Inside Indonesia - Celebrating community

A temple procession brings Chinese culture to life in Jakarta’s streets

Margaret Chan

A god's palanquin Margaret Chan

On Sunday 18 October 2009, contingents from 33 Chinese temples from all over Java staged what was probably Jakarta’s largest ever Chinese religious festival. Accompanied by musicians, lion and dragon dancers, hundreds of devotees paraded through the streets of Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown, carrying 38 images of Chinese deities mounted on palanquins. The procession stretched for more than a kilometre as it wound its way around a ten kilometre circuit in and out of the Glodok district. Three police cars cleared a way for the procession through the city’s perpetual traffic jam.

The focus of the parade was the Fat Cu Kung temple in Glodok itself. No grand place of worship, this little temple’s prayer hall is really just the cramped front room of a private residence at the end of a cul-de-sac off Jalan Kemenangan. By way of enthusiastic celebrations of its deity’s birthday, however, the Fat Cu Kung community punches well above its weight. It started observing the anniversary with a religious procession in 2006, and each year the celebrations have become progressively bigger, yet another sign of the renaissance of Chinese culture in a district that eleven years ago was the scene of violent anti-Chinese riots.

Bringing migrants together

Fat Cu Kung is portrayed as having a black face, staring eyes and a mane of wild black hair reaching to his waist. His cult originates in Fujian province in China, from where it has spread to Taiwan and Southeast Asia. The Chinese have a long history of migration and their success in their adopted lands is largely due to a tradition of mutual help. New migrants are received and resettled within host communities by a network of organisations whose connections extend beyond country borders. Welfare groups, clan associations, trade guilds, schools and hospitals all form part of the network, but the centre of all social activities has always been the community temples. Traditionally, it is on the birthdays of the patron deities that everybody gathers to re-commit to the communal ties that bind them together.

A statue of a deity is the focus of devotion at temples. In addition, each deity is also represented in a number of other typically smaller images, specifically for travel purposes. This can be no more than a short trip within the village, such as when a member of the parish is very ill. In this case, a small image of the deity might be brought to the patient’s house to ensure that the sick person gets the full attention of the god.

Chinese gods enjoy outings so devotees dress their images in travelling clothes and take them on journeys, even moving them to new homelands

Chinese gods enjoy outings so devotees dress their images in travelling clothes and take them on journeys, even moving them to new homelands. This is why the main statues in temples of the Chinese diaspora are often small – they are the original diminutive images brought from the ancestral village.

The images of the gods embody the cult, but ash from the container in which incense is burnt – called a censer – is also important. When a branch temple is set up, ash from the main censer of the mother temple must be collected and brought to the branch location. This is the ritual of fenxiang, which translates as ‘dividing the incense’. At a temple festival, the gods on parade form the main spectacle. But it is the less ostentatious ceremony of fenxiang that is socially binding. Dividing of incense ash represents a commitment to a shared identity and destiny, and it is this spirit of solidarity that joins Chinese around the world.

When representatives from the 33 temples from all over Java gathered at the Fat Cu Kung temple in Glodok, each party brought along a small censer of incense ash. Placed together on a common altar table, the collection of censers represent the communal bonds that join the temples in a mutual help network. Bringing together such widely-dispersed temple communities, the Fat Cu Kung celebrations represented an important event in Indonesian-Chinese communal relationships. According to several people I spoke to at the parade, the celebration was the grandest Chinese religious festival Jakarta had seen since the start of reformasi.

All the excitement of a parade

A frisson of anticipation shot through the crowd when a large drum was struck at 1pm to mark the start of the parade. Several bands of musicians immediately took up the cue. Cymbals clashed and gamelan gongs were beaten as the palanquins were lifted onto shoulders. These palanquins had been trucked into Glodok from places like Jepara, Losarai Brebes, Semarang, Tegal and Cilacap in Central Java; Bogor, Kerawang and Purwakarta in West Java; and Pamekasan Madura, East Java. Some of them were as large as the cab of the ubiquitous scooter-taxis (bajaj) of Jakarta. The Indonesian word for these heavy chairs is joli, and the English word ‘jolly’ describes the exuberance that permeated the Fat Cu Kung celebrations.

Muslim students join the march Margaret Chan

In the euphoria of the moment the devotees swung the palanquins onto their shoulders, ignoring the pain of the carrying shafts cutting into their flesh. Caught in the excitement of it all I impulsively leapt onto a friend’s motorcycle. We zig-zagged between cars and rode up and down pavements, following the procession part of the way and then we cut through backstreets to outflank them and get to a vantage point where we stopped to let the parade pass by. The route began at the Fat Cu Kung temple on Jalan Kemenangan in the Patekwan district, leading on to Jalan Pintu Kecil, Jalan Kali Besar Barat, Jalan Kali Besar Timur 3, around Fatahillah Museum Square, Jalan Lodan, and past Plaza Glodok on Jalan Hayam Wuruk, Jalan Mangga Besar. It then made a U-turn to head back up Jalan Mangga Besar to Jalan Gajah Mada before returning to Jalan Kemenangan.

Religious differences set aside

Watching the parade, I was struck by the sight of marching bands of Muslim students and a contingent of dragon dancers from the Indonesian armed forces at the head of the column. Right after the vanguard of police cars, came the Guntur Naga Geni, a dragon dance troupe from the Yon Armed-11 Kostrad, a land artillery battalion of the Indonesian Army’s Strategic Reserve. Earlier, I had chatted with the soldiers while we waited for the start of the parade in the main hall of the Ricci Catholic School on Jalan Kemenangan. As they tucked into their specially-catered halal meal of curry and rice, I ate noodles prepared by volunteers of the Fat Cu Kung temple. These macho men and their twin dragons were followed by three marching bands of high school youths. Two groups played on brass instruments and drums while the third comprised a band of girls wearing headscarfs and twirling large flags. I heard that they came from Islamic schools in Kerawang, just west of Jakarta.

Right after the vanguard of police cars, came the Guntur Naga Geni, a dragon dance troupe from the Yon Armed-11 Kostrad

The military dragon dance team and the school marching bands were paid a fee for taking part in the Fat Cu Kung parade. It was a pragmatic arrangement, strictly commercial and entirely devoid of religious involvement. Such a matter-of-fact attitude is also evident among the troupes that regularly prowl the lanes of Glodok, going from shop to shop to perform the Chinese lion dance. Most of them are made up of non-Chinese youths, many of whom must be Muslim. But religion does not come into the picture. If the Chinese will pay for perfunctory performances of lion dance at their place of business, then the youths see no problem in quite literally dancing to that tune.

Such pragmatic arrangements are not out of place in Indonesia. Indeed, they offer an opportunity for different communities to come together in peaceful solidarity in a society where ethnic and religious connections are still being re-negotiated. People can get together for all sorts of reasons. It does not matter if the objectives are lofty or prosaic. The important thing is that they do get together.

Margaret Chan (margaretchan@smu.edu.sg) is Practice Assistant Professor of Theatre/Performance Studies, School Social Sciences, Singapore Management University.

