China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes -

By EDWARD WONG

Published: July 6, 2009

URUMQI, China — The Chinese government locked down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region on Monday and early Tuesday, imposing curfews, cutting off cellphone and Internet services and sending armed police officers into neighborhoods after clashes erupted here on Sunday evening between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese. The fighting left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, according to the state news agency.

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People who were injured in ethnic riots rested in a city hospital on Monday during a government tour for the media. More Photos »

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But hundreds of Uighur protesters defied the police again on Tuesday morning, crashing a state-run tour of the riot scene for foreign and Chinese journalists. A wailing crowd of women, joined later by scores of Uighur men, marched down a wide avenue with raised fists and tearfully demanded that the police release Uighur men who they said had been seized from their homes after the violence. Some women waved the identification cards of men who had been detained.

As journalists watched, the demonstrators smashed the windshield of a police car and several police officers drew their pistols before the entire crowd was encircled by officers and paramilitary troops in riot gear.
“A lot of ordinary people were taken away by the police,” a protester named Qimanguili, a 13-year-old girl clad in a white T-shirt and a black headscarf, said, crying. She said her 19-year-old brother had been taken away by police officers on Monday, long after the riots had ended.

The confrontation later ebbed to a tense standoff between about 100 protesters, mostly women, some carrying infants, and riot police in black body armor and helmets, tear-gas launchers at the ready, in a Uighur neighborhood pocked with burned-out homes and an automobile sales lot torched during the Sunday riots.
The fighting on Sunday was the deadliest episode of ethnic violence in China in decades. The bloodshed here, along with the Tibetan uprising last year, shows the extent of racial hostility that still pervades much of western China, fueled partly by economic disparity and by government attempts to restrict religious and political activity by minority groups.

The rioting, which began as a peaceful protest calling for a full government inquiry into an earlier brawl between Uighurs and Han Chinese at a factory in southern China, took place in the heart of Xinjiang, an oil-rich desert region where Uighurs are the largest ethnic group but are ruled by the Han, the dominant ethnic group in the country.

Protests spread Monday to the heavily guarded town of Kashgar, on China’s western border, as 200 to 300 people chanting “God is great” and “Release the people” confronted riot police officers about 5:30 p.m. in front of the city’s yellow-walled Id Kah Mosque, the largest mosque in China. They quickly dispersed when officers began arresting people, one resident said.

Internet social platforms and chat programs appeared to have unified Uighurs in anger over the way Chinese officials had handled the earlier brawl, which took place in late June thousands of miles away in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. There, Han workers rampaged through a Uighur dormitory, killing at least two Uighurs and injuring many others, according to the state news agency, Xinhua. Police officers later arrested a resentful former factory worker who had ignited the fight by spreading a rumor that six Uighur men had raped two Han women at the site, Xinhua reported.

But photographs that appeared online after the battle showed people standing around a pile of corpses, leading many Uighurs to believe that the government was playing down the number of dead Uighurs. One Uighur student said the photographs began showing up on many Web sites about one week ago. Government censors repeatedly tried to delete them, but to no avail, he said.

“Uighurs posted it again and again in order to let more people know the truth, because how painful is it that the government does bald-faced injustice to Uighur people?” said the student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the government.

A call for protests spread on Web sites and QQ, the most popular instant-messaging program in China, despite government efforts to block online discussion of the feud.

By Tuesday morning, more than 36 hours after the start of the protest, the police had detained more than 1,400 suspects, according to Xinhua. More than 200 shops and 14 homes had been destroyed in Urumqi, and 261 motor vehicles, mostly buses, had been burned, Xinhua reported, citing Liu Yaohua, the regional police chief.

Police officers operated checkpoints on roads throughout Xinjiang on Monday. People at major hotels said they had no Internet access. Most people in the city could not use cellphones.

At the local airport, five scrawny, young men wearing black, bulletproof vests and helmets stood outside the terminal, holding batons. The roadways leading into the city center were empty early on Tuesday, except for parked squad cars and clusters of armored personnel carriers and olive military trucks brimming with paramilitary troops. An all-night curfew had been imposed.

Residents described the central bazaar in the Uighur enclave, where much of the rioting took place, as littered with the charred hulks of buses and cars. An American teacher in Urumqi, Adam Grode, and another foreigner said they had heard gunfire long after nightfall Sunday.

Xinhua did not give a breakdown of the 156 deaths, and it was unclear how many of them were protesters and how many were other civilians or police officers. There were no independent estimates of the number of the death toll. At least 1,000 people were described as having protested.

Photographs online and video on state television showed injured people lying in the streets, not far from overturned vehicles that had been set ablaze. Government officials gave journalists in Urumqi a disc with a video showing bodies strewn in the streets.

The officials also released a statement that laid the blame directly on Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman and human rights advocate who had been imprisoned in China and now lives in Washington. It said the World Uighur Congress, a group led by “the splittist” Ms. Kadeer, “directly ignited, plotted and directed the violence using the Shaoguan incident in Guangdong.” The statement said bloggers first began calling for the protest on Saturday night and also used QQ and online bulletin boards to organize a rally at People’s Square and South Gate in the Uighur quarter of Urumqi.

The World Uighur Congress rejected the accusations and said that it condemned “in the strongest possible terms the brutal crackdown of a peaceful protest of young Uighurs.” The group said in a statement on Monday that Uighurs had been subject to reprisals not only from Chinese security forces but also from Han Chinese civilians who attacked homes, workplaces or dormitories after the riots on Monday.
The violence on Sunday dwarfed in scale assaults on security forces last year in Xinjiang. It was deadlier, too, than any of the bombings, riots and protests that swept through the region in the 1990s and that led to a government clampdown.

Uighurs make up about half of the 20 million people in Xinjiang but are a minority in Urumqi, where Han Chinese dominate. The Chinese government has encouraged Han migration to many parts of Xinjiang, and Uighurs say that the Han tend to get the better jobs in Urumqi. The government also maintains tight control on the practice of Islam, which many Uighurs cite as a source of frustration.

But an ethnic Han woman who lives in an apartment near the central bazaar said in a telephone interview that the government should show no sympathy toward the malcontents.

“What they should do is crack down with a lot of force at first, so the situation doesn’t get worse, so it doesn’t drag out like in Tibet,” she said after insisting on anonymity. “Their mind is very simple. If you crack down on one, you’ll scare all of them. The government should come down harder.”

Michael Wines, Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting from Beijing, and David Barboza from Shanghai. Huang Yuanxi contributed research from Beijing, and Chen Yang from Shanghai.

More Than 150 Killed in Western China in Struggle Between Muslim Uighurs and Police

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 7, 2009

URUMQI, China, July 7 -- Clashes between Muslim Uighur protesters and security forces have killed at least 156 people in China's far west, state media said Monday, in what appears to be one of this country's bloodiest outbreaks of violence in recent history.

The capital of China's Xinjiang region, Urumqi, was under heavy guard after a crowd of rioters, estimated to number more than 1,000 and armed with knives and sticks, faced off against police in the city's main bazaar on Sunday, according to witnesses. As word of the fighting spread, smaller incidents of retaliatory violence erupted across Urumqi at universities, bus stops and restaurants.

Early Tuesday, the official New China News Agency reported that Chinese police had dispersed "more than 200 rioters" trying to gather at the main mosque in Kashgar, another city in Xinjiang.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that a fresh protest broke out in Urumqi, with about 200 Uighurs blocking a main road in a standoff with security forces. Some of the protesters were screaming that their husbands and children had been arrested, AP said.

State media reported Monday that more than 1,000 people had been injured in the Sunday rioting, and that more than 1,400 had been arrested. It was unclear who suffered the heaviest casualties -- protesters, bystanders or security forces. Telephone and Internet communication in the area was severely restricted, making it difficult to verify government reports. In Urumqi, the roads were empty Monday night, and stores and restaurants normally open late were closed.

Ethnic tensions are high in Xinjiang, which has experienced sporadic bursts of violence in recent years. Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority group, have long complained that, like ethnic Tibetans, they have been subjected to political, cultural and religious persecution under the rule of Han Chinese, the country's ethnic majority. The ruling Communist Party has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent tensions from flaring, particularly during this symbolic year, the 60th anniversary of Communist China's founding.

The violence in Xinjiang was in many ways reminiscent of the ethnic uprising in Tibet in spring 2008, when riots erupted after a protest in the capital, Lhasa. In those riots, which spread quickly throughout the region, the Chinese government insisted the death toll had been contained to 13, even as the Tibetan government in exile insisted the number was closer to 220.

In Washington, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that the administration is "deeply concerned" about the reports from China and called "on all in Xinjiang to exercise restraint." He added, however, that circumstances surrounding the incident were unclear. A State Department spokesman said officials would raise their concerns about the violence with China's deputy foreign minister, who was visiting Washington on Monday.

