Drug Cartels Target Mormon Clans in Mexico

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 23, 2009

COLONIA LEBARON, Mexico -- Mormon pioneer Alma Dayer LeBaron had a vision when he moved his breakaway sect of polygamists to this valley 60 years ago: His many children would live in peace and prosperity among the pretty pecan orchards they would plant in the desert.

Prosperity has come, but the peace has been shattered.

In the past three months, American Mormon communities in Mexico have been sucked into a dust devil of violence sweeping the borderlands. Their relative wealth has made them targets: Their telephones ring with threats of extortion. Their children and elders are taken by kidnappers. They have been drawn into the government's war with the drug cartels.

This month, a leader of their colony was abducted by heavily armed men dressed as police, then beaten and shot dead 10 minutes from town. Benjamin LeBaron, 31, whom everyone called Benji, had dared to denounce the criminals, while refusing to pay a $1 million ransom demanded by kidnappers who had grabbed his teenage brother from a family ranch in May.

Amid the blood and mesquite at the site of his last breath, Benjamin LeBaron's killers posted a sign that read: "This is for the leaders of LeBaron who didn't believe and who still don't believe."

"We're living in a war zone, but it's a war zone with little kids running all around in the yard," said Julian LeBaron, a brother of the slain leader. Like most members of the Mormon enclave, he has dual Mexican-American citizenship and speaks Spanish and English fluently.

These Mormons, some who swear and drink beer, are the latest collateral damage in the Mexican government's U.S.-backed war against criminal organizations.

Here in Chihuahua, the border state south of Texas and New Mexico, conditions are rapidly deteriorating. The violence has left more than 1,000 dead in Ciudad Juarez this year, even though the government has sent 10,000 troops and police officers into the city.

Increasingly the violence is moving from the big cities into the small, usually placid farm towns of the rugged desert mountains. Criminal bands have ambushed the governor's convoy along the highway, and they have assassinated local police at stop lights and political leaders at will. Gunmen executed the mayor of Namiquipa last week.

"The northeast of Chihuahua is now a zone of devastation," said Victor Quintana, a state lawmaker, who reports an exodus of business people fleeing kidnappers and farmers refusing to plant their crops because of extortion.

The columnist Alberto Aziz Nassif wrote in El Universal newspaper, "Chihuahua today is the emblem of a failed state, run by incompetent authorities who have little ability to protect the citizens."

Many of the Mormons have fled north to the United States, and Julian LeBaron said he fears for his life. He has reason. In Ciudad Juarez, a three-hour drive to the north, hand-painted banners were hung from overpasses last week threatening the extended clan.

"All we want to do is live in peace. We want nothing to do with the drug cartels. They can't be stopped. What we want is just to protect ourselves from being kidnapped and killed," said Marco LeBaron, a college student who came home for the funeral of his brother, the slain anti-crime activist. Marco LeBaron is one of 70 Mormons who have volunteered to join a rural police force to protect the town. The Mexican government has given them permission to arm themselves.

Dragged Into Drug Fight

For all the violence swirling around them, the Mormons have mostly stayed out of the fight. Their ancestors first settled in Mexico in the 1880s, during the reign of dictator Porfirio Díaz, who offered the religious outcasts refuge from the harassment and prosecution they faced in the United States for their polygamist lifestyles. Some men in Colonia LeBaron and surrounding towns continue to follow what early Mormon prophets called "the Principle," marrying multiple wives and having dozens of children, though the custom here is fading. Polygamy was banned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the official Mormon Church, in 1890.

The Mormon community based in Colonia LeBaron, numbering about 1,000, has one motel, two grocery stores and lots of schools. There are no ATMs and no liquor sales. Many Mormons are conspicuous not only for their straw-colored hair and pale skin, but also for their new pickup trucks, large suburban-style homes with green front lawns, and big tracts of land for their pecans and cattle. They are wealthy, by the standards of their poor Mexican neighbors. Most of the Mormon men make their money working construction jobs in the United States; a young Mormon might work 10 years hanging drywall in Las Vegas before he has enough money to buy a plot of land to start his own pecan orchard here.

The Mormons were dragged into the drug fight on May 2, when 16-year-old Eric LeBaron and a younger brother were hauling a load of fence posts in their truck to their father's ranch in the Sierra Madre. According to the family's account, five armed men seized Eric and told his brother to run home and tell his father to answer the telephone. When the kidnappers called, they told Joel LeBaron that if he ever wanted to see Eric again, he must pay them $1 million.

The next day, 150 men gathered at the church house in Colonia LeBaron to debate what to do. They had no confidence in the local police. One of their members, Ariel Ray, the mayor of nearby Galeana, reminded them that someone had put an empty coffin in the bed of his pickup. Some men argued that they should hire professional bounty hunters from the United States to get Eric back. Others wanted to form a posse.

"But we knew the last thing we could do was give them the money, or we would be invaded by this scum," Julian LeBaron said.

Another brother, Craig LeBaron, told the Deseret News in Salt Lake City: "If you give them a cookie, they'll want a glass of milk. If we don't make a stand here, it's only a matter of time before it's my kid."

A caravan of hundreds of the LeBaron Mormons, along with Mennonites and others, went to the state capital to protest the crime. This kind of public advocacy is almost unheard of among the Mexican Mormons, who keep to themselves. Led by Benjamin LeBaron, the protesters met with the governor and state attorney general, who quickly dispatched helicopters, police and soldiers to the area. The government forces erected roadblocks and searched the countryside.

Eric LeBaron was freed eight days after his abduction. His kidnappers simply told him to go home. But soon after, another member of the community, Meredith Romney, a 72-year-old bishop related to former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was taken captive. The state governor sent Colombian security consultants to LeBaron. The Mormons, led by an increasingly public and outspoken Benjamin LeBaron, formed a group called SOS Chihuahua to organize citizens to defend themselves, report crimes and demand results from authorities. LeBaron was featured prominently in the local media. He gave a speech to a graduating class of police cadets. He staged rallies. He got noticed.

Attack on Family Home

Early on July 7, four trucks loaded with men passed through a highway tollbooth, where they were recorded on videotape outside Galeana, where Benjamin LeBaron lived in a sprawling, new stucco home with his wife and five young children. Two trucks stopped at the cemetery outside town and waited. Two pickup trucks filled with 15 to 20 heavily armed men, wearing helmets, bulletproof vests and blue uniforms, came for LeBaron.

They smashed in his home's windows and shouted for him to open the door, as his terrified children cried inside, according to an account given by his brothers. LeBaron's brother-in-law Luis Widmar, 29, who lived across the street, heard the commotion and ran to his aid. Both men were beaten by the gunmen, who threatened to rape LeBaron's wife in front of her children unless the men revealed where LeBaron kept his arsenal of weapons.

"But he didn't have any, because I promise you, if he did, he would have used them to protect his family," Julian LeBaron said.

LeBaron and Widmar were shot in the head outside town. A banner was hung beside their bodies that blamed them for the arrest of 25 gunmen who were seized in June after terrorizing the town of Nicolas Bravo, where they burned down buildings and extorted from business owners. According to Mexican law enforcement officials, the gunmen are members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is fighting the Juarez cartel for billion-dollar cocaine-smuggling routes into El Paso.

After the men killed LeBaron and Widmar, a video camera captured their departure at the highway tollbooth -- the make, model and year of their vehicles and the license numbers, according to family members. There have been no arrests.

Who killed Benji LeBaron -- and why? These questions are difficult to answer in Mexico's drug war, and the unknowns fuel the fear of those left in Colonia LeBaron.

The state attorney general, Patricia González, blamed the group La Línea, the Line, the armed enforcement wing of former police officers and gunmen that works for the Juarez cartel. A few months ago, González said La Línea was an exhausted remnant of dead-enders whose ranks had been decimated by infighting and arrests.