Inside Indonesia 99: Jan-Mar 2010

Israeli-Palestinian West Bank Success Story Offers Hope

By Joe Klein

Sometimes the prosaic can be breathtaking. I am standing in the new showroom of a company that manufactures plumbing supplies in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Mansour Izgayer, one of three brothers who own the factory, is giving me a tour of his business and his life. He and his brothers were living in the U.S. when peace seemed to break out in the Middle East after the 1993 Oslo accords. They decided to return home, as did many other members of the Palestinian diaspora. They built their company, Royal Industries & Trading, persistently, even after the prospects for peace shattered in the second intifadeh and it became near impossible to do business in the midst of a war zone, near impossible to move their products through Israeli checkpoints. It still isn't very easy, but the past few years have been much better. A new Palestinian government quietly began to restore order and emphasize economic growth. Israel removed many, but not all, checkpoints. Royal now has 360 employees, new product lines — fireplaces, welcome mats — and a new wing, complete with an assembly hall. It has an on-site mosque and a cafeteria. The Izgayer brothers' story is at the heart of the new optimism and old frustrations that mark the West Bank territory of Palestine. (See TIME's Middle East covers.)

A young woman enters the showroom, walking confidently toward us and smiling. "Very nice to meet you," she says. "I'm new here." She does not shake my hand; she is religious, dressed in a hijab and bulky overcoat. Her name is Samiya abu-Rayyan, and she is a bit of a miracle as well — a graduate of a new program, Education for Employment (EFE), that trains young Palestinians in how to get and keep jobs. She is a graduate of Hebron University, but she was entirely unprepared for the workplace. "I had many interviews, but I didn't know how to introduce myself," she says. EFE taught her everything from how to fill out a job application to how to deal with an angry boss — and how to look someone in the eye and smile, even though that ran counter to the tradition in which she was raised. She learned some business English and marketing as well. After several months of training, she interviewed with a bank and the plumbing company and received offers from both. She chose Royal because the Izgayer brothers offered a religiously conservative working environment and because of the company mosque. (See pictures of 60 years of Israel.)

And here is another odd, but inspiring, thing: Samiya would not have her new skills if it were not for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. On that day, a Jewish American real estate magnate named Ronald Bruder was desperately searching for his daughter, who worked in downtown New York City, near ground zero. His daughter turned up safe, but the shock and panic stirred him. "I started reading and thinking about the Middle East," Bruder told me recently. "And what I came to was this: if people were gainfully employed, maybe they wouldn't be so angry at us." Bruder began to travel the region, asking questions. "It was the Minister of Education in Jordan who told me, 'If you really want to help, what we need is soft skills.' I didn't know what soft skills were," Bruder said. "Now they're my life." In fact, they are the sort of skills that Samiya abu-Rayyan has acquired.

Bruder started EFE's first program in Jordan in 2006, but he quickly expanded to Morocco, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, plus Gaza and the West Bank. EFE's graduates number only in the dozens in the West Bank, but more classes are about to begin in Hebron and Ramallah. "We can expand pretty rapidly," he said, "if there are jobs for the people we graduate."

Watch TIME's video about Mike Huckabee's tour of Israel.

See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.

The West Bank GDP grew at around 8% in 2009, although that was an improvement on practically no economic activity at all. "We started from utter lawlessness, virtual disintegration in 2007," says Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister — an economist who graduated from the University of Texas and spent much of his career at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Palestinian Authority had been sundered by the Hamas coup in Gaza; Fayyad — a technocrat's technocrat — freely admits that governance in the West Bank had long been marked by corruption and ineptitude. "The only way to gain Palestinian statehood," Fayyad says, "was to start building the institutions of a credible state."

The first job was to regain control of the streets, which were in the hands of criminal gangs and radical militias. With the help of U.S. General Keith Dayton, the Palestinians trained five brigades (2,500 troops) of a new national-security force — with two more in the pipeline — and began training local police. "We started with Nablus, the most lawless city," says Fayyad. "Our policy was zero tolerance. Anyone who committed a crime was an outlaw, regardless of party affiliation." It seems to have worked. Nell Derick Debevoise, an American woman who works with an excellent pre- and after-school program in Nablus called Tomorrow's Youth, told me, "When I first got here, you couldn't walk the streets or go to the Old City. Now you can. In fact, there are some good restaurants opening there." (See the top 10 news stories of 2009.)

Security, Fayyad assumed, was one prerequisite of economic development. Another was transparent governance. "We're firing incompetents and thieves in the government. You can't be taken seriously unless you fire people," Fayyad says. As a result, "we're beginning to see some economic growth. Cement consumption is up 30%." Part of the growth has been funded by aid from the U.S., Europe and the Islamic world, which helps pay the salaries of government workers and funds new infrastructure projects. In 2008, Fayyad held a conference in Bethlehem, looking to begin the next phase — private development — and got some takers, including a Palestinian developer named Bashar Masri who is building an entire new city for 50,000 just outside Ramallah. "We could not have done this without Fayyad's reforms," Masri told me. "I mean, you deal with the police or with bureaucrats. They don't ask for a bribe. That never happened in Palestine before."

But the progress is taking place in the context of repression: the West Bank still has many aspects of a low-security prison. Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the water supply and the electricity. As you drive from Ramallah north to Nablus, illegal Israeli settlements and outposts command the tops of many hills — an infestation that most Palestinians, rightly, consider a continuing invasion of their land. Even the most optimistic Palestinians assume that the real Israeli plan is to wait them out, keep building settlements and force as many Palestinians into the diaspora as they can. Benjamin Netanyahu's recent decision to declare sites in the Arab cities of Hebron and Bethlehem Jewish historical landmarks seemed a provocation intended to cause the sort of mass violence that has destroyed the hopes of responsible Palestinians in the past. Fayyad's progress is as fragile as plate glass; the next rock thrown could shatter it. (See TIME's photo-essay "Life in the West Bank Settlements.")

"We are working hard. In fact, we have met every one of the obligations that we were assigned by the road map," says Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, referring to the peace process instituted by George W. Bush. Many Israelis, including members of the Netanyahu government, privately agree that the West Bank Palestinians, who had famously kicked away every good chance for peace they were offered, have finally gotten their act together. There has been no significant violence directed at Israel from the West Bank. Even the Hamas-controlled border with Gaza has been quiet. "On the other hand, what have the Israelis done to meet their road-map obligations?" Abbas continues. "What have they done with regard to stopping illegal settlement on our land?"

That is a very good question. Abbas and Fayyad plan to have all the components of a functioning Palestinian state in place in the West Bank by the summer of 2011. At that point, a different question arises — not just for Israel but for the U.S.: What obstacles are there to recognizing a legitimate state of Palestine? What excuses do we have left?

Survey Finds Slack Standards at Magazine Web Sites

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

The only thing standard about magazines’ Web sites is that there are no standards.

That is the chief finding of a research project conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review, which surveyed 665 consumer magazines on the practices and profitability of their Web sites.

“There isn’t yet a generally accepted set of norms for this new medium,” said Victor Navasky, chairman of the magazine. “There’s chaos out there.”

Columbia plans to release the survey on Monday, and publish an accompanying article on the magazine’s Web site at CJR.org.

For the project, Mr. Navasky and his researchers contacted about 3,000 magazines in the summer and fall of 2009, and 665 of them completed the survey. They represented a range of sizes: about 12 percent of respondents had print circulations of more than 500,000, which represents most major consumer magazines, like Time, Wired and Redbook.

About 51 percent had circulations of less than 100,000, which tend to be niche publications like ArtNews, New Jersey Monthly or Nascar Illustrated.

There was wide variance in most of the answers to survey questions — how and whether the sites made money, for one. Only a third of the Web sites reported making a profit.

More than half the magazines put their entire print editions online free. Four percent put all or almost all print content behind a paywall, and 10 percent put some of it behind a paywall. The rest post only some of their print output online, but all of it free.

