looking for a few good recruits [fight and flight]

LAT: profile of an elusive capo in Tijuana
"His heavily armed hit men, authorities say, have been leaving the gruesome displays of charred and decapitated bodies across the city, signed with the moniker "Tres Letras," for the three letters in "Teo." And authorities believe he runs a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are held in cages...

"The government's strategy was to break the cartels into smaller, more manageable pieces," said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. "But smaller doesn't mean more manageable. . . . It's begetting more violence . . . and more dangerous organizations, and people like this guy."

Garcia, whose family is said to be from Sinaloa state, grew up in Tijuana and started out in the Arellano Felix organization as a trusted enforcer, probably in the 1990s, and grew powerful as a lieutenant who helped transform kidnapping into a multimillion-dollar industry.

This year, the head of the cartel, Fernando Sanchez Arellano, a nephew of the founding brothers, tried unsuccessfully to halt the abductions of doctors, businessmen and politically influential figures. Sanchez Arellano apparently was worried that the crime wave, attributed to Garcia, was hampering the cartel's drug-trafficking business, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities.

In April, the renegade lieutenant and the cartel leader split in spectacular fashion; their gangs shot it out on an expressway in eastern Tijuana, leaving 14 dead. Garcia fled to Sinaloa but returned in September to launch all-out war. He is believed to be allied with the Sinaloa cartel, which is led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman...

The government, meanwhile, seems helpless to stop the killings. Police officers who have not been lured away to work for Garcia as drivers, lookouts and hit men are paralyzed with fear. Garcia is said to possess a list with every cop's address and phone number."
BBC: drug traffickers biggest organized crime threat to US: National Drug Threat Assessment
WP: 12 decapitated bodies found in southern Mexico

AP: UN tribunal convicts Rwandan of genocide
"On Thursday, the court said Bagosora used his position as the highest authority in Rwanda's Defense Ministry to direct Hutu soldiers to kill Tutsis and moderate Hutus. According to the indictment against him, Bagosora once said he was returning to Rwanda to "prepare the apocalypse."

The court said he was responsible for the deaths of Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian peacekeepers who tried to protect her at the outset of the genocide...

About 63,000 people are suspected of taking part in the genocide. Many have been sentenced by community-based courts, called gacaca, where suspects were encouraged to confess and seek forgiveness in exchange for lighter sentences."
Gdn: background on Bagosora
Gdn: Q&A on the genocide

BBC: massacre by 'bandits' in the Central African Republic
"So who are these bandits that plague the CAR? Many are veteran fighters from the many coups there have been in this country.

Others are fugitives from neighbouring countries like Chad and Sudan.

They have been able to operate freely here as the government of President Francois Bozize has little control over much of the countryside which is divided between a number of rebel groups.

Often the bandits are better organised and equipped than any of these other forces."
BBC: the violence attracts little attention but is generating a humanitarian crisis
"The Central African Republic has seen more than 300,000 people forced from their homes over the past three years, due to civil war and attacks by armed bandits.

One father of four, Zaoro Joseph, told of bandits killing eight people in his village and beating those that remained.

But when the government soldiers came to chase the bandits away, they robbed and burned the village too...

There are only 500 miles of paved roads in an often lawless country that is bigger than France."

BBC: evidence of enslavement in Darfur
"Kidnapped men have been forced to work on farmland controlled by Janjaweed militias, a coalition of African charities says.

Eyewitnesses also say the Sudanese army has been involved in abducting women and children to be sex slaves and domestic staff for troops in Khartoum."

WP: Somalis join or flee the Islamist group al-Shabab
"Ibrahim and two friends fled several months ago, just after the Shabab began beating people not attending Friday prayers and just before the group publicly stoned to death a 13-year-old girl it had convicted of adultery.

The options for young men like them, it seemed, had narrowed to two: sign up or run.

"For us, it was not good to join," said Ibrahim, a lanky 22-year-old who fled to this overflowing refugee camp across the Kenyan border. "Because if we join one side, the other side will hunt us and kill us."...

Mohamed estimated that about 80 percent of his friends had relented and joined the Shabab, some because they were "seduced" by religious ideology, he said, and others because they felt they had no other choice.

The rest attempted to survive by banding together in small groups, he said. When the Shabab took over southern Mogadishu, they fled to the northern part of the city. When it took over the north, they fled south again."