After González said the Juarez cartel was responsible for the killings, banners appeared in Ciudad Juarez that read: "Mrs. Prosecutor, avoid problems for yourself, and don't blame La Línea." The message stated that the LeBaron killings were the work of the Sinaloa cartel. On Wednesday, another banner was hung from an overpass, suggesting that Benji LeBaron was a thief: "Ask yourself where did all his properties come from?"

At the LeBaron funeral, attended by more than 2,000 people, including the Chihuahua state governor and attorney general, Benji's uncle Adrian LeBaron said, "The men who murdered them have no children, no parents, no mother. They are the spawn of evil."

Kingdom 'Not Free' in 2008

Wednesday, 22 July 2009 14:04 Sebastian Strangio

A REPORT released Thursday by the US-based international watchdog organisation Freedom House rated Cambodia as "not free" and claimed that the government had only "paid lip service" to its stated goals of combating corruption and improving governance.

In its 2009 Freedom in the World report, an annual comparison of global political rights and civil liberties, the organisation said Cambodia had earned its rating due to endemic corruption, free speech restrictions and the lack of an independent judiciary in the Kingdom.

"Cambodia is not an electoral democracy," the report stated.

"Prime Minister Hun Sen and the [Cambodian People's Party] dominate national and local politics through their control of the security forces, officials at all levels of government and the state-owned media."

The report also paints a picture of a judiciary "marred by inefficiency and corruption", and claims corruption and abuse of power by high-ranking government officials have "significantly hindered" economic growth.

"Although the economy has been growing as a result of increased investments ... these enterprises frequently involve land grabs by the political elite, top bureaucrats and the military," the report states.

Each year, Freedom House designates countries as "free", "partly free" or "not free". Except for 1993 and 1994, Freedom House has rated Cambodia as "not free" every year since the report was launched in 1973.

Thun Saray, president of the local rights group Adhoc, said the report generally described the situation in Cambodia accurately, though he said the static "not free" rating did not capture the dynamic of transition the country is still experiencing.

Referring to the recent crackdown on government critics, he said Cambodia was certainly in a period of decline.

But he said history showed a pattern of ups and downs.

"Sometimes we see the political space widen, and sometimes we see it narrow down," he told the Post.

"The improvement is that people are more aware of their rights than ever before."

He added: "In a transitional period there are always struggles between democratic and authoritarian forces, and sometimes the authoritarian forces prevail."

A transitional period
Phay Siphan, spokesman for the Council of Ministers, said he had not seen the Freedom House report, but that Cambodia still faces many challenges.

He said the current government had experienced peace and stability only in the past 11 years, providing a narrow window for reform.

"We understand that we do have some flaws, but [I would like to] remind them that we are still in a stage of reform and development," he said.

"Thank God the CPP is still strong, to keep this country at [the stage] where everyone can enjoy work and enjoy seeing human rights and development."

The new Freedom House report echoes an earlier press freedom report from the organisation, which ranked Cambodia 132nd among 195 countries surveyed.

In its 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index, global corruption monitor Transparency International listed Cambodia as the 166th most-corrupt country out of 180 nations surveyed.

China Urges U.S. to Prevent Separatist Activities

BEIJING, July 22 (Xinhua) -- A senior Chinese diplomat on Wednesday urged the United States to prevent separatist activities against China on U.S. territory, saying the July 5 riot in the northwestern region of Xinjiang was a grave and violent criminal incident.

"The nature of the riot is neither an ethnic problem nor a religious issue, but a grave and violent criminal incident plotted and organized by the outside forces of terrorism, separatism and extremism," Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told a press briefing on the first round of the China-U.S. strategic and economic dialogue.

The violence in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, had left 197 people dead and more than 1,600 injured. Houses of 633 families were damaged and 627 vehicles were smashed and torched.

Some separatists, including World Uyghur Congress (WUC) president Rebiya Kadeer who flew to the United States on medical parole in 2005, were conducting separatist activities in foreign countries, said He.

"Chinese people know well about their activities and I suppose the U.S. side did so too," He said.

Rebiya Kakeer and her WUC, which was seeking "Xinjiang independence", were believed by the Chinese to be behind the Urumqi riots and a series of protests at Chinese embassies worldwide.

"China and the United States took care of each other's core concerns, which facilitated the sound development of bilateral ties since President Barack Obama took office," He said.

"We noticed that the U.S. government's statements were cautious in general and if this issue is touched upon during the dialogue, I think both sides could discuss in a peaceful manner," He said.

The issue, as well as the Chinese government's measures to protect the life and property, however, was China's internal affair, he said.

The dialogue will be held in Washington, D.C. from July 27 to 28. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will join their Chinese Co-Chairs, State Councilor Dai Bingguo and Vice Premier Wang Qishan.

Saudi 'Rights Abuses' Criticised

Amnesty International has strongly criticised Saudi Arabia over abuses allegedly committed as part of its counter-terrorism operations.

In a report, the human rights group says since 2001 thousands of Saudi suspects have been detained for years without charge or trial.

The 69-page report describes Saudi Arabia's human rights record as "shocking" and "dire".

It says the international community has been far too quiet about the abuse.

In the report, entitled "Saudi Arabia: assaulting human rights in the name of counter-terrorism", the UK-based organisation accuses the oil-rich conservative kingdom of massive and widespread abuse.

It says that two years ago, the Saudi interior minister said the country had detained 9,000 security suspects since 2001, and 3,106 were still being held.

AMNESTY REPORT ALLEGATIONS

Thousands of people detained arbitrarily

Some of those held are prisoners of conscience

Abuses include beatings, suspension from ceiling, electric shocks

But, says Amnesty International, no information - not even their names and the charges - were forthcoming and unofficial sources put the numbers far higher.

Over the last two years, it says, "new waves of arrests" have been reported.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the Saudi authorities have been widely credited with defeating al-Qaeda in their country.

And, he says, Amnesty International concedes that most of the thousands detained without trial are suspected of links to groups which have committed attacks, on westerners and other targets.

But it says their cases are shrouded in secrecy and, quoting numerous examples, it doubts that even basic human rights standards are being met.

The director of Amnesty's UK office, Kate Allen, said that, except for the re-education programme for ex-jihadists, and the carefully co-ordinated mass trials, Saudi Arabia's habitual cloak of secrecy was wrapped even more tightly than ever in "security" cases.

"It is true", she said, "that Saudi Arabia faces a challenge in dealing with terrorism, but its response has been shocking - something the international community has been far too muted about.

"We are calling for a fundamental change of policy by the Saudi authorities."

Serious violations

This is not the first time Saudi Arabia has been criticised for alleged human rights abuses.

In February, the US-based organisation Human Rights Watch listed what it called "ongoing serious violations of rights" in the kingdom.

They included restrictions on speech, association, assembly and religion; an arbitrary criminal justice system, discrimination against women; and serious abuses against migrant workers in the country.

And in 2008, it published a 144-page report criticising Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system.

It said that it had "found systematic and multiple violations of defendants' rights".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8162256.stm

Ayatollah Tells Ahmadinejad to Drop Choice for Top Iranian Deputy

By ROBERT F. WORTH

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In a sign of persistent fissures within Iran’s conservative ranks, Iran’s supreme leader has told President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to reverse his decision to appoint a top deputy, according to comments reported by Iranian news agencies on Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, scattered opposition rallies took place in Tehran, the capital, and other cities, with a heavy presence by the police and members of the Basij militia apparently discouraging many from taking to the streets to protest Iran’s disputed June 12 election.

A senior member of Parliament said the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had sent a letter to Mr. Ahmadinejad telling him to dismiss the deputy, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose appointment was announced Friday, according to news reports.