But profitability and paywall did not appear to be tightly linked. About 49 percent of unprofitable Web sites gave away all of their content, and 65 percent of profitable Web sites did the same.

Copy-editing requirements online were less stringent than those in print at 48 percent of the magazines. And 11 percent did not copy-edit online-only articles at all.

A similar trend held with fact-checking. Although 57 percent of the magazines fact-check online submissions in the same way they fact-check print articles, 27 percent used a less-stringent process. And 8 percent did not fact-check online-only content at all. (The other 8 percent did not fact-check either print or online articles.)

There was also variance in how corrections were indicated to readers. Almost all of the magazine sites — 87 percent — corrected minor errors, like typos and misspellings, without telling readers of the change. And 45 percent of the sites changed factual errors without letting readers know they had gotten it wrong.

Those that did alert readers to errors had different ways of signaling it; 37 percent corrected the error and added an editor’s note explaining what had been changed, 6 percent left the inaccuracies intact and added an editor’s note about the error, and 1 percent put corrections in a special area of the site.

“One of the things that it appears to mean is that there’s this trade-off of standards for speed,” Mr. Navasky said of those topics. “The conventional wisdom is that you have to be there first in order to get traffic, and you need traffic in order to sell ads, therefore you do not have time to do conventional copy-editing and fact-checking.”

The sites’ approach to comments was not standardized, either. More than 40 percent of the sites depended on staff members to approve comments at their discretion, while just over 10 percent did not moderate comments at all. A slightly larger percentage used an automatic system to filter for comments that included offensive words or spam.

Mr. Navasky said he hoped the study would spark conversations about standards for magazines’ Web sites, similar to the standards that the American Society of Magazine Editors establishes for print editions.

“This is something where no one knows what anyone else is doing,” he said. “This is the first attempt to at least get the data out there,” he added, saying he would like the Columbia Journalism Review to hold a conference about the findings.

“The next step is to get everyone in a room together, and see whether we can identify the best practices,” he said.

Memo From Tripoli - Unknotting Father’s Reins in Hope of ‘Reinventing’ Libya

By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Prying open a closed economy is no easy job, especially if the country in question is Libya — a nation that has spent more than two decades with its back turned to the world. It becomes all the more challenging when doing so means taking on the legacy of your father and fighting an entrenched bureaucracy with little interest in serious change.

Yet that is the goal of Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son and possible successor to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, as he sets out to dismantle a legacy of Socialism and authoritarianism introduced by his father 40 years ago.

“It is hard work reinventing a country,” he said in an interview last month, as he slouched on a sofa in his villa in the hills above Tripoli, picking at a tray of fruit including fresh dates brought to him by a black-suited waiter. “But that is what we are doing. We will have a new constitution, new laws, a commercial and business code and now a flat tax of 15 percent.”

In the last few years, Mr. Qaddafi, 37, who has a doctorate from the London School of Economics, flawless English and a bold independent streak, has emerged as the Western-friendly face of Libya and symbol of its hopes for reform and openness. When he was nominated last year to lead a powerful government body overseeing tribal leaders, analysts saw it as a sign of his father’s endorsement.

But in Libya’s opaque politics, little is seldom as it appears. And it is far from clear to what extent the younger Mr. Qaddafi’s vision is official policy or wishful dreaming.

Despite his broad international appeal and evidence of popular support at home, analysts say that resistance to his pell-mell approach to modernization appears to be building.

Recently the government curtailed the operations of two crusading newspapers he backed. His entreaties for Western investment were undercut last month when the government imposed a visa ban on more than 20 European countries hoping to do business here. And the old, bellicose Libya seemed to hold sway last week when Colonel Qaddafi escalated a running feud with Switzerland by declaring a “jihad” against it.

The developments have bolstered the view that the hard-line faction championed by Seif Qaddafi’s equally ambitious older brother, Mutassim, the country’s national security adviser, was gaining ground.

“A lot of people have jumped on Seif’s bandwagon as if he were the future of Libya,” said Dana Moss, a Libya expert and the author of a forthcoming monograph on United States-Libya relations. “But that is not clear yet. In a future Libyan system both Seif and Mutassim will have a say, but the question is who will have more of a say.”

Since Libya agreed to renounce its nuclear weapons, an initiative led by Seif Qaddafi, and began to mend ties with the West in the last decade, experts predicted that the opening of the economy would soon follow, spurred by privatization and an influx of foreign investment beyond the presence of international oil companies.

Those expectations were buoyed last October when Seif Qaddafi was proposed to lead the umbrella grouping of local leaders, a position that would give him, like his brother, a voice in the government and an official platform to further his reform agenda.

But months later, he has yet to accept the job. In his first public comments on the subject in London in January, Seif Qaddafi said that until Libya adopted democratic institutions he would stay on the political sideline.

“I will not accept any position unless there is a new constitution, new laws and transparent elections,” he said. “Everyone should have access to public office. We should not have a monopoly on power.”

Instead, he has continued his high-wire act, using his status to occasionally challenge his father’s ways — pushing for openness, opposing the ubiquitous revolutionary committees, allowing human rights critics into the country — while trying to retain his viability as his father’s successor.

Some analysts see his reluctance to enter government as a calculated strategy to retain the aura of an outsider, to rise above the political infighting just as his father did in 1972 when he removed himself from government and adopted the title Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.

Free of bureaucratic restraints, Seif Qaddafi has been able to propose far-reaching ideas: tax-free investment zones, a tax haven for foreigners, the abolition of visa requirements and the development of luxury hotels.

“We can be the Dubai of North Africa,” he said, citing Libya’s proximity to Europe (the flight from London to Tripoli is under three hours), its abundant energy reserves and 1,200 miles of mostly unspoiled Mediterranean coastline. In the den of his villa, where a stuffed white tiger lay in watchful repose, a fountain gurgled peaceably nearby and the air was thick with incense, the idea seemed plausible. Libya is wealthier than debt-ridden, oil-poor Dubai. Its $15,000 gross domestic product per person ranks it above Poland, Mexico and Chile, according to the World Bank. The government’s sovereign fund, a reserve of oil revenues, boasts $65 billion. And the government has announced plans to invest $130 billion over the next three years to improve infrastructure.

But a descent into the center of Tripoli offers a bracing dose of reality. The streets are strewn with garbage, there are gaping holes in the sidewalks, tourist-friendly hotels and restaurants are few and far between. And while a number of seaside hotels are being built, the city largely ignores its most spectacular asset, the Mediterranean.

Unemployment is estimated as high as 30 percent and much of the potential work force is insufficiently trained.

“The whole country looks like a construction site,” said Mustafa Fetouri, a political analyst based in Tripoli. “But it is developing and growing Libya’s people, that is the real problem. We are not Dubai.”

Libya’s market economy remains more aspirational than real. On a recent weekday morning at the nascent Tripoli stock exchange, 10 or so brokers sat looking blankly at their screens while a handful of customers waited languorously nearby. Ten companies trade on the exchange, which says it does $400,000 worth of business on an average day.

“The cost of running the stock market is more than the daily trading volume,” said Shokri M. Ghanem, the chairman of the National Oil Corporation, the state oil company.

That scene is unlikely to change until the government releases its tight grip on the economy. But Mr. Ghanem, a former prime minister who supports efforts to open the economy, said the political resistance was formidable and has been bolstered by the world financial crisis. The same oil wealth that would finance Seif Qaddafi’s vision has propped up an entrenched elite vigorously opposed to reform.

“There are certain people high up in the government that are against privatization, even though a majority of Libyans wish to go for a market economy,” Mr. Ghanem said.

