Starting Points

Sep 7, 2009

Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai, Officials Assert - NYTimes.com

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.

The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan.

“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said.

The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. “We are talking about orders of magnitude,” the senior Western diplomat said.

The widening accounts of fraud pose a stark problem for the Obama administration, which has 68,000 American troops deployed here to help reverse gains by Taliban insurgents. American officials hoped that the election would help turn Afghans away from the Taliban by giving them a greater voice in government. Instead, the Obama administration now faces the prospect of having to defend an Afghan administration for the next five years that is widely seen as illegitimate.

“This was fraud en masse,” the Western diplomat said.

Most of the fraud perpetrated on behalf of Mr. Karzai, officials said, took place in the Pashtun-dominated areas of the east and south where officials said that turnout on Aug. 20 was exceptionally low. That included Mr. Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, where preliminary results indicate that more than 350,000 ballots have been turned in to be counted. But Western officials estimated that only about 25,000 people actually voted there.

Waheed Omar, the main spokesman for Mr. Karzai’s campaign, acknowledged Sunday that there had been cases of fraud committed by different candidates. But he accused the president’s opponents of trying to score political points by making splashy accusations in the news media. “There have been cases — we have reported numerous cases — and our view is the only place where discussion can be held is in the Election Complaints Commission,” he said.

American officials have mostly kept a public silence about the fraud allegations. A senior American official said Sunday that they were looking into the allegations behind the scenes. “An absence of public statements does not mean an absence of concern and engagement on these issues,” the official said.

But a different Western official in Kabul said that there were divisions among the international community and Afghan political circles over how to proceed. This official said he believed the next four or five days would decide whether the entire electoral process would stand or fall. “This is crunch time,” he said.

Adding to the drumbeat, on Sunday the deputy director of the Afghan Independent Election Commission said that the group was disqualifying all the ballots cast in 447 polling sites because of fraud. The deputy director, Daoud Ali Najafi, said it was not clear how many votes had been affected, or what percentage they represented of the total. He gave no details of what fraud had been discovered.

With about three-quarters of the ballots counted in the Aug. 20 election, Mr. Karzai leads with nearly 49 percent of the vote, compared with 32 percent for his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent, the election goes to a runoff.

Officials in Kabul say it will probably take months before the Election Complaints Commission, which is dominated by Westerners appointed by the United Nations, will be able to declare a winner. Such an interregnum with no clear leader in office could prove destabilizing for a country that is already beset by ethnic division and an increasingly violent insurgency.

One opposition candidate for president, Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister, said that the scale of the fraud on Election Day had deeply damaged the political process that was being slowly built in Afghanistan.

“For five years Mr. Karzai was my president,” he said in an interview at his home in Kabul. “Now how many Afghans will consider him their president?”

Since ballots were cast last month, anecdotal evidence has emerged of widespread fraud across the Pashtun-dominated areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where Mr. Karzai has many allies. Many of the allegations come from Kandahar Province, where Mr. Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the chairman of the provincial council and widely regarded as the most powerful man in the region. Last week, the governor of Shorabak District, which lies in Kandahar Province, claimed that Hamid Karzai’s allies shut down all the polling centers in the area and falsified 23,900 ballots for Mr. Karzai.

Two provincial council candidates in Kandahar, both close to the government, confirmed that widespread pro-Karzai fraud had occurred, in particular in places where poor security prevented observers and candidates’ representatives from watching.

“Now people will not trust the provincial council and the government system,” said Muhammad Ehsan, the deputy head of the provincial council, who was running for re-election. “Now people understand who has come to power and how.”

Hajji Abdul Majid, 75, the chief of the tribal elders council in Argestan District, in Kandahar Province, said that despite the fact that security forces opened the town’s polling place, no one voted, so any result from his district would be false.

“The people know that the government just took control of the district center for that day of the elections,” he said. “People are very frustrated. They don’t believe in the government.”

He added: “If Karzai is re-elected, people will leave the country or join the Taliban.”

More evidence of fraud has emerged in the past few days. In Zangabad, about 20 miles west of Kandahar, local residents say no voting took place on Aug. 20. The village’s single polling site, the Sulaiman Mako School, is used by Taliban guerrillas as their headquarters, the residents said. The area around Zangabad is one of the most contested in Afghanistan. Despite the nonexistent turnout, Afghan election records show that nearly 2,000 ballots were collected from the Sulaiman Mako School and sent to Kabul to be counted by election officials.

The allegations in Zangabad are being echoed throughout the Panjwai District. Official Afghan election records show that 16 polling centers were supposed to be open on Election Day. But according to at least one local leader, only a fraction of that number actually existed.

Haji Agha Lalai is a senior member of the provincial council in Kandahar, where Panjwai is located. As a candidate for re-election, he sent election observers across the area, including to Panjwai. In an interview, Mr. Lalai said that only “five or six” polling centers were open in Panjwai District that day — far fewer than the 16 claimed by the Afghan government.

So far, the Independent Election Commission has released results from seven of Panjwai District’s polling centers. The tally so far: 5,213 votes for Mr. Karzai, 328 for Mr. Abdullah.

Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul and Istanbul, and Carlotta Gall from Kandahar and Kabul.