“Without any delay, the removal or acceptance of Mashaei’s resignation must be announced by the president,” the deputy speaker of Parliament, Mohammad-Hassan Aboutorabi-Fard, told the ISNA news agency.

The appointment had provoked a storm of criticism from conservatives, who were angered last year when Mr. Mashaei reportedly said that the Iranian people were friends with all other peoples, including Israelis.

As late as Tuesday, Mr. Ahmadinejad had defended Mr. Mashaei — whose daughter is married to his son — and said he would keep him on. Cabinet appointments do not require the approval of the Iranian Parliament. Mr. Mashaei tried to defend himself, saying he meant that Iranians were friends of those who suffered under Zionist oppression in Israel and that his comments were “a psychological warfare against the Israeli regime.”

But what appeared to be the intervention of Ayatollah Khamenei, who wields final authority on affairs of state, would seem to seal the matter. Conservatives largely closed ranks after the presidential election, which set off the worst internal unrest since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. But as Mr. Ahmadinejad begins appointing his new cabinet, splits among conservatives have surfaced again.

On Tuesday evening, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported that Mr. Ahmadinejad might make as many as 19 changes to the cabinet, including the key posts of foreign minister, finance minister and intelligence minister.

The cabinet changes are being closely watched for signs that Mr. Ahmadinejad might be making conciliatory gestures toward some of his critics. Many in the conservative and the reformist ranks have called for such signals, observing that the election has deepened a serious political and social rift in Iran.

Supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, say that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s landslide election was rigged. Their protest movement, largely quelled by a heavy police crackdown, has gained new energy since Friday, when an influential former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, delivered a speech urging the government to recognize a broad lack of public confidence in the results.

Opposition Web sites had issued calls for widespread demonstrations on Tuesday, the anniversary of a day in 1952 when huge street protests took place to reinstate Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a national hero in Iran.

There were scattered protests in Tehran, Shiraz and other cities on Tuesday, according to reports by witnesses and video clips posted on opposition Web sites. But they appeared to have been quickly suppressed by the police. In Tehran, witnesses said the police and the Basij militia used sticks and tear gas to disperse protesters in Haft-e-Tir Square in the center of the city.

Radical Islamists Slip Easily Into Kenya

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

HULUGHO, Kenya — A thin, dusty line is about the only thing separating Kenya, one of the Western world’s closest allies in Africa, from the Shabab, a radical Islamist militia that has taken over much of southern Somalia, beheading detractors, stoning adulterers and threatening to kill any Americans or Europeans who get in their way.

In most places this line, the official international border, is not even marked, let alone protected. In the village of Hulugho, there is simply a tattered Kenyan flag and a cinderblock schoolhouse with chicken-wire windows. Then a meadow of thorn trees and donkey dung. Then Shabab country.

Kenya is widely seen as a frontline state against the Islamist extremism smoldering across the Horn of Africa. Few expect the Shabab to make good on its threats to march en masse across the border. But the creeping fear, the one that keeps the security staffs at Western embassies awake at night, is that the Shabab or its foreign jihadist allies will infiltrate Kenya and attack some of the tens of thousands of Westerners living in the country, possibly in a major strike like Al Qaeda did in 1998.

Last month, Western counterterrorism experts in Kenya sent out text messages warning expatriates to stay away from malls in Nairobi, Kenya’s usually laid-back capital, because of possible suicide attacks by the Shabab. A few weeks later, the group threatened to destroy Nairobi’s “tall, glass buildings.”

The Shabab has already penetrated refugee camps inside Kenya, according to camp elders, luring away dozens of young men with promises of paradise — and $300 each. It has carried out cross-border attacks, kidnapping an outspoken cleric in May from a refugee camp 50 miles inside Kenya. Last Wednesday, in one of its boldest cross-border moves yet, a squad of uniformed, heavily armed Shabab fighters stormed into a Kenyan school in a remote town, rounding up all the children and telling them to quit their classes and join the jihad.

“If these guys can come in with their guns and uniforms in broad daylight,” said one of the teachers at the school, “they must be among us.”

Then on Saturday it happened again: Somali gunmen, widely believed to be with the Shabab, stormed the offices of an aid organization and kidnapped three aid workers from a Kenyan border town before melting back into Somalia.

American and British advisers are working closely with Kenyan counterterrorism teams, but the area along the Somali border is known to be a gaping hole.

“The Kenyans don’t have the skills to close the border, even if they wanted to,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol. “People are very concerned. But on some level, we can’t defend Kenya’s border for them.”

When asked to assess the level of security at the Somali border, the diplomat flatly stated, “There is no security.”

The raging war in the country next door, between Somalia’s weak transitional government and the Shabab, is rapidly becoming a proxy war — with Western arms and money keeping the transitional government alive, while Arab and Pakistani jihadists with links to Al Qaeda fight for the Shabab.

Late last month, American officials acknowledged that they had shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia’s transitional government, a disclosure that has only sharpened the Shabab’s anti-American sentiments.

Kenyan security forces are now flooding into their borderlands, marching along the shimmering roads and across the unforgiving landscape, their assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

But the 400-mile border is inevitably porous, and Somali-speaking nomads from both countries flow seamlessly back and forth in diaphanous shawls and worn-out wooden carts. And the biggest proverbial holes may be in the police officers’ pockets.

Just this month, Transparency International listed Kenya as the most corrupt nation in East Africa. The region’s most corrupt public institution? The Kenyan police.

Even though the border is officially closed, Hassan Mohamed, a refugee who used to build houses in Somalia but got driven out by war, explained how thousands of Somali refugees find their way into Kenya each month.

“It’s easy,” he said, rubbing his thumb and index finger together in the universal sign of a bribe. “If you pay, you can come in.”

The cracked wooden shelves in the border-town markets are heaped with the telltale signs of a flourishing smuggling business: sacks of Pakistani sugar, foreign brands of sodas and soaps, cigarettes with Somali labels — all illegal imports from Somalia that somehow made it past the dozen police checkpoints on the Kenyan side.

Abdi Dimbil Alan, an elder who lives in Alin Jugul, a town near the Somali border, says that nearly every night he witnesses the same Somali businessmen paying off the Kenyan police to allow consumer goods and even assault rifles to slip through the border.

“These guys are so corrupt,” Mr. Abdi said, referring to the border police, “that if 100 Shabab pulled up with a truckload of weapons and said they were coming to Kenya to kill the president, the police would let them through — for the right price.”

Erick Kipkorir, a district officer in Alin Jugul, said Kenyan forces were hard-working and honest.

“We can’t say that nothing is coming in because, as you see, the border is very expansive,” he said. “But as for bribes, that has never happened.”

Ever since Al Qaeda blew up the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people and wounding thousands, American counterterrorism officials have been watching East Africa warily. But in the areas along the Kenya-Somalia border, it seems that anti-Americanism is still spreading, despite the millions of dollars the American government has spent on a hearts-and-minds campaign.

Take an American-built well in the village of Raya. No one is using it, though Raya is desperately poor and dry.

“The Americans wanted to finish us,” said one villager, Ibrahim Alin, convinced that the American water engineers who built the well had poisoned it to sterilize him.

The Somali-speaking areas of Kenya have always been an uneasy fit, and Kenya has often responded brutally.

This area tried to secede in the 1960s and join Somalia, leading to a guerrilla war. In 1984, Kenyan security forces imprisoned and then killed thousands of ethnic Somali men at a remote airstrip, according to Kenyan human rights groups.

In recent weeks, Human Rights Watch accused Kenyan security services of raping women and smashing the testicles of men during a crackdown in northeastern Kenya in October.

“We’re trying to find a way that when they do deploy,” the Western diplomat said, “they do more helping than hurting.”