That majority includes people like Muhammad Younes, 35, a mechanical engineer in Tripoli who has not had a steady job for years. Libya may be wealthy, but he has nothing to show for it, despite his fluent English and a university education.

“No work, no chances, no job,” he said with a fatalistic shrug. “Yet we have so much money. Something must be wrong.”

White House Is Rethinking Nuclear Policy

By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — As President Obama begins making final decisions on a broad new nuclear strategy for the United States, senior aides say he will permanently reduce America’s arsenal by thousands of weapons. But the administration has rejected proposals that the United States declare it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, aides said.

Mr. Obama’s new strategy — which would annul or reverse several initiatives by the Bush administration — will be contained in a nearly completed document called the Nuclear Posture Review, which all presidents undertake. Aides said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will present Mr. Obama with several options on Monday to address unresolved issues in that document, which have been hotly debated within the administration.

First among them is the question of whether, and how, to narrow the circumstances under which the United States will declare it might use nuclear weapons — a key element of nuclear deterrence since the cold war.

Mr. Obama’s decisions on nuclear weapons come as conflicting pressures in his defense policy are intensifying. His critics argue that his embrace of a new movement to eliminate nuclear weapons around the world is naïve and dangerous, especially at a time of new nuclear threats, particularly from Iran and North Korea. But many of his supporters fear that over the past year he has moved too cautiously, and worry that he will retain the existing American policy by leaving open the possibility that the United States might use nuclear weapons in response to a biological or chemical attack, perhaps against a nation that does not possess a nuclear arsenal.

That is one of the central debates Mr. Obama must resolve in the next few weeks, his aides say.

Many elements of the new strategy have already been completed, according to senior administration and military officials who have been involved in more than a half-dozen Situation Room debates about it, and outside strategists consulted by the White House.

As described by those officials, the new strategy commits the United States to developing no new nuclear weapons, including the nuclear bunker-busters advocated by the Bush administration. But Mr. Obama has already announced that he will spend billions of dollars more on updating America’s weapons laboratories to assure the reliability of what he intends to be a much smaller arsenal. Increased confidence in the reliability of American weapons, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in a speech in February, would make elimination of “redundant” nuclear weapons possible.

“It will be clear in the document that there will be very dramatic reductions — in the thousands — as relates to the stockpile,” according to one senior administration official whom the White House authorized to discuss the issue this weekend. Much of that would come from the retirement of large numbers of weapons now kept in storage.

Other officials, not officially allowed to speak on the issue, say that in back-channel discussions with allies, the administration has also been quietly broaching the question of whether to withdraw American tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, where they provide more political reassurance than actual defense. Those weapons are now believed to be in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Turkey and the Netherlands.

At the same time, the new document will steer the United States toward more non-nuclear defenses. It relies more heavily on missile defense, much of it arrayed within striking distance of the Persian Gulf, focused on the emerging threat from Iran. Mr. Obama’s recently published Quadrennial Defense Review also includes support for a new class of non-nuclear weapons, called “Prompt Global Strike,” that could be fired from the United States and hit a target anywhere in less than an hour.

The idea, officials say, would be to give the president a non-nuclear option for, say, a large strike on the leadership of Al Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan, or a pre-emptive attack on an impending missile launch from North Korea. But under Mr. Obama’s strategy, the missiles would be based at new sites around the United States that might even be open to inspection, so that Russia and China would know that a missile launched from those sites was not nuclear — to avoid having them place their own nuclear forces on high alert.

But the big question confronting Mr. Obama is how he will describe the purpose of America’s nuclear arsenal. It is far more than just an academic debate.

Some leading Democrats, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have asked Mr. Obama to declare that the “sole purpose” of the country’s nuclear arsenal is to deter nuclear attack. “We’re under considerable pressure on this one within our own party,” one of Mr. Obama’s national security advisers said recently.

But inside the Pentagon and among many officials in the White House, Mr. Obama has been urged to retain more ambiguous wording — declaring that deterring nuclear attack is the primary purpose of the American arsenal, not the only one. That would leave open the option of using nuclear weapons against foes that might threaten the United States with biological or chemical weapons or transfer nuclear material to terrorists.

Any compromise wording that leaves in place elements of the Bush-era pre-emption policy, or suggests the United States could use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear adversary, would disappoint many on the left wing of his party, and some arms control advocates.

“Any declaration that deterring a nuclear attack is a ‘primary purpose’ of our arsenal leaves open the possibility that there are other purposes, and it would not reflect any reduced reliance on nuclear weapons,” said Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association. “It wouldn’t be consistent with what the president said in his speech in Prague” a year ago, when he laid out an ambitious vision for moving toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama’s base has already complained in recent months that he has failed to break from Bush era national security policy in some fundamental ways. They cite, for example, his stepped-up use of drones to strike suspected terrorists in Pakistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility by January as Mr. Obama had promised.

While Mr. Obama ended financing last year for a new nuclear warhead sought by the Bush administration, the new strategy goes further. It commits Mr. Obama to developing no new nuclear weapons, including a low-yield, deeply-burrowing nuclear warhead that the Pentagon sought to strike buried targets, like the nuclear facilities in North Korea and Iran. Mr. Obama, officials said, has determined he could not stop other countries from seeking new weapons if the United States was doing the same.

Still, some of Mr. Obama’s critics in his own party say the change is symbolic because he is spending more to improve old weapons.

At the center of the new strategy is a renewed focus on arms control and nonproliferation agreements, which were largely dismissed by the Bush administration. That includes an effort to win passage of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was defeated during the Clinton administration and faces huge hurdles in the Senate, and revisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to close loopholes that critics say have been exploited by Iran and North Korea.

Mr. Obama’s reliance on new, non-nuclear Prompt Global Strike weapons is bound to be contentious. As described by advocates within the Pentagon and in the military, the new weapons could achieve the effects of a nuclear weapon, without turning a conventional war into a nuclear one. As a result, the administration believes it could create a new form of deterrence — a way to contain countries that possess or hope to develop nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, without resorting to a nuclear option.

China Names Its Own Lama To Top Body Of Advisers

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — China’s handpicked Panchen Lama, the teenage religious figure whose legitimacy is a matter of dispute among many Tibetan Buddhists, has been appointed to the country’s top advisory body, the state media have announced.

Although membership in the advisory group, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, is of nominal interest to Chinese, the appointment of the Panchen Lama, 19, on Sunday ratchets up the government’s efforts to elevate his stature among Tibetans. Because he was appointed by Communist Party authorities rather than by Buddhist leaders, many Tibetans reject his religious authority as the ranking leader after the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959.

Born as Gyaltsen Norbu, he was anointed the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, after the Dalai Lama identified a different child as the latest incarnation of the Panchen Lama. A few weeks later, that boy and his family vanished. The government has said that they are in “protective custody,” but their whereabouts have been a mystery for 15 years.

According to Xinhua, the official news agency, the official Panchen Lama, just shy of his 20th birthday, is the youngest person ever appointed to the conference, which convenes this week as part of the annual pageant that includes meetings of the National People’s Congress, the country’s main legislative forum.

The advising conference is made up of wealthy businessmen, sports celebrities and prominent members of China’s ethnic minorities. It is also cynically viewed as a reward for retired officials. Among the 13 new members appointed Sunday was Li Changjiang, the former head of China’s food safety administration, who was forced to resign over the scandal involving melamine-contaminated milk.

Bkra-lo, a Tibetan scholar at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said there was nothing surprising about Gyaltsen Norbu’s appointment to the advisory conference.