IMF: stop funding Honduras - guardian.co.uk

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by Mark Weisbrot

The IMF is undergoing an unprecedented expansion of its access to resources, possibly reaching a trillion dollars. This week the EU committed $175bn, $67bn more than even the $108bn that Washington agreed to fork over after a tense stand-off between the US Congress and the Obama administration earlier this summer.

The Fund and its advocates argue that the IMF has changed. The IMF is "back in a new guise", says the Economist. This time, we are told, it's really going to act as a multilateral organisation that looks out for the countries and people of the world, and not just for Washington, Wall Street or European banks.

But it's looking more and more like the same old IMF on steroids. Last week the IMF disbursed $150m to the de facto government of Honduras, and it plans to disburse another $13.8m on 9 September. The de facto government has no legitimacy in the world. It took power on 28 June in a military coup, in which the elected President Manuel Zelaya was taken from his home at gunpoint and flown out of the country.

The Organisation of American States suspended Honduras until democracy is restored, and the UN also called for the "immediate and unconditional return" of the elected president.

No country in the world recognises the coup government of Honduras. From the western hemisphere and the EU, only the US retains an ambassador there. The World Bank paused lending to Honduras two days after the coup, and the Inter-American Development Bank did the same the next day. More recently the Central American Bank of Economic Integration suspended credit to Honduras. The EU has suspended over $90m in aid as well, and is considering further sanctions.

But the IMF has gone ahead and dumped a large amount of money on Honduras – the equivalent would be more than $160bn in the US – as though everything is OK there.

This is in keeping with US policy, which is not surprising since the US has been – since the IMF's creation in 1944 – the Fund's principal overseer. Washington made a symbolic gesture earlier this year by cutting off about $18.5m to Honduras, and the state department announced on Thursday that it is terminating other assistance.

But more than two months after the Honduran military overthrew the elected president of Honduras, the US government has yet to determine that a military coup has actually occurred. This is because such a determination would require, under the US Foreign Appropriations Act, a complete cutoff of aid.

One of the largest sources of US aid is the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a government entity whose board is chaired by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state.

Interestingly, there were two military coups in the last year in countries that were receiving MCC money: Madagascar and Mauritania. In both of those cases MCC aid was suspended within three days of the coup.

The IMF's decision to give money to the Honduran government is reminiscent of its reaction to the 2002 coup that temporarily overthrew President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Just a few hours after that coup, the IMF's spokesperson announced: "We stand ready to assist the new administration in whatever manner they find suitable."

This immediate pledge of support by the IMF to a military-installed government was at the time unprecedented. Given the resources and power of the IMF, it was an important source of international legitimacy for the coup government. Members of the US Congress later wrote to the IMF to inquire how this happened. How did the IMF decide so quickly to support this illegitimate government?

The Fund responded that no decision was made, that this was just an off-the-cuff remark by its spokesperson. But this seems very unlikely, and in the video on the IMF's website, the spokesperson appears to be reading from a prepared statement when talking about money for the coup government.

In the Honduran case, the IMF would likely say that the current funds are part of a $250bn package in which all member countries are receiving a share proportional to their IMF quota, regardless of governance. This is true, but it doesn't resolve the question as to whom the funds should be disbursed to, in the case of a non-recognised, illegitimate government that has seized power by force. The Fund could very easily postpone disbursing this money until some kind of determination could be made, rather than simply acting as though there were no question about the legitimacy of the coup government.

Interestingly, the IMF had no problem cutting off funds under its standby arrangement with the democratically elected government of President Zelaya in November of last year, when the Fund did not agree with his economic policies.

We're still a long way from a reformed IMF.

Sep 6, 2009

Temple plan shelved after Muslim opposition |- My Sinchew

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KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 6 (AFP) - Plans by a local Malaysian government to relocate a 150-year-old Hindu temple to a majority Muslim area have been shelved after continued protests, a lawmaker said Sunday.

The decision came after a consultation between Selangor state officials and local people descended into chaos on Saturday, with protesters threatening violence, local media reported.

Charles Santiago, an MP with the opposition Democratic Action Party, told AFP, "Selangor state is looking for a new site due to the protest by the Muslims."

Demonstrators claimed the Hindu temple would create traffic jams and noise in their Muslim-majority neighbourhood, he said.

The consultation session was held after a group of Muslim protesters last week paraded the severed head of a cow at the site of the proposed temple, in Shah Alam west of Kuala Lumpur.

Selangor Chief Minister Abdul Khalid Ibrahim told reporters the state government would search for another site.

"We have already asked Selangor state development corporation... to identify another location," he was quoted as saying by the Sunday Star newspaper.

Around 60 percent of Malaysia's 27 million people are Muslim Malays, but the country is also home to large Chinese and Indian minorities, variously practising Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism, among others.

Issues related to religion, language and race are sensitive matters in multi-racial Malaysia, which witnessed deadly riots in 1969. (AFP)

Generation B - The Damage of Vietnam, Four Decades Later - NYTimes.com

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By MICHAEL WINERIP

SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

ON Aug. 26, 1966, Philip Van Cott’s Marine unit was ambushed in the jungles of Vietnam, a trip wire went off, a bomb exploded and shrapnel pierced a hole in his right hand. Mr. Van Cott, whose squad was in constant firefights during his five months in the jungle, was helicoptered to safety. He spent seven months in Japanese and American hospitals as the wound healed, completed his two-year tour in the States, then was honorably discharged.

