Civil rights-era killings yield secrets to FBI probe

By Carrie Johnson
Sunday, February 28, 2010; A01

Three years after the FBI pledged to investigate more than 100 unsolved civil rights killings, the agency is ready to close all but a handful. Investigators say they have solved most of the mysteries behind the cases, but few will result in indictments, given the passage of decades, the deaths of prime suspects and the challenge of gathering evidence.

"There's maybe five to seven cases where we don't know who did it," said FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who is heading the bureau's effort. "Some we know; others we know but can't prove. For every other case, we got it."

Even without taking cases to court, the project has filled in broad gaps in the stories of the murdered, many of whom were forgotten victims from a brutal chapter of American history.

Officials now believe, for example, that an Alabama state trooper killed an unarmed civil rights protester in 1965, a case that helped inspire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to march in the state. In the deaths of two North Carolina men in police custody -- one found in 1956 with a crushed skull and the other who refused medical treatment in 1960 after a heart attack -- the agency concluded that there was no federal law it could use to pursue the cases.

Investigators have walked through rural cemeteries looking for clues, searched yellowed documents in government archives and interviewed witnesses, some so shattered by their experiences that they still refused to talk. Along the way, officials discovered a more complex story than they had imagined.

In nearly one-fifth of the 108 cases, they learned that the deaths had no connection to the racial unrest pulsing through the South at the height of the civil rights struggle.

In at least one case, the victim had been killed by a relative, but the family blamed the Ku Klux Klan. In other cases, a victim drowned or was fatally knifed in a bar fight. Two black women registering voters in the hot Mississippi summer died in a car accident. One man died under his mistress -- a bedroom secret kept for more than four decades until the bureau came calling.

The FBI's project, which at its peak involved more than 40 agents working in cities across the South and along the Eastern Seaboard, was the agency's most focused campaign to find out what happened in the deaths. For some families, hopes of a legal reckoning have been dashed, but the investigation has produced a different kind of accounting.

"These racially motivated murders are some of the greatest blemishes on our nation's history," said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights. "We owe it to people who were all a part of this struggle to be persistent. . . . If we can solve a number of these cases, that's fantastic. But if we can bring to closure all of these cases, I think this will be well worth the effort."

At the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., where the names of victims are etched on the walls of the organization's civil rights memorial, President Richard Cohen added, "Justice in a few of those cases is going to have to serve as a symbolic victory in all of them."

Long-lost evidence

From a conference room on the third floor of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in the District, the civil rights struggle continues. But four decades or longer after the deaths, nearly every aspect of the trail has gone cold.

Special Agent James Hosty, a former police officer from Kansas who joined the FBI after helping capture the notorious "BTK" serial killer, has spent three years hunting down leads in a case near Atlanta.

In 1946, four black sharecroppers were killed on Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, prompting President Harry S. Truman to order the FBI to work round-the-clock to bring the shooters to justice. As many as two dozen people, some of them prominent members of the community, might have been involved in the deaths, investigators say.

But no charges were filed -- and volumes of case files sat untouched in FBI archives in Silver Spring for decades until the investigation was reopened by Howard Hatfield, who is an assistant special agent in charge at the Atlanta office, and an agent was assigned full time to the case.

"It basically took six to eight months to get through those records and determine who was alive or dead," Hosty said.

Some of those Hosty thinks witnessed or were involved in the killings had neither a Social Security number nor any other identifier that would allow him to determine whether they are alive and could be questioned or prosecuted.

The case remains unsolved, but new evidence allowed investigators to secure a search warrant in 2008, 62 years after the deadly encounter. FBI agents in Atlanta said they continue to work leads, hoping for a breakthrough from witnesses who at the time feared talking to authorities but since might have changed their minds.

In many of the unsolved cases, family members or victims' rights advocates have complained about how long it has taken for the federal government to investigate and about what they say is the lack of results. But more reasonable expectations are called for by Alvin Sykes, who was part of a successful effort to have the government reopen the investigation into the 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Mississippi case that helped launch the civil rights movement.

"From the beginning, our focus was not just to prosecute cases but to find the truth," Sykes said. "We're not disappointed, but we do expect to find a significant number of more cases through the outreach effort, a criminal manhunt to find these people, and go from there."

Few legal tools

"Welcome to my headache," said Deitle, who was handpicked by the current FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III, to lead the re-energized civil rights effort.

The government has scant legal tools at its disposal in prosecuting the decades-old deaths because it can use just three federal statutes on the books before 1968, when Congress passed an expansive statute governing civil rights prosecutions.

The pre-1968 statutes apply in homicides only if a victim was killed on federal land; a victim was kidnapped and killed; or if an explosive device was transported across state lines with the intent to injure, according to Paige Fitzgerald, a Justice Department lawyer who played a central role in two of the cold cases that went to trial in recent years.

The FBI looks for room to maneuver within the old statutes. In a Florida killing, for example, an agent was dispatched to secure Global Positioning System coordinates to determine whether the killing occurred on land once belonging to a Native American tribe.

One case has drawn the agency's focused attention because it might be connected to other interstate Ku Klux Klan attacks.

On Dec. 10, 1964, Frank Morris, a shoe store owner in Ferriday, La., woke to the sound of tinkling glass. He emerged from a cot at the back of the burning building with third-degree burns covering his body. Morris survived four days in a hospital, but he wasn't able to name the attackers before he died.

At the time, FBI investigators found a charred finger near the crime scene that did not belong to Morris. Over the years, the finger was lost. But an agent had recorded a fingerprint, which remains in the FBI's files.

"So," Deitle asked one morning last month, "who's missing a finger in Ferriday?"

An undercover agent has been canvassing the town for a fingerless man, and the FBI lab is searching for fingerprint matches. But in the meantime, the case remains unsolved.

In an FBI office in Jackson, Miss., Jenny Williams, a supervisory special agent, has instructed 11 agents working on nearly four dozen cold cases to take nothing for granted -- even reports of the demise of the prime suspects, especially when death certificates are not available.

"We definitely don't take someone's word for it," Williams said. "We'll send people out to a cemetery. We have evidence that's a picture of a tombstone in a cemetery, old small-town family cemeteries."

Special Agent Jeromy Turner walked a 300-headstone cemetery in Yazoo City, Miss., four times looking for a dead man. Relatives insisted that the man was buried in a plot there, but "I never could find him," Turner said. "Finally, I was able to locate a funeral home owner who had the death certificate that showed he was buried in that cemetery, but the family had disowned him." There was no headstone marking his grave.