“He has a lot of influence and popularity among the Tibetan people, so it makes sense,” he said. “Although he is very young, he is also very learned.”

Last month, the state media liberally featured his elevation as vice president of the government-run Buddhist Association of China. In an address, he swore to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party and promised to “adhere to socialism, safeguard national unification and strengthen ethnic unity.”

Despite its stated devotion to atheism, the Communist Party has struggled to offer a counterweight to the immense stature of the Dalai Lama, whom it views as a separatist eager to sunder Tibet from China. The Dalai Lama says his only interest is greater religious and cultural autonomy for Tibetans.

Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile group in India, said no amount of grooming would burnish Gyaltsen Norbu’s reputation among Tibetans.

“If you look at the Tibetan struggle for the last 60 years, neither torture nor financial incentives by the Chinese have been able to win the hearts of the people,” he said. “Tibetans will never accept him as the Panchen Lama.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Rashad Hussain, a Muslim and new U.S. envoy, is bridge between two worlds

By Scott Wilson
Monday, March 1, 2010; A19

Rashad Hussain, President Obama's new special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, was an avid high school debater in Plano, Tex., where he grew up.

His debate partner and best friend was a classmate named Josh Goldberg, meaning that at the end of many tournaments, the judge would announce "Goldberg-Hussain" as the cultural odd couple who had won the argument. "People got a kick out of it," Hussain said in a recent interview. "We joked that one day we would have the solution to the peace process." The two remain close friends.

In his new position, Hussain, who is both a Koran scholar and an ardent North Carolina Tar Heels basketball fan, will be responsible for helping to bridge another cultural divide -- the one in U.S. relations with Muslims inside and outside the nation's borders.

Since taking office, Obama has adopted an approach to broaden the ways in which the United States engages the Islamic world, moving from a policy focused mostly on counterterrorism to one that includes partnerships with Muslim countries and communities in education, health, science and commerce.

Hussain, 31, will be the face of that policy in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, where the Islamic Conference has it headquarters, and in the other capitals of its 56 member countries. His is an appropriately young face for an American representative to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims, the majority of whom are younger than he is.

At a time when the United States is fighting two wars in Muslim nations and defending itself against an enduring terrorist threat, changing perceptions will take time. "The challenge is to continue to communicate that this is a long-term process," Hussain said. "Sometimes the challenge becomes that people want to focus exclusively on the political issues, issues that this administration is working very diligently to solve."

Hussain's father, a mining engineer, moved from Bihar, India, to Wyoming in the late 1960s. A few years later, during a visit to India, he married Hussain's mother, now an obstetrician in Plano.

The family prayed regularly in a mosque not far from the church-heavy city. At about the time he began middle school, the Persian Gulf War began and, as he recalled, "it was not the easiest time to be named Hussain." But he said he encountered very little religious persecution during a childhood that featured study, prayer and basketball -- a passion he shares with the president. Hussain said it is his "dream" to play in one of Obama's pickup games.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then enrolled at Harvard University to pursue a master's degree in Arabic and Islamic studies. An internship after his first year of graduate school with Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) cemented his interest in government, and he returned after completing his degree to work on the House Judiciary Committee and was there on the morning of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I experienced firsthand being evacuated from the building, not knowing what was going on, seeing the twin towers burning on TV as soon as I got into work, not knowing . . . whether there was a plane heading for the Capitol," he said. "I very much experienced the terror on that day myself."

In the following days, he said, he experienced a "whole set of feelings," from the initial fear of attack to worry about discrimination against American Muslims. He said he found that compassion, broader than the pockets of persecution, is often overlooked by Muslims here and abroad.

"A lot is made about American misperceptions about Muslim communities, but there's a lot of misperceptions that Muslim communities have about the United States," he said. To counter such misunderstandings of Muslim culture, Hussain cited his wife, whom he said "breaks down a lot of the misperceptions of women in Islam." Isra Bhatty, a Yale Law School student currently on a Rhodes scholarship, wears the hijab and is an epic Chicago Bears fan.

Hussain left Capitol Hill to attend Yale Law School. While there, he criticized the trial of Sami al-Arian, a University of South Florida professor, as "politically motivated persecution." Arian was accused of aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Hussain, who did not criticize the charges against Arian, was on a civil liberties panel with Arian's daughter when he made the comment. A jury acquitted Arian on some charges and deadlocked on others; he eventually pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy.

"My extensive writings on this topic make it clear that I condemn terrorism unequivocally in all its forms," Hussain said. "I'd be happy to put that against one sentence from 2004 that I believe was taken out of context."

After the 2008 election, Hussain was recruited to the White House counsel's office by Cassandra Butts, a fellow Tar Heel and Obama's former Harvard Law classmate. He has worked there on national security and new-media issues and helped inform the administration's Muslim outreach efforts.

Ben Rhodes, Obama's chief foreign policy speechwriter, sought Hussain's counsel last year as he drafted the president's Cairo address. Hussain said his advice concerned the contributions Muslims have made to American society and the context behind some of the religious passages. Hussain has memorized the Koran. He prays daily, often in a room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building reserved for all faiths.

Hussain traveled in the Middle East after Obama announced his appointment during a Feb. 13 videoconference at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. His approach, Hussain said, will be to emphasize to Muslim countries what "America stands for," including through the partnerships.

"It's clear that we're not going to agree on every single issue," Hussain said. "Our job will be to try to maximize our areas of agreement and work through our areas of disagreement and come to the best policy."

With pressures high, South Korean women put off marriage and childbirth

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 1, 2010; A10

SEOUL -- In a full-page newspaper advertisement headlined "I Am a Bad Woman," Hwang Myoung-eun explained the trauma of being a working mom in South Korea.

"I may be a good employee, but to my family I am a failure," wrote Hwang, a marketing executive and mother of a 6-year-old son. "In their eyes, I am a bad daughter-in-law, bad wife and bad mother."

The highly unusual ad gave voice to the resentment and repressed anger that are common to working women across South Korea.

In a country where people work more and sleep less than anywhere else in the developed world, women are often elbowed away from rewards in their professional lives. If they have a job, they make 38 percent less money than men, the largest gender gap in the developed world. If they become pregnant, they are pressured at work not to take legally guaranteed maternity leave.

Thanks to gender equality in education, the professional skills and career aspirations of women in South Korea have soared over the past two decades. But those gains are colliding with a corporate culture that often marginalizes mothers at the workplace -- or ejects them altogether.

Women who do combine work and family find themselves squeezed between too little time and too much guilt: for neglecting the education of children in a nation obsessed with education, for shirking family obligations as dictated by assertive mothers-in-law, and for failing to attend to the care and feeding of overworked and resentful husbands.

As Hwang complained in two mournful newspaper advertisements she bought last fall in Seoul newspapers: "We work harder than anyone to manage housekeeping and earn wages, so why are we branded as selfish, irresponsible women?"

When the ads were published in September, Hwang's name did not appear in them. But she has since acknowledged buying them and has gone on television to draw attention to the pressures endured by working women.

Most South Korean corporations do little to accommodate working mothers -- or working fathers, experts say. South Korean law allows a full year of subsidized parental leave, but intense peer pressure at work means that working mothers usually take little time off, according to government surveys. Only about 35,000 parents in this country of 49 million people took advantage of child-care leave subsidies last year.

"The longer leave they take, the less the likelihood of getting their old job back, even though that is illegal," said Yoo Gye-sook, an associate professor of family studies at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. "Flextime is frowned on by human-resources managers. They feel that company discipline might erode."