State TV reports showed Uighurs attacking Han Chinese bystanders but said nothing about deaths or injuries resulting from police action. The government blamed the bloodshed on exile groups and others it cast as agitators -- specifically Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur leader living in exile in the Washington area -- saying they are separatists plotting against Chinese rule. China made similar claims last year against the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

"Their accusations are completely false," Kadeer said at a news conference in Washington on Monday, speaking through an interpreter. "I did not organize the protests or call on the Uighurs to demonstrate."

She condemned the use of force by both sides and denounced what she called "brutal suppression" of her people by the Chinese government. She also called on the White House to release a stronger statement on the government's treatment of the Uighurs.

Uighur supporters plan to gather in Dupont Circle at 2 p.m. Tuesday and march to the Chinese Embassy, where a formal demonstration is to begin at 3:30.

Witnesses to the violence in Urumqi said that Sunday had started relatively peacefully, with several hundred demonstrators gathering to call for a more thorough investigation of the deaths of two Uighurs last month at a toy factory in southern China. The protesters had gathered in the Grand Bazaar, a marketplace where vendors hawk nuts, fruit and kebabs and where members of the Uighur community assemble at night.

Ao Simin, 60, who works at a retail store near the south gate of the bazaar, said he saw thousands of "Uighur young people" walking past his door shouting slogans. Ao said that although he had heard rumors about Han Chinese being beaten by Uighur protesters carrying sticks, he "saw them with empty hands." The city appeared calm.

Another witness, Adam Grode, 26, an American who is in Urumqi on a Fulbright scholarship, said that about 6:30 p.m., the situation turned. He said he saw protesters throwing stones and vegetables at police and smashing windows. Soon afterward, the police were "chasing them down with shields and fire hoses," he said.

Tang Yan, 21, a Han Chinese who works at a drugstore, said that her boss stepped outside, only to be leapt upon by Uighur rioters. The attackers -- carrying benches, tables and bricks -- reportedly smashed the windows of the store, then entered the supermarket next door and set it on fire. She fled with other employees of nearby stores to the safety of their homes.

"All the residents living in my building are Han Chinese. We were afraid that some people would rush in and hurt us. All the men in the building patrolled the courtyard the whole night," Tang recalled.

Han Chinese and Uighurs have occasionally clashed in Urumqi on a smaller scale. But the city, which is majority Han, was supposed to be a showcase for a more prosperous and stable Xinjiang.

Through a government campaign dubbed "Develop the West," some of China's most revered companies -- from the wealthy Han-dominated coastal areas -- have been given tax breaks, free rent and other incentives to expand their operations to this frontier.

Although the government has helped develop the region, workers from minority ethnic groups -- which include not only Uighurs but also Kazakhs and Mongolians -- complained that their Han bosses provided them with only menial work and hired other Hans for higher-paying skilled jobs.

Minority groups have also accused the government of pursuing a policy of cultural assimilation. Officials have expanded efforts to make Mandarin the dominant language. Male civil servants who were Uighur were told to shave the beards they had grown for religious reasons. And teachers and schoolchildren were ordered not to fast during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.

The protesters who initially gathered in Urumqi on Sunday appeared to have been mindful not to push their case too far.

Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress who is in exile in Sweden, said protesters reportedly carried a Chinese flag to show they were not part of an independence movement. He said demonstrators were shouting slogans such as "Stop racial discrimination" and "Punish the criminals severely."

Staff writer Greg Gaudio in Washington and researchers Zhang Jie in Urumqi and Liu Liu and Wang Juan in Beijing contributed to this report.

Riots Engulf Chinese Uighur City

Groups of ethnic Han Chinese have marched through the city of Urumqi carrying clubs and machetes, as tension grows between ethnic groups and police.

Security forces imposed a curfew and fired tear gas to disperse the crowds, who said they were angry at violence carried out by ethnic Muslim Uighurs.

Earlier, Uighur women had rallied against the arrest of more than 1,400 people over deadly clashes on Sunday.

The two sides blame each other for the outbreak of violence.

AT THE SCENE Quentin Sommerville, Urumqi There are many armed military police standing around, also a few remnants of those Han Chinese demonstrators, still people wandering around the city carrying poles and batons and some carrying knives. There's a great air of trepidation here as to how this night will play out. I wouldn't have thought today that I would have seen Uighur men and women acting so defiantly in the face of Han Chinese authority, but they did. I wouldn't have thought that thousands of Han Chinese would be able to walk freely through a Chinese city and march and shout slogans. Xinjiang is one of the most tightly-controlled parts of the country. Those controls seem to have slipped quite considerably.

Officials say 156 people - mostly ethnic Han Chinese - died in Sunday's violence. Uighur groups say many more have died, claiming 90% of the dead were Uighurs.

The unrest erupted when Uighur protesters attacked vehicles before turning on local Han Chinese and battling security forces in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province.

They had initially been protesting over a brawl between Uighurs and Han Chinese several weeks earlier in a toy factory thousands of miles away in Guangdong province.

On Tuesday about 200 Uighurs - mostly women - faced off against riot police to appeal for more than 1,400 people arrested over Sunday's violence to be freed.

'Heart-breaking' violence

Later hundreds of Han Chinese marched through the streets of Urumqi smashing shops and stalls belonging to Uighurs.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, in Urumqi, says some of the protesters were shouting "down with Uighurs" as they rampaged through the streets armed with homemade weapons.

UIGHURS AND XINJIANG Xinjiang population is 45% Uighur, 40% Han Chinese Uighurs are ethnically Turkic Muslims China re-established control in 1949 after crushing short-lived state of East Turkestan Since then, large-scale immigration of Han Chinese Sporadic violence since 1991 Attack on 4 Aug 2008 near Kashgar kills 16 Chinese policemen In pictures: Protests Q&A: China and the Uighurs China tells its own story Accounts of Xinjiang violence

Police used loudspeakers to urge the crowd to stop and later fired tear gas, as the Han Chinese confronted groups of Uighurs.

One protester, clutching a metal bar, told the AFP news agency: "The Uighurs came to our area to smash things, now we are going to their area to beat them."

Urumqi's mayor, Jierla Yishamudin, said a "life and death" struggle was being waged to maintain China's unity.

"It is neither an ethnic issue nor a religious issue, but a battle of life and death to defend the unification of our motherland and to maintain the consolidation of all ethnic groups, a political battle that's fierce and of blood and fire," he told a news conference.

One official described Sunday's unrest as the "deadliest riot since New China was founded in 1949".

Xinjiang's Communist Party chief Wang Lequan announced during a televised address that a curfew would run from 2100 until 0800.

State-run news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying any ethnic violence was "heart-breaking" and blaming "hostile forces both at home and abroad" for the trouble.

China's authorities have repeatedly claimed that exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer is stirring up trouble in the region.

But she told the BBC she was not responsible for any of the violence.

"Last time during the Tibet riots, [the Chinese government] blamed the Dalai Lama, and now with the Xinjiang riot, they are blaming me," she said.

"I will never damage the relationship between two communities and will never damage the relationship between people. For me, all human beings are equal."

Disabled Athletes Shine With Pride

By Matt Crook

DILI, Jul 6 (IPS) - Getting around isn't easy for Jose Noronha. With minimal use of his legs, he has opted for a red wheelchair-bicycle hybrid that he pedals with his hands, a common sight in Dili, East Timor's capital.

In a small field with patches of grass and mounds of sand, he is out of his chair, alternating a pair of flip flops between his hands and feet as he shuffles into position.

Picking up a five kilogram shotput, he swings back and forth before unleashing a piercing growl as he launches the metal ball into the air. He watches it land five metres away.

"I enjoy doing this," he says. "Because I can practise like this, I can be happy; I can do something."

Part of the nation's under-supported troop of disabled athletes, 46-year-old Noronha first started throwing shotputs in 1991 during the Indonesian occupation, which lasted for 24 years until 1999.

"I practise here four times a week, lifting and throwing," says Noronha, who services radios and televisions when he's not hurling shotputs.

He had been hoping to secure a spot at this month's Lusophony Games in Portugal, but a dearth of funding opportunities means that East Timor can only send two athletes.

Manuel Marquis, 27, an ambulant athlete with an impaired leg and arm function, is one of the lucky ones. Running back and forth along the field, Marquis thunders across the grass as beads of sweat dribble off his body.

Marquis will go to Portugal to compete in three long-distance events: the 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres and a 21-kilometre mini-marathon.

"When I go to represent my country, the main thing I want to do is make a lot of effort," he says. "Even if I don't win any medals, at least I can try."

Marquis and Noronha aren't the only ones training in Dili. Near the patchy field, Juliao Soares da Silva, head of East Timor's National Paralympics Committee, has opened up his home to the nation's disabled athletes.

Space is limited at the family residence, where da Silva lives with his wife, five sons, six daughters and an ebullient bunch of nieces and nephews.

Da Silva went to the Asean ParaGames in Vietnam in 2003 under the flag of the United Nations. "They recommended for us to go back to our country and build a Paralympics organisation," he says.

The National Paralympics Committee was formed in 2004 with da Silva at the helm. Since then, East Timor's disabled athletes have been all over the world.