Among the most promising cases are those in which accomplices have not been prosecuted. That is a central focus in the killing of Louis Allen, a logger and member of the NAACP in Amite County, Miss., who was ambushed in January 1964 after years of threats.

Allen's son Henry and other family members have plastered the community with posters thanking God "for anyone willing to come forward to solve this heinous crime. Anonymity promised." They are offering a $20,000 reward for information.

Deitle, who helped investigate the New York Police Department shooting of immigrant Amadou Diallo 11 years ago, said the FBI effort is one of the last opportunities to investigate the dark alleys of the segregated past.

"If we don't correct history, then who's going to go back through this? Who's going to fix history to make it accurate?" she asked.

Terror Begins With Fearmongering Politicians

Fearmongering politicians are scoring cheap political points at the expense of the American people.

By Daniel Klaidman | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 12, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Feb 22, 2010

Jostling before the midterms has begun, and so too has the GOP's ritualistic hazing of Democrats on national security. At every turn Republicans are hammering the Obama administration for "capitulating" in the fight against terrorism. But their macho rhetoric actually sends a message of weakness: we can't try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the same civilian courts that have convicted dozens of other international terrorists because Al Qaeda might attack New York. (When since 9/11 has New York not been a target of Al Qaeda?) Our criminal-justice system can't deal with a failed underwear bomber. The GOP assault may be smart politics, but in the long run it damages U.S. security by undermining our confidence and resiliency in the face of certain attacks to come.

By contrast, much of the current administration's antiterror policy seems aimed at strengthening the American spirit in the face of a diffuse but determined enemy. After Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to bring down Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, President Obama waited 72 hours before appearing in front of the cameras to make a statement. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) immediately cruised the cable circuit lambasting Obama for his lapse in "leadership" in the wake of what he claimed could have been "one of the greatest tragedies in the history of our country." The president should have stepped forward "to give a sense of confidence to the country." But it was precisely the president's deliberate restraint that conveyed confidence, not King's hysterical overreaction. When Obama did address the public, his response was measured and proportionate. "This incident," he said, "demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist."

Those words may have been dismissed as boilerplate, but Obama aides tell me they reflected a core conviction of the president's. In fact, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has also made encouraging "resiliency"—in government institutions as well as people—a priority. In surprisingly blunt language, the recently released Quadrennial Homeland Security Review says Americans will need to be "psychologically prepared to withstand" terrorism and other disasters, "and grow stronger over time."

The next time a prophet of doom warns of impending disaster, think how our behavior compares with that of other countries that have been attacked since 9/11. After the 7/7 attack on the London Underground, which killed 52 people, Londoners, recalling their pluck during the Blitz, gamely showed up en masse the next morning for their daily commute. The Israelis make a point of rebuilding blown-up cafés in a matter of days after an attack; similarly, they return to targeted bus lines the day after a bombing. The message is clear: we're not going to let terrorists break our spirit. Had America rebuilt the Twin Towers in the first years after 9/11, they would be standing tall today as symbols of defiance. Instead, when I drive by Ground Zero, still a gaping pit, I wonder how we would react if New York were hit again.

Even the administration's emphasis on resiliency isn't enough on its own, says homeland-security expert Stephen Flynn, who has done more than anyone to promote the concept. "The hard part is converting the rhetoric into reality," he says, complaining that the White House has not put forward the necessary funds to train ordinary citizens to handle disasters and terror attacks.

Americans are historically a tough lot. But the policies and rhetoric of the Bush-Cheney years, which set the tone for the current GOP attacks, are infantilizing: be very afraid, we're told, and let the government take care of you. The tough-guy bluster has led to a permanent state of anxiety—and a slew of counterproductive policies, from harsh visa restrictions to waterboarding. Our politicians rail about apocalyptic threats while TSA officers pat down toddlers at the airport. The irony is that many potentially lethal terror attacks—from United Flight 93 to Richard Reid to the underwear bomber—have been foiled by regular citizens. The aim of terrorists is to make people feel powerless and afraid. Un-fortunately, not every plot will be foiled. But if that's the standard we and our leaders set for ourselves, we are doomed to perpetuate dumb policies that flow from irrational fears. Just what the terrorists want.

Ahmed Chalabi's renewed influence in Iraq concerns U.S.

By Ernesto Londoño and Leila Fadel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 27, 2010; A01

BAGHDAD -- Ahmed Chalabi, the onetime U.S. ally, is in the limelight again, and his actions are proving no less controversial than they did years ago.

On the eve of Iraq's parliamentary elections, Chalabi is driving an effort aimed at weeding out candidates tied to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Chalabi is reprising a role he played after the U.S.-led invasion -- which many critics believe he helped facilitate with faulty intelligence -- and, in the process, is infuriating American officials and some Iraqis, who suspect his motive is to bolster his own political bloc.

Chalabi, a Shiite, has defended the work of the commission he is leading as legal and crucial during a period of transition to Iraq's first sovereign government. But his reemergence on the political scene has rankled U.S. officials and fueled concerns that Sunnis and other secular Iraqis will be marginalized.

Some Iraqi and U.S. officials think Chalabi might have his eyes on the ultimate prize, however unlikely he can attain it.

"Even if it kills him, he's going to stay in Iraq to try to become prime minister," said Ezzat Shahbandar, a Shiite lawmaker from a competing slate who has known Chalabi for more than 20 years. "This issue is the only tool he has, because he has nothing else going for him."

Chalabi fell out of favor with the Americans in 2004, after they accused him of spying for Iran. The year before, though, he had been appointed to head a U.S.-formed commission to rid the government of officials tied to Hussein's regime.

The hasty, wholesale purge that the commission conducted is now widely seen as a catalyst of the insurgency and Iraq's sectarian war. Today, however, Chalabi remains at the helm of a similar "de-Baathification" panel, the Justice and Accountability Commission, because parliament has not appointed new members.

When the commission recently announced the disqualification of nearly 500 candidates from the March 7 parliamentary elections, critics noted that candidates from Sunni-led and mixed secular coalitions were disproportionately targeted. Many of those ousted were rivals of Chalabi's bloc.

A court impaneled to review the cases carried out a cursory review behind closed doors. Candidates were allowed to submit written appeals but were never told the specific nature of the allegations against them. The court disqualified 145 candidates; most others dropped out or their parties replaced them.

Now the disqualifications are widening sectarian and religious divides in Iraq, even as it continues to reel from decades of authoritarian rule, occupation and bloodshed. This week, in an apparent attempt to allay some of the bitterness, the government said it would reinstate 20,000 former army officers ousted because of their ties to Hussein.