In the years since, he has been married to the same woman, Karen, for nearly four decades, had two sons and a grandson, held several jobs, bought a home, owned a restaurant, spent 20 years with the post office and in 2006 at age 60, retired.

Nowadays, he paints in his studio several times a week, swims and lifts weights, attends 7:30 Mass on Sunday mornings, and travels with his wife. Every other Thursday, for the last 10 years, he has driven to the Veterans Administration Vet Center here where he gets therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder in connection with his Vietnam combat service.

He first went for help after threatening a supervisor at the post office, and nearly losing his job. “I had rages, and I was getting worse,” he said. “I was constantly embarrassing my family, screaming and hollering at people.”

He got into fistfights at Little League and high school football games. At night, asleep, he’d have nightmares, break into cold sweats, scream and flail at his wife. “It’s been going on so long, now she hears me wind up and wakes me before I do it,” he said.

When a V.A. psychiatrist diagnosed the disorder, Mr. Van Cott did not believe it — Vietnam was so long ago. They had him join a therapy group for Vietnam veterans. “I figured these guys were doing it to collect a disability check,” he said. “It took two to three years before I started realizing what I was doing was crazy.”

He now takes medications for anxiety and depression. And in therapy, he works on anger control. His wife thinks it’s helped, but he’s not sure. “I don’t know if you can escape what you are,” he said. In mid-August, he stormed out of a session at the Vet Center because he was sure his therapist was snubbing him. “He was late for our appointment, then walked by three times without saying anything,” Mr. Van Cott said.

While studies estimate as many as 20 percent of those now returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from P.T.S.D., it is veterans like Mr. Van Cott, from a war nearly a half-century ago, who still dominate the administration’s P.T.S.D. caseload. In 2008, of the 442,695 people seen at veterans hospitals for P.T.S.D., 59.2 percent were Vietnam-era veterans, while 21.5 percent served in the Iraq, Afghanistan or Gulf wars.

The most authoritative study conducted on the disorder and Vietnam veterans, in 1988, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, estimated that at the time, 500,000 of the 3.14 million Americans who served in Vietnam had P.T.S.D., and a total of 1 million had experienced it at some point.

Even as Vietnam veterans now enter their 60s and begin to die off, the number seeking P.T.S.D. treatment is growing — up 11.6 percent from 2003 to 2005, the latest figures available. “We have new Viet vets coming in every week,” said David Bressem, who runs the Vet Center clinic here and is Mr. Van Cott’s therapist.

On so many fronts, the country still pays for the Vietnam War. A veteran diagnosed with P.T.S.D. may receive over $3,000 a month if judged 100 percent disabled. That stipend comes out of the veterans compensation and pension system, which this year is expected to pay $44.7 billion for a variety of benefits, with the biggest share going to veterans of Vietnam and the current conflicts.

In Mr. Van Cott’s case, his therapist believes his problem predated the war (Mr. Van Cott was a tough kid who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and liked to fight) and then was severely exacerbated by war.

Mr. Bressem said a large number of the Vietnam veterans he sees were slow to get help. P.T.S.D. wasn’t accepted as a formal diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980 — years after many of the soldiers returned — and it took many more years for the V.A. to build the extensive mental health outreach system that exists today.

Karen Van Cott said that for first 20 years of their marriage, her husband never spoke of Vietnam. Only in the late 1990s, when he began going to reunions of Mike Company 3rd Battalion 7th Marines and she overheard the conversations, did she begin to understand his rages.

Said Mr. Van Cott, “I thought you go to Vietnam and kill a few people and forget about it. I thought guys who complained were full of it.”

Mr. Bressem said the aging Vietnam veterans who walk into his clinic are often in crisis — a third divorce, a lost job, an arrest — and have built up a lifetime of bad habits.

“That’s me,” said Mr. Van Cott. “I’ve been like this so long, I don’t know any other way.”

Mr. Bressem said they’re trying to reach the Afghan and Iraq veterans right away to prevent bad habits from developing. Asked how a veteran could still experience P.T.S.D. 40 years later, the therapist — himself an Army helicopter pilot shot down and severely wounded in Vietnam — turned to Mr. Van Cott and said, “How many firefights were you in?”

“Three or four a week.”

“And how long before you were wounded?”

“Five months.”

“Do the math,” Mr. Bressem said. “That’s 70 times in five months someone was trying to kill Phil here. Pretty intense experience.”

Mr. Van Cott said that during his tour, he knew about a dozen men who were killed. His Marine unit was the subject of one of the great Vietnam documentaries, “A Face of War,” by Eugene Jones, who followed the soldiers for three months of combat. Of the 18 Marines the film focused on, 12 were wounded (Mr. Van Cott is seen being hit and going down in the film); one was killed; and only five got out of Vietnam without a physical wound. There are also scenes of Vietnamese villages being burned to the ground by Mr. Van Cott’s unit for cooperating with the enemy and Vietnamese peasants dying.