Pakistan Objects to U.S. Plan for Afghan War

By ERIC SCHMITT and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is objecting to expanded American combat operations in neighboring Afghanistan, creating new fissures in the alliance with Washington at a critical juncture when thousands of new American forces are arriving in the region.

Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.

The Pakistani account made clear that even as the United States recommits troops and other resources to take on a growing Taliban threat, Pakistani officials still consider India their top priority and the Taliban militants a problem that can be negotiated. In the long term, the Taliban in Afghanistan may even remain potential allies for Pakistan, as they were in the past, once the United States leaves.

The Pakistani officials gave views starkly different from those of American officials regarding the threat presented by top Taliban commanders, some of whom the Americans say have long taken refuge on the Pakistani side of the border.

Recent Pakistani military operations against Taliban in the Swat Valley and parts of the tribal areas have done little to close the gap in perceptions.

Even as Obama administration officials praise the operations, they express frustration that Pakistan is failing to act against the full array of Islamic militants using the country as a base.

Instead, they say, Pakistani authorities have chosen to fight Pakistani Taliban who threaten their government, while ignoring Taliban and other militants fighting Americans in Afghanistan or terrorizing India.

Such tensions have mounted despite a steady rotation of American officials through the region. They were on display last weekend when, during a visit to India, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said those who had planned the Sept. 11 attacks were now sheltering in Pakistan. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued an immediate rebuttal.

Pakistan’s critical assessment was provided as the Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday night.

The country’s perspective was given in a nearly two-hour briefing on Friday for The New York Times by senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. They spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy. The main themes of the briefing were echoed in conversations with several military officers over the past few days.

One of the first briefing slides read, in part: “The surge in Afghanistan will further reinforce the perception of a foreign occupation of Afghanistan. It will result in more civilian casualties; further alienate local population. Thus more local resistance to foreign troops.”

A major concern is that the American offensive may push Taliban militants over the border into Baluchistan, a province that borders Waziristan in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Army is already fighting a longstanding insurgency of Baluch separatists in the province.

A Taliban spillover would require Pakistan to put more troops there, a Pakistani intelligence official said, troops the country does not have now. Diverting troops from the border with India is out of the question, the official said.

A spokesman for the American and NATO commands in Afghanistan, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, said in an e-mail message on Monday that there was no significant movement of insurgents out of Afghanistan, and no indication of foreign fighters moving into Afghanistan through Baluchistan or Iran, another concern of the Pakistanis.

Pakistani and American officials also cited some positive signs for the alliance. Increased sharing of information has sharpened the accuracy of strikes against militant hide-outs by Pakistani F-16 warplanes and drones operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. And Pakistani and American intelligence operatives are fighting together in dangerous missions to hunt down fighters from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas and in the North-West Frontier Province.

But the intelligence briefing clearly illuminated the differences between the two countries over how, in the American view, Pakistan was still picking proxies and choosing enemies among various Islamic militant groups in Pakistan.

The United States maintains that the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leads an inner circle of commanders who guide the war in southern Afghanistan from their base in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan.

American officials say this Taliban council, known as the Quetta shura, is sheltered by Pakistani authorities, who may yet want to employ the Taliban as future allies in Afghanistan.

In an interview last week, the new leader of American and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, paused when asked whether he was getting the cooperation he wanted from Pakistani forces in combating the Quetta shura. “What I would love is for the government of Pakistan to have the ability to completely eliminate the safe havens that the Afghan Taliban enjoy,” he said.

The Pakistani intelligence officials denied that Mullah Omar was even in Pakistan, insisting that he was in Afghanistan.

The United States asked Pakistan in recent years to round up 10 Taliban leaders in Quetta, the Pakistani officials said. Of those 10, 6 were killed by the Pakistanis, 2 were probably in Afghanistan, and the remaining 2 presented no threat to the Marines in Afghanistan, the officials said.

They also said no threat was posed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taliban leader who American military commanders say operates with Pakistani protection out of North Waziristan and equips and trains Taliban fighters for Afghanistan.

Last year, Washington presented evidence to Pakistani leaders that Mr. Haqqani, working with Inter-Services Intelligence, was responsible for the bombing last summer of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed 54 people.

Pakistani officials insisted that Mr. Haqqani spent most of his time in Afghanistan, suggesting that the American complaints about him being provided sanctuary were invalid.

Another militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is also a source of deep disagreement.

India and the United States have criticized Pakistan for allowing Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, to be freed from jail last month.

The Pakistani officials said Mr. Saeed deserved to be freed because the government had failed to convince the courts that he should be kept in custody. There would be no effort to imprison Mr. Saeed again, in part because he was just an ideologue who did not have an anti-Pakistan agenda, the officials said.

Most Mexicans in U.S. Stay Put Despite Recession

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Despite the recession, the flow of Mexican immigrants out of the United States and back into Mexico has stayed level, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center.

The report, which used surveys of families in Mexico, Census data and U.S. Border Patrol data, also found a continued decrease in immigration from Mexico since 2006.

Last year, 433,000 people returned to Mexico, compared with 479,000 two years earlier. The number of people coming in decreased more sharply, with 636,000 people arriving last year compared with nearly 1.03 million two years earlier.

"People are essentially staying put at both ends," said Michael Fix, senior vice president of the Migration Policy Institute, after reading the report. "They're basically riding out the storm."

The findings answer questions that have been raised recently about whether immigrants are leaving the United States because of diminished economic prospects, said Jeff Passel, a senior demographer at Pew.

"It's not surprising, and it fits in well with what we've seen in previous economic downturns," he said, adding that even in a good economy, many Mexican immigrants go back and forth across the border.

About 8 in 10 recent immigrants from Mexico are undocumented, so it is impossible to track arrivals and departures precisely. The report said that although the Mexican-born population in the United States, the country's largest immigrant group, grew in the earlier part of the decade, it has stayed steady in recent years at more than 11 million.

Although the report did not analyze causes for the trend, Passel said reasons could include the faltering Mexican economy; tales of drug violence there putting off returnees; and indications that tougher enforcement by U.S. border patrol agents is keeping people in the United States.

"The monetary cost of getting into the United States, and the danger, have increased," he said, noting that those factors might keep people from crossing the border in both directions. "People who have already spent the money and taken the risk . . . might try to stay here and ride it out rather than spend the money to go back to Mexico and try again at a later date."

Although the numbers still show "a lot of dynamic migration" between the two countries, that may change if the recession continues, said Audrey Singer, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. "If we experience more job loss, we'll see fewer people coming," she said.

Although the report focused only on Mexicans, an October Pew report showed the number of illegal immigrants from other Latin American countries in the United States has also decreased.

Uighurs Lose Economic Ground to Han

By IAN JOHNSON

URUMQI, China -- As Chinese leaders look to prevent another outbreak of ethnic violence, they face a key question: how to spread China's growing wealth to its ethnic minorities when they are losing control over even their traditional industries?

This month's rioting in the capital of China's northwestern Xinjiang region left 197 people dead and more than 1,700 injured, the government says. According to official statistics, most victims were ethnic Chinese, or Han, attacked by Uighurs, the once-dominant group in Xinjiang that is increasingly being eclipsed.

Although the immediate catalyst for the attacks appears to have been the murder of two Uighurs in a southern Chinese factory, longer-term problems have simmered. Like Tibetans, who rioted last year against Han partly in protest of growing Han control of their region's economic life, many Uighurs feel that Han are taking over Xinjiang's economy. Most galling to some Uighurs, Han seem to be taking over traditional Uighur industries -- from traditional markets to Muslim foodstuffs.