But the political disqualifications threaten to undermine the elections, overshadowing campaign issues such as security, unemployment and basic services.

At the center of it all is Chalabi.

In campaign posters, Chalabi, a onetime Iraqi exile, bills himself as "the Destroyer of the symbols of the Baath." Placards for other candidates on his political slate, the Iraqi National Alliance, are graced with the words "No space for the Baath," written in crimson letters that suggest blood.

The alliance is a Shiite coalition of parties whose most prominent figures are former Iraqi exiles in the current government. Those parties did poorly in provincial elections in January 2009.

"The provincial elections showed the limits of the appeal of sectarianism," a senior Western diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer candid analysis. By fanning fears of the return of the Baathists, the official added, "they may be hoping that Baathism will help them get past that limit."

Chalabi, 65, comes from an elite Baghdad family. He formed the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group, in the early 1990s with U.S. backing.

He has long had a strong relationship with Iran. But he became close to the CIA and the Pentagon in the run-up to the invasion, as U.S. officials used his group to muster opposition against Hussein. The U.S. government funneled millions to his group, which provided it with intelligence reports that later proved to be erroneous. In 2004, Chalabi was a guest of President George W. Bush at the State of the Union address.

Many Iraqi Shiite politicians have little regard for Chalabi because he left in the late 1950s, avoiding authoritarian rule. Many of his peers were imprisoned, tortured and forced into exile.

Despite his lack of popular support, Chalabi has remained relevant. Even his rivals allow that he has keen political instincts, a sharp mind and a knack for influencing powerful people. He also does not shy from controversy.

This week, his deputy on the commission, Ali Faisal al-Lami, said hundreds of officials in Iraq's intelligence, army and police agencies are subject to dismissal for links to the Baath Party.

"We believe there are thousands of others who will be found," he said in an interview. "These measures will seriously enhance security in Iraq by dismissing any bad elements that carry the Baath ideology."

If that effort gains traction in the weeks ahead, U.S. officials say, political violence could very well follow. U.S. commanders could also suddenly lose key Iraqi officers who they have trained and mentored over the years.

"They will try to get rid of pro-U.S. generals, but more importantly, they are stacking the deck with pro-Iranian officers, which will damage U.S. long-term interests in the long run," a senior U.S. military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to talk to reporters. "This is why many neighboring Arab countries aren't so happy about us modernizing the Iraqi military with some of the latest equipment."

Chalabi did not respond to calls, e-mails and text messages seeking an interview. In a recent statement, he said his commission was "carrying out its legal, moral and nationalistic duty to protect the political process against infiltration by the Saddamist Baathists."

Ryan C. Crocker, who served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007 until last year, said Chalabi is no one's "agent."

"He's an opportunist and he's a nationalist," Crocker said, "and he will use whatever vehicle or platform that presents itself to further his own agenda."

Special correspondent K.I. Ibrahim contributed to this report.

Iraqi Sunnis Pin Their Hopes on Elections

By MARC SANTORA

BAQUBA, Iraq — Here in Diyala, a quarter of provincial council members, all Sunnis, have warrants against them. Most don’t show up for votes, fearing they will be jailed. The leading Sunni candidate was arrested this month on what supporters call trumped-up terrorism charges. Crushing poverty is the norm. So is mistrust of a central government and the Shiite-dominated security forces.

Yet Sunnis here say they are determined to participate in the March 7 national parliamentary elections. Even after a call last week by a national Sunni political party to boycott — a call it later rescinded — Sunnis continued to hang banners of their preferred candidates, including those barred from running.

In some ways, it is an inspiring measure of progress in Iraq that Sunni Muslims, the minority that long ran Iraq under Saddam Hussein, are trusting in the ballot box to improve their fortunes.

But the hope they place in politics also reflects weakness: how sharply Sunnis’ choices have narrowed after nearly seven years of war. Past boycotts denied them electoral positions they might have won and deprived them of the spoils of power. Violence drew deadly retribution, from both American soldiers and Shiite death squads. Now elections seem the only way to forge a more formal and enduring political role.

Interviews in this once restive area make clear that Sunni expectations from these elections are high, and that renewed violence may not be far behind electoral disappointment.

“If the government does not change, there will be a problem between the Sunni and the Shia, and it will not be good,” said Sami Dawoud Salman, a local leader of a branch of the Sunni militia that allied with the Americans to do battle with Al Qaeda.

Without a change, he said, “I think the government will hunt down every Sunni person, and the Sunnis will have no choice but to hold their own weapons and defend themselves.”

He plans to vote in any case.

Across Diyala Province, about 17,000 square miles stretching from Baghdad to the Iranian border, the conditions that existed as the fighting subsided have hardened in place. Once mixed villages have either been razed or remain in the control of one sect. Few of those displaced from their homes have returned. Lingering blood feuds bring daily reports of violence.

Shiite towns, like Khalis, bustle with commerce. In Sunni neighborhoods, the shops are fewer, the tension is higher and the uncertainty palpable.

Shiites dominate both the local police and the Iraqi Army in the region, making up about 90 percent of the forces, American officials say, although the population is more than 50 percent Sunni. Sunnis see reminders of Shiite ascendancy and intimidation all around. For instance, during a recent Shiite holiday, nearly every police checkpoint was decorated with portraits of Imam Hussein and Ali, two revered Shiite martyrs.

The mistrust has deepened in recent months as government security forces have staged a series of arrests.

Over three days in December, 101 people were arrested, predominantly Sunni, according to an American intelligence briefing paper.

“Continued, pervasive, and biased targeting by the Iraqi Security Force” raised the possibility militants might have more success in recruiting fighters, according to the report. In recent weeks, there has been evidence that those networks have stepped up their recruitment efforts, American military commanders say.

In the provincial elections last year, Sunnis took control of the local government, which helped ease tensions. However, 7 of the 29 provincial council members have arrest warrants against them. The arrest in early February of Najim al-Harbi, the Diyala leader of the important Sunni political bloc that won six seats, was considered the most recent provocation.

Mr. Harbi, who gained widespread support for his role battling Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has been the frequent target of assassination attempts, and 23 members of his family have been killed by militants. Six months ago, his 6-year-old son was kidnapped by Al Qaeda and killed. His arrest on terrorism charges, with no evidence made public, stirred anger and was viewed as politically motivated, because his slate of candidates poses a serious challenge to both Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s alliance and the candidates of other Shiite parties.