When people ask how World War II veterans adjusted to civilian life in an era without a P.T.S.D. diagnosis, Ms. Van Cott mentions her father. He fought in North Africa, was honorably discharged, worked two to three jobs at a time to support his family and in his late 40s had what was then called a nervous breakdown — probably severe depression. He spent several weeks at a V.A. psychiatric hospital. “They sent you away back then,” she said. “They called it shell shock.”

At his most recent therapy appointment with Mr. Bressem, Mr. Van Cott started by discussing why he’d stomped out of their previous session angry. “Three times you walked right past me and ignored me,” Mr. Van Cott said.

“I passed you on my right side,” said Mr. Bressem. “Notice anything about my right eye?” Mr. Bressem is blind in the right eye, from his war wounds.

“I was talking to you,” Mr. Van Cott said.

“These don’t always work,” Mr. Bressem said, fingering his two hearing aids — also vestiges of the war.

“Geez,” Mr. Van Cott said. “You sound like my wife — you’re saying it’s not all about me. I spend my life apologizing to people.”

The session lasted an hour. Sometimes Mr. Van Cott talks about Vietnam; this time he didn’t. As he drove home on Interstate 91, some young punk tailgated him, then raced past. Mr. Van Cott started to raise his voice, his eyes flared, but then he let it go.

E-mail: Generationb@nytimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - The Afghanistan Abyss - NYTimes.com

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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group’s concern — dead right, in my view — is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said.

The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

“We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.

These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.

“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”

I’m writing about these concerns because I share them. I’m also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn’t match what I’ve found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into “Taliban” or “non-Taliban.” Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.

Many Pashtuns I’ve interviewed are appalled by the Taliban’s periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they’re a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.

Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land — particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated.

Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.

In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can’t be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.

That may be why the troop increase this year hasn’t calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan — with four months left to go.

The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.

This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.

•

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While Europe Sleeps, Bosnia Seethes - NYTimes.com

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By NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN

NEARLY 14 years after peace for Bosnia was hammered out in Ohio, the hills rising up around Sarajevo can still lead a visitor to uncomfortable thoughts about sightlines for snipers.

As I stood there in person on a visit back in May with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the violence of the ’90s didn’t feel so far away. Mr. Biden barnstormed through the Balkans on Air Force 2, also stopping in Serbia and Kosovo, with the goal of trying to draw flagging attention back to the region, delivering his sternest lecture to the Bosnian Parliament, warning against falling back onto “old patterns and ancient animosities.”

Mr. Biden is not alone in his warnings. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, under the headline “The Death of Dayton,” Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western write that because of ethnic divisions that refuse to heal, widespread corruption and political deadlock, “the country now stands on the brink of collapse” and “unless checked, the current trends toward fragmentation will almost certainly lead to a resumption of violence.”

Whether or not that happens, the peacekeeping force meant to crack down on any outbreaks now has fewer than 2,000 troops. And the American contingent, a promise and a deterrent to those who justifiably doubt the European Union’s resolve if force is needed, has left entirely.

These circumstances might be cause for widespread alarm, if anyone had noticed them in the first place. It didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that you didn’t have to shout to get heard on the subject of Bosnia. The name alone was enough to evoke the rape, torture, burned-out homes and mass graves that marked a three-and-a-half-year war in which roughly 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims.

But that was a long time ago. For much of the Western world Bosnia is an all-but-forgotten problem, far down the list of priorities after countries like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. As if to drive the point home, the chief architect of the Dayton peace accords in the Clinton administration, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy in the Obama administration, has his hands full with the war in Afghanistan and the even more complex situation in neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan. Mr. Holbrooke has complained in recent years of a “distracted international community.”

If the drift of public attention away from Bosnia is a result of more pressing issues in an age of terrorism and rogue nuclear states, it is also a function of the simple fact that this ethnically divided country finds itself in the middle of a far more united, stable and at times downright boring Europe than in the days of the civil war.

Bosnia could well return to violence, but it has lost a large measure of what might be called its Franz Ferdinand threat. For all of the moral and humanitarian arguments for getting involved in the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, there was also the severe lesson from Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, which provided the spark for World War I. That lesson was simple: conflicts start in the Balkans, but they do not necessarily stay there.

The end of the cold war brought elation but also trepidation. In hindsight, the march of countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania from the Warsaw Pact into NATO and the European Union may appear steady and all but predestined, but the paths of those newly freed countries were anything but certain at the time. Bosnia was a starkly destabilizing factor in a far more unstable continent. The fighting that began in the spring of 1992 was not quite three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and less than a year after the attempted coup of August 1991 in Russia, and came hard on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Today, the picture has changed again. Now that Europe is no longer the fault line of a divided world, it looks ever more like a retirement community with good food and an excellent cultural calendar. Spies cut from the George Smiley cloth could really come in from the cold, retiring with legions of their countrymen to the Spanish coast, with no more to worry about than the decline of the pound against the euro and the sinking value of their condos.

The European Union has its share of problems, including a rapidly graying population projected to shrink by 50 million people by 2050 and deep troubles in integrating the immigrants — particularly from Muslim countries — it so drastically needs to reverse the demographic slide. And the union’s energy security depends on its often capricious and at times menacing neighbor to the east, Russia.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer served as a stern reminder that things can still get rough outside of the gated community, and certainly made newer members like Poland and Estonia nervous about the sturdiness of the fence.