Pascoela Pereira, 28, was at the Arafura Games held in Darwin, Australia, this May, from which East Timor brought back 13 medals. Her skinny legs may be weak, but put a table tennis bat in her hand and she can do some damage. Pereira first got involved with the team in 2007.

"I was just walking around one time when some guy called to me to ask me to be an athlete. I asked him, 'How Come?' I didn't know there was this. He told me that I could go to Mr Juliao's house and so Mr Juliao asked if I can play table tennis," she says.

"I said, 'Not too much,' but he taught me how and I liked it, so I started to play. It makes me stronger and I'm happy to move," adds Pereira, who is now the coordinator for the women's Paralympic team.

Pereira came home from the Arafura games with a silver and a bronze medal.

"My family says that if I'm happy, they're happy. When I came back from the Arafura Games, my mum said I made her proud. She gave me a hug and kisses," says Pereira, who works as a nanny for an expat couple in her spare time.

Next up for Pereira is this year's Asean ParaGames in Malaysia, slated for August.

Despite all this hope and success, Juliao Soares da Silva says East Timor's disabled athletes are a force in need.

"We've been working for about six years, but we don't get enough support from the government or anyone else. We get support, with uniforms, tickets and hotels, only if there is a big event on," says da Silva, who buys most of the squad's equipment.

"We see that disabled people have a talent and we want to build that talent," he adds.

Other sports the disabled athletes take part in include badminton, power lifting and athletics.

In da Silva's backyard there is a hustle of activity around a ping pong table where athletes take turns to slug it out. Some use wheelchairs, one has an amputated arm and others stand on club feet or weakened legs.

Across town from da Silva's house, down a rocky, dusty road, there is a small, sweaty shed with no air and a lot of old weightlifting equipment.

With his legs strapped to a bench, 28-year-old Jacinto Pereira bench presses a barbell in front of old wrestling posters, all under the watchful eye of Domingos Freitas, president of East Timor's Disabled Power Lifting Federation.

Pereira says he can bench press 120 kilograms, but he doesn't have much hope of winning any medals in the future because of a lack of decent training equipment and facilities.

August's Asean ParaGames and the 2012 London Paralympic Games are some of the major events East Timor's seven disabled power lifters are aiming for, but the athletes are in dire need of aid.

"If we're going to get to London, we need more support. We need more barbells, weights, benches. We've had to buy all the equipment ourselves," says Freitas.

In the meantime, people like shot-putter Noronha, runner Marquis, table-tennis star Pascoela Pereira and power lifter Jacinto Pereira will carry on with their preparations for international events.

"For all the disabled people in East Timor, I say don't be so frustrated," Pereira says. "You can do something for your country even though you're disabled."

Indonesia's President Looks Ahead as Vote Nears

By TOM WRIGHT

Reuters

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife, center, greet supporters at a campaign rally on Saturday in the capital of Jakarta.

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- On the eve of a national election this week, Indonesia is re-emerging as one of the world's hottest developing economies, a remarkable turnaround for a country that was once widely viewed as a basket case.

Despite the global financial crisis, Indonesia's economy is on track to grow nearly 4% this year, making it one of only a handful of major economies -- including China and India -- that International Monetary Fund expects to expand in 2009.

Its stock market is up 50% for the year, and companies including Volkswagen AG and British American Tobacco PLC are making new investments there.

Much of the credit goes to Indonesia's president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former army general who is widely expected to win re-election after five years in power. Under his watch, the government has stamped out Islamic terrorism and ended its civil war in the resource-rich province of Aceh. He has brought state spending under control and launched a popular anti-corruption drive, landing a number of senior politicians and central bank officials, including one whose daughter is married to Mr. Yudhoyono's son, in jail.

But critics say Mr. Yudhoyono will have to do more to attack corruption if the nation is to reach its potential of China-style economic growth rates of over 8%. Last year, China attracted six times more foreign direct investment than Indonesia. Foreign businesses say that a corrupt legal system and bureaucracy are major deterrents to doing business in Indonesia.

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Indonesia's Election

In a rare hour-long interview on Sunday at his home -- a sprawling estate outside Jakarta that has a library of 13,000 volumes -- Mr. Yudhoyono said that if he's re-elected, he will fill his next cabinet with technocrats, rather than hand out positions to a wide range of under-qualified leaders from rival political parties, as he did to placate opponents in his first term. He acknowledged that in the past his government has included businessmen with conflicts of interest that made it harder for him to rein in corruption and push reform -- a practice that he pledged to end in a second term.

"Five years from now, I have to complete my effort in reforming Indonesia," Mr. Yudhoyono said. "Good governance, bureaucratic reform, the anti-corruption campaign all have to be intensified."

A broad-shouldered man who dresses neatly in bureaucrats' safari suits or silk batik shirts, Mr. Yudhoyono, 59, is an unlikely reformer. He is a career military officer in a country where the military is widely associated with corruption and human rights abuses.

In a poll of 3,000 people released on Sunday by Lembaga Survei Indonesia, 63% of respondents said they will vote for Mr. Yudhoyono in the presidential election set for Wednesday. Twenty percent opted for his closest rival, former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, who has been pushing an anti-free trade stance. Trailing a distant third is Jusuf Kalla, chairman of the Golkar Party.

The question is whether Mr. Yudhoyono could carry his law-and-order campaign to a new level in a second term, putting Indonesia -- the world's fourth-largest country with 240 million people -- on a more sustainable path as one of the world's top emerging-market economies. Mr. Yudhoyono has taken a number of steps in recent weeks -- including choosing a well-respected Wharton-educated economist with few political ties as his new running mate -- that suggest he'll press for bigger changes during a second term.

In the interview, Mr. Yudhoyono said he would protect only a few crucial industries such as the local rice market, to make sure food security is maintained, but said he is otherwise committed to free trade and investment as a way to raise incomes in a country filled with natural resources.

For more than a decade, this ethnically-diverse archipelago nation of more than 17,000 islands -- covering a distance greater than Los Angeles to New York -- was known for corruption and chronic instability, with one of the world's longest-running civil wars. Islamic terrorists struck Western targets in Indonesia with impunity, and foreign investors mostly steered clear. Indonesia seemed so unstable at times that some Western analysts feared it would turn into another Pakistan.

Recently, its fortunes are changing. Last month, a Morgan Stanley analyst report suggested Indonesia should be added to the famous "BRIC" grouping of fast-growing emerging markets that now includes Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Mr. Yudhoyono's reputation as a reformer in the Muslim world's largest democracy is far from assured. Indonesia's cosy business elite has barely changed since the fall of former authoritarian president Suharto in 1998. The judiciary and civil service remain graft-ridden, according to advocacy group Transparency International, despite Mr. Yudhoyono's personal reputation for probity. Without more serious changes, investors fear the recent surge in interest in the country will fizzle.

Despite his anti-corruption drive, Mr. Yudhoyono remains part of the nation's elite, making him cautious in going after the most powerful politicians, judges and other government officials involved in graft, critics say. Last month, New York-based Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing continued abuses by military special forces, including rape and torture, in Indonesia's easternmost province of Papua.

"He's very much part of the system," says Michael Buehler, a fellow at Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute. "If you look at civil service reform, nothing has happened in the past five years."

Mr. Yudhoyono hit back at critics who charge he has been slow at bringing reform. He says they underestimate the enormity of Indonesia's problems of graft, which could take 10 years more to clean up, and the need to weigh decisions carefully to bolster respect for the nation's laws and Constitution, which in the past were often disregarded. "That's the way we have to run the country, it's not a small company where you can make decisions right away," he said.

And while acknowledging that army reform isn't yet complete, Mr. Yudhoyono insisted there have been no major violations of human rights or other systematic repressions under his watch.

Like Mr. Suharto, who was also an army general, Mr. Yudhoyono can seem aloof and stiff in public, preferring to read from prepared scripts than answer questions off-the-cuff from the media. He often deliberates so long over decisions that cabinet meetings have been known to run all day without reaching a decision.

But he is also considered to be an intellectual who has shown a commitment to democracy and rule of law that's somewhat unusual for Indonesia. After declaring independence from the Netherlands in 1945, Indonesia became one of the world's most impoverished economies under its first president, an independence hero named Sukarno. Mr. Suharto took over in 1965 and presided over growth fueled by Western capital and foreign aid, but also ruled the country as his own fiefdom. In 2007, a report by the U.N. and World Bank alleged Mr. Suharto stole more state funds than any other modern world leader -- as much as $35 billion. Rights groups documented a range of abuses, including military-led massacres in East Timor, which voted in 1999 to split from Indonesia in a U.N.-backed referendum after a 24-year civil war.

Mr. Suharto, who died in 2008, justified his practices by arguing that Indonesia would disintegrate without an authoritarian figure at the helm. This seemed all the more true after Mr. Suharto's government collapsed in the wake of the 1998 Asian financial crisis. A series of ineffective civilian leaders left the country adrift and foreign investors fled.

Mr. Yudhoyono appears to have broken that mold. Born into a poor family whose father was a low-ranking military official, he excelled in studies from an early age and won a place at Indonesia's prestigious military academy, where he graduated top of his class.