“Of course the sectarian nature of the politics will be reflected on the street,” said Rasam Esmael Hamud, a member of Mr. Harbi’s party. “If we fail to control the politics, then we will fail to control the street.”

There has been hope that the elections would be a step toward reconciliation. But as the campaign has heated up, so has the oratory, with distinct sectarian overtones. The fiery campaign speeches have been coupled with actions by the government security forces and political leaders that are viewed by Sunnis as an attempt to diminish their standing.

For months, Mr. Maliki, who once hoped to court a substantial alliance with powerful Sunni political blocs but was largely rebuffed, has repeatedly raised the specter of the Baath Party to justify a crackdown on Sunni and secular leaders.

Mr. Maliki’s rival, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who has been joined by powerful Sunni blocs to pose a serious electoral challenge, has accused the Shiite dominated blocs and the prime minister of being beholden to Iran.

When the Iraqi government pressed ahead with its anti-Baath campaign by seeking to bar more than 500 candidates from running in the election, Mr. Allawi suggested that such heavy-handed tactics could lead to civil war.

With only a little more than a week until the election, though, Sunnis still view the voting booth as the best place to secure influence in Iraq, according to American and Iraqi officials and dozens of interviews with residents.

“We are always facing pressures by the security forces, which are dominated by the Shiite parties,” said Baqir Jalalaldin al-Khashali, a 24-year-old employee of the Education Department in Baquba. “I think that the pressures will be useless, because there is a great desire of Sunnis to participate in the election.”

How they will react once the votes are counted, especially if there is a perception of fraud, is uncertain.

“We have spent a lot of time studying the question: What is the Sunni breaking point?” said Col. David Funk, commander of the Third Stryker Brigade, Second Infantry Division, which has responsibility for Diyala Province. “It won’t likely be a single event. It will be the slow erosion over time of the belief that they have a role in this country.”

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Diyala Province.

To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case

By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA — For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences.

So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.

Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.

The idea resonated, said Nancy Smith, the executive director.

“We were shocked when we spent less money and had more phone calls” to the hot line, Ms. Smith said.

This month, the group expanded its reach, making national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species,” and a Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com.

Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans and encouraging black abortion opponents across the country to become more active.

A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations.

Black abortion opponents, who sometimes refer to abortions as “womb lynchings,” have mounted a sustained attack on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spurred by a sting operation by young white conservatives who taped Planned Parenthood employees welcoming donations specifically for aborting black children.

“What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said Johnny M. Hunter, a black pastor and longtime abortion opponent in Fayetteville, N.C. “The game changes when blacks get involved. And in the pro-life movement, a lot of the groups that have been ignored for years, they’re now getting galvanized.”

The factors fueling the focus on black women — an abortion rate far higher than that of other races and the ties between the effort to legalize and popularize birth control and eugenics — are, at heart, old news. But they have been given exaggerated new life by the Internet, slick repackaging, high production values and money, like the more than $20,000 that Georgia Right to Life invested in the billboards.

Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women.

Day Gardner, now the president of the National Black Pro-Life Union in Washington, said those figures shocked her at first.

“I just really assumed that white people aborted more than anyone else, and black people would not do this because we’re culturally a religious people, we have large families,” Ms. Gardner said.

Many black anti-abortion leaders, including Ms. Davis and Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the director of African-American outreach for Priests for Life, often recount their own abortion histories (each woman had two).

Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during the Super Bowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.

“The more I dug into it, the more vast I found that the network was,” Ms. Davis said. “And I realized that African-American women just did not know the truth, they did not understand the truth about the abortion industry.”

But those who support abortion rights dispute the conspiracy theory, saying it portrays black women as dupes and victims. The reason black women have so many abortions is simple, they say: too many unwanted pregnancies.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, listing a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence. “There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case,” Ms. Ross said.

But, she said, the idea that abortion is intended to wipe out blacks may be finding fertile ground in a population that has experienced so much sanctioned prejudice and violence.

Black opponents of abortion are fond of saying that black people were anti-abortion and anti-birth control early on, pointing to Marcus Garvey’s conviction that blacks could overcome white supremacy through reproduction, and black militants who protested family planning clinics.

But that is only half the picture, scholars say. Black women were eager for birth control even before it was popularized by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and black doctors who provided illegal abortions were lauded as community heroes.

“Some male African-American leaders were so furious about what they perceived as genocidal intentions that in one case they burned down a clinic,” said Carole Joffe, the author of “Dispatches From the Abortion Wars.” “But women were very resolute, saying, ‘We want birth control.’ ”

In 2008, Lila Rose, a college student at U.C.L.A. and the founder of an anti-abortion group called Live Action, released four audio recordings of a man trying to make donations to Planned Parenthood clinics to pay for black women’s abortions. In one, the caller, played by James O’Keefe III, the provocateur recently arrested on charges that he tried to tamper with the telephones of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said, “You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better,” to which the Planned Parenthood employee replies, “Understandable, understandable.”

Planned Parenthood has apologized for the employees’ statements and says they do not reflect the organization’s values or policies.

The recordings led to calls by black leaders to withdraw financing of Planned Parenthood, which receives about $350 million a year in government money for education and medical services. They reinvigorated old claims that the organization was a front for racial genocide and that Sanger viewed blacks as undesirable.

Scholars acknowledge that Sanger did ally herself with eugenics, at the time a mainstream movement, but said she believed that birth control, sterilization and abortion should be voluntary and not based on race. She was also allied with black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. King, who praised her efforts to bring birth control to black families.

“It’s unfair to characterize those efforts as racially targeted in a negative way,” said Ellen Chesler, a historian and Sanger biographer, who is now on the board of Planned Parenthood.

Still, enough threads of truth weave through the theory to make “Maafa 21,” the documentary whose name is a Swahili word used to refer to the slavery era, persuasive to some viewers, at least at a recent screening at Morris Brown College, a historically black institution in Atlanta.

“Before we saw the movie, I was pro-choice,” said Markita Eddy, a sophomore. But were she to get pregnant now, Ms. Eddy said, “it showed me that maybe I should want to keep my child no matter what my position was, just because of the conspiracy.”

Pelosi’s Challenge - Corraling Votes for a Health Bill

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The future of President Obama’s health care overhaul now rests largely with two blocs of swing Democrats in the House of Representatives — abortion opponents and fiscal conservatives — whose indecision signals the difficulties Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces in securing the votes necessary to pass the bill.