To lower stress as they climb corporate ladders, women in South Korea are postponing marriage and motherhood. The number of unmarried women in their 20s and 30s is surging. For three years running, South Korea has had the world's lowest birthrate, according to the U.N. World Health Organization.

The no-husband, no-baby trend has become a demographic epidemic in East Asia. Among the 10 countries or territories with the world's lowest fertility rates, six are in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a 2008 CIA ranking. From Japan to Singapore, the percentage of women who remain single into their mid-30s is rising at historically unprecedented rates. In South Korea, the percentage of unmarried women ages 30 to 34 nearly doubled in the past five years, rising to 19 percent from 10.5 percent.

"Women in their late 20s are just not willing to make the sacrifice of having children, juggling family responsibilities and working," Yoo said.

Collapsing birthrates are alarming East Asian governments, which in coming years will face a demographic crunch as the proportion of pensioners rises and the number of working-age adults declines. South Korea, which has projected a population decline beginning in 2018, is scrambling to encourage childbirth with incentives including low-interest home loans for families with three or more children.

But for South Korean women, choosing to have children usually means falling off the career track. There is a 30 percent employment gap here between men and women, the fourth-largest gap in the world, after Turkey, Mexico and Greece. Even if women choose to stay on the job, they have no guarantees of career advancement.

U.N. statistics show that gender empowerment, as measured by women holding management and professional jobs, is falling.

"This means that despite Korean women having good health and excellent education, they still have a much greater chance of becoming a politician or even a middle manager or computer programmer in countries like Kyrgyzstan, the Dominican Republic, Botswana or Nicaragua," said James Turnbull, whose blog, "The Grand Narrative," tracks sex discrimination and the role of women in South Korea.

Hwang, the working mom who says she spent about $8,600 last fall buying newspaper ads to vent her frustrations, works 10 to 12 hours a day as a chief strategic officer in charge of product promotions for a Seoul marketing company. She said her salary is about double what her husband makes -- a rare and delicate equation in a South Korean family.

"When you make more than the husband, you have to be careful not to hurt his pride," said Hwang, 38, who makes about $86,000 a year. "I make a point of getting a suggestion from him, when I buy my own clothes or a new aquarium for my son's fish."

Even more problematic, Hwang said, is her husband's mother.

In the "I Am a Bad Woman" advertisement that she placed in the newspaper, Hwang gives this account of telephoning her mother-in-law to ask for help with child care:

"Her sharp scolding returns from the other side of the phone: 'Have you forgotten today is the day of your father-in-law's memorial service? Your other family members are already here. I understand you are talented and all, but do you ever fulfill your family obligations?' "

Hwang said her husband is more sympathetic and "does more at home than other husbands in South Korea." She said she understands that it is not easy for him to have a working wife.

"The husbands here expect a warm home and a pat on the shoulder, but sometimes my husband may not get that," she said.

Hwang's husband declined to comment.

Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.

New Ukrainian president could disappoint supporters in the Kremlin

By Philip P. Pan
Monday, March 1, 2010; A08

MOSCOW -- The inauguration of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine's president was celebrated in Russian media last week as a long-sought victory for the Kremlin, which tried to put him in office five years ago, only to be thwarted by the mass protests known as the Orange Revolution.

Now that he has taken power, though, the man who had been Russia's preferred choice to govern the former Soviet republic could prove to be far less accommodating to Moscow's interests -- and more open to Washington's -- than the Kremlin would like.

Breaking with tradition, Yanukovych is scheduled to make his first official trip abroad Monday to Brussels, the seat of the European Union, instead of Moscow, which he will visit Friday. The decision follows a campaign in which he labored to shed his image as a Kremlin lackey and recast himself as a proponent of further integration with Europe as well as closer ties with Russia.

The line that Yanukovych and his advisers have used is that he will be a pro-Ukrainian president, not a pro-Russian or pro-Western one. In his inaugural address, he pledged that Ukraine would serve as a "bridge between East and West, an integral part of Europe and the former Soviet Union at the same time" and "a European state outside of any bloc."

How such rhetoric will be translated into policy, especially in Ukraine's strategically important energy sector, remains uncertain and will be the subject of close scrutiny in Yanukovych's meetings this week and in the months ahead.

Many analysts say Moscow is more likely than the West to be disappointed, if only because it wants much more from a Yanukovych presidency. In five years of bitter feuding with his predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-West hero of the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin built up a substantial store of grievances that plunged relations between Russia and Ukraine to a low point.

Near the top of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's agenda is greater control over Ukrainian pipelines that transport much of the natural gas that Russia sells to Europe. Other goals include scaling back Ukraine's cooperation with NATO, extending basing rights for Russia's Black Sea fleet in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol, and providing broader market access to Russian investors and businesses.

"I think that the elites here expect much more than Yanukovych could possibly give them," said Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst and scholar in Moscow, noting that the new president has been portrayed in Russian media as "a very pro-Russian politician."

In reality, though, Oreshkin said, Yanukovych is under pressure to broaden his political base, in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, by winning over voters in western Ukraine who are wary of Russia and feel more strongly about integration with Europe.

Washington and its European allies, analysts said, have more limited expectations, in part because they have looked on with frustration for five years as Yushchenko bickered with other Orange Revolution leaders and failed to deliver on the promise of the pro-democracy uprising.

"If the West was disappointed with Ukraine for the last five years, I think now it's Russia's turn," said Samuel Charap, a scholar of the region at the D.C.-based Center for American Progress. "If you believe the Russian press, they arrived with a wish list . . . and I don't think they'll get everything."

Charap said Washington's goals will be modest in comparison. U.S. and European officials will urge Yanukovych to continue cooperation with NATO and adopt legislation authorizing joint exercises, he said. They will also push for economic measures that would unlock a suspended emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund.

But the Obama administration is also expected to continue pressing Ukraine to clean up its corrupt energy sector, which is considered a source of political instability and was singled out as a priority by Vice President Biden in his visit last summer. The business interests that backed Yanukovych, however, make significant progress on that front unlikely, analysts say.

Mikhail Gonchar, director of energy programs at the Ukraine-based Nomos Center, said a key early test will be the fate of proposed legislation to bring regulation of Ukraine's domestic gas market to European standards. Another will be whether Yanukovych can put off a Russian proposal for an international consortium to upgrade and manage Ukraine's gas pipelines -- a plan that makes little financial sense for Ukraine, Gonchar said.

He added that Yanukovych is considering Russian proposals to establish partnerships in uranium and nuclear fuel production that would push out the U.S.-based atomic giant Westinghouse. "He's under a high level of pressure from the Russian side in the energy sector," Gonchar said. "It's a serious challenge."

Irina Kobrinskaya, a scholar at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, said she expected "tough bargaining" on energy issues but an easing of bilateral tensions because Yanukovych will drop his predecessor's efforts to appeal to Ukrainian nationalism by rewriting history and taking "ideologically anti-Russian steps."

While the Kremlin endorsed Yanukovych five years ago and sent political operatives to help his campaign, it hedged its bets in the recently concluded race by signaling its willingness to work with Yanukovych's chief opponent, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who lost by 3.5 percentage points.

Putin had praised her handling of a gas contract and said Russia was staying neutral because it had been let down by candidates in the past -- a remark widely read as an expression of disappointment in Yanukovych's ability to deliver for Moscow while serving as prime minister from August 2006 to the end of 2007.