BBC: Kenya sets up tribunal for voting violence, will seek "ring leaders"

wronging rights: UNHCR awareness campaign video on the Congo (via Chris Blattman)

London Review of Books: Mamdani on how Mugabe has retained power (via Chris Blattman)
"There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe."
WP: US says it's time for him to go

WP: the US military has been protecting an Iranian opposition group that had ties to Hussein; Iraq to expel it
LAT: 35 arrested in Iraq, accused of membership in Al Awda (The Return), reorganized Baath Party
WP: Interior Minister claims arrests based on 'a big lie'
WP: segregation and violence in Kirkuk
"In contrast to security improvements elsewhere in the country, Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen residents of Kirkuk remain targets of political violence as their leaders vie for control of what they see as their ancestral lands. Last week, at least 57 people died in a suicide bombing on the outskirts of the city, the deadliest assault in Iraq in six months..

Politics infuses virtually every discussion in this neighborhood -- a sprawling jumble of houses, shops and mosques connected by dusty, unpaved roads in the southern part of Kirkuk. About 120 Kurdish families are clustered inside sand berms, blast walls and checkpoints. Arab and Turkmen houses surround them.

For decades, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens mingled freely, intermarried and ran businesses together. Today, the communities rarely mix...

Senior non-Kurdish police commanders complain that Kurdish intelligence agencies were opening offices in many enclaves, mirroring Hussein's security apparatus."

Newsweek: interview with President Zardari
"[Q:] 'Do you control Pakistan or does the Army control Pakistan?'
[A:] 'Democracy controls Pakistan … All the players today understand that democracy is the only way.' "

WP: protests seem to be spreading among urban middle class in China
"Rural protests, often led by impoverished farmers angry over land seizures that leave them unable to feed their families, have occurred sporadically over the past decade. But richer, more educated Chinese are behind the recent strikes, which have disrupted life in China's cities. The success achieved by the drivers in Chongqing has inspired work stoppages elsewhere."

NYT: Georgian military needs makeover
"The military Mr. Saakashvili inherited was a Red Army orphan: small, decrepit, badly trained and poorly equipped. In the early 1990s the Georgian Army lost two wars against Russian-backed separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Some of its troops were accused of committing war crimes. (Abkhaz and Ossetian forces have also been accused of ugly battlefield excesses.)

Mr. Saakashvili purchased new arms and vehicles, raised salaries, built new bases, increased the country’s collaboration with the Pentagon and urged the armed forces to emulate Western practices, in part by encouraging volunteer soldiers.

The Georgian military appeared to be transforming. American officers praised a few of their Georgian counterparts in Iraq. And Eduard Kokoity, the president of South Ossetia, said the Georgian military was much more prepared and capable in its initial attack in August than it had been in the past.

But as the war drew into a second day and Russian forces flowed into South Ossetia, the Georgian military quickly broke down. Many commanders were reduced to communicating by cellphone. The army fired cluster munitions on its own villages. Many units fled, abandoning equipment, ammunition and their own dead...

“One of the reasons they got into the war is that their command and control is a mess,” [an American] officer said. “They have no ability to process and analyze strategic information and provide it to decision makers in a systematic way.” The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the assessment."

Gdn: recruitment, displacement, and denunciations as gov't continues push against the LTTE in Sri Lanka
"With its back to the jungle, the Tigers are stepping up pressure on civilians to defend their dwindling area of control, according to a Human Rights Watch report this week. "Trapped in the LTTE's iron fist, ordinary Tamils are forcibly recruited as fighters and forced to engage in dangerous labour near the front lines", Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director said on Monday. "It has recently gone beyond its longstanding 'one person per family' forced recruitment policy and now sometimes requires two or more family members to join its ranks. The LTTE claims to be fighting for the Tamil people, but it is responsible for much of the suffering of civilians".

The government, meanwhile, urges civilians to flee the Tiger areas and houses them in so-called welfare camps, which independent sources describe as detention camps. There government-paid informers wearing masks walk through the ranks of the displaced, identifying people as alleged Tiger supporters who are promptly detained."

Newsweek: the whistleblower on the wiretaps comes forward
"In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies—a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was 'probably illegal.'...

For weeks, Tamm couldn't sleep. The idea of lawlessness at the Justice Department angered him. Finally, one day during his lunch hour, Tamm ducked into a subway station near the U.S. District Courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. He headed for a pair of adjoining pay phones partially concealed by large, illuminated Metro maps. Tamm had been eyeing the phone booths on his way to work in the morning. Now, as he slipped through the parade of midday subway riders, his heart was pounding, his body trembling. Tamm felt like a spy. After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he picked up a phone and called The New York Times."