From early on, his approach to soldiering often put him at odds with army colleagues. Upon taking command of Battalion 744, a feared infantry unit with a reputation for brutality in East Timor in the 1980s, he moved to end the common practice of summarily executing prisoners.

On one occasion, he intervened to stop troops from killing a resistance fighter who was badly injured in a skirmish, ordering that he instead receive hospital treatment, according to an account of the incident in Mr. Yudhoyono's official biography. Former senior generals confirm the account and say Mr. Yudhoyono was criticized by some for these unusual tactics.

He studied several times in the U.S. on joint-training programs and served as a top United Nations commander in Bosnia. In 1990, he spent a year at the U.S. Army's staff college in Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where officials conducted classes on the role of the army in the U.S. and its separation from politics.

"He saw how the United States could be a superpower and democratic," says T.B. Silalahi, a former general who was Mr. Yudhoyono's senior in rank at staff training college in the 1990s and is now a presidential national security adviser for Mr. Yudhoyono.

By the mid-1990s, a pattern in Mr. Yudhoyono's leadership was emerging in which he stayed loyal to the country's establishment but pressed for more flexibility and reform from within. He became head of the army's political wing, an army staff position that oversaw the secondment of generals to the civilian government's cabinet and played a role in policymaking.

When tensions between pro-democracy student activists and Mr. Suharto's government reached a boiling point in 1998, with three days of rioting in which hundreds of people were killed, Mr. Yudhoyono backed the government. But unlike most other generals, he tried to help mediate by organizing televised forums with pro-democracy groups to reduce tensions. There was an ethos that "rebellions must be crushed militarily. I didn't agree," Mr. Yudhoyono said.

After Mr. Suharto stepped down, Mr. Yudhoyono took a lead role in the new government headed by Mr. Suharto's last vice president, B.J. Habibie, and drew up a blueprint for army reforms that were quickly enacted. They included measures aimed at withdrawing the military from domestic politics -- including forcing generals to resign before taking up cabinet positions -- and removing the country's national police from army control.

Mr. Yudhoyono, who left the army for a full-time career in politics in 1999, also grew frustrated by the country's low reputation abroad. The following year, as the nation's top political and security minister under then-President Abdurrahman Wahid, he was summoned by the U.N. Security Council in New York after an episode in which an Indonesian military-backed militia attacked a U.N. office near East Timor, killing three U.N. personnel.

Mr. Yudhoyono defended his country, amid angry responses by President Bill Clinton and other world leaders, telling U.N. officials that sending a U.N. peacekeeping force would be meddling in Indonesia's affairs. But he also promised to create a timetable for reining in the militias and privately told advisers he was deeply embarrassed by the affair.

"The world had a problem with Indonesia because of East Timor," Mr. Yudhoyono said in the interview. World leaders saw the nation as a "repressive country in which internal security problems were resolved militarily."

Indonesia was in chaos on other fronts, too. Hard-line Islamist groups that had been forced into exile by Mr. Suharto but were able to return after the end of military-backed rule plotted terrorist attacks on Western targets, culminating in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali that killed 202 people.

Meanwhile, decentralization laws designed to unravel some of Mr. Suharto's power network instead led to near anarchy in the provinces, where newly-empowered local politicians became extremely wealthy handing out permits to cut down trees and mine inside national parks.

Mr. Yudhoyono coordinated the setting up of a U.S.-funded anti-terrorism police unit called Detachment 88 that made scores of arrests over the next few years, including those of the Bali bombers, all but destroying a local Islamic terrorist network linked to al Qaeda.

In 2004, backed by a group of disgruntled liberal former generals, Mr. Yudhoyono resigned from the government of Ms. Megawati, a daughter of Mr. Sukarno, to stand in Indonesia's first direct presidential elections. Mr. Yudhoyono, who wasn't implicated in a number of corruption scandals that plagued Ms. Megawati's tenure, promised voters he wouldn't shy away from taking tough decisions to end Indonesia's security and economic woes. The voters responded, electing him in 2004 in a landslide victory.

His strategy, he now says, was to identify a few key areas where Indonesia needed to act -- including lack of respect for the law, reining in corruption and restoring overall economic and political stability -- while recognizing that some other areas couldn't be fixed right away.

Within a year, he signed a deal to end 30 years of fighting in the province of Aceh by agreeing to give it special autonomy within Indonesia and more power to run its own affairs, despite opposition from hard-line generals who feared compromise would cause Indonesia's other minorities to demand independence -- something that hasn't happened.

"I did convince military officers we had to change," Mr. Yudhoyono said. "It's not that we necessarily had to conduct military operations all the time."

On the economic front, high global oil prices were wreaking havoc on the state budget, with generous consumer fuel subsidies adding up to $7 billion in 2004. Foreign investors were fleeing the stock market and local currency on fears the nation was on the verge of bankruptcy.

The government raised fuel prices twice in 2005, sparking street protests. Opposition politicians and NGOs slammed the moves as anti-poor and inflationary. But Mr. Yudhoyono appeared regularly in public and mustered academic experts to point out fuel prices disproportionately benefited the middle classes who drive cars, while leaving less for education and health care.

To balance the fuel-price increase, Mr. Yudhoyono instituted a cash-transfer program that reached a third of households. The government has spent more than $2 billion in cash handouts, subsidized primary education and other benefits, paid for in part from fuel subsidy savings.

The president appointed well-respected technocrats who have run a tight economic ship. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, a former International Monetary Fund executive director, has presided over a reduction in public debt to 30% of gross domestic product from 60% when Mr. Yudhoyono came to power. The economy, helped by a commodity boom and healthy consumer spending, grew by over 5% annually between 2004 and last year.

"The fact he's going after corruption is a very good sign," said Mark Mobius, a Hong Kong-based executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management LLC, who has covered emerging markets for over 40 years. "The $64 million question is whether he will continue to carry that out. They're up against a lot of competition in the race for investment from around the world. They've really got to move forward."

Mr. Yudhoyono's ability to drive change is now greater, his supporters argue. In part because of his success over the past several years, Mr. Yudhoyono's Democrat Party is today the largest in Parliament, which means he can more easily press through reform legislation, if he chooses.

"I've tried to transform Indonesia," he said. His goal, he says, is "to be as any other normal democratic countries."

-- Yayu Yuniar contributed to this article.

Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com

Obama Raises Concerns About Freedom and Judicial Independence in Russia

By PETER BAKER and CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — Ahead of his departure for Moscow on Sunday night for a visit aimed at repairing strained relations with Russia, President Obama vowed not to sacrifice American support for greater freedom here and questioned the politically charged prosecution of a prominent Russian businessman.

Mr. Obama raised concerns about the treatment of the businessman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, who along with his partner has been put back on trial six years after they were first arrested. Critics say the new trial seems aimed at keeping Mr. Khodorkovsky, an opponent to the government who was once Russia’s richest man, in prison.

“Without knowing the details, it does seem odd to me that these new charges, which appear to be a repackaging of the old charges, should be surfacing now, years after these two individuals have been in prison and as they become eligible for parole,” Mr. Obama said in written answers to questions posed by a Russian opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, over the weekend. “Nonetheless, I think it is improper for outsiders to interfere in the legal processes of Russia.”

But Mr. Obama called on President Dmitri A. Medvedev to follow through on his promise “to strengthen the rule of law in Russia, which of course includes making sure that all those accused of crimes have the right to a fair trial and that the courts are not used for political purposes.”

In a television interview that was broadcast in Russia on Saturday night, Mr. Obama did not repeat critical comments that he had made about Vladimir V. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, who is widely considered Russia’s dominant leader.

Mr. Obama plans to conduct negotiations with Mr. Medvedev on Monday and have breakfast with Mr. Putin on Tuesday. In the interview on Russian state television, Mr. Obama was asked why it was important to meet both men. Mr. Obama noted that he had never met Mr. Putin, but added, “Obviously, he has been a very strong leader for the Russian people.”

The interview with Russian television was conducted on Thursday shortly after Mr. Obama offered a different view of Mr. Putin in an interview with The Associated Press.

In the A.P. interview, Mr. Obama said Mr. Putin had “one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.” Mr. Obama said that it was time to move forward and that Mr. Medvedev “understands that.”

The comment was seen as provocative, and some American officials worried that Mr. Obama may have been too sharp in taking on Mr. Putin while others argued that it let the president come in a position of strength.

On Sunday, the Kremlin released the text of an interview in which Mr. Medvedev once again suggested that the United States needed to compromise on its proposed antimissile system in Eastern Europe in order to obtain a broader agreement on cutting nuclear arsenals.

Mr. Khodorkovsky’s case is one of three that have come up as Mr. Obama heads here. Supporters want him to press Russia not only to free Mr. Khodorkovsky but also to do more to pursue the killers of two journalists, Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading war correspondent, and Paul Klebnikov, an editor for Forbes magazine.