With Republicans unified in their opposition, Democrats are drafting plans to try on their own to pass a bill based on one Mr. Obama unveiled before his bipartisan health forum last week. His measure hews closely to the one passed by the Senate in December, but differs markedly from the one passed by the House.

That leaves Ms. Pelosi in the tough spot of trying to keep wavering members of her caucus on board, while persuading some who voted no to switch their votes to yes — all at a time when Democrats are worried about their prospects for re-election.

Representative Dennis Cardoza, Democrat of California, typifies the speaker’s challenge. The husband of a family practice doctor, he is intimately familiar with the failings of the American health care system. His wife “comes home every night,” he said, “angry and frustrated at insurance companies denying people coverage they have paid for.”

But as a member of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, Mr. Cardoza is not convinced that Mr. Obama’s bill offers the right prescription. It lacks anti-abortion language he favors, and he does not think it goes far enough in cutting costs. So while he voted for the House version — “with serious reservations,” he said — he is now on the fence.

“I think we can do better,” Mr. Cardoza said of the president’s proposal.

Representative Frank Kratovil Jr., Democrat of Maryland, is also unconvinced. He voted against the House bill on the grounds that it is too big and too costly — a view that some constituents in his Republican-leaning district share. In case he did not get the message, one of them hanged him in effigy this past summer outside his district office on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

“This system is broken; we have to do something,” Mr. Kratovil said. “But my preference would be to do smaller things.”

For the moment, there is no actual bill. The tentative plan calls for the both the House and the Senate to use a parliamentary device known as reconciliation to pass a compromise measure.

The tactic is intended to avoid a Republican filibuster, but in the Senate, the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, faces challenges if he tries to use it. He is having trouble persuading a majority of his caucus to go along.

In the House, lawmakers like Mr. Kratovil, Mr. Cardoza and other swing Democrats will come under increasing scrutiny from leadership as a vote draws near. Of the 219 Democrats who initially voted in favor of the House measure, roughly 40 did so in part because it contained the so-called Stupak amendment, intended to discourage insurers from covering abortion.

Some, notably Representative Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat for whom the amendment is named, will almost certainly switch their yes votes to no because the new version being pushed by Mr. Obama would strip out the House bill’s abortion restrictions in favor of Senate language that many of them consider unacceptable.

An additional 39, like Mr. Kratovil, are fiscal conservatives who voted no the first time around. Ms. Pelosi is hoping that she can get some to switch those no votes to yes in favor of Mr. Obama’s less expensive measure.

But persuading Democrats who are already on record as opposing a health overhaul to do a turnabout will not be an easy task, especially during a midterm election year in which Democrats’ political prospects already look bleak. Of the 39 Democrats who voted against the House measure, 31, including Mr. Kratovil, represent districts that were won in 2008 by Senator John McCain of Arizona, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival. Fourteen, including Mr. Kratovil, are freshmen, who are generally considered more politically vulnerable than more senior lawmakers.

“The concern among Democrats right now is that there are more yes votes reconsidering than no votes,” said David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “My sense is that for Democrats to pass this bill, they would have to convince several members who are already in serious jeopardy, even after voting no on the first health care bill, to put passage of the bill ahead of their own chances of being competitive in the fall.”

But politicians do not want to be martyrs. They want to hold onto their seats.

Ms. Pelosi is facing resistance from some of her most senior members, like Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He has been in office since 1977, but is facing his toughest re-election challenge in years.

Mr. Skelton says he does not see any improvements in the measure that would cause him to vote in favor of it; like Mr. Kratovil, he favors a smaller, less ambitious bill. “It would be a lot easier,” he said, “if we cut this back to basics — take two or three or four issues on which everyone agrees and build on it.”

Others, like Representative Jason Altmire, a Pennsylvania Democrat who also voted against the House bill, seem to wonder aloud why Mr. Obama is bothering. With so many Democrats feeling nervous about their past votes in favor of the health bill, Mr. Altmire said, he can imagine vote-switching in only one direction: from yes to no.

“I don’t know of any no votes at this point that would switch unless the bill is substantially changed, including me,” he said. “And I know of a handful of yes votes who regret it and would relish the opportunity to put a no vote on the board so they could go back home and talk about that.”

Analysts like Mr. Wasserman say Ms. Pelosi’s best chances for no-to-yes conversions rest with Democrats who are retiring, because they do not have to worry about their political fortunes in the fall. So far, there are only three: Representative John Tanner and Representative Bart Gordon, both of Tennessee, and Representative Brian Baird of Washington.

Mr. Tanner has told colleagues he has no intention of switching his vote, according to one Democratic lawmaker who has spoken with him. And in interviews on Friday, Mr. Gordon and Mr. Baird sounded decidedly noncommittal.

Mr. Gordon said his constituents were “starting to get a little bit tired” of hearing about health care. He said he wanted to see “at least a partially bipartisan bill” — something that now seems impossible in the House, given that the lone Republican who voted in favor last time, Representative Anh Cao of Louisiana, has publicly changed his mind.

Mr. Baird said he was ”totally undecided” about whether he could support the new version taking shape in Congress, though he did say the bipartisan forum Mr. Obama conducted at Blair House on Thursday would “potentially” make him more likely to vote for the legislation, perhaps because Republicans seemed so dug in against it.

“At several points,” Mr. Baird said, “President Obama tried to find common ground, only to see the other side go back on message.”

Publicly, House Democratic leaders are trying to sound upbeat. The House Democratic whip, Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said last week that he felt ”pretty good” about the chances of passing Mr. Obama’s bill. But the leadership has not yet started counting votes, and a senior House leadership aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, conceded that rounding them up would not be easy.

“It’s going to be a heavy lift,” this aide said, ”but so have many other votes. In the last health care vote we really didn’t have the majority until the afternoon, and this will probably be that way too. That’s how these votes come together in the end.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

Changing Face in Poland - Skinhead Puts on Skullcap

By DAN BILEFSKY

WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”

Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.

Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.

Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.

Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.

“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”

The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.

In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.

Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said.

Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.

“Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.”

One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said.

Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.

“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ”

Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.

When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.

“I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.”

Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed.

“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”

At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.

Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ”

And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.

Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.

In Yemen’s South, Protests Could Cause More Instability

By ROBERT F. WORTH

ADEN, Yemen — Less than an hour’s drive outside this dilapidated port town, the Yemeni government’s authority is scarcely visible, and a different flag appears, that of the old independent state of South Yemen.

The flags are one sign of a rapidly spreading protest movement across the south that now threatens to turn into a violent insurgency if its demands are not met. That could further destabilize Yemen, already the poorest and one of the most troubled countries in the Arab world, and create a broader haven for Al Qaeda here.

