separating the sleepy heads from the killers [veiled reality]

WP: arrest of Sunni Awakening leader in Baghdad sparks clashes
The battles, the most ferocious in nearly a year in Baghdad, erupted minutes after the arrest of Adil Mashadani, the leader of the Fadhil Awakening Council, which is composed mostly of former Sunni insurgents who allied themselves with the U.S. military in exchange for monthly salaries that are now paid by Iraq's government.
WP: residents direct anger at Iraqi police for failing to dismantle car bomb that killed 16
Standing with his colleagues as residents cleaned the street, Abbas, the sergeant, teared up.

"As long as there is vengeance against you and vengeance against me, as long as there's blood between us, this isn't going to end," he said. "This isn't going to finish. Even if the government drafted half the people into the army and police, it won't end."

...Thursday's bombing was the fourth major attack in Baghdad and its outskirts this month, illustrating the resilient ability of insurgents to carry out devastating strikes in some of the country's most dangerous regions -- parts of Baghdad and its outskirts, Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and the region around the northern city of Mosul. Some police and Interior Ministry officials have warned that Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents are reorganizing in parts of Baghdad and its outskirts and in Basra.

"They're all waiting for the Americans to leave," Abbas said.
WP: Iraq to relocate members of Iranian dissident group

IHT: sectarian tensions in Bahrain
For years there have been tense relations between Bahrain's Sunni elite and the Shiite majority. That tension exploded into regular protests this year after the police arrested 23 opposition organizers, including two popular figures, Hassan Mushaima'a and a Shiite cleric, Sheik Mohammed Habib al-Moqdad. Prosecutors accused them of trying to destabilize the government and planning terrorist attacks.

...Compared with other places in the Persian Gulf, tiny Bahrain feels laid back and calm in the capital and the better neighborhoods. More than half the nation's one million residents are expatriate workers, giving the streets a relatively cosmopolitan feel. Bahrain also has a not-too-hidden seedy side. Prostitution is rampant in the hotels and nightclubs, and the streets are filled with "massage parlors." Bahrain is a destination for sex tourism.

Bahrain's politics are heated, too. The 40-member Parliament is controlled by religious parties, Sunnis and Shiites, who have turned it into a sectarian battleground. The country is run by a self-declared king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who presides over a police force staffed primarily by foreigners: Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, almost anyone who happens to be a Sunni and is eager to earn a Bahraini passport.

Shiites are all but banned from the military and security forces — certainly from command positions — one of their primary grievances.

The Shiite majority complains that the government has a plan to naturalize as many Sunnis as possible, to change the demographic balance. The government and its supporters insist that is not true.

BBC: clashes in Yemen between security forces and al-Qaeda associates

Slate: The Art of Recruitment: al-Qaeda's training manual

Slate: assessing Obama's new strategy for Afghanistan
Gdn: identifying allies and enemies
"I can become someone's worst enemy in a second, but that is a short-term solution," said [Colonel David] Haight. "My aim here is governance, security and sustainability."...

"Sometimes we are talking to people then someone joins us and the villagers all go quiet," [Captain José] Vasquez said. "In one village there are three brothers who say they have no power but clearly run the place and clearly are not on our side. Another village is just plain bad. We got stones thrown at us there."

Interviews with MPs, officials and judges from Logar revealed a typically web of shifting loyalties, divided communities, inter-generational tensions and desperate bids by village elders to gauge who is the best guarantor of security and resources: the Americans who have guns and money but will eventually leave, or the insurgents who have less of both but are going nowhere.
Gdn: training the Afghan army (video): 'it's like having 26 kids'

NYT: segment of Pakistan's ISI aiding Taliban in Afghanistan
Support for the Taliban, as well as other militant groups, is coordinated by operatives inside the shadowy S Wing of Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the officials said. There is even evidence that ISI operatives meet regularly with Taliban commanders to discuss whether to intensify or scale back violence before the Afghan elections...

The ISI helped create and nurture the Taliban movement in the 1990s to bring stability to a nation that had been devastated by years of civil war between rival warlords, and one Pakistani official explained that Islamabad needed to use groups like the Taliban as “proxy forces to preserve our interests.”
NYT: factions of Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan try to solidify alliance in anticipation of US troop deployment
WP: village on border pays price for resisting

WP: torture yielded no actionable intel
Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
AP: Spanish court considers trying Bush administration officials for providing legal cover for torture
The ex-Bush officials are Gonzales; former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.

NYT: leaked accounts of Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza raise questions of war crimes
When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”
Slate: why use white phosphorous?

Gdn: the Naxalite insurgency in India
The Naxalites - villagers call them dada, Hindi for older brother - get their name from an uprising in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal in 1967. Playing on the frustrations of India's hundreds of millions of rural poor, they have won support by redistributing the wealth of the landowners and opposing industrialisation. They are estimated to have a strong presence in at least 170 out of India's 602 districts and have warned that they will use violence to block the elections in those areas.

