"Death squads, military courts and other tribunals sent 114,000 people to their deaths during and after a three-year civil war in the 1930s that traumatised Spain for generations, according to the judge.
Several thousand lie in unmarked mass graves, despite the attempts of volunteers over the past eight years to disinter corpses and hand them over to relatives for reburial. The judge ordered the digging up of 19 such graves, including one on a hillside overlooking the southern city of Granada where Lorca is thought to have been shot in 1936. Lorca's family do not want the poet exhumed, but recently promised not to oppose a petition from relatives of two men shot and buried alongside him for the grave to be dug up...
The judge explicitly said that his investigations included repression carried out until 1952, 17 years after Franco had won the civil war and established his dictatorship. Many Spaniards still find the period hard to talk about and some fear Garzón's investigation will reopen old wounds...
An unwritten "pact of forgetting" underpinned Spain's rapid transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975.
Garzón's critics claim that all civil war and Francoist repression is covered by a 1977 amnesty law and by rules which mean that most crimes lapse after 20 years. Garzón declared yesterday, however, that where a victim's body had not been found a crime of kidnapping was still being committed and had not lapsed."
CSM: peace movement emerges in Afghanistan
"In a musty room near the edge of town, a group of bearded men sit on the floor and heatedly discuss strategy. The men are in the planning stages of an event that they hope will impact Afghan politics – a peace jirga, or assembly, that will agitate for the end of the war between the Taliban and Afghan government by asking the two sides to come to a settlement."
NYT: Shiite party coalition has backed away as well
LAT: sectarian mistrust persists in Baghdad
WP: people still resettling into polarized neighborhoods
"The sectarian violence that raged in Baghdad during the past three years has left the city polarized, with mixed neighborhoods undergoing what amounts to sectarian cleansing. The few Sunni families in Shiite neighborhoods were forced to move to areas where Sunnis predominate, while Shiites in largely Sunni neighborhoods took the opposite path.
Sectarianism has taken hold, despite the government's efforts to undo the process by allowing the displaced families to return to their homes. A psychological barrier has been established that looks set to remain in force, maybe for several generations, no matter what the authorities do."
BBC: around Mosul, Christians clustering
NYT: contemplating 'cockamamie' federalism in Iraq
BBC: and in Belgium
"Some commentators believe that the dynamic of Belgian politics lead the French and Dutch speakers away from each other.
Following devolution reforms over the past 45 years, all parties are now either Dutch-speaking or French-speaking."
WP: ethnicity in Abkhazia
"For the 50,000 or so Georgians living in Gali district, the recent war between Russia and Georgia has cast new uncertainty over an already shaky existence. In August, ethnic Abkhaz celebrated when Russia recognized their land, along with South Ossetia, as independent countries. Tougher frontier controls are one sign of the sometimes triumphant confidence the Abkhazian authorities now display."
BBC: Russian troops come under attack in Ingushetia
BBC: elections set for Kashmir, met with ambivalence
BBC: 86 people on trial for coup plot in Turkey
LAT: the impact of the violence on children in Baghdad
NYT: and in Mexico
"Nowhere is the trauma greater than along the border with the United States, where drug cartels are battling one another for a growing domestic market and the lucrative transit routes north. In Tijuana alone, a wave of gangland killings has left at least 99 people dead since Sept. 26, a death toll that rivals, if not exceeds, that in Baghdad, a war-torn city that is four times as large, over the same period.
Across Mexico, the carnage is impossible to hide, with severed heads and decapitated bodies turning up, sometimes nearly a dozen at a time. There have been more than 3,700 killings related to drugs and organized crime this year, up from about 2,700 last year, the Mexican attorney general’s office said early last week, with Chihuahua the most violent state and the killings continuing in the days since.
Exchanging gruesome stories is nothing new for schoolchildren, who have a way of overstating their brushes with danger. But the 12 tortured, tongueless bodies that were the talk of the playground recently were no exaggeration. In the early hours of Sept. 29, the bodies of 11 men and one woman, bound and partly dressed, were found in an abandoned lot opposite the school."
NYT: one-man traveling library in Colombia describes institutional development
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
Gdn: police fight police in Sao Paolo
"The detectives, who form a branch of the state police, were marching towards Palácio de los Bandeirantes, the headquarters of the city government, to demand to speak to the governor when they were blocked by barriers and lines of colleagues from the military police, who were decked out with riot shields and helmets. Shoving and tugging turned to punches and swiftly escalated into a battle."
NYT: Mugabe refuses to give Tsvangirai a passport; opposition not represented at talks in Swaziland
BBC: former president of Botswana wins good governance prize: $5 million and $200k/year for life
BBC: US imposes sanctions on Mauritania
Gdn: churches fill in for state in sub-Saharan Africa
BBC: Sri Lankan military closing in on Tamil stronghold
BBC: a doctor's account of the situation in the targeted town
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The Onion: Obama racially profiled
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