Ms. Politkovskaya held dual Russian and American citizenship while Mr. Klebnikov was an American of Russian heritage. Mr. Obama is sending top advisers to a memorial service to be held in Moscow on Tuesday for the fifth anniversary of Mr. Klebnikov’s death, and offered a show of support for Ms. Politkovskaya’s colleagues by answering written questions posed by her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

Novaya Gazeta’s editors, Dmitri Muratov and Andrey Lipsky, asked Mr. Obama if he would ratchet back American attention to liberty issues in Russia.

“Of course not,” Mr. Obama wrote, adding: “I agree with President Medvedev when he said that ‘freedom is better than the absence of freedom.’ So, I see no reason why we cannot aspire together to strengthen democracy, human rights, and the rule of law as part of our ‘reset.’ ”

Mr. Khodorkovsky, who led Yukos, Russia’s most successful oil company at the time, was arrested in 2003 when he challenged Mr. Putin. He was convicted of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to eight years in prison, while his oil company was effectively taken over by the state. He is back on trial on new charges of embezzlement and money laundering.

Mr. Khodorkovsky’s parents hoped that Mr. Obama’s interest would prompt Mr. Medvedev to stop the trial and free their son. “I liked very much what Obama said,” his father, Boris Khodorkovsky, said in an interview. But Mr. Medvedev dismissed the possibility of a pardon, at least for now, comparing the case to the recent conviction of Bernard L. Madoff in the United States.

“Some businessmen have been given very long sentences, 150 years in the United States of America,” Mr. Medvedev said in his interview with Italian news media. “Why is it that somehow no one is unduly upset about this case?”

Piecing Together an Immigrant’s Life the U.S. Refused to See

By NINA BERNSTEIN

When the 43-year-old man died in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2005, the very fact seemed to fall into a black hole. Although a fellow inmate scrawled a note telling immigrant advocates that the detainee’s symptoms of a heart attack had long gone unheeded, government officials would not even confirm that the dead man had existed.

In March, more than three years after the death, federal immigration authorities acknowledged that they had overlooked it, and added a name, “Ahmad, Tanveer,” to their list of fatalities in custody.

Even as the man’s death was retrieved from official oblivion, however, his life remained a mystery, The New York Times reported in an April article on the case that pointed up the secrecy and lack of accountability in the nation’s ballooning immigration detention system. Just who the man was and why he had been detained were unknown.

Yet at the end of a long trail of government documents and interviews with friends and relatives in New York, Texas and his native Pakistan, there was his name, “Ahmad, T.,” still listed last week on the tenants’ buzzer board at the Eldorado, an apartment building in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he had lived for years. And the tenant list itself — Jones, Nadler, Mahmud, Fong, Quinones — testified to the long history of American immigration that he had tried so hard to join.

Tanveer Ahmad, it turns out, was a longtime New York City cabdriver who had paid thousands of dollars in taxes and immigration application fees. Whether out of love, loneliness or the quest for a green card, he had twice married American women after entering the country on a visitor’s visa in 1993. His only trouble with the law was a $200 fine for disorderly conduct in 1997: While working at a Houston gas station, he had displayed the business’s unlicensed gun to stop a robbery.

It would come back to haunt him. For if Mr. Ahmad’s overlooked death showed how immigrants could vanish in detention, his overlooked American life shows how 9/11 changed the stakes for those caught in the nation’s tangle of immigration laws.

In the end, his body went back in a box to his native village, to be buried by his Pakistani widow and their two children, conceived on his only two trips home in a dozen years. He had always hoped to bring them all to the United States, his widow, Rafia Perveen, said in a tearful telephone interview through a translator.

“He said America is very good,” she recalled. “When it comes to the treatment of Muslims in the U.S., he had faith in the rule of law. He said, ‘In America, they don’t bother anyone just for no reason.’ ”

When immigration agents burst into Mr. Ahmad’s two-room Flatbush apartment on Aug. 2, 2005, they were looking for someone else, his friends say — a roommate suspected of violating his student visa by working. But they ordered Mr. Ahmad to report to immigration headquarters in Manhattan on Aug. 11.

He went, and was delivered in shackles to the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold, N.J. His Texas misdemeanor had popped up in the computer as an offense involving a deadly weapon — reason enough, after 9/11, for authorities to detain him pending deportation proceedings.

Like several million other residents of the United States, Mr. Ahmad occupied the complicated gray zone between illegal and legal immigration. Though he had overstayed his first visa, he had repeatedly been authorized to work while his applications for “adjustment of status” were pending. Twice before 9/11 he had been allowed back into the country after visits to Pakistan.

But the green card application sponsored by his Bronx-born wife, Shanise Farrar, had been officially denied in March 2005, leaving him without a valid visa. Although the couple could have reapplied, by the time he was arrested they had not spoken in more than a year, and Ms. Farrar, who had received a letter threatening a marriage fraud investigation, was unaware of his detention.

As she tells it, theirs was an intimate relationship ruined by 9/11. With regret, she recalled her reaction: “I was just cursing him. I was like, ‘You people come here and kill us and mess up our city.’ He was trying to convince me and prove to me that he’s a good man, not those people.”

“I loved him,” she added. “It was just, once the World Trade Center came down, I changed my mind.”

He was a natural immigrant, friends said, the fifth child in a poor but striving family, the captain of his village school’s victorious cricket team who grew into a funny and generous adult. After his family arranged his engagement to his cousin Rafia, he left to work in a brother’s store in Saudi Arabia. But once he visited New York, he had eyes only for the United States.

“His brother called him to come back,” recalled Mohammad S. Tariq, 58, a cabby whose Brooklyn apartment was Mr. Ahmad’s first home in the city. “But Tanveer did not want to go back.”

Instead he followed a job to Texas. He worked the night shift at a gas station that was robbed at gunpoint 7 times in 35 days, said the manager, Kathy Jean Lewis — who married him while she was battling thyroid cancer.

After her recovery, Mr. Ahmad made a three-month trip back to Pakistan, where he wed his cousin in 1998. His marriage to Ms. Lewis, now 53, was annulled by a Texas court in 1999.

She harbors no hard feelings. “He was emotionally supportive when I was sick,” she said, recalling how Mr. Ahmad took her to midnight dinners at her favorite restaurant when she was undergoing radiation treatment. “He just had a very big heart.”

His second American wife, Ms. Farrar, tells a similar story.

They wed at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan in July 2000, when Ms. Farrar was a single mother struggling to support her young son as a car service dispatcher, and they applied for a green card. She says she did not know he had a wife in Pakistan, and she denies that hers was “a paper marriage,” as Mr. Ahmad’s Pakistani widow put it. Ms. Farrar, 36, still speaks wistfully of family outings to Six Flags Great Adventure and the Bronx Zoo.

Then came 9/11. “Friends and family, ringing my phone — ‘You better watch it, you maybe married a terrorist,’ ” Ms. Farrar recalled, evoking a period when hundreds of Muslim immigrants in New York were swept up on the strength of vague suspicions. “I would bring it to him. He was scared anybody was going to hurt him.”

They patched things up before a November 2002 immigration interview, Ms. Farrar said. But they flunked it — the interviewing agent apparently doubted their marriage was genuine — and never appeared for the second-chance interview in 2003, Ms. Farrar said, because they had split up.

By the time Mr. Ahmad was taken in handcuffs to immigration court on Aug. 17, 2005, all he wanted was to return to Pakistan. He insisted on giving up his right to contest deportation, even though he faced a 10-year bar on returning, said Kenneth M. Schonfeld, an immigration lawyer hurriedly hired by Mr. Ahmad’s friends, all cabdrivers from Pakistan.

“He couldn’t stand the thought of having to stay in custody,” the lawyer said, and he seemed “really terrified” of the Monmouth jail. “It’s a place that would frighten or depress anyone.”

Three weeks later, Mr. Ahmad was dead. Since he had no known health problems, his friends were shocked and disbelieving. They were told that Mr. Ahmad had suffered a heart attack in the jail, and despite all efforts to revive him, had been pronounced dead in a hospital emergency room at 5:51 p.m. on Sept. 9. An autopsy cited “occlusive coronary atherosclerosis.”

His friends did not know that the jail had a history of detainee complaints of medical neglect and physical abuse, and did not allow guards to send detainees to the medical unit without prior approval. Similar complaints have been made about many detention centers, spurring the Obama administration to order a review of the system.

According to the jail’s internal investigation, Mr. Ahmad walked into the medical unit shortly after 3:50 p.m. on Sept. 9 and “was seen immediately.” But the letter scrawled by a fellow inmate contended that before he showed up there, Mr. Ahmad’s pleas for treatment had been rebuffed by a guard for an hour.

Complaints about his death were filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, documents show; the matter was passed for internal inquiry to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with the notation that it need not report back its findings.

By 2007, when the immigration agency compiled its first list of deaths in immigration detention, under pressure from Congress and the news media, Mr. Ahmad’s death was not on it.

Yet if his death was not counted, his arrest was — it had been added to the agency’s anti-terrorism statistics, according to government documents showing he was termed a “collateral” apprehension in Operation Secure Commute, raids seeking visa violators after the London transit bombings.