Renewed fighting in Bosnia may not launch World War III, but it could well spread to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence last year, and the United States Embassy in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, burned at the hands of angry rioters. I walked the streets in the aftermath, interviewing Serbs, and found rage, sadness and desperation even among the most pro-Western elements of society.

It was something of a pleasant surprise, then, to return with Mr. Biden this year and find average Serbs on the same streets sounding deeply pragmatic about the visit by an American politician who not only represented the superpower that had bombed them but was personally an early and staunch supporter of Muslims in both Bosnia and Kosovo. While there were holdouts, most said that jobs and freedom to travel trumped old enmities.

With any luck the sentiment will find more traction in neighboring Bosnia too, drowning out the extreme voices and their loose talk of war. Given how far the world’s attention has wandered, supporters of peace in the Balkans will have to hope they find their own path to moderation. Otherwise the crack of snipers’ bullets and the whistle of mortar shells could herald the terrible spectacle of a preventable return to bloodshed.

Tribesmen Attack a Village in Southern Sudan, Killing 20 - NYTimes.com

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JUBA, Sudan (Reuters) — Tribesmen killed 20 people, including a chief and his family, in an attack on a south Sudan village in the latest violence in the oil-producing territory, the southern Sudanese military said Saturday.

A southern army spokesman accused Sudan’s former foreign minister, Lam Akol, now the leader of a breakaway political party, of arming the attackers from his Shilluk tribe. Mr. Akol dismissed the accusation.

The Shilluk tribesmen attacked the village of Bony-Thiang in Upper Nile State on Friday morning, killing civilians of the Dinka tribe, the army said.

Dinka fighters mounted a retaliatory attack on the nearby Shilluk village of Buol on Saturday morning, killing at least five people, said the army spokesman, Kuol Diem Kuol.

Rival tribes from Sudan’s underdeveloped south have clashed for years in disputes often caused by cattle rustling and long-running feuds, but violence has soared this year.

The United Nations said the attacks could mar preparations for Sudan’s first multiparty elections in 20 years, scheduled for April 2010. They could also affect the security of oil installations.

Southern politicians accuse north Sudan’s dominant party, the National Congress Party, of trying to destabilize the south by provoking and arming rival tribes.

Sudan’s mostly Christian south fought the Muslim north in a two-decade civil war that ended in a 2005 peace accord. The deal created a semiautonomous southern government, allowed the south to keep an army and promised elections, followed by a referendum on southern independence in 2011.

Kuol Diem Kuol, the southern army spokesman, accused the north of conspiring with Lam Akol to arm the Shilluk attackers and encourage them to take revenge for past Dinka raids.

The attackers killed the Dinka chief Thon Wai, his two wives and three children, and burned down Bony-Thiang, he said.

Mr. Akol dismissed the accusations of his involvement as “absolute nonsense” and an attempt to smear his new political party.

Several Dead in Somali Clashes, Possibly Including U.S. Jihadist - NYTimes.com

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By MOHAMED IBRAHIM and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Fierce fighting exploded in this capital city on Friday night and Saturday morning, and witnesses said at least 10 people had been killed in the past two days, possibly including a Somali-American who had joined the insurgents.

One battle began on Friday after soldiers from Somalia’s transitional government attacked an insurgent base with mortars and machine guns.

“Soon after breaking fast,” said Fatima Elmi, a Mogadishu resident, referring to the evening Ramadan holiday ritual, “we heard strange noises of weapons and we ran into a concrete building nearby.”

The government forces pushed back the insurgents, who belonged to an extremist Islamist group called the Shabab. But by Saturday morning, witnesses said, the Shabab had recaptured the territory and once again remained in firm control of most of Mogadishu.

Among the dead was a Somali-American identified as Mohamed Hassan, 21, from Minnesota, according to Shabab fighters.

“We lost a martyr who was from Minnesota in the overnight raid,” said a Shabab foot soldier. He did not provide any more information about when Mr. Hassan might have arrived in Somalia or what exactly he was doing.

According to the F.B.I., dozens of Somali-Americans may have joined the Shabab jihadist movement, which American officials have accused of having links to Al Qaeda. At least one Somali-American killed himself in a suicide bombing last fall.

In earlier fighting, witnesses said that eight people were killed Thursday when insurgents attacked an African Union base at a former military academy. The deputy mayor of the city, Abdifatah Ibrahim Shaaweeye, told reporters in a news conference on Friday that as soon as the holy month of Ramadan ended, the government would drive the insurgents out of the capital.

“We will capture neighborhoods that are not government controlled,” he said.

Mohamed Ibrahim reported from Mogadishu, and Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi, Kenya.

Hamas Fights Over Gaza’s Islamist Identity - NYTimes.com

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By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ETHAN BRONNER

GAZA — An acute struggle is emerging within the Hamas movement, which rules this coastal Palestinian strip, over the extent and nature of its Islamist identity. Guardians of religious morality, some self-appointed, others from within the government, have sought to impose their views in recent months.

So far, top government officials have pushed them back, but it remains unclear for how long.