The movement’s leaders say the Yemeni government — based in the north — has systematically discriminated against the south, expropriating land, expelling southerners from their jobs and starving them of public money. They speak with deep nostalgia of the 128-year British occupation in South Yemen, saying the British, who withdrew in 1967, fostered the rule of law, tolerance and prosperity. The north, they say, respects only the gun.

In recent months, calls for secession have grown louder after a harsh government crackdown on demonstrations and opposition newspapers. The movement’s leaders say that they believe in peaceful protest, but that their ability to control younger and more violent supporters is fraying.

“It is too late for half measures or reforms,” said Zahra Saleh Abdullah, one of the few Southern Movement leaders who agreed to be identified in print. “We demand an independent southern republic, and we have the right to defend ourselves if they continue to kill us and imprison us.”

Another movement leader, sitting across the room, held up a coin minted under the British in 1964 and pointed to the words engraved on it: South Arabia.

“This is our true identity, not Yemen,” he said. “A southern republic or death.”

Public outrage swelled last month after Yemeni security forces laid siege to the house of a prominent newspaper editor in Aden, setting off a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire as the editor and his young children cowered inside. (The government said he was stockpiling weapons.) They were not injured, but the clash left at least one of the family’s guards dead and others wounded, fueling more demonstrations. All told, more than 100 people have been killed in clashes with the police since the movement began in 2007, its leaders say, and about 1,500 supporters remain in prison.

In some rural areas of South Yemen, police officers refuse to wear their uniforms for fear of being shot, according to several accounts from local residents.

The Yemeni government has largely dismissed the movement as a small band of malcontents and has repeatedly accused its leaders of being affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The movement’s leaders call that an outrageous perversion of the truth: they say that they stand for law, tolerance and democracy, and that it is the north that has a history of using jihadists as proxy warriors. But some human rights workers say a shared hatred of the government could be creating a sense of unity between some members of the movement — which is broad and very loosely organized — and members of Al Qaeda.

Perhaps a greater danger, some say, is the spread of lawlessness across the south if the movement’s demands for greater equity are not addressed and it grows more violent. The movement’s own internal contradictions also pose a real threat.

“There is no clear leadership, everyone wants to be the boss,” said Afra Khaled Hariri, a lawyer here who has represented arrested members of the movement. The movement’s leaders include socialists and Islamists with wildly different goals and unresolved disputes dating to internal conflicts between socialist factions that left thousands of southerners dead during the 1980s.

“If the movement succeeds in making a separate state, I expect disaster because of our bloody past,” Ms. Hariri said. And Aden — the heart of the British protectorate and the base of the south’s intelligentsia — would be the chief victim, she added.

For that reason, some in the south say, the best solution is not secession, but a political accommodation in which the north agrees to address some of the movement’s main grievances about land expropriation and job discrimination. Many also say that moving away from Yemen’s highly centralized system of government and granting the provinces more power to govern themselves would ease tensions.

So far the government has shown little sign it intends to do that.

Behind the Southern Movement’s protests is an old belief that North and South Yemen are fundamentally different societies, and that their unification — achieved with great fanfare on both sides in 1990 — has been a failure.

The differences are apparent even to a first-time visitor. Aden has churches, parks, a smaller model of Big Ben and a stately garden where a statue of Queen Victoria presides. The roads, though a little faded, are generally better than those in the north. It is a commonplace that people respect red lights and driving lanes here, unlike in the north.

The people of the south are generally better educated, a legacy not only of the British but of the Socialist government that ruled here during the 1970s. Although they shattered the economy and suppressed their opponents brutally, the Socialists also put an end to harmful tribal practices like child marriage, championed women’s equality and achieved some of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world.

All those achievements have since collapsed: literacy and education have dropped precipitously across the south, child marriage has returned and lawlessness prevails.

Many here blame the north for all that. A brief civil war broke out in 1994, during which the north used jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan as proxy fighters.

“They want to push us into backwardness so we are like them,” said Ali Abdo, a professor of transportation engineering at Aden University and a member of a party that supports decentralization but not secession. “Aden was tolerant: there were Jews, Christians, Muslims all living together here. The North is not.”

The Southern Movement began in 2007 with protests led by former military officers who said they had been mistreated and denied pensions after the 1994 civil war. Gradually, it has grown to encompass other groups. Last year, it received a large boost when Tareq al-Fadhli, a former Afghan jihadist and ally of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, defected to the movement.

The movement now includes a substantial body of powerful tribal figures as well as Aden-based intellectuals and political figures. There is a 42-member leadership committee, though it is not clear how many of the movement’s supporters it represents. Most supporters seem to acknowledge Ali Salim al-Bidh, the exiled former president of South Yemen, as their leader. Mr. Bidh emerged from years of silence recently and began actively advocating southern independence.

The movement has its own songs, which can be heard blasting from the open windows of cars in southern towns. “We swear to God, we will not put up with this corrupt dictator and his gang, even if the whole sky erupts in fire,” goes one song by Aboud Khawaja, a singer now based in Qatar.

This month, a 27-year-old man named Faris Tamah was arrested near Aden while playing that song from his car stereo, and he was later shot to death in prison after being tortured, said several movement supporters who know his family and say they saw a medical report. Yemen’s government-run newspapers later ran an article saying that Mr. Tamah was arrested for drunken driving and committed suicide in custody by grabbing an officer’s gun and shooting himself. “The movement began with demands, but they were refused and the pressure grew,” Professor Abdo said. “Now, the movement is in every house in the south.”

Int’l peace monitors return to Mindanao

By Cynthia Balana
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:52:00 02/28/2010

MANILA--THE 60-MAN INTERNATIONal Monitoring Team (IMT) overseeing the ceasefire between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is expected to return to Mindanao Sunday after both sides resumed peace talks last month.

Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Rafael Seguis, chief government negotiator, said in a recent interview the IMT members would come from Brunei, Libya, Japan and Malaysia.

The European Union, Qatar, Indonesia and Norway had also been invited to join the team, Seguis said.

The IMT, which has a one-year renewable mandate, would be redeployed on the first week of March, he added.

The Japanese Embassy in Manila said two Japanese development experts—Tomonori Kikuchi, first secretary of the Japanese Embassy in the Philippines, and Yusuke Mori, second secretary of the embassy, would be sent to IMT headquarters in Cotabato City Sunday.

