages of ammunition and fuel. "If we have contact with the enemy, we can't fight for more than two hours," he said.

Both police forces have lost dozens of men to insurgent attacks in recent years, the Afghan officers said.

U.S. Army Capt. Michael Repasky, chief of the team that mentors the border police here, remains frustrated at the lack of logistical support. "I've been here five months and haven't been able to figure out why they aren't getting fuel," he said, explaining that the police receive fuel perhaps every two weeks and then run out.

That, in turn, makes the border police officers reluctant to move beyond their headquarters in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, he said. "If they move farther from Lash, it will be harder for them to get what they need. They want a roof over their heads, hot meals, time to rest," Repasky said. "I can encourage them to start a new checkpoint. But the commander can say no, and there's nothing I can do about it."

The overall shortage of security forces in southern Afghanistan exacerbates such tensions. There are about 13,600 Afghan soldiers and 11,000 police officers in the south, and each force is short of 4,000 men for positions that have been authorized but not filled. U.S. military officers say Afghan forces should be doubled to provide adequate security in the south.

"The U.S. force is growing down here, but the Afghan force is not growing nearly as fast," said Col. Bill Hix, who until recently led the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command in Kandahar, another large southern province, overseeing the development of police and soldiers in southern Afghanistan. "We have people who are bleeding and dying, and we need to look hard at how we generate [Afghan] forces."

The shortages of capable Afghan forces means they usually assist with searches and security on operations planned and led by Marines, the mentors said. "Right now, they're just happy with us telling them 'Go there, do this,' " said Stephen Woods, a civilian police adviser with the Marine mentoring team.

There are exceptions. Two police officers buying lunch in Garmsir this week observed a drug sale, shadowed the dealer, detained him and seized 30 bundles of heroin, Grieco said.

Gaining approval for increasing the size of the Afghan forces -- which requires international endorsement -- has been a maddening process, said Hix, comparing it to "negotiating a peace treaty."

Even after such approval, many hurdles remain, particularly in the south, he said.

"It's a challenge to get people down here," said Hix, adding that units that deploy to southern Afghanistan often suffer higher rates of unauthorized absences. "The guys think there is a monster down here." Drug use in the forces is another problem, according to U.S. and Afghan officers. "We lose 5 to 10 percent of every class in the police force to opiate use," Hix said.

Training the police and army poses other challenges, he said. Police officers and soldiers -- the vast majority of them illiterate villagers -- require extensive training, but during a war only so many can be pulled away from their jobs at any one time.

Building training and other facilities for the forces and providing them with equipment remain slow because of red tape and contracting rules, he said. It takes 120 to 180 days to start work on a training facility and often more than a year to 18 months to field new equipment, such as the 1,000 Humvees on order for the Afghan army in the south. "We can't swing the money cannon quickly enough to adapt," Hix said.

Still, Hix said, the Afghan forces have made significant progress in the south. In the past year, the training capacity for regional police has doubled and the rate of those absent without leave has halved.

Despite the problems, Hix said that replacing foreign forces with homegrown ones is the only viable long-term solution, in part because the latter cost far less. "We should not be substituting U.S. troops for Afghans, which is what we are effectively doing now . . . in trying to secure and stabilize Afghanistan," he wrote in an e-mail.

U.S. and Afghan officers urged greater emphasis on professionalizing the Afghan police, which are at least as critical as the army in a counterinsurgency campaign but have received far fewer resources. Residents also have complained about corruption among police officers, the mentors say.

The police's law-enforcement role in Garmsir is limited because many of the officers are illiterate, Grieco said. "Paperwork, evidence, processing -- they don't know how to do it," he said. "You can't get a policeman to take a statement if he can't read and write."

Increasing numbers of residents are coming to the police station to report problems, said Staff Sgt. David Dillon, one of Grieco's team members. Still, as a patrol moved through the local bazaar, the police barely interacted with civilians, troubling their mentors.

Shopkeepers and residents eyed the patrol silently and did not respond to greetings in Pashto. An Afghan boy swore in English at one of the Marines, who responded: "Go home."

"They're still a little hostile towards us," Woods said. "They will throw rocks. They will give you that look. They don't trust us."

Inmates at U.S. Facility in Bagram Protest Indefinite Detention

By Greg Jaffe and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 16, 2009

The prisoners at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan have refused to leave their cells for at least the past two weeks to protest their indefinite imprisonment, according to lawyers and the families of detainees.