How his children will remember him is another matter. Without the money Mr. Ahmad used to send, they had to move in with relatives far from his grave in Pakistan. But his 10-year-old son clings to a souvenir, the widow said: “He keeps his father’s photograph in his pocket.”

Margot Williams contributed research.

Karzai's Challengers Skirt Thorny Issues, Face Huge Odds in Afghan Campaign

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 6, 2009

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- As U.S. Marines launched a major offensive against Taliban insurgents in southern Helmand province, the presidential campaign unfolding in more peaceful parts of northern and eastern Afghanistan last week seemed to be taking place on another planet.

Whether addressing rallies, chatting with voters in the streets or receiving delegations of tribal leaders, candidates barely mentioned the violent insurgency that international experts fear could sabotage the Aug. 20 polling.

Instead, the presidential hopefuls stuck to themes they knew would resonate with Afghan audiences. They denounced civilian casualties by foreign forces and called for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. They railed against corruption in government, evoked past military triumphs and hyped their personal ties to late national leaders.

"I decided to launch my campaign here because this is where the holy war began," said Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, addressing a large outdoor rally Wednesday in this muggy eastern city. "I want to stand and struggle for the honor and dignity of the holy warriors. I want to build an Afghanistan that can defend itself without foreign troops."

Dressing for the occasion, the dapper professional wore a traditional Afghan tunic and baggy trousers. He also strove for ethnic balance by donning a rolled wool cap worn by Afghan Tajiks, then exchanging it for a striped turban favored by Pashtuns.

His audience, mostly men rounded up by a local legislator and former anti-Soviet militia leader, listened politely in the steamy tent. Later, after Abdullah had departed in a government helicopter for Kabul, the capital, some said they had not decided whom to support for president, but many said they were fed up with the incumbent, Hamid Karzai.

"We gave Karzai a chance, but he did not serve the people. He is weak, and his administration is corrupt," said Ghulam Sahi, 48, a tribal elder. A man named Zaman ul-Haq complained that Karzai's government had "taken away our weapons but not given us jobs. Today only the mafia people get jobs. After three decades of war, we need a strong and honest leader."

Public opinion surveys show that Karzai, who has led Afghanistan since soon after the overthrow of Islamist Taliban rule in late 2001, is still likely to emerge the winner. To shore up his flagging popularity, he has made preelection deals with powerful tribal, business and militia figures -- including some with unsavory reputations -- who command large numbers of votes.

Within the field of 41 candidates, only Abdullah and former finance minister Ashraf Ghani are considered remotely in the running; most others are expected to pull out or support one of the big three. Karzai can hold endless televised news conferences in his secure palace, while the threat of insurgent attacks makes it dangerous for other candidates to venture into the countryside to enhance their name recognition.

As a result, with just over six weeks until the election, only a handful of the country's 10 million to 12 million voters have met any of the candidates in person. Most campaign events have been highly guarded and orchestrated, such as Abdullah's visit here, which included closed-door meetings with local officials but not a single handshake with audience members.

"There is very little public enthusiasm for this election," said Haroun Mir, director of the Afghan Center for Research and Policy Studies. "The old political actors are still running things, and the attempt to form an opposition coalition failed. No matter who wins the presidency, the government will be dysfunctional -- with little hope of reform."

International concern has focused on whether the Taliban will follow through on threats to attack the polling places, especially in the south, where low turnout could raise the prospect of ethnic imbalance in the national count. The United States and NATO are sending extra troops to protect the vote, but officials said it would be impossible to guarantee the safety of all 28,000 polling stations.

Election advisers and opposition candidates said they are also worried about pro-government rigging on election day. They warned that this could trigger a violent confrontation similar to what has recently occurred in Iran -- only worse because Afghanistan is awash with weapons.

"The stakes are very high, so if the race gets tight, all the stops may be pulled out to deliver the vote," said one international election observer in Kabul. An election complaint office has been established, but its cumbersome procedures might be unable to forestall a wave of public anger.

Karzai has pledged not to use his government status and powers to influence the election. He has also complained that U.S. officials, while maintaining a formally neutral position, recently held high-profile meetings with several key opponents. Relations between the Afghan president and Washington have gone steadily downhill in the past year.

Yet only a few of Karzai's challengers have journeyed into the provinces on their own or mingled with crowds in Kabul. One is Ramazan Bashardost, a former planning minister and eccentric crusader whose office consists of a tent pitched outside the parliament. Another is Shala Attah, a psychologist and legislator who spent 20 years as a war exile in Alexandria, Va., and returned home in 2007.

"I'm not afraid of people, and I'm not afraid to speak the truth," said Attah, 41, who left her husband and five children behind in Virginia and said she misses them terribly. "There is too much corruption in this country. There are women in villages living in caves. There are boys killing for the Taliban. Someone has to talk about the real problems."

One evening last week, Attah drove through the capital and stopped in a busy market, draped in an elegant black cloak, to greet astonished shoppers. Because she has near-zero name recognition, her campaign posters feature images of the late Mohammed Daud Khan, a former president.

"Daud Khan was a good man, and this lady says she will follow in his footsteps," said Ghulam Haider, 51, a cook who was bicycling home and stopped to take one of Attah's fliers. "What we really need from our next leader is to negotiate with the Taliban. They are our brothers, and the foreigners have destroyed our country. We have to end this war."

Several other candidates, including Ghani and former anti-drug official Mirwais Yasini, have developed substantive policy platforms but tend to campaign in the traditional Afghan way, through private meetings and elaborate receptions for visiting provincial elders.

Like Abdullah, both men are former senior aides to Karzai who broke with him and are now highly critical of his performance. Ghani has accused Karzai of wasting billions in foreign aid and allowing corruption to poison the state.

Yasini tends to sound the same alarm, saying Karzai is running the government like a crony enterprise and cozying up to ethnic strongmen. Yasini is the only candidate who has dared to speak strongly in favor of keeping Western troops in the country, but he scoffs at opinion polls predicting that he and other challengers have little chance.

"Unless the election is rigged, Karzai is not unbeatable," Yasini said in an interview. "He thought he could use the warlords, but they won't help him because the people are fed up with these dragons. This boat is sinking, and if Karzai stays or the wrong man takes his place, the country will drown."

For U.S. and OAS, New Challenges to Latin American Democracy

By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 6, 2009

The Obama administration has signaled its support for democracy in Latin America by condemning the coup in Honduras, reducing military cooperation and joining with other countries in the hemisphere yesterday in a rare suspension of a nation from the Organization of American States.

But bayonet-wielding soldiers are not the biggest threat to democracy in the region, where more than a dozen presidents have been removed prematurely since 1990. In recent years, a crop of elected, authoritarian-minded leaders has packed courts with supporters, held dubious elections and curtailed press freedoms. Legislatures have also pushed the boundaries of democratic order, giving legal cover to "civilian coups" in which protest groups have forced the ouster of presidents.

"The threats against democracy in Latin America, and I don't in any way minimize what's happened in Honduras . . . are not those coming from military coups, but rather from governments which are ignoring checks and balances, overriding other elements of government," said Jeffrey Davidow, a retired U.S. ambassador who served as President Obama's special adviser for the recent Summit of the Americas.

But it has been difficult for the U.S. government and regional bodies to respond to constitutional crises that fall short of a coup. Although the OAS has launched a determined effort to reinstate Manuel Zelaya as Honduran president, it has reacted more mildly to other irregular changes of power and to abuses by presidents and congresses.

Zelaya set out in a plane for Honduras yesterday, ignoring warnings from U.S. diplomats and representatives of many Latin American countries that his arrival could provoke a clash. The Honduran government declared it would not let him land, and his plane instead went on Nicaragua. Zelaya is likely to return to Washington soon to discuss further efforts to end the standoff, U.S. officials said.

The Honduran crisis began as a clash among institutions. Zelaya defied his country's Supreme Court by proceeding with a non-binding poll on writing a new constitution that many believed would scrap term limits, allowing him to seek a second term next year.

The coup that removed him brought back ugly memories of the 1960s and 1970s, when Latin American generals seized power and ruthlessly repressed opponents. But events in Honduras reflected how that old model has changed: The military quickly recognized a new civilian president sworn in by the country's Congress. Honduran lawmakers overwhelmingly voted June 28 to remove Zelaya after he was bundled onto a plane to Costa Rica.

Jennifer McCoy, head of the Americas Program at the Carter Center, said the international community has rarely insisted on the reinstatement of a toppled president in Latin America in recent years, with the United States and other countries generally calling for new elections or other constitutional mechanisms.

This time, though, the sight of soldiers hauling off a pajama-clad president was too much. The Obama administration joined the chorus of condemnation, despite its frustrations with Zelaya, who belongs to a group of vociferously anti-American leaders allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

The strong reaction to the coup might "put to rest the temptation to resort to the military, once and for all," McCoy said. "But we're now in a different context of democratic frameworks in Latin America. It doesn't mean a crisis won't arise. It's just the nature of the crises are different. And we haven't figured out how to deal with them."