In downtown Urumqi, for example, the main marketplace is in Han hands, although it features sculptures of Uighur merchants outside and bills itself as a grand Central Asian bazaar to rival Istanbul or Samarkand. Even some large companies making halal foods -- those prepared according to Muslim purity laws -- are run by Han and not Uighurs. In tourism, which has boomed in recent years by featuring the exoticism of the Uighur culture, Han companies seem to dominate.

"For the Uighurs, it's their homeland, but they're not the ones who have benefited from economic growth and development," says Jing Huang, a professor of Chinese politics at National University of Singapore.

More than 90% of China's population is Han, with the rest divided among 55 smaller ethnic groups. China aims to help its minorities through an array of generous policies, from easier college admission to soft loans and hiring requirements. Some of these have helped to create a small class of prosperous Uighurs who sit on government advisory boards and have risen to top levels in the region's government. The current head of the exiled Uighur opposition, Rebiya Kadeer, for example, was a prominent Uighur businesswoman before she left.

An exact calculation of ethnic income or hiring isn't possible because while the government collects such figures, it doesn't make them public. But available statistics indicate a stubborn gap. Xinjiang's economy has doubled from 2002 to 2008, but it remains reliant on energy -- especially oil, coal and gas -- for 60% of its economic output. The companies involved in these industries are run by Han companies, and visits to oil fields suggest that most employees are Han Chinese.

Rural statistics also imply ethnic inequality. Most Uighurs live in the countryside, especially in the southern part of the province. Last year, government statistics showed rural annual income averaged 3,800 yuan ($560) in Xinjiang as a whole, but for rural residents in southern Xinjiang it is much lower. For example rural residents around the oasis town of Khotan earn 2,226 yuan a year, according to government figures. Agriculture in northern Xinjiang, which is less arid and supports cotton farming, is controlled by the Han-dominated Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military organization established to pacify the region.

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Government programs have sought to level this imbalance. Soft loans to small-scale farmers, most of whom are Uighurs, have enabled them to expand production. The government has also encouraged large food companies to sign long-term contracts with small farmers to give them some economic stability.

"The government really has made a good-faith effort to improve minorities' livelihood," said Wang Ning, an economist at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences.

Anecdotal evidence suggests Han control has expanded beyond the obvious areas of energy and large-scale agriculture. Huo Lanlan is a prominent Han entrepreneur who runs Xinjiang Jiayu Industrial & Trading Co. Her company offers 46 halal food products, from lamb and horse meat to camel and chicken.It is now one of Xinjiang's largest halal food processors, supplying Air China with food for its flights to Xinjiang and Muslim countries.

Most of her 300 employees, however, are Han, she says. She says she has a few Uighur employees, such as a cleaning lady, but all top positions are Han. "It's a requirement of all halal food companies to have Uighur employees," she said.

Equally striking is the Grand Bazaar. Once a stronghold of Uighur entrepreneurs, most of the bazaar was torn down and rebuilt in 2003 by a Hong Kong developer and Xinjiang Grandscape Group, a Han-run company. Just like in the fabled Silk Road city of Kashgar, whose old town is being torn down by the city's Han mayor, many Uighurs seem uneasy by the developments.

The new bazaar now features anchor tenants, such as a Kentucky Fried Chicken and French department-store chain Carrefour, both run by Han Chinese. Located in the heart of the Uighur part of Urumqi, it hasn't yet been reopened because many of the tenants are Han and afraid to return there, according to Han and Uighur business people interviewed.

Across the street is what is left of the traditional bazaar, a ramshackle series of alleys lined with small-scale Uighur businesses. The area is one of the last parts of the city where riot police are omnipresent, and the road between the old and new bazaars is still blocked to traffic.

"We are not so well organized like the Han," said one Uighur who owns a stand selling jeans. "They have the bazaar now."

—Jason Dean in Beijing contributed to this article.

Write to Ian Johnson at ian.johnson@wsj.com

Minority Turnout Was Critical to Obama's Election, Data Show

By CONOR DOUGHERTY

Census Bureau data released Monday show the extent to which strong minority-voter turnout in the 2008 election helped President Barack Obama win over swing states and make inroads into Republican strongholds.

About five million more people voted for president in November than four years earlier, with minorities accounting for almost the entire increase. About two million more black and Hispanic voters and 600,000 additional Asians went to the polls.

While the figures reflect a long-term demographic shift, they also attest to the success of the Democrats' extensive campaign to register their supporters and get them to the polls. Overall, the 64% turnout was unchanged from four years earlier.

The data also show an increase in turnout by young voters. Those between 18 and 24 had a 49% turnout rate, up from 47% in 2004 -- the only age group to see a statistically significant jump at the polls.

Strong minority support helped Mr. Obama's campaign win swing states such as Ohio and pick off Republican redoubts including Virginia, Nevada and Indiana, according to an analysis of poll and Census data by William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who blended the Census data on voter turnout with poll data from Voter News Service.

The data are the latest to highlight the demographic conundrum facing the Republican Party, which in 2008 lost several red states to Mr. Obama largely because it couldn't compete among minority voters. This demographic challenge isn't going away, as non-Hispanic whites are expected to account for less than 50% of the U.S. population by 2042.

To be sure, Mr. Obama's victory also relied on white voters: In 19 states including California, New York and Massachusetts, a majority of white voters cast ballots for Mr. Obama.

"Democrats are getting the growing parts of the population: Young people, minorities and states people are moving to," Mr. Frey said.

Mr. Frey cautioned that while the long-term demographic changes favor any candidate that can best harness minority voters, Mr. Obama's success in 2008 doesn't mean an easy road to victory awaits him in 2012. Whites accounted for 76% of voters in 2008, down three percentage points from 2004 but still a substantial majority. His rival, Sen. John McCain, won white voters by 12 percentage points, versus the 17 percentage-point margin enjoyed by George W. Bush in 2004. A Republican candidate who could capture a larger share of whites could neutralize the minority edge that went to Mr. Obama.

"President Obama can continue that momentum only if he continues to hold onto minorities and also hold Republicans at bay among white voters," Mr. Frey said.

Mr. Frey found minority voters made the difference in several key states: North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Indiana, Maryland and New Jersey. Mr. Obama's ability to win over minorities there overcame white voters who favored John McCain.

Write to Conor Dougherty at conor.dougherty@wsj.com

Yiddish Resurfaces as City’s 2nd Political Language

By SAM ROBERTS

In 1897, Isaac Fromme, an office-seeker from the largely Jewish Lower East Side, punctuated his campaign palaver with Yiddishisms to refute insinuations that he was Irish. In 1922, Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected to Congress from East Harlem after he rebutted charges of anti-Semitism by challenging a rival to debate in Yiddish. La Guardia, a son of Jewish and Italian parents, was fluent in Yiddish. His Jewish rival was not.

That Yiddish remains the second language of New York politics was demonstrated yet again over the weekend in the disembodied debate between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the State Senate.

On Friday, Mr. Bloomberg said that for the Senate to adjourn for the summer without voting to extend his control over New York City’s school system was “meshugeneh.”

To which State Senator Hiram Monserrate replied on Sunday: “We believe it would be meshugeneh not to include parents in the education of our children. As opposed to loosely using the word ‘meshugeneh,’ we would also say we don’t need a yenta on the other side of this argument and this debate.”

Neither Mr. Monserrate, who is Hispanic, nor Mr. Bloomberg, who is Jewish, was surgically precise with his Yiddishism.

But their casual embrace of an onomatopoetic language is a reminder of how universal Yiddish has become. Not only in New York, where Jews now constitute fewer than one in five mayoral election voters, but even beyond. Meshuga and yenta both appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The last Jewish mayor, Edward I. Koch, suggested as much on Monday when he offered an obvious reason why New York politicians drift into Yiddish. “They all want to sound like citizens of the world,” Mr. Koch said.