In Chhattisgarh alone, in the past two years, 578 civilians have died in Naxal-related violence. The police and special police officer death toll stands at 231, against 142 dead Naxalites. According to police figures, in the past eight years in the Dantewada district alone 72 roads have been destroyed, 18 banks, 291 public vehicles, 87 schools, two hospitals, 24 railway lines and 56 electricity stations.

To counter their influence, the Salwa Judum militia emerged in 2005, ostensibly out of the frustration of those who had suffered at the hands of the Naxalites. The result was more killing, as the SJ members turned on those they accused of harbouring and supporting the Naxalites. Caught in the middle are the tribal people who live in the forests. There was no voting in the state elections in November in once prosperous Nendra: it has been attacked three times; 145 houses have been burned down, 16 adults and nine children killed.

The few villagers who have since returned huddle together around the one building that still has a roof. Its pink walls are covered with neatly painted Hindi script. The message the Naxalites left would be unequivocal, were the villagers able to read Hindi: "Don't take part in elections. Don't listen to the Hindu fascist members of the BJP [the Hindu nationalist opposition party]. Throw away their leaflets, don't help the police."

Scared at first, they relax as night falls, the trees around come alive with fireflies and the local hooch emboldens them. Yes, the dadas come from time to time, they say, but what can they do? They feed them and send them on their way. Then the SJ comes and burns their houses and kills those who cannot run away. "We are just living and surviving," says a voice in the darkness.

...

• The Naxalites take their name from the Naxalbari district in West Bengal where the movement began in 1967.

• They started by organising uprisings among landless workers in West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh. They then moved into the mineral-rich areas of Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

• The movement, whose aim is violent revolution, has now spread to 170 of India's 602 administrative districts.

• The Naxalites consider themselves the heirs of Mao Zedong, although China has denounced the movement.

• With a force of up to 15,000 soldiers, it controls a fifth of India's forests.

• Two wings, People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre, combined several years ago to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

BBC: investigations of a weapons cache found in Bangladeshi madrassa

WP: Colombian gov't to return stolen land to internally displaced
Government investigators say that illegal, anti-guerrilla death squads that swarmed through in 1996 and 1997 worked with troops commanded by Gen. Rito Alejo del Rio, who is now in jail on charges that include murder and collaborating with paramilitary groups. More than 100 villagers were slain, and as many as 3,000 farmers were forced to abandon 247,000 acres, a swath about a third the size of Rhode Island.

The palm companies then built roads through the forest and planted nearly 15,000 acres with African palm, which is used as a biofuel and in many other products. The few farmers who had individual titles to land were forced to sell. "They would say, 'Sell, or your widow will,' " recalled one farmer, Eustaquio Polo Rivera, 40.

...Documents from the attorney general's office and the nation's controller obtained by The Washington Post show that state loans were used to bankroll the palm oil company operations. Urapalma received most of its start-up funding from the state, the controller's office said, and the company accounted for 89 percent of the incentives provided from 2002 to 2006 through a rural development fund to companies in Choco.

...Court documents and depositions show that some of the companies had close links to illegal paramilitary groups that massacred villagers in a dirty war against leftist rebels. The commanders of those groups have since disarmed their forces and are offering testimony about their alliances with military and government officials in exchange for leniency.
Miami Herald: one of them, Raul Hasbún, describes banana company payments to paramilitaries in the same region
The son of a former plantation owner, Hasbún took over the family banana plantation as guerrilla power hit its peak in Urabá, the heart of the Colombian banana-growing region.

At that time, it was the rebels who were extorting business owners, transportation companies and shopkeepers. They kidnapped the wealthy and middle class alike, using the ransom to finance their war against the government. Like nearly everyone else, Hasbún paid his quota to the guerrillas.

In 1994, Hasbún became fed up with the shakedowns. He said he approached the Castaño family, a powerful clan that was forming small paramilitary death squads to fight the rebels and assassinate their followers, and ultimately joined their cause.

Working closely with local military officials, paramilitaries spent the next 10 years killing hundreds of suspected rebel collaborators and sympathizers, former paramilitaries from the region have testified. Hasbún himself has confessed that he killed or ordered the deaths of hundreds across a 200-mile swath of coastal territory.
CSM: FARC targets Colombian cities
LAT: police foil plot to kill Defense Minister

WP: Clinton acknowledges failure of US drug war policies, US demand for cocaine driving violence in Mexico
LAT: drug cartels diversify trafficking operations to include humans
SlateV: meanwhile, gringo guns go south
NYT: violence also crossing the border
African Affairs: ...and the Atlantic: a history of drug trafficking in West Africa (via Chris Blattman)

CSM: policing Giuliani-style in Rio

LAT: political prisoners in Zimbabwe

WP: members of Georgian opposition party arrested
The arrests, some of which took place at the offices of Burjanadze's party, come just over two weeks before Georgia's main opposition parties plan mass demonstrations calling on Saakashvili to resign.