The prison-wide protest, which has been going on since at least July 1, offers a rare glimpse inside a facility that is even more closed off to the public than the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Information about the protest came to light when the International Committee of the Red Cross informed the families of several detainees that scheduled video teleconferences and family visits were being canceled.

Representatives of the ICRC, which monitors the treatment of detainees and arranges the calls, last visited the Bagram prison on July 5, but inmates were unwilling to meet with them.

"We have suspended our video telephone conference and family visit programs because the detainees have informed us they do not wish to participate in the programs for the time being," said Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization.

Although the prisoners are refusing to leave their cells to shower or exercise, they are not engaging in hunger strikes or violence. Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for Yemeni national Amin al-Bakri, said detainees are protesting being held indefinitely without trial or legal recourse.

"We don't want to hold detainees longer than necessary," said a U.S. military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We engage in regular releases and transfers when we feel a detainee's threat can be sufficiently mitigated to warrant being released or transferred. Of course, there will continue to be some detainees whose high threat level can only be successfully mitigated via detention, but we review their status regularly to assess whether other options are available."

Unlike at Guantanamo Bay, where detainees have access to lawyers, the 620 prisoners at Bagram are not permitted to visit with their attorneys. Afghan government representatives are generally not allowed to visit or inspect the Bagram facility.

President Obama signed an executive order in January to review detention policy options. The Justice Department is leading an interagency task force examining the issue and is set to deliver a report to the president on Tuesday.

In recent years, Bagram became the destination for many terrorism suspects as Guantanamo Bay came under more scrutiny through legal challenges. The last significant group transfer from the battlefield to the prison in Cuba occurred in September 2004, when 10 detainees were moved there; in September 2006, 14 high-value detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay from secret CIA prisons. Since then, six detainees have been moved there.

The Bagram prison population, meanwhile, has ballooned. U.S. officials are building a bigger facility there that will hold nearly 1,000.

The Bagram facility includes inmates from Afghanistan as well as those arrested by U.S. authorities in other countries as part of counterterrorism efforts. The prison now holds close to 40 detainees who are not Afghan citizens, many of whom were not captured in Afghanistan.

In April, a D.C. district judge ruled that the Supreme Court decision that extended habeas corpus rights to detainees at Guantanamo Bay also applied to a certain set of detainees held at Bagram -- those who were not arrested in Afghanistan and who are not Afghan citizens. The Justice Department has appealed the decision.

The indefinite detention of Afghan prisoners also has been a source of anger among Afghan citizens, human rights advocates say. "U.S. detention policy is destroying the trust and confidence that many Afghans had in U.S. forces when they first arrived in the country," said Jonathan Horowitz, a consultant at the Open Society Institute, which seeks to promote democracy around the world. Horowitz is in Afghanistan interviewing the relatives of Bagram detainees, as well as former Bagram prisoners.

Young Baghdad Diarist Serves as Witness to War

Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 4, 2009

BAGHDAD The words are as simple as they are profound.

"I was born in war," Amal Salman says today, in reflection and epiphany.

She was 13 when the United States invaded her country, a war of its own choosing, buoyed by grand ambition and perhaps folly. Off a busy, four-lane street in the working-class district of Karrada, she huddled with her large family in the relative safety of their modest home, where rats sometimes scurried down a darkened stairwell.

When The Washington Post first profiled her in those days, she was a vivacious but awkward girl. In public, an adolescent giggle would give way to the brashness of youth, her convictions delivered impetuously. In quieter moments alone, keeping a diary imbued with her intelligence and curiosity, she would turn more contemplative about an imminent end and an uncertain beginning. The "suqut" -- collapse -- was her term for what followed: the fall of Saddam Hussein and 35 years of pitiless Baath Party rule.

"What's going to be the future of Iraq? Can it be good?" she asked in her diary then, the sloping script of her Arabic still lacking confidence. "No one knows."

Now 20, Amal has become calm and demure, tradition dictating reserve. Her words are considered, not impulsive. She exudes the quiet assuredness of intelligence, the realization that the fiercest argument can sometimes belie the deepest uncertainty.

Once wrapped in newspaper, her diary has become a sleek notebook, its pages protected by a plastic sheath and bundled by an elastic band. No longer tentative, her script forgoes a calligrapher's flourish for a stenographer's precision. She still writes at night when, as she puts it, "the noise subsides, and I hear only the frequent roar of the helicopters roaming back and forth, to which I have grown accustomed."