The comedian Jackie Mason said Mr. Bloomberg would have felt more self-conscious about using Yiddish 10 or 15 years ago. “It’s now hip to be Jewish,” he said. “A Jew used to be embarrassed at saying a Jewish word.”

Twenty years ago, Mr. Mason himself regretted being quoted as describing David N. Dinkins, the Democratic mayoral candidate, as “a fancy schvartze,” invoking a Yiddish word, often used derogatorily, for a black man. Mr. Mason later apologized. “I’m a comedian,” he said then, “not a politician.” He was criticized for calling President Obama the same word during a show this year, but told the entertainment Web site tmz.com that it was no longer a pejorative term.

In 1998, Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato referred to his Democratic opponent, Charles E. Schumer, as a “putzhead.” The backlash to Mr. D’Amato’s reference resonated because of his own reputation for crudity and because he at first denied using the slur.

“I think that Mayor Bloomberg probably used Yiddish as a way of having his kugel and eating it, too,” said Michael Wex, the author of “Born to Kvetch” and “Just Say Nu.”

“His use of meshugeneh — a not uncommon solecism, incidentally; the adverb should be meshuga — seems intended to strengthen his point at the same time as it gives his expression of it a heartfelt, rather than denunciatory, feel,” Mr. Wex said. “The idea that ‘this is crazy, pure and simple’ comes across all the more strongly by implying that English simply lacks the words to describe what he’s feeling — that in his guts, as they used to say, he knows it’s nuts.

“Rather than crossing ethnic lines here, Mayor Bloomberg seems to be presenting himself as an Everyman who, since he happens to be Jewish, expresses himself in the idiom that’s supposed to be closest to his heart,” Mr. Wex said.

“Senator Monserrate raises the stakes, though, by calling the mayor a yenta —‘a female motormouth,’ ” Mr. Wex continued. “If the senator’s earlier uses of meshugeneh were meant to show that he could play the mayor’s game, yenta is his way of proving that he can even play it better.”

Whatever the mayor’s motivation in resorting to Yiddish, the debate with some of the Democratic senators, who want to loosen mayoral control of the schools, was degenerating well beyond meshugas into a very English digression. When Mr. Bloomberg invoked Neville Chamberlain on Friday in defending his version of mayoral control over education against any compromise, was he suggesting that the senators were comparable to Adolf Hitler?

“It wasn’t an analogy at all — the mayor was talking about endless negotiations in general,” Stu Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, explained on Monday. “The former prime minister’s name is now synonymous in the American lexicon with appeasement and endless negotiations. Since it wasn’t an analogy, the mayor wasn’t comparing anyone to anyone else.”

Lawyer Leads Local Fight Against Illegal Immigration

By JULIA PRESTON

DALLAS — On a recent morning, Kris W. Kobach, a conservative law professor, rushed late into a federal courtroom here with his suit slightly rumpled and little more than a laptop under his arm. His mission was to persuade the judge to uphold an ordinance adopted by a Dallas suburb that would bar landlords from renting housing to illegal immigrants.

A team of lawyers from a Latino advocacy group had set up early at the opposing table, fortified with legal assistants and stacks of case documents. Unfazed, Mr. Kobach unleashed a cascade of constitutional arguments. Case names and precedents spilled out so rapidly that the judge had to order Mr. Kobach several times to slow down.

Mr. Kobach is on a dogged campaign to fight illegal immigration at the local level, riding an insurgency by cities and states fed up with what they see as federal failures on immigration. As these local governments have taken on enforcement roles once reserved for the federal government, he is emerging as their leading legal advocate.

The Dallas hearing — the judge has yet to rule — was one match in an immigration contest playing out in courts in Arizona, California, Missouri and Pennsylvania, among other states, with civil liberties and Hispanic groups on one side and, increasingly, Mr. Kobach on the other.

A professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City law school and a Republican politician, Mr. Kobach developed his immigration views while working in the Justice Department at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The cases he has championed — like housing restrictions on illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, Tex., and sanctions for employers in Valley Park, Mo., who hire such immigrants — are fiercely fought, with Mr. Kobach’s opponents accusing him of fostering discrimination against Hispanics and dividing immigrant communities.

But Mr. Kobach’s allies say he has borrowed a page from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other pro-immigrant groups he confronts before the bench, by re-thinking the conservative tenet that the courts should not be a forum for policy change.

And with the Obama administration indicating that it will put off an overhaul of immigration until late this year or beyond, the courtroom campaign for tougher rules is likely to expand as cities and states remain the main battleground for shaping immigration policy.

“To rigidly separate local government from federal government when we think about immigration enforcement is not only legally incorrect, it’s also bad policy,” Mr. Kobach said in an interview.

Lawyers who have confronted Mr. Kobach in court say the cases he pursues would cover the country in a patchwork of local immigration rules that are contrary to federal law and costly to defend.

“These laws divide communities, stereotype Latinos, burden businesses and trigger needless and expensive litigation,” said Lucas Guttentag, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Kobach rejects any accusation that his strategies unfairly single out Latinos.

“The driving principle is to restore the rule of law,” he said. “You have members of Congress throwing up their hands and saying the system is broken. I really think that’s a cop-out. Different parts of the system are working fine. The question is, How do you actually enforce the law in a vast nation that has very different circumstances in different states?”

So far, his results are mixed. He lost an early round in a case defending Hazleton, Pa., which passed an ordinance that sought to punish employers who give illegal immigrants jobs as well as landlords who rent to them. In a suit led by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Federal District Court in Scranton, Pa., struck down the ordinance, and the city is awaiting a decision from the court of appeals.

But when Mr. Kobach defended a similar ordinance in Valley Park, Mo., on the outskirts of St. Louis, a Federal District Court upheld it, after major revisions. It survived an appeal last month.

Mr. Kobach lost a suit against Kansas to block a statute allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates in public colleges. But he won a similar case in California; it is now before that state’s highest court. And he helped Arizona defend a statute that cancels the business licenses of employers who repeatedly hire illegal immigrants; it was upheld by the federal courts.

Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, praised Mr. Kobach for empowering local governments by helping his city craft “a masterful ordinance that at the end of the day will have a great effect on this country of eliminating illegal immigrants.”

The recently elected mayor of Valley Park, Grant Young, was more guarded, noting that the town of 6,500 had paid some $270,000 in legal fees.

“Like most Americans, I do not support illegal immigration,” said Mr. Young, who has not met Mr. Kobach. “But as a fiscal conservative, I’m going to scrutinize any bill of that size.”

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard with a doctorate from Oxford University, Mr. Kobach, 43, earned his law degree from Yale. He is “by no means reactionary or hidebound or anti-immigrant,“ said Peter Schuck, a professor of immigration law at Yale who taught Mr. Kobach. “He simply strikes a different balance between national security and undocumented immigrant rights than immigrant advocates do.”

Mr. Kobach joined the Justice Department barely a week before the Sept. 11 attacks. As officials scrambled for information about the hijackers, Mr. Kobach said, he was stunned to realize that several had been in the United States illegally and had recently been stopped by traffic police, who had no information about their immigration status.

“That impressed on me in a very salient way that there was a huge missed opportunity there that might have caused the 9/11 plot to unravel,” he said.

He started thinking of ways to turn the local police into the “eyes and ears,” he said, of federal immigration agents.

While at the department, Mr. Kobach also was the prime mover of a program that required temporary immigrants from 25 Muslim countries to register frequently with federal authorities. The program led to the deportation of more than 13,000 immigration violators. But some Muslim leaders said it traumatized their communities.

Mr. Kobach also worked with Attorney General John Ashcroft to streamline the immigration appeals court, reducing the number of judges and making it easier for them to dismiss an appeal. Immigration appeals did become speedier, but the changes clogged the federal appeals courts with cases from immigrants claiming they had not been fairly heard.