Examples of the battle abound. The most threatening occurred in mid-August when an extreme group called the Warriors of God commandeered a mosque in the southern city of Rafah and, calling Hamas impure and collaborationist, declared strict religious law to be in force. Hamas forces surrounded the mosque and, after an all-night gun battle, killed about two dozen people, including the group’s leader, and arrested 155 others, Hamas officials said. The Interior Ministry is now monitoring mosques and sponsoring public lectures against Muslim extremism.

Other cases involved no violence but plenty of coercion. The chief justice decreed this summer that female lawyers must wear the hijab head covering in court. A committee set up by the religious affairs ministry sent men along the beaches instructing bathers not to touch each other in public and to cover up. And a number of teachers and headmistresses in girls’ high schools told their students to dress in long coats and hijab rather than the jean skirts of past years.

All of those rules have already been reversed. Prime Minister Ismail Haniya told the chief justice, Abed al-Raouf Halabi, to rescind his order to female lawyers, and he did so.

The education minister, Mohammed Asqoul, called any new uniform requirement “an individual act.”

“The government and Hamas have nothing to do with it,” he said. “I’m against such orders since there is no need to impose the hijab in a conservative society.”

Khalil al-Hayya, a senior political leader in Hamas, said: “Neither the government nor Hamas has come out with any decision regarding such orders. We are an Islamic resistance movement that will never oblige anyone against his or her will. Advice is the best tactic.”

Iyad el-Serraj, a psychiatrist and close observer here, said there was little doubt that Gaza, long a religiously and socially conservative place, was increasingly so. Without instruction from above, the vast majority of women wear religiously modest dress and more and more men are bearded. No alcohol is sold.

Dr. Serraj attributes the shift to several developments beyond the fact that such an outward expression of identity is increasingly common across the Muslim Middle East. Hamas, he noted, has been in power for more than two years and those in midlevel positions of power, as well as those aspiring for such jobs, want to be noticed and promoted.

Second, he said, with the economy completely stalled because of the blockade of Gaza led by Israel, there is little to do and little horizon for advancement or development. In such circumstances, he suggested, fundamentalism finds fertile ground.

But Hamas, despite favoring Islamic law and behavior, has many reasons for pushing back. Its rival, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, uses any hint of the imposition of religious law as evidence that Hamas is not capable of running a responsible, modern government. Hamas is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union and Israel, and is seeking international legitimacy to be the leader of the Palestinian movement.

It rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains doctrinally committed to its destruction. However, its leaders have said several times that if Israel were to leave all land taken in the 1967 war, Hamas could accept a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, depending on the terms of a truce.

A hard-line leader in Gaza said Hamas was deluding itself if it thought moderation would lead to international acceptance. “The world will never recognize us and will never end the siege,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He added that perhaps imposing religious law “will scare them and force them to end the siege.”

For the small number of relatively secular Palestinians in Gaza, the growing push toward a more Islamic life is deeply worrying.

Ahmed Shawa, 18, said that when he asked friends for a back massage on the beach recently, a man wearing civilian clothing intervened. He said there should be no touching and instructed Mr. Shawa to put on a shirt. When he and his friends asked for an explanation, the man said: “The way you sit is satanic. You invite the devil to play in your heads.”

Mr. Shawa, who plays basketball, also said he was walking home from the stadium recently and was stopped by a man wearing Pakistani-style clothing who told him not to wear shorts or a sleeveless shirt. When Mr. Shawa argued, the man threatened him, saying, “Next time, I’ll use the other way.”

The morals committee that sends such men around the streets is against mixing of the sexes, against men’s wearing “feminine” clothing and against the sale of posters, books, magazines and DVDs that violate strict morals. The men have visited cafes, asking owners not to serve women the traditional shisha water pipes smoked throughout the region.

At the start of the school year in late August, a number of high school girls were told to return home to cover their heads and dress in the long coat known as the jilbab. In the wealthier sections of Gaza City, many were unhappy.

“It’s the first time in my life to cover my hair and to wear a jilbab, and I feel suffocated,” said Domoua al-Ali, 16, on a recent day. The moment she stepped out of the school, Ms. Domoua and her friend Dinah Nasrallah, 17, opened the buttons of the jilbab and proudly showed their tight jeans, then turned the hijab into a scarf around their neck. They mocked their religion teacher who explained the order this way: “It’s God who called for the hijab, not the headmistress. How can we forbid what he called for?”

Outside Ahmed Shawqi School, another circle of girls was led by Aziza Doghmosh, 16. She, too, removed the hijab the moment she stepped out of school and complained about her teacher. “My teacher said when you wear a tight skirt and shirt, the devil plays in the head of men,” she said to the laughter of her friends.

While only 20 girls among more than 800 did not abide by the new dress code during the first week of school, the number rose by the second week. But in the more conservative and less well-off eastern part of Gaza City, all complied, even after the rule was officially lifted.

Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.

China Web Sites Seeking Users’ Names - NYTimes.com

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By JONATHAN ANSFIELD

BEIJING — News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.

Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.

But in early August, without notification of a change, news portals like Sina, Netease, Sohu and scores of other sites began asking unregistered users to sign in under their real names and identification numbers, said top editors at two of the major portals affected. A Sina staff member also confirmed the change.

The editors said the sites were putting into effect a confidential directive issued in late July by the State Council Information Office, one of the main government bodies responsible for supervising the Internet in China.