In those pages, penned in the third house her family has lived in since the invasion, the questions she asked as a child have given way to the declarations of an adult, in a nation that has journeyed away from the peaks of invasion, occupation and civil war. In the grimmest, most wrenching fashion, those events were spectacles. Like her country, Amal now grapples with the ambiguity of the ordinary, the equivocation that maturity brings.

"Life has made men forget the meaning of innocence and childhood," she wrote this year.
"Baghdad Has Fallen"

In nearly 1,250 years of history, invaders had vanquished Baghdad no less than 15 times, and Amal, reflexively defiant, witnessed its latest conquest.

"If a foreigner wants to enter Baghdad in peace, we will welcome him like a brother," she said then. "If a foreigner wants to enter as an enemy, every family will go out and confront them, even with stones. If they don't throw rocks, then they'll throw dirt."

Her father was killed in a car accident in the holy month of Ramadan in 1996. For years, her mother, Karima, sold gum from a canvas mat in the street and now bakes bread for neighbors. Of Karima's eight children, the oldest son, Ali, served as a soldier in Mosul; his younger brother, a ne'er-do-well and ex-convict, had joined a motley unit of militiamen patrolling Baghdad. Fatima, the oldest daughter, left school to help care for Amal and the rest of the children: Zeinab, the twins Hibba and Duaa, and the youngest son, Mahmoud.

The war was lost as soon as it began, and on a sunny morning, a neighbor's radio delivered the news to Amal and her family. Her entry on April 9, 2003, was shorter than most.

"And so," she wrote, "Baghdad has fallen to the Americans."

An image of the aftermath of invasion lingers in Baghdad, resonating in the prolonged interregnum between the suqut and the onset of a more routine life. The city felt like a dazed inmate stumbling out of a cell and squinting into harsh sunlight.

Amal grappled with words that seemed shorn of meaning. "They talk about democracy. Where is democracy? Is it that people die of hunger and deprivation and fear?" she wrote in the weeks after the invasion in the diary, which she kept tucked in a drawer.

She struggled with the nihilistic spasm of carnage into which Iraq soon descended, reflected in her family's lives. Her oldest brothers joined the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and blamed for some of the country's worst sectarian bloodletting. Dozens of bombings eventually tore through her neighborhood. Among the wounded was her sister Hibba, whose right arm was sliced by flying debris. "Shrapnel Hibba," schoolmates nicknamed her.

Her brother Mahmoud, just 11 then, recalled the grisliest of scenes: burning metal slicing through the living, a bone jutting through a pant leg, a car's engine resting on corpses. "The dead have become cheap," the boy said dryly.

In that crucible, Amal was no longer the girl who parroted slogans. Reflex had given way to questions, which in turn gave rise to an appreciation of an opposing view. Her words were more nuanced as she was forced to consider her country's experience.

"If I say the Americans are better, someone asks what have the Americans done," she noted then. ". . . If I said the time of Saddam was better, they say, what? If he didn't like you, he would cut off your head." She shook her head. "I don't know what to say."
Prayers and Toy Guns

Over the years, religion for Amal and her family was never piety. Like the Muslim call to prayer, it gave their lives cadence, speaking with clarity, offering simplicity and serving as a refuge in troubled times. It remains so today. "Oh God, if my livelihood and subsistence are in Heaven, do let it come down," reads a prayer hanging from a wall in Amal's house, whose blue paint has faded to reveal the water-stained cement beneath.

If it is in the ground, let it come out,

If it is far, let it come near,

If it is near, let it appear,

If it is little, increase it,

If it is much, bless it,

And make me, by it, avoid sins and wrongdoing.

But like the country, long subsumed in the grandest of narratives -- dictatorship, invasion, occupation and civil war -- the verse vies with the potpourri of influences that a semblance of normalcy has brought. Gone are the utopian promises of liberation. Hidden, somewhat, is the hatred. Quelled for now is the dystopia of violence.

Two of Amal's sisters, Fatima and Zeinab, have married, but the family still gathers almost every day. Zeinab's son Fahd, dressed in a shirt that reads "Tacky is Goofy," waves a play pistol and machine gun, then dances to a song written by a follower of Sadr, the Shiite cleric, whose militia once rampaged through Baghdad.

"A break and we'll return," the lyrics say. "We'll make the blood rise up to the knees."