How that snub will affect Yanukovych's view of Russia is complicated by the fact he still presides over a divided government, with Tymoshenko refusing his demand to resign as prime minister. To oust her, he will need to win over lawmakers in her coalition or call early parliamentary elections, and thus continue reaching out to western Ukraine.

Ivan Lozowy, president of the Institute of Statehood and Democracy in Kiev, warned that Yanukovych might also make an autocratic bid to consolidate power that triggers a confrontation with Ukrainian society. A similar authoritarian turn in the early 2000s alienated the West and strengthened Russia's influence in Ukraine.

Still, Lozowy said, Yanukovych is unlikely to embrace Russia immediately because the powerful businessmen who support him are more interested in Western markets -- and wary of Russian competition -- than they were five years ago. "Europe is what's exciting for them now," he said. "I don't expect Ukraine to be throwing itself into the Russian bear hug."

US Condemns Burma on Aung San Suu Kyi Decision

Burma's detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi (2009 file photo)

The United States has criticized Burma's Supreme Court for not releasing opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from her extended house arrest.

A State Department official told reporters the Burmese court's ruling Friday was "purely political." He noted that the U.S. has consistently urged the ruling military in Burma to free its political prisoners.

New York Congressman Joe Crowley, a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, issued a statement calling Aung San Suu Kyi's continuing house arrest "a sham from day one." Crowley said the military must face consequences for violating the human rights of the Burmese people.

He said it is time for the United States to fully implement increased targeted sanctions against officials in Than Shwe's military regime under the Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE Act.

Aung San Suu Kyi was convicted last year of violating the terms of her detention when she gave shelter to an American man who swam to her lakeside Rangoon house uninvited.

Burma's Supreme Court on Friday rejected an appeal against the latest extension of her house arrest.

She initially was sentenced to three years of hard labor. But Senior General Than Shwe, the head of the ruling military, commuted her sentence to just an extra 18 months of house detention.

Aung San Suu Kyi's legal team argued that the extension was not lawful, because it was based on provisions from the 1974 constitution, which is no longer in force.

Her lawyers say they will pursue a final, special appeal.

United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon said he is "disappointed" Aung San Suu Kyi's appeal was dismissed. He called for the release of all political prisoners in Burma and for their participation in its political process.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "appalled and saddened" at the court's decision. He also said the sole purpose of Aung San Suu Kyi's trial was to prevent her from taking part in this year's elections.

The government of Singapore issued a statement urging talks between the Burmese military, Aung San Suu Kyi and other political groups ahead of the elections. Singapore said those talks would offer the best chance for "national reconciliation and the long-term political stability" of Burma.

Burma's military leaders said they will hold elections later this year, for the first time in two decades.

Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition National League for Democracy won the 1990 election, but the military refused to relinquish power. The military has kept her under some form of detention for 14 of the last 20 years.

Key leader of Eta Basque separatists held in France

One of the top leaders of the Basque separatist group Eta has been arrested in north-western France, the Spanish interior ministry has said.

Ibon Gogeascotxea was arrested with two other suspected Eta members in a French and Spanish operation in Normandy.

Madrid said the arrests had foiled a planned "commando" operation in Spain.

A militant group fighting for an independent Basque homeland, Eta has been blamed for more than 820 deaths during its 41-year campaign in Spain.

Eta called a short-lived truce in 2006, but broke it in December of that year.

Guggenheim plot

The Spanish interior ministry said Ibon Gogeascotxea was the "most senior" member of Eta and its military chief.

The arrests took place close to the small Normandy village of Cahan.

The Spanish interior ministry said the three arrested men had raised suspicion after renting a rural home with false identities and using a car with fake number plates.

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the operation was "very significant".

The other two men were named as Beinat Aguinalde Ugartemendia, 26, and Gregorio Jimenez Morales, 55.

Mr Rubalcaba said the pair "were part of a commando [unit] ready to enter Spain".

They had come to "say goodbye to the military chief, who gave them their final instructions as Eta has a habit of doing", Mr Rubalcaba said.

Ibon Gogeascotxea was born in 1965 and has been on the run since 1997 after members of the Eta group's Katu cell allegedly tried to kill King Juan Carlos when he attended the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

The cell is also wanted for attacks on Burgos and Majorca.

French and Spanish authorities have maintained close cooperation to try to track down Eta members.

Four suspected members of Eta were arrested in Portugal and France in January.

Three weeks ago Portuguese police also seized half a tonne of explosives at a house they said was being used as a base by Eta.

Although there have been a number of arrests of leaders, Eta has remained active - the group killed three Spanish police officers using car bombs in 2009.

In December, Spain raised its terror alert level to two on a four-point scale.

Mr Rubalcaba said that despite recent arrests, Spain did "not rule out an attack by Eta".

Eta is considered a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the US.

In Afghanistan, U.S. seeks to fix a tattered system of justice

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 28, 2010; A09

KABUL -- Behind the combat troops and military trainers, alongside the aid workers and agriculture experts, come the lawyers.

U.S. State Department legal experts and contractors are fanning out across the capital and throughout the provinces, trying to build a functioning legal and correctional system in a broken country where justice is too often delayed, denied or nonexistent.

The widespread sentiment that there is no justice in Afghanistan is one of the principal causes of popular disillusionment with the government of President Hamid Karzai. The feeling has been exploited by the militant Taliban, which dispenses its own brutal version of summary justice in areas under its control.

The U.S.-led effort is already showing signs of having an impact. Near the end of a seven-month American training course for prosecutors and police officers, a prosecutor from Takhar province, Abdul Zaher, said: "In this country, Afghans are used to torturing suspects. In this course, we've learned to stop, because it's illegal. If we have a suspect in custody, we've learned how to treat him."

The problems here affect every level of the justice system, from police to courts to prisons.

Because there are not enough attorneys, many arrested suspects are sentenced to prison without ever seeing a defense lawyer as required by the Afghan constitution. Many prisoners languish in jail past the time they can be legally held without a trial. Others have remained in prison for months after their sentences, because their cases fell between the cracks.

Some of the problems were on display during a recent court session at the country's main intelligence office, the National Security Directorate, which tries terrorism suspects. In a cramped room, the prosecutor read out the charges while one of the three judges talked on his cellphone and another sent text messages.

There was no computer, telephone or electricity. The prosecutor carried court documents in a green plastic shopping bag. Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtiari told one suspect he was being sentenced to six years in prison for belonging to the Taliban but said the man could appeal. The defendant angrily demanded a copy of the charges against him, and the judge burst out: "We don't have a photocopier! You want the judge to pay for this out of his own salary?"

Judges complain they have no equipment, no cars to travel to court, no government-issued phones and, most importantly, no security -- many are threatened, some have been kidnapped, others killed. Bakhtiari said that during a sensitive trial, he had to move his family to a hidden location for six months and take his children out of school.

"All of this causes injustice," Bakhtiari said. "Justice cannot be implemented in the country."

Nearly everyone agrees the system is awash in corruption. The wealthy, or those with connections, rarely face punishment. Judges and prosecutors -- whose salaries are barely $200 per month -- routinely accept payments to drop charges, lose case files or let suspects walk free.

"People who have money can go free," said Harum Mutmaeen, 22, who was on his way to visit his cousin at Pul-i-Charkhi prison outside Kabul. His cousin had been imprisoned there for a year and a half after being implicated in a kidnapping. "The people who don't have money -- nobody cares about them," Mutmaeen said.

U.S. officials recognize those doubts about the system here.

"This is one of the most important challenges that we face," said David T. Johnson, assistant secretary for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. "People have to be confident that justice is being done."