The Obama administration's reaction reflects lessons learned in a 2002 coup against Chávez. The Bush administration was widely seen as tacitly welcoming that maneuver. But the coup collapsed within two days, and U.S. proclamations of support for democracy in the hemisphere suddenly rang hollow.

"We were on the wrong side. We paid for it in a host of ways, both bilaterally, in the region, but also in the OAS," said Peter Romero, a former assistant secretary of state in charge of Latin America.

Obama's declaration last week that the Honduran coup was "illegal" and a "terrible precedent" won him plaudits in a region where the U.S. government has been losing influence. Obama has been courting Latin America and the Caribbean, pledging an "equal partnership" with them at the hemispheric summit in April, instead of the United States playing its traditionally dominant role.

The U.S. government response to the Honduras crisis has been nuanced, however. It has not withdrawn its ambassador, and the administration did not grant Zelaya a White House meeting during his visits to Washington last week.

In a boost for U.S. policy, the OAS handled the crisis by turning to the Inter-American Democratic Charter it adopted in 2001. The charter commits countries to elections, press freedoms and human rights, but it has often been ignored. U.S. diplomats fought an uphill battle last month in an OAS assembly to have the document shape the decision on whether to readmit Cuba after a 47-year ban.

With the Honduran crisis, the OAS for the first time invoked a part of the charter that can suspend a country for an interruption of democratic order.

"This is a dramatic move by the OAS. It underscores its commitment to democracy," said a senior U.S. official who took part in the marathon OAS sessions last week.

Some critics question why the OAS did not do more in recent months when Zelaya plunged ahead with an illegal referendum, even firing the military chief for refusing to order soldiers to hand out ballots.

"There doesn't seem to be any political will to confront the caudillismo that is re-emerging in the hemisphere," said Roger Noriega, a senior policymaker on Latin America under the Bush administration, using the Spanish term for strongman tendencies. The Bush administration sought to give the OAS a bigger role in monitoring democratic practices, but member countries rejected it, concerned about interference in their internal affairs.

The region's strong reaction to the Honduran coup contrasts with its limited response to the situation in Venezuela. Over the past decade, Chávez has taken control of the courts, the armed forces and all oversight agencies; curtailed anti-government media; and launched criminal investigations of opposition politicians.

Ecuador has gone through a string of constitutional standoffs, with three presidents ousted between 1996 and 2006 by a combination of public protests and dissident soldiers and lawmakers. Nicaragua was stuck in political gridlock for months after local elections in 2008 that were considered fraudulent by the opposition and were criticized by international monitors.

"This is what we're facing in Latin America today -- as their democracies mature, we're seeing these conflicts between institutions of government," McCoy said. "We need to deal with that before they turn into these full-blown crises. We still have not learned to do that successfully."

Zelaya's Plane Not Allowed to Land in Honduras

By William Booth and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 6, 2009

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, July 5 -- In a high-stakes standoff that played out in the skies over Honduras, the airplane carrying ousted president Manuel Zelaya was forced to circle the nation's main airport twice before flying away Sunday evening after coup leaders who deposed Zelaya blocked his landing with troops on the runway.

The turn-back of Zelaya's white jet left thousands of his supporters shouting in disappointment and anger. Minutes earlier, security forces fired tear gas and bullets at the crowd to keep demonstrators away from the airport, which was surrounded by soldiers and military vehicles.

The Red Cross said people 30 people were wounded in the melee, but there were conflicting reports about fatalities. An Associated Press photographer reported that one man was shot in the head.

Immediately after Zelaya's plane flew away, Honduran air force helicopters and aircraft appeared over Tegucigalpa, the capital. Zelaya, who had repeatedly vowed to return to his country, later landed in Managua, Nicaragua.

The aerial standoff, which took place at sunset, punctuated a crisis that has gripped this country of 7 million for the past week. The entire hemisphere, including the United States, has been drawn into a bitter political brawl in Honduras between the leftist Zelaya and his conservative opponents that shows no sign of ending soon.

Zelaya was deposed June 28 in a military-backed coup that has been condemned throughout the Americas but has frustrated diplomats in the Obama administration, who have not been able to persuade the Honduran coup leaders to back down. The leaders of the new Honduran government say Zelaya is guilty of treason for advocating a change to the constitution that would allow a president to serve more than one term. The coup backers also fear Zelaya's close ties with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

The government of Roberto Micheletti, the de facto president, had warned Sunday that it would refuse to allow Zelaya to land at any airport in Honduras and ordered the military to turn the plane back. A Honduran aviation official said the restrictions applied only to Zelaya and his entourage. But the order effectively shut down air traffic across the country for the day. Flights from all major carriers in and out of the nation were canceled.

Zelaya took off for Honduras from Washington's Dulles International Airport about 3 p.m., followed by a plane carrying the presidents of Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay, as well as the secretary general of the Organization of American States, according to senior Obama administration officials.

Zelaya and the other presidents flew in different planes for safety reasons -- and because the other leaders were expecting Zelaya to mount his face-off over Tegucigalpa.

Zelaya was accompanied only by top advisers, a Nicaraguan priest and U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann. Also aboard his plane was Venezuelan state television network Telesur, which broadcast live interviews with Zelaya from 35,000 feet.

"Today I feel like I have sufficient spiritual strength, blessed with the blood of Christ, to be able to arrive there and raise the crucifix," he said in one live transmission.

He insisted that he remained commander in chief of the Honduran military and pleaded with troops to allow him to land.

As his plane circled the airport, Zelaya narrated his approach live on Telesur. "I am here with the two pilots. They are doing what is humanly possible to approach the landing strip. They do not want to land with obstacles in the way," he said. "What is happening here is a barbarity."

Thousands of his supporters surrounded the international airport in the Honduran capital. Hundreds of police officers and soldiers in riot gear kept the crowds away from the terminal.

As word spread that Zelaya's plane was coming, the crowds pressed against the police barricades. Soldiers or police fired tear gas, and shots were heard.

Asked why his government did not allow Zelaya to land and then arrest him, as officials have repeatedly threatened, Micheletti said that kind of publicity could incite violence.

"When Zelaya is prepared to turn himself in quietly, he can do so," he said.

Micheletti said in a news conference that Nicaraguan troops were massing at the border with Honduras.

"I want to ask the country of Nicaragua, our brothers, not to cross our borders, because we are ready to defend our country. If there are acts of war against our country, there will be bloodshed," he said.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega dismissed the charges of troop movement as "totally false." Critics of the de facto Micheletti government said the rumors of a war with Nicaragua were propaganda intended to consolidate power for the new regime by introducing an illusory external threat.

Pressed on the Nicaraguan confrontation, Micheletti conceded that "it is a small number of troops, without the support of their commanders, and they haven't crossed the border, and they are not in a position to strike against Honduras."

U.S. officials said they were not aware of any Nicaraguan troop movements toward its border.

Senior Obama administration officials, briefing reporters earlier Sunday, said that if Zelaya's plane were not allowed to land in Honduras, he probably would return to Washington for consultations with the OAS, possibly as early as Monday.

Zelaya, however, said he would try to return home Monday or Tuesday.

U.S. officials confirmed that Honduras's de facto government had sent a message to the OAS seeking to open negotiations, a move that one official described as positive.

"We think this could create the basis for continuing movement by the OAS on diplomatic initiatives," one official said. However, he said the hemispheric body would still insist that Zelaya be allowed to return and serve out the rest of his term, which ends in January.

Zelaya left Washington after the OAS voted in a late meeting Saturday to suspend Honduras, putting in jeopardy about $200 million in loans the Central American country receives from the Inter-American Development Bank. In addition, U.S. military and development aid has been "put on pause," the official said, and military cooperation has been limited.

Representatives of many countries at the OAS meeting -- including the United States -- urged Zelaya not to fly back to Honduras, saying the move was dangerous for him and his supporters.

"Given the situation in Honduras, we did not see how this was going to assist in creating a political space for dialogue. But at the same time, we respect the right of President Zelaya as a Honduran citizen, and the legal and constitutional leader of Honduras, to make his own decisions," the U.S. official said.

Sheridan reported from Washington.

Iraq Steps Out of Iran’s Shadow

Nuri al-Maliki wants to keep Tehran at bay.

Larry Kaplow

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Jun 15, 2009

Decades later, the memory still rankles Iraq's prime minister. Nuri al-Maliki was an exile in southern Iran at the time, running covert Iraqi networks against Saddam Hussein, and Iran and Iraq were at war. Maliki needed official Iranian clearance to enter the border area, but Maliki's Iranian handlers liked to make life difficult: one of them announced that a pass could be obtained only from another Iranian official, a 12-hour drive away in blustery winter weather. When the road-weary Maliki finally got there, his application was summarily rejected.

In isolation, the incident might have been merely a nuisance, but to Maliki it was just another piece in a vast pattern of condescension and sabotage by the Iranians. Years after being sent on that fool's errand, Maliki spotted the former handler from a distance at an official function in Damascus. As the prime minister recounts the story now, according to his ally Sami al-Askari, Maliki quietly warned a friend: "If he comes near me, I'll take my shoes off and hit him in the head."