Two pictures of Shiite saints adorn the wall, near a television stacked with DVDs of movies starring Jim Carrey and Antonio Banderas. Sitting on a soiled mattress covered with a brown blanket, Fatima declares her fondness for Dr. Phil and Oprah.

Smiling, Amal looks down at the floor's buckling tiles. "We already have enough disasters in Iraq," she jokes. "Why do we need to hear about other people's?"

In the worst days of the invasion in 2003, Karima once said something as her daughters sat around her: "It's like we're part of a play on a stage. Life's not good, it's not bad. It's just a play." The mother's words seemed to acknowledge a powerlessness she felt. The script was already written, and she was a spectator, watching the performance.

That sense still pervades Karima's life. Her oldest son, Ali, newly graduated from training in Jordan to work as a security guard, was detained when U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a cafe last year. He was one of 13 arrested, and his family believes it was arbitrary; eight months on, there is no sign of his release. After school, Amal and her younger sisters occasionally visit a church to light candles for him.

"Not even the cockroaches would eat the food in prison," his mother says. "He sees me and starts crying. His hair is turning gray. He's so worn out, so worn out."

Fatima, the oldest daughter and the most bitter, turns angry. "Have you seen anything tangible in this country?" she asks. "Has anything ever turned out for the better?"

No one answers, perhaps out of respect. In a few minutes, though, a levity that has become more common returns. Mahmoud, the boy who once recalled the ghastliest moments of a bombing, saunters in, wearing a jersey of his idol, the Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho. He celebrates the feats of his favorite team, Barcelona.

Fahd's giggles echo off sagging walls as his aunts chase him around the room. Karima smiles at the 2-year-old, whom she calls "the candle of my life."

"We're going to bring the police to take you," Fatima teases the boy.

"Call the police! Call the police now!" Amal cries. "They'll take you away."
'You Have to Be Optimistic'

Fatima and Amal gathered recently in Fatima's apartment, where the family lived during the invasion. On this day, an American patrol of four Humvees had just stopped by the building, a visit perhaps most remarkable for how commonplace it had become.

"Is it quiet?" they recalled the soldiers asking through a translator. "Peaceful here?"

They shrugged their shoulders, not too concerned.

Four years apart, the sisters are the most committed in their opinions, shaping a sibling rivalry. Fatima longs for childhood, before the suqut. Amal has hope, tempered as it is.

"We want to live like we used to," said Fatima, a newlywed. "There's still fear here. You still don't know who you can trust, whether you can trust anyone else."

Amal stayed quiet for a moment. "You have to be optimistic," she replied. "If you don't have a goal, if you don't have hope, then life has no meaning. It doesn't matter."

"What would be the reason for optimism?" Fatima shot back.

It was an argument Fatima and Amal had had dozens of times over the years. Fatima has never voted in Iraqi elections, nor will she. To her, officials here are hopelessly corrupt. Her brother's detention is symptomatic of a government unrestrained by notions of human rights or due process.

Amal agreed with much of what her sister said, but she was reluctant to settle for answers that felt too easy. After the suqut, the fear she expressed became questions; now, she had the confidence of conviction.

"I thought that in a democracy, you could say anything about anyone in the state, and nothing would happen to you. I thought that was democracy," she said. She smiled at what she judged her naivete. "A person is free," she said. "Free in everything, not just in expressing opinion, but in religion, in belief. Democracy is the basis of all freedom.

"That's my sense of it," she added. "Other than that I don't know."

"There are a lot of things that have to come before democracy," Fatima told her. "The people are hungry, sick. There are a lot of other things we have to worry about."

Fatima has no recollection of assassinations when Hussein ruled, nor does she remember neighbors dismembered by car bombs.

"If you sat in your house and didn't say anything, if you stayed quiet, would anything happen to you?" she asked. "Would anything have happened to our brother?"

Amal shook her head. "Of course, it would have," she said. "This was the basis of life back then: Don't see, don't talk, and don't hear. That was the old regime."

"But no one was killed without a reason or justification," Fatima told her.

"That's ignorant," Amal declared.

"Don't call me ignorant," Fatima said.

"Let Fatima be president," Amal quipped. "We'd be better off."
From Bombs to Exams

As a young girl, Amal began her diary with a simple invocation.

"In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate."