After leaving the department in 2003, Mr. Kobach ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Kansas in 2004. He served as head of the Kansas Republican Party, and recently announced a run for secretary of state there.

Some of his adversaries have emphasized his ties to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which calls for reducing immigration to the United States. The group helped mobilize voters to defeat a bill in Congress in 2007 to give legal status to illegal immigrants. Mr. Kobach is partially paid by the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a nonprofit group described by its general counsel, Michael Hethmon, as the legal arm of FAIR.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a group in Alabama that favors legalization measures, has named FAIR a hate group, claiming a history of “associating with white nationalists” by its founder, John Tanton. The center has produced no evidence of bigotry by Mr. Kobach.

Mr. Kobach calls the center’s assertions slander. “I would immediately disassociate myself from any litigation that was racist in nature,” he said.

Cambodia Court Cases Mount Against Opposition

By SETH MYDANS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Deadly Month for U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Four American soldiers were killed by a roadside explosion in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, making July the deadliest month for American service members in the country since the 2001 invasion and underscoring the frightening rise in the sophistication and accuracy of roadside bombs.

With the four newest fatalities, at least 30 Americans have died in the first three weeks of July, surpassing the highest previous monthly toll, 28, reached in June 2008.

Part of the reason for July’s sharply higher fatalities — for American troops and for British and other NATO forces — is the three-week-old offensive in opium-rich Helmand Province, where United States Marines and British soldiers are trying to take control of areas dominated by the Taliban.

But the most significant factor is the increasing power of roadside bombs employed by guerrillas in eastern and southern Afghanistan, including Helmand.

The bombs are generally not as powerful as the improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, used by Iraqi guerrillas, who drew on huge stockpiles of artillery shells the Pentagon left unguarded. In later years, Shiite insurgents also employed explosively formed penetrators, a more precisely machined bomb that launched a fist-size molten ball that could pierce the thickest armor.

By contrast, Afghan guerrillas have fewer tools at their disposal — yet the toll of I.E.D. deaths continues to rise just as it did as the Iraqi insurgency grew stronger in 2005.

Twenty-one American soldiers have died from I.E.D. blasts so far this month, according to data recorded by icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths. Six more Americans were killed by fire from Kalashnikovs or other guns, rockets, mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades. Two Air Force officers were killed when their F-15E fighter jet crashed on Saturday, and a sailor died from pneumonia earlier this month, according to the group’s Web site.

The military tallies do not include Afghan civilians regularly killed by I.E.D.’s often intended for Western or Afghan forces. On Sunday at least 10 Afghan civilians died in Farah Province along the Iranian border when a minibus and truck were struck by two hidden bombs, authorities said. “The Taliban are planting mines on roads in which both officials and civilians are traveling, but often civilians are the victims,” said Lt. Col. Juma Khan, an Afghan commander in Farah.

Taliban fighters do have access to mortar shells and military munitions, but many bombs are made from rudimentary ingredients like fertilizer and diesel fuel. Such bombs are less effective, but with enough fertilizer and diesel, Afghan guerrillas have shown they can destroy almost anything American forces operate in the rugged countryside.

And the Taliban exploit environmental factors: Afghanistan has few paved roads, making it easier for insurgents to bury bombs with no trace. Moreover, the new mine-resistant vehicles effective at protecting troops from I.E.D.’s in Iraq have struggled on Afghanistan’s uneven and craggy landscape. The Pentagon is developing a lighter and less cumbersome version.

Even before Monday’s American fatalities crossed a new threshold, July had already become the deadliest month for the entire NATO-led coalition: At least 56 coalition troops have died this month, surpassing the previous high of 46 recorded in June and August 2008, according to icasualties.org. Two out of every three coalition deaths in July have been from I.E.D.’s.

The British military has lost 17 soldiers this month, all but one in Helmand Province. Lt. Col. Rupert Thorneloe, the 39-year-old commander of the First Battalion of the Welsh Guards, was killed by an I.E.D. on July 1, the most senior British commander to die in battle since the Falklands war.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar.

Venezuelan State That Chávez Family Rules Is Rife With Kidnapping

By SIMON ROMERO

BARINAS, Venezuela — Stretching over vast cattle estates at the foothills of the Andes, Barinas is known for two things: as the bastion of the family of President Hugo Chávez and as the setting for a terrifying surge in abductions, making it a contender for Latin America’s most likely place to get kidnapped.

An intensifying nationwide crime wave over the past decade has pushed the kidnapping rate in Venezuela past Colombia’s and Mexico’s, with about 2 abductions per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Interior Ministry.

But nowhere in Venezuela comes close in abductions to Barinas, with 7.2 kidnappings per 100,000 inhabitants, as armed gangs thrive off the disarray here while Mr. Chávez’s family tightens its grip on the state. Seizures of cattle ranches and crumbling infrastructure also contribute to the sense of low-intensity chaos.

Barinas offers a unique microcosm of Mr. Chávez’s rule. Many poor residents still revere the president, born here into poverty in 1954. But polarization in Barinas is growing more severe, with others chafing at his newly prosperous parents and siblings, who have governed the state since the 1990s. While Barinas is a laboratory for projects like land reform, urgent problems like violent crime go unmentioned in the many billboards here extolling the Chávez family’s ascendancy.

“This is what anarchy looks like, at least the type of anarchy where the family of Chávez accumulates wealth and power as the rest of us fear for our lives,” said Ángel Santamaría, 57, a cattleman in the town of Nueva Bolivia whose son, Kusto, 8, was kidnapped while walking to school in May. He was held for 29 days, until Mr. Santamaría gathered a small ransom to free him.

The governor of Barinas, Adán Chávez, the president’s eldest brother and a former ambassador to Cuba, said this month that many of the kidnappings might have been a result of destabilization efforts by the opposition or so-called self-kidnappings: orchestrated abductions to reveal weaknesses among security forces, or to extort money from one’s own family.

“With each day that passes,” the governor said recently, “Barinas is safer than before.”

Through a spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed.

In an election last year marred by accusations of fraud, Adán Chávez succeeded his own father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, a former schoolteacher who had governed Barinas for a decade with the president’s brother, Argenis, the former secretary of state in Barinas.

Another brother, Aníbal, is mayor of nearby Sabaneta, and another brother, Adelis, is a top banker at Banco Sofitasa, which does business with Adán’s government. Yet another brother, Narciso, was put in charge of cooperation projects with Cuba. The president’s cousin Asdrúbal holds a top post at the national oil company.

Politicians once loyal to the president who have broken with him and his family here contend that Mr. Chávez’s family has amassed wealth and landholdings through a series of deals carried out by front men.

One opposition leader, Wilmer Azuaje, detailed to prosecutors and legislators what he said was more than $20 million in illegal gains by the family since the president’s father was elected governor in 1998. But in a brief review of those claims, National Assembly, under the control of Chávez loyalists, cleared the family of charges of illicit enrichment.

“In the meantime, while the family wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism, we are descending into a neo-capitalist chaos where all that matters is money,” said Alberto Santelíz, the publisher of La Prensa, a small opposition newspaper.

One reason for the rise in kidnappings is the injection of oil money into the local economy, with some families reaping quick fortunes because of ties to large infrastructure projects.

A new soccer stadium, built under the supervision of Adelis Chávez’s at a cost of more than $50 million, is still unfinished two years after its first game in 2007, joining other white elephants dotting Barinas’s landscape. Nearby lies the unfinished Museum of the Plains, intended to celebrate the culture of the president’s birthplace. A sprawling shopping mall stands half-completed after its backers fled a shakedown by construction unions.