With America's involvement in Iraq beginning to wind down, many Westerners share the concern of Arab leaders that the big winner will be Iran. Maliki's domestic opponents, the Sunni hardliners especially, already complain that his Shia-led administration is a proxy for its coreligionists in Tehran—that "an Iranian government" controls Iraq. And the fact is that the Iranians now exert more influence inside Iraq than they have for centuries. The leverage takes many forms: not only cross-border trade and direct lobbying by envoys in Baghdad, but also covert links to Shia militants and assassination teams. Even so, Iraq's leaders are scarcely inclined to take orders from Tehran. They're Arabs, not Persians, and they've learned what confidants say Maliki long ago found out the hard way: Iran rigorously pursues its own national interests, regardless of their shared Shia faith. The Iraqis respond in kind: Maliki's government uses the Iranian threat as a way to extract concessions from Iraq's nervous Arab neighbors and the West—if they don't help Maliki, the Iranians will. Nevertheless, the prime minister's personal view might be better summed up in an old Iraqi proverb he's been known to quote when speaking of Baghdad's "friends" in Tehran: "They'll take you to the water and bring you back thirsty."

Maliki's personal experiences say a lot about the limits of Iran's influence over Iraq's leaders. The prime minister's political organization, the Islamic Dawa Party, began as a Shia revivalist movement—in Iraq, not in Iran—and gained national importance in the 1970s as Saddam's main internal opposition. (Al Dawa is Arabic for "The Call.") Saddam did all he could to eradicate the group. The party says more than 200,000 Iraqis died in the purges: Dawa members, relatives of members, friends of those relatives, anyone with connections of any sort to the party.

Maliki fled Iraq in October 1979, only steps ahead of Saddam's police. He would return many times with Dawa guerrilla bands to Iraq's southern marshes or the mountains of northern Kurdistan. In those years he adopted pseudonyms—"Mr. Mohseni" in Iran and "Jawad Maliki" in Syria—to protect his relatives from Saddam's secret police. Still, dozens in his extended family were killed.

Dawa members credit Iran with giving them sanctuary when no one else would. They and the Iranians shared a hatred of Saddam when most other countries, including the United States, backed their enemy in Baghdad. Tehran's support for the Iraqi guerrillas grew with the 1980 outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, and a year later the Iranian government let them set up housekeeping at a camp that had been abandoned by a South Korean oil company. The camp, about 13 miles from the Iranian city of Ahwaz, was in a predominantly Arab area near the border, convenient for staging raids into Iraq. The group named its new home after Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, a Dawa founder and venerated Shia cleric who had been tortured and executed by Saddam. Several hundred fighters bunked in joined wooden trailers, usually four to a room, well supplied with electricity and water. They received military training from Dawa members who had served in Saddam's Army.

With daily religious and political indoctrination, the camp became what Dawa elder and camp founder Hussein al-Shami calls "a lush oasis." Dawa shared the Iranians' enthusiasm for the fledgling Islamic Revolution, even though they answered to a different clerical leadership. Jaafar Sadek al-Dujaili, a mullah who lived in the camp, recalls how the fighters at midday and evening prayers would chant: "Religion is always victorious! Long live Sadr!" Maliki gave regular seminars on politics and hung out in fatigues with an egalitarian mix of doctors, clerics and unschooled Dawa loyalists. "Martyrdom will strengthen our roots, not uproot us," he promised.

But Dawa's idyll didn't last. The Iraqis disliked the Iranian model of an Islamic government led by a supreme cleric, and the Iranians kept trying to take control of the Iraqis' guerrilla war against Saddam. There were disputes over control of the camp's entrances and access to the border. "We used to ask why, as religious people, they were doing this to us," says Dujaili. He remembers Maliki urging patience, but finally the Iranians unilaterally decided to reorganize the anti-Saddam Iraqis into a new group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Some Dawa members joined but most refused or eventually dropped out. "SCIRI was the spoiled son [of Iran]," says Izzat al-Shabander, who split from Dawa in the 1970s but lived in Iran and stayed friendly with party members. (He's now a member of the Iraqi Parliament.)

Iraqis who were at the camp describe the run-up to its handover to SCIRI. They say Maliki, a camp leader at the time, held meetings to promise the angry rank and file that Dawa's struggle would continue. Talib al-Hassan, a Maliki adviser who has recently been named governor of Thiqar province in southern Iraq, recalls the day in early 1983 when Maliki stood at the camp's main mosque and told the fighters that they were free to stay or go. "But the Dawa Party will have nothing to do with this camp anymore," he announced.

Tehran gave its full support to the camp's new occupants. Captured Iraqi Shia troops were allowed to join SCIRI's fighting ranks, rather than being tossed into a POW camp. While Dawa's influence dwindled, its run-ins with the Iranians continued. Hassan recounts how he went to renew his and Maliki's immigration cards, only to be told by an Iranian functionary that written approval from SCIRI was needed. One of the worst moments came when Saddam threatened airstrikes on Ahwaz. Townspeople were fleeing for their lives when Maliki knocked on Hassan's door and asked for his help; Maliki's wife had just delivered a son by Caesarean, and the hospital was being evacuated. The two men raced to carry her, her IV drip and the baby down the hospital steps to a car heading out of town—with no help from the Iranians. "They didn't care about us," Hassan says.

Acquaintances say Maliki was anything but sorry to leave Iran when he moved to Syria. (Sources differ on the date, but his official biography says it was in 1990.) His Farsi is even worse than his English, according to friends. "You can only learn a language if you love the people," Shami remarks. All the same, Maliki and other Shia leaders in Iraq have not forgotten that Iran was the first neighbor to recognize the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council in 2003. Nor have they forgotten the snubs of Arab governments in the region. While other powers like Saudi Arabia and Egypt refused to open embassies in Baghdad, Iran kept its mission open and stayed engaged. And during the sectarian bloodshed of 2006, money and weapons from Iran helped Iraq's Shia defend themselves. No other regional head of state had visited Iraq before Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad paid a call last year. (An Iraqi official says American diplomats tried to discourage the trip but finally gave in and facilitated Ahmadinejad's travels from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone.)

Maliki has grown bolder lately about asserting Iraq's independence. "As he sees his fortunes go up, you can see him trying to put distance between himself and the Iranians, [just] as he's tried to put more distance between himself and the Americans," says Wayne White, a former State Department analyst. But the Iranians have been pushing back. Dawa parliamentarian Haider al-Abadi quotes the prime minister as saying that last year's drive against militants in Basra uncovered a "snake" that stretched across the eastern border. After government forces captured a notorious Iranian-backed militant, the Basra resistance intensified. "This is from the Iranians," Maliki told colleagues gathered in his improvised Basra war room. To save face, Iran organized talks between senior Dawa figures and radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose troops were armed by Iran. Shabander remembers Maliki at a security conference after the shooting stopped, warning the Sadrists that their Iranian backers could not be trusted. "Those who give you rockets to attack others today will give rockets to others to attack you tomorrow," he told them.

Skeptics say Dawa will always be in bed with Iran, willingly or otherwise. Shabander, who has known Dawa's leadership since the 1970s, says Maliki is surrounded by senior party members with Iranian loyalties who enable Tehran to "run Dawa by remote control," in his words. On the other hand, Dawa members know from experience what a fickle ally Tehran can be. "The Iranians are not necessarily straight. They may say one thing and do something else," says Zuhair al-Naher, Dawa's spokesman in London. "With the Americans there will also be some level of skepticism—but often the Americans have said things and followed through."

There's no way to eliminate Tehran's influence. Iraqi officials note that Iran's $4 billion annual trade with their country is second only to Turkey's $5 billion. And, if necessary, the Iranians can create chaos through the armed militants they continue to support. Maliki suspects one Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander in particular, Qassam Suleimani, of now and then subtly threatening to engineer his ouster, according to Shabander. (Maliki aides deny any such worries.) An American adviser in Baghdad, who asked not to be named discussing Iraqi internal matters, says ranking Iraqis even fear that Iran could attempt to assassinate leaders who stand in their way.

Still, Dawa may finally be settling old scores with the upstarts who took over its exile camp a quarter century ago. This past January, Maliki's party defeated the Supreme Council for the first time in local elections. Tensions are rising between the two longtime rivals, and Tehran seems worried that its favored party may be in trouble. With parliamentary elections due early next year, Iran is pushing Maliki to maintain a coalition with the Supreme Council. "They want everyone to return to one united power," says senior Dawa figure Ali al-Adeeb.

This time, however, Maliki is expected to insist on leading the coalition. Otherwise, party allies say, he has enough support from Sunnis to form a mixed coalition. If they're right, it would bring Iraq that much closer to national reconciliation, and push the country that much further outside Iran's ambit. The question is whether the Iranians are prepared to let that happen—and how far they might go to prevent it.

With Hussam Ali and Saad Al-Izzi in Baghdad and Hassan Al-Jarrah in Najaf

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/200865