But as she often points out, her life has seen little of either mercy or compassion. She was born soon after Iraq's war with Iran, eight bitter and destructive years that forced a tenth of Iraq's population into the military. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait followed two years later, in 1990. Another war of sorts ensued -- devastating economic sanctions that wiped out Iraq's middle class and ended only after the United States overthrew Hussein. She witnessed occupation, insurgency and sectarian war, sometimes intersecting in anarchy.

"No one has had a chance to catch their breath," she says today.

No one would bestow on Baghdad the title its founder gave his capital: the City of Peace. But the war that once filled the pages of Amal's diary has ended, too.

She complains about school. "The material is tough, the teachers are tougher and the exams are even worse," she wrote in February. "Examinations are like hurricanes. They leave you no room even to breathe." She dreads Fridays and Mondays, days that fill her with pessimism; she enjoys March, the month of her birthday. She grows excited over the prospect of voting in elections this year. "I have a choice," she wrote.

"My choice may be right or may be wrong," she went on, "but the good thing is that in a democracy we can correct the mistake every few years. It is better than nothing."

In her room, she now has a poster of her favorite soccer team, Real Madrid (endlessly irritating her brother Mahmoud). Over her bed, she has smaller photos of actor Brad Pitt and soccer icon David Beckham. Her wall is an advertisement for stalwarts of Iraqi pop: Hussam al-Rassam, Hatem al-Iraqi, Kadhem al-Saher and Majid al-Mohandes.

Even the path she takes to school with her twin sisters, whom she still considers her best friends, has become habit.

"For three years, we have been going this way, but for me, every time I walk along it, it is as if it was the first time. As they say, the road is like a friend, the sweeter and more comfortable, the less you would be bored by it," she wrote in February. "Not a bad theory."

Her family's hardship has not ended. Amal complains about the cost of food and medicine, the lack of charity from her father's relatives, the ordeal of her brother and the corruption of a government that keeps him imprisoned.

"The harshness of life has become a part of my day," she wrote.

But age has brought a wisdom born of acceptance. Far from the heights of expectation and valleys of disappointment, a sober sense of life now colors her landscape.

"I have a rule," she wrote in an entry six years after the suqut. "Let's live 10 days in grief, 10 days in joy. If we laughed more than necessary, then we should cry. Joy and grief, the laugh and the tear are always together, inseparable from each other."

Drug-Cartel Links Haunt an Election South of Border

By JOEL MILLMAN and JOSE DE CORDOBA

COLIMA, Mexico -- The candidacy of Mario Anguiano, running for governor in a state election here Sunday, says a lot about Mexican politics amid the rise of the drug cartels.

A brother of the candidate is serving a 10-year prison sentence in Mexico for peddling methamphetamine. Another Anguiano is serving 27 years in a Texas prison for running a huge meth ring. A few weeks ago, a hand-painted banner hung on a highway overpass cited the Zetas, the bloodthirsty executioners for the Gulf Cartel drug gang, praising the candidate: "The Zetas support you, and we are with you to the death."

Mr. Anguiano says his meth-dealing brother was just an addict who sold small amounts to support his habit. He says the man jailed in Texas, reported by local media to be his cousin, may or may not be a relative. "If he is my cousin, I've never met him," he says. Denying any involvement with traffickers, he says the supposed Zetas endorsement was just a dirty trick by his election rivals.

If so, it backfired. In the weeks after the banner made local headlines, new polls showed Mr. Anguiano pulling ahead in the race. He is expected to be elected governor on Sunday.

The reaction suggests how blasé some voters have become about allegations of ties between their politicians and the drug underworld, as Mexico prepares to elect a new lower house of Congress, some state governors and many mayors. This, even as political experts and law-enforcement people worry that violent drug gangs are increasingly bankrolling a wide range of politicians' campaigns across Mexico, in return for turning a blind eye to their activities.
Cartel Turf Wars

The election comes amid President Felipe Calderón's all-out war on drug gangs, which wield armies of private gunmen and account for the bulk of illegal drugs sold in the U.S. The conservative president has deployed 45,000 troops to fight the gangs. In bloody confrontations between his forces and the cartels, and especially in turf battles among the cartels, an estimated 12,000 lives have been lost since Mr. Calderón took office in late 2006. June was the deadliest month yet: 769 drug-related killings, according to a count by Mexican newspapers.

Until recent years, Mexican drug traffickers focused the bulk of their bribery efforts on law enforcement rather than politicians. Their increasing involvement in local politics -- in town halls and state capitals -- is a response, experts say, to the national-level crackdown, to changes in the nature of the drug trade itself and to the evolution of Mexico's young democracy.