The new step is not foolproof, the editors acknowledged. It was possible for a reporter to register successfully on several major sites under falsified names and ID and cellphone numbers.

But the requirement adds a critical new layer of surveillance to mainstream sites in China, which were already heavily policed. Further regulations of the same nature also appeared to be in the pipeline.

And while the authorities called the measure part of a drive to forge greater “social responsibility” and “civility” among users, they moved forward surreptitiously and suppressed reports about it, said the editors and others in the media industry familiar with the measure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their jobs at risk.

Asked why the policy was pushed through unannounced, the chief editor of one site said, “The influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big.”

Government Internet regulators have been trying to usher in real-name registration controls since 2003, when they ordered Internet cafes around China to demand that customers show identification, nominally to keep out minors. Last year, lawmakers and regulators began discussing legislation on a more extensive “real name system,” as it is known.

But such proposals have aroused heated debate over the purview of the state to restrict China’s online community, which is the largest in the world at about 340 million people and growing.

Proponents, led by officials and state-connected academics in the information security field, argue that mandatory controls are necessary to help subdue inflammatory attacks, misinformation and other illegal activity deemed to endanger social order. They often note registration requirements on large sites in South Korea to support their point.

Critics counter that government regulation represents an incursion on free speech, individual privacy and the watchdog role of the Web in China.

The critics say sites and users should retain the right to discipline themselves. Given the country’s huge population of Internet users and its failure to guarantee freedom of expression, they argue, the case of China is hardly analogous to that of South Korea.

In 2006, Internet users and the news media rebuffed one official proposal to require real-name registration on blog hosting sites. Star bloggers denounced the notion, while ordinary users overwhelmingly rejected it in surveys conducted on sites like Sina.

In another key test of the policy earlier this year, the legislature in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, passed a regulation that would have placed the requirement on users who comment, blog or play games on sites based there. Amid a popular outcry, however, the city shied away from enforcing the regulation.

Central authorities have gone to new lengths to tame online activity in 2009, a year peppered with politically delicate anniversaries.

Government censors have closed thousands of sites in a continuing war on “vulgarity,” closed liberal forums and blogs for spreading “harmful information,” blocked access to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and cut off Internet service where serious unrest has erupted, notably in the Xinjiang region of the west after deadly clashes between ethnic Uighurs and Han in July. Increasingly, officials have defended the Web shutdowns on the grounds of national security.

The government recently set off an international furor when it ordered that all computers sold in China come prepackaged with pornography filtering software that authorities could remotely control. Officials were forced to retreat from the order after international companies and trade bodies protested and Chinese hackers showed that the software was designed to block politically offensive content as well.

The authorities had aimed to avoid a similar showdown over the new real-name requirement. “We had no recourse to challenge it,” said the news editor of another portal.

Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper loyal to Beijing, first leaked news of the State Council edict in late July. But the report was scrubbed from the paper’s Web site within a few days.

Another state newspaper tried to follow up on the Ta Kung Pao report soon thereafter, the paper’s editors said, but they were forced to abort their article because they were warned that the order was a state secret.

The State Council Information Office had yet to respond to a list of submitted questions about the move.

The new mandate did not appear to affect formerly registered users of the portals. Nor did it affect blog hosts, forums or government news sites like People’s Daily or Xinhua.

Whether because it had an impact mainly on rookie users or because of the void of news about it, bloggers in China were unusually slow to recognize the measure. But those who did were critical.

One commentator on the popular forum Tianya wrote, “Not daring to write one’s real name, in truth, is a form of self-protection for the weak.”

There were signals in the state media in recent weeks that more name registration measures would follow.

An influential advocate of the policy, Fang Bingxing, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told a forum in August that the “time was ripe” to roll it out widely to bolster information security, newspapers reported.

A trail of comments on Sina thrashed the report.

Late last month, the Communist Party-run Guangming Daily ran a positive story about a city government portal in western China that imposed the requirement on new bloggers, calling it a “forerunner.”

Hu Yong, a new media specialist at Peking University, said government-enforced registration requirements carried long-term side effects.

“Netizens will have less trust in the government, and to a certain extent, the development of the industry will be impeded,” he said.

From a comparison of the most commented-on articles in July and August on a number of portals it was hard to determine whether the volume of posts had been affected so far.

But both editors at two of the major portals affected said their sites had shown marked drop-offs.

China Oil Deal Is New Source of Strife Among Iraqis - NYTimes.com

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By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq — When China’s biggest oil company signed the first post-invasion oil field development contract in Iraq last year, the deal was seen as a test of Iraq’s willingness to open an industry that had previously prohibited foreign investment.

One year later, the China National Petroleum Corporation has struck oil at the Ahdab field in Wasit Province, southeast of Baghdad. And while the relationship between the company and the Iraqi government has gone smoothly, the presence of a foreign company with vast resources drilling for oil in this poor, rural corner of Iraq has awakened a wave of discontent here.

“We get nothing directly from the Chinese company, and we are suffering,” said Mahmoud Abdul Ridha, head of the Wasit provincial council, whose budget has been cut in half by Baghdad in the past year because of lower international oil prices. “There is an unemployment crisis. We need roads, schools, water treatment plants. We need everything.”