More than a decade into the Chávez family’s rule in Barinas, the state remains Venezuela’s poorest, with average monthly household income of about $800, according to the National Statistics Institute. Kidnapping, once feared only by the wealthy, has spread in Barinas to include the poor. In one case this year of a 3-year-old girl kidnapped in the slum of Mi Jardín, the abductor, when told that the only thing of value owned by the girl’s mother was a refrigerator, instructed her to sell it to pay the ransom.

Kidnapping specialists here said the abductors were drawn from two Colombian rebel groups, a small Venezuelan guerrilla faction called the Bolivarian Liberation Front, other criminal gangs and corrupt police officers. Just a fraction of the kidnappings result in prison sentences.

“With impunity rampant in Barinas, how can our governor say with a straight face that people are kidnapping themselves?” asked Lucy Montoya, 38, a hardware store owner whose sister, Doris, a 41-year-old mother of three, was kidnapped in March.

Doris Montoya’s abductors have not freed her or communicated with her family since receiving ransom money in May, Lucy Montoya said, adding, “The government’s handling of this crisis is an affront to our dignity as human beings.”

Meanwhile, new figures show kidnappings climbing to 454 known cases in the first six months of 2009, including about 66 in Barinas, compared with a nationwide 2008 estimate of between 537 and 612. But officials acknowledge that the true figures are probably higher because many cases are never reported.

Here in Barinas, victims seethe over the inaction of the president and his family. “Our ruling dynasty is effectively telling us we are expendable,” said Rodolfo Peña, 38, a businessman who was abducted here last year. “The only other plausible theory,” he said, “is that they are too inebriated by power to notice the emergency at their feet.”

Revolutionary Guards Crush Dissent and Widen Control in Iran

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — As Iran’s political elite and clerical establishment splinter over the election crisis, the nation’s most powerful economic, social and political institution — the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — has emerged as a driving force behind efforts to crush a still-defiant opposition movement.

From its origin 30 years ago as an ideologically driven militia force serving Islamic revolutionary leaders, the corps has grown to assume an increasingly assertive role in virtually every aspect of Iranian society.

And its aggressive drive to silence dissenting views has led many political analysts to describe the events surrounding the June 12 presidential election as a military coup.

“It is not a theocracy anymore,” said Rasool Nafisi, an expert in Iranian affairs and a co-author of an exhaustive study of the corps for the RAND Corporation. “It is a regular military security government with a facade of a Shiite clerical system.”

The corps has become a vast military-based conglomerate, with control of Iran’s missile batteries, oversight of its nuclear program and a multibillion-dollar business empire reaching into nearly every sector of the economy. It runs laser eye-surgery clinics, manufactures cars, builds roads and bridges, develops gas and oil fields and controls black-market smuggling, experts say.

Its fortune and its sense of entitlement have reportedly grown under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Since 2005, when he took office, companies affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards have been awarded more than 750 government contracts in construction and oil and gas projects, Iranian press reports document. And all of its finances stay off the budget, free from any state oversight or need to provide an accounting to Parliament.

The corps’s alumni hold dozens of seats in Parliament and top government posts. Mr. Ahmadinejad is a former member, as are the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, and the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf. And the influence of the Revolutionary Guards reaches deep into the education system, where it indoctrinates students in loyalty to the state, and into the state-controlled media, where it guides television and radio programming.

“They are the proponents of an authoritarian modernization, convinced that the clergy should continue supplying the legitimation for the regime as a sort of military chaplains, but definitely not run the show,” said a political scientist who worked in Iran for years, but asked not to be identified to avoid antagonizing the authorities.

They are so influential partly because they present a public front of unity in a state where power has always been fractured. By contrast, clerics have many different agendas and factions. Nonetheless, there are glimmers of fractures under the corps’s opaque and disciplined surface.

Political analysts said that behind the scenes there were internal disagreements about the handling of the election and the demonstrations against disputed results that gave a second term to Mr. Ahmadinejad.

“I have received reports, at least part of the top commanders in the Revolutionary Guards are not happy with what is going on,” said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor at the University of Southern California, who says he has a network of contacts around the country. “There are even reports of some who have protested.”

Even a former commander in the corps, Mohsen Rezai, who served for 16 years, decided to challenge the status quo by running for president this year, and he openly complained of the government’s failure to investigate accusations of vote-rigging.

One political analyst said that many of the rank and file were known to have voted for Mohammad Khatami, an outspoken reformer, when he was first elected president in 1997.

The corps is not large. It has as many as 130,000 members and runs five armed branches that are independent from the much bigger national military. It commands its own ground force, navy, air force and intelligence service. The United Nations Security Council has linked its officials to Iran’s nuclear program. The West suspects Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons, an allegation the government denies.

The corps’s two best-known subsidiaries are the secretive Quds Force, which has carried out operations in other countries, including the training and arming of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon; and the Basij militia. The Basiji, who experts say were incorporated under the corps’s leadership only two years ago, now include millions of volunteer vigilantes used to crack down on election protests and dissidents.

Members of the Revolutionary Guards and their families receive privileged status at every level, which benefits them in university admissions and in the distribution of subsidized commodities, experts said.

Mr. Nafisi, the RAND report co-author, said a former commander in the corps estimated that all the corps and Basiji members, together with their families, added up to a potential voting bloc of millions of people. “This new machinery of election was quite important in bringing Ahmadinejad forward,” Mr. Nafisi said.

Within this bloc is a core of military elites who have displaced — and at times clashed with — the clerical revolutionaries who worked beside Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in founding the Islamic republic. They are the second generation of revolutionaries, ideologically united and contemptuous of first-generation clerics like former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and of reformers and those eager to engage with the West. The corps has even trained its own clerics.

In an essay describing the rise of the Revolutionary Guards phenomenon, Professor Sahimi drew a portrait of the new elite: leaders in their mid-50s who as young men joined the corps and fought two wars: one against Iraq in the 1980s and another to force out the Mujahedeen Khalq, which the United States considers a terrorist organization and which is now based in Iraq.

The corps then split into two groups. One believed that Iran needed a chance to develop politically and socially; the other, which emerged the victor, was intent on maintaining strict control. Mr. Nafisi said Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was close to that second group.

“He went to the war front several times, more than any other commander,” Mr. Nafisi said. “He made personal contact with many commanders, got to know them and earned their loyalty. Now all the people in charge were basically assigned to him at the time of war.”

Today, the corps has expanded its role and reach. Its financial interests have, for example, been linked directly to the government’s foreign policy. Iran may well have remained silent on the attacks on Uighur Muslims in China this month in part because Beijing is one of the main trading partners with the corps.

Shortly after the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Rafsanjani, then the president, encouraged the corps to use its engineers to bolster its own budget and to help rebuild the country. Since then, a Revolutionary Guards company, Khatam al-Anbia, has become one of Iran’s largest contractors in industrial and development projects, according to the RAND report. Its contracts with the government, including projects like the construction of a Tehran subway line, hydroelectric dams, ports and railway systems, are carried out by the company’s subsidiaries or are parceled out to private companies.

What is less quantifiable is the corps’s black-market smuggling activity, which has helped feed the nation’s appetite for products banned by sanctions, while also enriching the corps. The Rand report quoted one member of Iran’s Parliament who estimated that the Revolutionary Guards might do as much as $12 billion in black-market business annually.

In his will, Ayatollah Khomeini asked that the military stay out of politics, and senior Revolutionary Guards officials have been careful to defend themselves against accusations of political meddling after the June 12 election. But Gen. Yadollah Javani, director of the corps’s political arm, warned the public that there was no room for dissent.

“Today, no one is impartial,” he said, according to the official news agency IRNA. “There are two currents: those who defend and support the revolution and the establishment, and those who are trying to topple it.”

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Toronto, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.