Mario Anguiano's campaign for governor in Mexico reveals the problems of power in a country with increasing narcotics trafficking and violence. WSJ's Joel Millman reports.

Starting in 2000, a system of fiercely contested multiparty elections began to replace 71 years of one-party rule, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. "In this newly competitive, moderately democratic system, it takes serious money to run a political campaign," says James McDonald, a Mexico expert at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. "This has given the narcos a real entree into politics, by either running for office themselves or bankrolling candidates."

In addition, the gangs have evolved from simple drug-smuggling bands into organized-crime conglomerates with broad business interests, from local drug markets to extortion, kidnapping, immigrant smuggling and control of Mexico's rich market in knockoff compact discs. "There is more at stake than before. They need to control municipal governments," says Edgardo Buscaglia, a professor of law and economics at both Columbia University and Mexico's ITAM University.

Because of the federal crackdown and the warfare between rival cartels the drug traffickers also need more political allies than ever before.

Politicians who won't cooperate sometimes are threatened. On Monday, in the drug-producing state of Guerrero, a grenade blew up a sport-utility vehicle belonging to Jorge Camacho, a congressional candidate from President Calderón's National Action Party, or PAN. A message next to the destroyed car said, "Look, you S.O.B. candidate, hopefully, you will understand it is better you get out, you won't get a second chance to live."

Mr. Buscaglia says criminal groups' one-two punch of bribes and threats has given them either influence or control in 72% of Mexico's municipalities. He bases his estimate on observation of criminal enterprises such as drug-dealing and child-prostitution rings that operate openly, ignored by police.

According to a September 2007 intelligence assessment by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the governors of the states of Veracruz and Michoacán had agreements with the Gulf Cartel allowing free rein to that large drug-trafficking gang. In return, said the report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the cartel promised to reduce violence in Veracruz state and, in Michoacán, financed a gubernatorial race and many municipal campaigns across the state.

In Veracruz, the FBI report said, Gov. Fidel Herrera made a deal with the cartel letting it secure a drug route through the state. In an interview, Mr. Herrera said the allegation is "absolutely false, and has no basis in fact -- it never happened." The PRI politician said he has never had any dealings with a criminal organization and blamed a rival political operative, whom he declined to name, for trying to sabotage his career.

In Michoacán, the FBI report said, "in exchange for funding, the Gulf Cartel will be able to control the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, to continue to introduce cocaine and collect a 'tax'" from other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.
Control of Ports

Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, the Michoacán governor from the leftist PRD party who was in the office when the FBI said the deal was made, says the allegation is "totally false." Mr. Cárdenas Batel, grandson of the former Mexican president for whom the port is named, said Mexican ports are controlled by federal agencies, so drug traffickers have nothing to gain from bribing state officials in connection with them.

His successor, the winner of the 2007 election, is Leonel Godoy, also of the PRD. He calls the FBI allegation "an infamy" with "not a shred of evidence or any proof," and said he had never met or cut deals with drug traffickers. Messrs. Cárdenas Batel and Godoy both say they had alerted authorities before the elections about the growing infiltration of drug traffickers in Michoacán.

None of the three men -- Messrs. Cárdenas Batel, Godoy and Herrera -- have been charged with any crime. U.S. intelligence documents have occasionally proved unreliable in the past.

Police agents in Mexico City stand guard in May after a group of top officials from Michoacán were detained due to their alleged ties to 'La Familia' drug cartel. Ten mayors and 17 other officials were detained.

The Gulf Cartel doesn't appear to be the only gang with alleged influence in Michoacán officialdom. In May, soldiers and federal police arrested 10 mayors, as well as 17 police chiefs and state security officials, including a man who was in charge of the state's police-training academy. They have been charged with collaborating with "La Familia," the state's violent homegrown drug gang. Those arrested, who have said they are innocent victims of political vendettas, represented all three of Mexico's main political parties. On Monday, three more people, including the mayor of Lázaro Cárdenas, were arrested and charged with the same offense, according to the attorney general's office.

Five hundred miles to the north in the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza García, a mayoral candidate from President Calderón's party sparked a scandal in June when he was recorded telling a gathering of supporters that security in the town was "controlled by" members of one of Mexico's most fearsome drug cartels, the Beltran Leyva gang.