Both experts would be working on the socioeconomic development aspect of the IMT, including assessment of the needs for reconstruction and development, monitoring of development projects in the former conflict-affected areas, and the formulation of a comprehensive development plan.

“Japan has recognized the significance of the Mindanao peace process and contributed to its progress through various assistance projects called J-BIRD and participation in the International Contact Group among others,” the Japanese Embassy said in a statement.

Seguis said a 20-man team from Malaysia was also expected to arrive today.

On Feb. 17, an eight-man IMT advance team headed by Lt. Gen. Datuk Raja Mohammed Affendi bin Raja Mohamed, chief of staff of the Malaysian Armed Forces headquarters, arrived in Manila before proceeding to Mindanao to conduct an ocular inspection.

Malaysia: Banning of Books Alarms Freedom Advocates

Posted: 2010-02-24

By Baradan Kuppusamy

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 24 (Asia Media Forum) — The confiscation and banning of books by Malaysian authorities is sending alarm bells ringing among activists, who want the repeal of laws that the government is using to suppress freedom of expression.

Home Ministry officials last week continued to raid numerous bookstores to confiscate books and publications by ‘Malaysiakini’, an independent news website that has been critical of government policies.

The ministry says it needs to “study and review” these books for content deemed to be against national security. But for ‘Malaysiakini’ chief editor Steven Gan, the action amounts to harassment of writers and booksellers.

Two publications by Malaysiakini, ‘1Funny Malaysia’ and ‘Where is Justice’, have virtually been banned because bookstores are afraid to sell them and people are afraid to buy because of official harassment, he said. Thus far, a dozen bookstores across this South-east Asian country have had their stocks of the two publications seized for “study and review.”

“According to Home Ministry officials, the books were suspected to cause harm to public order, morality, public safety and international relations,” Gan told IPS. “The books are not banned, but they want to seize the books for review purposes.”

“They can get the books from us,” he said. “There is no need to harass the bookstores.”

This follows the banning by the publication division of the Home Ministry of books that include works written by human rights activists and Muslim feminist academics.

Even the use of particular phrases like the word Allah, the Arabic word for God, is banned in some publications, with officials arguing that these words are exclusive to Islam.

“These works (Malaysiakini publications) are about current issues and written to arouse critical thinking and encourage healthy debates,” said political humourist Zunar, author of ‘1Funny Malaysia’, a collection of his best-known political cartoons that lambast the ruling power elites.

The title is a pun on the ‘1Malaysia campaign’ by Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is hoping to recoup political losses by convincing the public that the government is for all of them and not just for the ruling elite.

“It is a violation of press freedom, freedom of expression and the principles of democracy,” Zunar told IPS.
The spate of raids and confiscations is being done under the Printing Presses and Publications Act, a law enacted to defeat a communist insurrection in the late 1940s.

While it remains in the books, opposition lawmaker Murugesan Kulasegaran said: “The law is outdated. It has no place in a liberal and progressive county. It should be repealed entirely.”

The mere possession of a banned book can lead to a jail term and fine of 5,000 Malaysian ringgit (1,470 U.S. dollars).

Meantime, the judiciary, which media and civil society hope to turn to for redress, has given mixed signals on the issue.

While some judges have ordered the government to lift the ban on books, others have supported the home minister in their judgements, arguing that the minister knows better and has the power to use his discretion to preserve “public safety and national security”.

In two conflicting judgements in the first two months of 2010, one judge lifted a ban on the book ‘Muslim Women and the Challenges of Islamic Extremism’ by Muslim feminist academic Noraini Othman and another confirmed a ban on ‘March 8’, a book by lawyer K Arumugam about the origins of a 2001 riot between Hindus and Muslims in the city.

Deputy Home Minister Fu Ah Kiow justified the ban as “just ordinary procedure”.
“We have to act to because some books are unfavourable for the public, cause ill feelings among the races,” the English-language daily ‘The Star’ quoted him as saying.

Discussions of race and ethnicity are sensitive in this country, where racial tensions have simmered under its multi-ethnic surface since independence in 1957 and where laws discourage inflammatory statements and publications.

Some 55 percent of Malaysia’s more than 28 million people are Malay, most of them Muslim, while 25 percent are Chinese, 12 percent indigenous peoples, and nearly 8 percent Indians.

Records in the past two decades show that some 7,000 books have been banned, the bulk of them from abroad. “Most of these books never enter the bookstores because they are vetted first on arrival,” said a senior manager of a leading publishing company, requesting anonymity. “We simply follow the Home Ministry orders.”

The current crackdown on books and publications comes after a lull during the 2003-2008 tenure of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi. During that time, there was greater tolerance for dissent, arbitrary arrests were suspended and media enjoyed greater freedom although none of the repressive laws that curb free speech and assembly were repealed.

The Kuala-Lumpur based Centre for Independent Journalism says the government is abusing the Printing Presses and Publication Act to harass the legitimate political opposition.

“Publications that challenge views propagated by the government are targeted. Writers whose books are banned are often not informed,” said the centre’s executive director Gayathry Venkiteswaran. “Publishers are vulnerable and the public and civil society are kept in the dark over what can be read and what is banned. This law needs to be repealed entirely.”

But the government has no plans to repeal the law and is in fact tightening its clauses administratively, political analysts said.

“Free speech and freedom of expression are under attack,” Kulasegaran said, adding that the government is more insecure following the massive losses that the ruling party Barisan Nasional suffered in the 2008 polls. “They are shaken and hope to recover political losses by curbing free speech. Intolerance is on the rise and they want everyone to toe the line. Alternative views that can undermine their status are strongly discouraged,” he said.

Often, books stay in limbo for months or even years and are officially classified as “being evaluated” by the Home Ministry until it is no longer economical to place them in bookstores.

One such book under ‘evaluation’ is ‘Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times’, written by Australian journalist Barry Wain.

The book arrived at the customs’ warehouse on Dec. 24, 2009 and is still “under evaluation”, even though former prime minister Mahathir himself has appealed to the authorities to release it. He has said he is not “afraid” of anything in the book, which accuses him of mismanagement on a grand scale during his 22 years as prime minister.

Mahathir’s own book, the controversial ‘The Malay Dilemma’, was banned in 1968. The ban was only lifted years later, after he became prime minister.

UMNO/BN betrayed its pledge of power-sharing by rotation of Sabah Chief Minister’s post - Lim Kit Siang

It is coming to a year since Datuk Seri Najib Razak became the sixth Prime Minister of Malaysia bombarding Malaysians with his multi-million ringgit “1Malaysia” slogan and campaign.