The bureau is working with police and prosecutors to develop a computerized case management system for the courts. Its $100 million budget is projected to nearly double next year.

The challenge is daunting. Afghanistan is divided into 34 provinces and 400 small districts, and fewer than a hundred of those districts have an assigned prosecutor. Most have no defense lawyers and no courts.

In an effort to bring some order to a system with 15,000 active criminal cases nationwide, a U.S. contractor developed a relatively simple system in which each case was assigned a number and a colored folder with a form for such basic information as the defendant's name, arrest date, arresting police officer, prosecutor and judge. About a third of the cases have entered the new system -- in the process of reviewing cases to create the files, authorities found that 128 prisoners were incarcerated beyond their sentence term.

Even before suspects are arrested, investigations must be improved, U.S. officials have said. They have created training sessions for police officers and prosecutors -- in many cases, the sessions mark the first time the two Afghan groups have ever trained together.

The training includes staged crime scenes with wooden dummies for corpses, marked off with red and white tape to keep onlookers at bay. The sessions also include providing officers with copies of the Afghan constitution and penal code, fingerprint kits and digital cameras -- and having them watch videos of American TV crime shows such as "CSI: Las Vegas" and courtroom movies such as "My Cousin Vinny."

Ghulam Mohammed has been a police officer in Takhar province for 25 years, dealing with hundreds of cases. But before coming to one of the training sessions, he said: "I didn't know anything about fingerprints or DNA or whatever. . . . I've learned a lot of new things."

Germany's frugality bemoaned for inhibiting euro zone growth

By Anthony Faiola
Sunday, February 28, 2010; A08

BERLIN -- Greek extravagance touched off the biggest crisis in the 11-year history of the euro. But the world's most ambitious monetary union faces a less obvious problem that might be even harder to lick -- German frugality.

Adoption of the euro a decade ago ushered in an era of cheap credit, soaring salaries and big government in nations like Greece, Spain and Portugal. Their debt-fueled splurges are now coming home to roost, with Greece the first to come close to running out of cash to operate the government, raising fears of a default. Germany -- Europe's economic powerhouse -- is expected to take a leading role in a rescue effort to prevent a possible run on the euro and the outbreak of a new bout of turmoil in global bond, currency and stock markets.

Southern European profligacy is now the target of open distain in Germany, with many here ruing the day in 1999 that this nation of 82 million kissed goodbye to the once-mighty deutsche mark.

Yet in the years since, a significant part of economic growth in Germany, analysts say, was fueled by a surge of spending in Greece, Spain, Portugal and other European nations after they adopted the euro. In fact, a jump in sales of everything from BMW sedans to Miele washing machines in other parts of Europe helped make up for the lack of spending here in Germany -- where stagnant wages and a culture of conservative consumers has led to years of anemic domestic demand.

A growing number of economists now say that must change to ensure the euro's survival. If Greece must slash spending and put its books in order to restore faith in the euro, then Germans must also begin to consume more of what Germany and its neighbors manufacture.

The economic imbalances in Europe underscore a broader global problem, the solving of which President Obama and others have called key to laying a path to sustained growth in the wake of the financial crisis. They argue that nations like Germany, China and Japan must do more to open the wallets of their consumers, who have some of the highest savings rates in the world, just as nations like United States, Britain and Greece must begin to export more while weaning themselves off the kind of credit-fueled spending sprees that have generated the economic bubbles of recent years.

A culture of thriftiness

That won't be easy.

Like many Germans, Rosi Wicher, 40, a preschool teacher and single mother of one, got minimal wage increases over the last decade, with aggressive cost-cutting by German companies and government policies holding the line on private- and public-sector salaries.

And like many of her peers in this shabby chic capital where ostentation is frowned upon, she prides herself on being thrifty. She has used the same stereo set for 12 years, runs no credit card debt, does not own a car and happily gets by with furniture purchased back in the 1980s. "Why do I need more?" she asked. "My child is happy with a DS Lite instead of a PlayStation. And my stereo still works fine. It don't think it's a sign of progress to run yourself into debt."

As a result of lopsided trade, Germany now enjoys a relationship with its partners in the euro not unlike that of China and the United States, with one acting as supplier and financier and the other as an overextended buyer. Over the past decade, Germany -- which now has the world's largest trade surplus after Saudi Arabia -- saw sales to Greece, Spain and Portugal soar 66 percent, 59 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Just as China is the major holder of U.S. Treasurys, German banks have also invested heavily in Greek, Spanish and Portuguese debt. But Germany imported relatively little from those nations in return -- partly, many here point out, because those countries still have relatively little to sell.

In the meantime, Germany is in a tight fix -- loath to reward feckless Greece with a concrete promise of aid but fearful of the consequences to its own economy if it does not.

"The Germans were catering a big party that was going on in the euro area, selling the food and offering the credit to the party guests," said Thomas Mayer, chief economist for Deutsche Bank. "But the guests got drunk and ate too much, and now Germany is stuck with the bill. What this tells us is that the euro model must be adjusted. Yes, the Greeks are going to have to make reforms, but the Germans are going to have to change, too."

Indignation over Greece

In recent years, Germany has made painful cuts in social services even as countries like Greece had an explosion in government spending. Not surprisingly, resentment is running high here, with polls showing almost 70 percent of Germans opposing a Greek bailout even though most analysts believe it would be a German-led intervention involving other European nations and/or a consortium of banks.

Indignation only heightened as Greece's deputy prime minister, responding to German calls for deeper spending cuts, suggested last week that instead of criticizing its policies, Germany should compensate Greece for the Nazi invasion of 1941.

"There were always great skeptics of the euro in Germany, now those forces are strengthening, and gathering more support," said Frank Schaeffler, a lawmaker from the Free Democratic Party, part of Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition. Asked whether the Greek crisis has made him drop his own support for the euro, Schaeffler said, "no, but I think it is clear we let the wrong countries join."

Analysts note that when the euro was launched, nations like Greece were expected to see a boost in salaries and spending as they played catch-up to their richer cousins, like Germany. But if the Greeks overshot, Germany, some economists contend, may have fallen short.

Especially over the past decade, German manufacturers -- already juggernauts of industry -- became some of the most globally competitive companies. Just as American firms did, they turned to outsourcing and overseas production hubs. They kept salaries down at home, with average wages stagnating in Germany for a decade. Germany still has no uniform minimum wage, and aggressive cost-cutting has resulted in more and more Germans laboring in temporary or contract jobs with lower pay and less job security.

The Germans have taken some steps to boost domestic demand. The government temporarily spurred consumer spending during the economic crisis, for instance, with a cash-for-clunkers program that was later copied by the Obama administration. But analysts note that such moves have been offset by hikes in the value-added tax, which acts as a sort of national sales tax and drives prices higher.

German officials bristle at the suggestion that their country is too dependent on foreign markets, or that taxpayers here are not doing enough to sustain the economy in the euro zone. They note that German tourists flock to Greek resorts in summer, and that Germany has funneled hundreds of millions of euros into European Union development funds that get spent on projects in the smaller European economies.

Joining the global culture of debt, many here say, is simply not an answer.

"There are two sides of the coin here. The first side is that if people spend a little more, they would help the economy to recover, and that's definitely a fact," said Joe Kaeser, chief financial officer for Siemens, one Germany's largest exporters and a global powerhouse with 400,000 employees worldwide, including 64,000 in the United States. "But companies have a responsibility to get into the consumer's wallet, and they have not been providing the right solutions and the right products. But I think we also have to say that there are some countries [where consumers] have spent too much."