The result has been a local-rights movement — extraordinary in a country where political dissent has historically carried the risk of death — that in the past few months has begun demanding that at least $1 of each barrel of oil produced at the Ahdab field be used to improve access to clean water, health services, schools, paved roads and other needs in the province, which is among Iraq’s poorest.

The ripples are traveling far beyond this province, too. Frustrations have spilled over into sabotage and intimidation of Chinese oil workers, turning the Ahdab field into a cautionary tale for international oil companies seeking to join the rush to profit from Iraq’s vast untapped oil reserves.

Because Iraq is so heavily dependent on oil revenue, any international hesitation by oil companies to invest could mean years of continued economic and political instability in the country. All oil revenues go directly to the government in Baghdad and are the foundation of the national budget.

The Iraqi government has so far rejected the locals’ demands, but people here are clearly beginning to feel that something new is possible.

“No one would have dared to ask for such a thing during Saddam’s regime; if he did, he would definitely be executed,” said Ghassan Ali, a 43-year-old farmer who lives near the oil field. “But now we are a democratic country, so we have the right to ask for our rights like any other province in Iraq.”

The basis of the complaints here is that, aside from the hiring of a few hundred residents as laborers and security guards at salaries of less than $600 a month, the Ahdab field — a roughly $3 billion development project — has provided no local benefit.

Some local farmers began reacting by destroying the company’s generators and severing electrical hoses, angry because they believed that their fields were being unfairly handed over to the company. Other residents began expressing outrage that very few jobs were being opened to them.

China National Petroleum says it needs relatively few workers because it is still in the exploration phase of its 23-year project at the Ahdab field. Oil production is not scheduled to begin for two and a half years.

Now, the field’s 100 or so Chinese workers rarely leave their spartan compound for fear of being kidnapped, the company said, even though the Iraqi government recently deployed extra security to the area.

But the Iraqis’ anger has been increasingly channeled into an above-board labor movement, expressing concerns about workers’ rights, local government authority, pollution, transparent hiring practices and public accountability, among other issues.

Ghassan Atiyyah, executive director of the nonprofit Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, said the nascent activism in Wasit Province was part of a broader shift in a society that had until recently been resistant to such demands because of years of dictatorship, economic sanctions, war and a culture that retains a strong tribal influence.

“There is a social transformation going on in Iraq that will take years to sort out,” Mr. Atiyyah said, “but what we are seeing is a new social order emerging as rural people challenge the urban people who have always looked down on them.”

The Iraqi government and the Chinese oil company have played down the tensions in Wasit Province, saying that aside from a few hiccups, things are going according to plan.

Still, the unrest also comes at a critical time for Iraq’s oil industry, which has struggled to reach prewar production levels and is preparing to auction off 10 oil fields to international companies this fall after a first round of bidding for a group of other oil and gas fields this summer led to only one signed contract.

The Ahdab field contains about one billion barrels of oil, modest by Iraq’s standards. In comparison, the Rumaila field in southern Iraq, for which the Chinese company and British Petroleum signed a development deal in June, is Iraq’s largest field with an estimated 17.8 billion barrels.

China National Petroleum said it renegotiated a Saddam Hussein-era contract at Ahdab last August knowing that it would take away profits of barely 1 percent.

“We wanted to get a foot in the door,” said Han Ruimin, vice president of Al Waha Petroleum Company, the name of the joint venture at Ahdab between the Chinese company and ZhenHua Oil, also based in China. “Our strategy worked, because we just got another contract,” he said, referring to the Rumaila field.

The Ahdab field is surrounded by tenant farmers living in cramped, mud houses without electricity or running water. They had hoped the arrival of the oil company would end their poverty.

Instead, China National Petroleum has hired only about 450 workers, many of whom lived outside the province, according to residents and local officials.

“The problem is that people were expecting thousands of jobs right away, and then they realized that the company depended more on machines than on people,” said Ali Hussein, head of the local district council.

Mr. Hussein said the extent of local suffering had emboldened him to begin discussing the situation with the Chinese company in unvarnished language. But troubles have persisted.

Earlier this year, the area’s farmers complained that the oil company’s electrical and seismic equipment — used to help determine where wells should be drilled — was damaging fragile homes and crops.

About the same time, electrical lines, many of which were laid across farmland, were severed or stolen, as were expensive generators and other equipment. This spring, a rocket was fired, though it fell harmlessly. Mr. Han said he believed that it had been aimed at a nearby American military base, though local farmers said they suspected that the Ahdab field was the target.

More trouble could be on the way next spring when 1,000 Chinese workers arrive to build a central processing plant.

Mr. Han said hiring Iraqis to do the job was out of the question. “We don’t have enough time to train local people to do that work,” he said.

In the meantime, the field’s neighbors say they worry that they are about to be swallowed by the pursuit of the oil beneath their crops.

Ghazi Hwaidi, 39, whose wheat field now shares space with towering seismic oil prospecting equipment, said he had sought compensation for his damaged crops — and just in case, had also applied for a job with the oil company. He has not received word about either effort.

“My farm is now more like an oil field,” he said, “and I have gotten nothing for it.”

Reporting was contributed by Abeer Mohammed and Mohammed Hussein from Baghdad, and Riyadh Mohammed and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Wasit Province.