It is sad and ironical that despite such high-intensity 1Malaysia publicity campaign in the past 11 months, Malaysians have never been more polarized both on race and religion, reminding Malaysians that they are even further from the goal of a united Malaysian nation, as illustrated by issues such as the Allah controversy, the burning of churches and attack of mosques and other places of religious worship, the cow-head and pig-head incidents; irresponsible politicking of race and religion as the mischievous attempt by Umno leaders and Umno-controlled media to paint the Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng and Penang Pakatan Rakyat state government as anti-Malay and anti-Islam; the racist brain-washing courses conducted by Biro Tata Negara of the Prime Minister’s Department, resulting in “ultra” statements like dismissing the Chinese and Indians as “pendatang” and defaming the Indians as coming to Malaysia as beggars and Chinese women coming as prostitutes; the rise of what UMNO elder statesman Tengku Razaleigh has described as “rabid racism” like the surfacing of organizations like Perkasa, etc.

Everywhere and everyday in Malaysia, there are more evidence of the absence of 1Malaysia rather than its presence.

In Kota Kinabalu today, I saw new evidence of the absence rather than the presence of 1Malaysia – with two conflicting and competing sets of billboards, banners and advertisements of Chinese New Year greetings by MCA in Sabah.

There is one set of Chinese New Year greetings by the “stand-alone” Sabah MCA Chairman Edward Khoo, Assistant Minister to the Chief Minister competing with another set of Chinese New Year greetings featuring the lame-duck MCA President Datuk Seri Ong Tee Keat accompanied by his Sabah MCA claque of supporters.

When under his leadership, the Barisan Nasional and its component parties cannot present a united front, like having 1MCA, 1Umno, 1Gerakan, 1Barisan Nasional, what credence and credibility can there be for Najib’s 1Malaysia?
Is there 1Sabah?

2013 in three years’ time mark Sabah’s 50th anniversary in the formation of Malaysia. It is appropriate in preparing for the occasion to seriously assess whether the dreams of Sabahans in 1963 to form Malaysia together with Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia had been fulfilled or betrayed.

Have the people of Sabah been granted their full citizenship rights as Malaysians in the past five decades?

Let the debate and soul-searching begin as to how one of the richest states in Sabah had been reduced in five decades to become the poorest state in the federation.

In the nineties, the Barisan Nasional promised Sabahans that poverty in Sabah would be eradicated in the year 2,000. However, instead of abolishing poverty in 2000, Sabah’s poverty rate became the worst in the whole of the country.

Barisan Nasional next promised that hard-core poverty in Sabah would be abolished in 2010. This is another candidate heading for the mountainous dump heap of Barisan Nasional broken promises, in Sabah and in Malaysia!

Sabahans and Malaysians remember that to topple the PBS Sabah government, Umno and Barisan Nasional pledged that if they come to power in Sabah, they would be genuine power-sharing through the rotation of the post of Sabah Chief Minister among the three major communities in the state.

What is the Umno/Barisan Nasional record of their rule of Sabah in the past 16 years since 1994?

UMNO/BN had betrayed their pledge of power-sharing by rotation of Sabah Chief Minister’s post as in the past 16 years, the Chief Minister’s post was held by a Kadazan native for 9 months, Chinese for 4 years and Umno for more than 11 years!

Nothing could be more eloquent than this episode to highlight the enormity of the breach of faith and betrayal of pledge of Umno/Barisan Nasional to the people of Sabah in the past 16 years of their rule of Sabah.

This is a far cry from the great promises shared by Sabahans in the early decades of nationhood.

Earlier today, together with DAP MPs Hiew King Cheu (Kota Kinabalu), Teo Nie Ching (Serdang), Lim Lip Eng (Segambut) and DAP Kadazan leaders Edward Muji and Jeffrey Kumin, I revisited the “Double Six” Mausoleum to pay respects to the great Sabah sons who perished in the Triple Six tragedy of June 6, 1976 – Chief Minister Tun Fuad Stephens and State Ministers, Datuk Salleh Sulong, Datuk Peter Mojuntin and Chong Thien Vun.

Almost exactly 32 years ago on February 25, 1978, I had first visited the “Double Six” Mausoleum as well as the grave of Peter Mojuntin at St. Michael’s Church, Penampang.

Sabah history would be very different today if not for the tragic air crash of June 6, 1976 wiping out the core of the Sabah cabinet.

It is time that Kadazans and Sabahans reflect what went wrong that the rights of Kadazans and ordinary Sabahans had become so emasculated and marginalized while the vast rich resources had been monopolized by a few.

In this connection, the time has also come for the Federal Government to lift the ban on the biography of Peter Mojuntin, “The Golden Son of the Kadazans”, written by my old friend and DAP comrade, Bernard Sta Maria, who was Malacca State Assemblyman.

The book was banned on June 22 1978 on grounds of public security and order. This is utterly unacceptable. Those who disagree with the interpretation of events in the life of Peter Mojuntin can write a rebuttal or come out with their own publications – but there can be no justification or excuse for the ban of the book “The Golden Son of the Kadazans”.

[Speech at the dinner with Kadazan representatives at Windbelll Restaurant, Kota Kinabalu on Friday, 26th February 2010 at 9 pm]

Chaos in the National Parliament as Democratic Party followers attack Fretilin MP's in the Chamber

ETLJB 27/02/2010 - In the wake of a fracas in the East Timor National Parliament, President Jose Ramos Horta has called on members of the Parliament to control themselves during Parliamentary debates.

President Horta made the call following the recent quarrel between the Fretilin and Democratic Party MPs in the Parliament while it was in Plenary Session. Followers of the Democratic Party stormed the Fretilin Bancada and threatened Fretilin members.

President Horta stressed that the MPs should use proper words in the Parliamentary debate recalling that the country is still in a fragile condition and should stop physical confrontation and engage in constructive debate to better develop the country.

Fretilin MP Osorio Florindo demanded that the President of the Parliament, Fernando Lasama de Araujo, who is also the President of the Democratic Party and former student resistance leader , to take the Democratic Party followers involved in the attack in Parliament to the court.

Mr. Florindo said that the attack in the Parliament against Fretilin MP is a crime and should be tried in the court.

Mr. Florindo also said that the constitution guaranteed the right of the MPs to discuss issues faced by the country and people should not wrongfully interfere with the Parliamentary debate.



Sources: Radio Timor Leste 26/02/2010 and Suara Timor Lorosa’e, February 25, 2010 language source: Tetun