The candidate, Mauricio Fernandez, seemed to suggest he would be willing to negotiate with the Beltran Leyvas if elected. "Penetration by drug traffickers is for real, and they approach every candidate who they think may win," Mr. Fernandez was recorded saying. "In my case, I made it very clear to them that I didn't want blatant selling."

Mr. Fernandez has acknowledged the audiotape's authenticity, but says his statements were taken out of context and that he had never met with members of the Beltran Leyva cartel. He says the full tape captures him saying he would not negotiate with the drug traffickers. As the election nears, he leads polls by a wide margin.

Meanwhile, in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, Mayor David Monreal of the town of Fresnillo denied having anything to do with 14.5 tons of marijuana police found months ago in a chili-pepper-drying facility owned by his brother. Mr. Monreal, who plans to seek the governorship next year, said his political enemies planted the mammoth stash.

In the campaign, the state of Mexico's economy appears to trump the drug issue for many voters. The economy is shrinking amid slumps in oil production, in exports to the U.S., in tourism and in remittances from emigrants. Polls give the PRI, the party that ruled for seven decades, an advantage of about six percentage points.

The governing party has made President Calderon's campaign against drug traffickers its main theme, and polls show his policy of using the military in the effort is widely popular. But they also show a majority of Mexicans don't think he is winning the narco-war.

Drugs are certainly campaign fodder in the border state of Chihuahua, where former Ciudad Juárez Mayor Héctor Murguía is the PRI's candidate for a congressional seat. Two years ago, Mayor Murguía named as his chief of public security a businessman named Saulo Reyes Gamboa. Last year, Mr. Reyes was arrested by U.S. law-enforcement agents in El Paso, Texas, after allegedly paying someone he thought to be a corrupt U.S. federal officer to help smuggle drug loads. During the operation, federal agents found nearly half a ton of marijuana in a Texas house, which they say Mr. Reyes had arranged to smuggle from Mexico.

Mr. Reyes, who pleaded guilty and is now serving eight years in a federal prison in Kentucky, couldn't be reached for comment. Mayor Murguía says that he has had no involvement with the Juárez Cartel and that Mr. Reyes never contributed "even five pesos" to support his political career.

Despite the bad publicity, Mr. Murguía is leading in polls and is expected to win Sunday -- not unlike Mr. Anguiano, the candidate in Colima with the supposed endorsement from the Zetas.
Talking Frankly

In Colima, the candidate for governor from President Calderón's party, Martha Sosa Govea, hasn't faced any narco-tie allegations. But there has been plenty of comment about her protegé, national assembly candidate Virgilio Mendoza Amezcua, thanks to a tape of him talking frankly about politics and drug traffickers, recorded by members of a rival party he was trying to win over.
[Drug-Cartel Links Haunt Election]

"You don't imagine how many 'nice' people have relations with those drug-trafficking bastards, and through them, the bastards bring things to you," he said on the tape. "They try to seduce you....They got close to me like they get close to half the world, and they sent me money."

Mr. Mendoza declined to comment, but has previously denied he took any money from the cartels. Ms. Sosa said the tape might have been doctored, and in any case, "just because they have him on a tape getting an offer of dirty money, there's still nothing on tape proving he accepted it."

The tape was turned over to federal authorities to determine whether it had been altered. Citing the proximity to the election, the Attorney General's office declined to comment on any of the drug cases.

Colima, though largely exempt from the narco-violence raging in neighboring states, has a reputation as a haven for traffickers, a sleepy place where residents don't ask questions about rich new neighbors. In the 1980s, Colima was home to a gentleman rancher from Guadalajara whom everybody knew as Pedro Orozco. He spent lavishly on schools, gave to charity and hung around with politicians.

In 1991, Mr. Orozco was gunned down in a firefight in Guadalajara, then Mexico's drug capital. It turned out the generous man-about-town was actually Manuel Salcido Uzueta, a top drug capo better known as Cochiloco, meaning the Mad Pig.

Ever since, Colima residents have grown cynical about the influence of drug gangs in politics. "Corruption? Drug ties? They say that about everyone who runs for office. Who can you believe?" says Salvador Ochoa, a local lawyer.

Ms. Sosa has been hammering her opponent, Mr. Anguiano, with claims that he has links to drug trafficking. But, she concedes, the response of many voters is, "Poor guy, why don't they just leave him alone?"

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com and Jose de Cordoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com