The opposition has accused Saakashvili of monopolizing power and betraying the democratic ideals of the Rose Revolution, the 2003 street protests that swept him into office. A favorite of the Bush administration, the U.S.-educated lawyer has come under increased pressure since Georgia's defeat in a war with Russia in August over two breakaway territories.
Gdn: ...while a protest singer imprisons himself

BBC: rural violence mars Turkish elections
CSM: hijab debate ignites in Norway

++
urban ennui
NYT mag: the collapse of Cleveland
Time: reconstructing Detroit
NYT: ideas for the Bronx, LA, New Orleans, and Buffalo

++
NYT Freakonomics: what the 'avatars of the underground' have to say about the bailout
“See, by the time there’s a crisis, the Sleepy Heads are already gone. They’re the ones who keep the books, so they know where the money is, and they know when trouble starts. So they usually get out first. But at this point, in most of these companies, all you got left is the Killers. They’re the ones who like hanging around, who ain’t got no home life, who just love the blood, and the guts, who love the pain!”

“Again,” I interrupted, “what does that have to do [with the financial crisis?]”

“Never lose your killers. Never let them go, because you’ll need them when things gets better. You can always get the Sleepy Heads back. They’re hiding under a rock anyway. But the Killers! Those folks are hard to find, so you got to give up the money. Pay the ones at the top, the one’s who like to smell blood. Let the Sleepy Heads go, but keep the Killers.”

++
public intellectuals
NYT: John Hope Franklin

NYT magazine: on science and consensus
Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus...Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

New Scientist: truth and revelation: physicist wins religious prize (via Chris Blattman)
Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D'Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.

roving specialists [sv, interrupted]

SV's taking the show on the road for a couple of weeks...we'll be back to our reliably sporadic posts soon.

outsourcing justice [slippery little bugger]

BBC: ICC issues warrant for Bashir's arrest; genocide charges dropped
Gdn: Bashir tells ICC to eat its warrant
He is accused of "masterminding and implementing" a counterinsurgency campaign designed to destroy the Fur, Marsalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, which were deemed supportive of a rebel uprising in Darfur in February 2003.

According to the ICC prosecution documents, Bashir's strategy caused 35,000 violent deaths.

But genocide is extremely difficult to prove, and even among human rights experts there is no consensus that it occurred in Darfur. Some analysts believe that the ICC will only push forward with the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Within Sudan, Bashir's indictment has increased the pressure on his ruling National Congress party, which faces an election this year. Senior ministers have warned that the ICC's action could trigger a rise in Islamic extremism, and attacks on foreigners in the country.
LAT: Salva Kiir, former SPLM leader, weighs in
[Q:] You just issued a statement that was very supportive of Bashir, calling him "Brother Bashir" and warning the international community against provoking chaos in Sudan. Does that mean you think the ICC case against Bashir is a mistake?

[A:] It's not a mistake. I didn't say it was a mistake. It's something that is looking for justice. The ICC is not indicting the whole country. It's looking for particular people that are accused of crimes against humanity and human rights violations. These include the president. The issue is that the president is still in office. The ICC has never done this to any president before. Why is it being done for the first time to the president of Sudan? That's the question that everyone is asking...

[Q:] The ICC case puts the SPLM in a tricky spot. Are you worried that if Bashir's government collapses, the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] could be at risk? At best, the ICC case will likely distract the government from implementing the final provisions of the peace deal.

[A:] It puts us in a very difficult situation as a country to have an indicted president who is not flexible in his movement. But we have said let us maintain the situation so that there are no clashes that will throw the whole country into chaos. The situation in Darfur can still be handled. And in southern Sudan, there is the CPA. Unless somebody is interested in taking people back to war, there is no connection between the ICC and peace in the south.

[Q:] Are you preparing militarily for possible violence?

[A:] I'm a soldier. I'm prepared.
BBC: Sudanese army deserter speaks out
Khalid, who is of black African origin, says he was forcibly recruited into President Omar al-Bashir's Sudanese army in late 2002.

He and several other men where he lived were taken to the headquarters of his regiment which was based near the north-western Darfur town of Fasher.

He admits to having taken part in seven different attacks on Darfur villages with the help of Janjaweed militia.

The first one was in the Korma area in December 2002 several months before the conflict in Darfur officially began.

He claims to have been extremely reluctant to carry out the savage orders he was given.

"When they asked me to rape the girl, I went and stood in front of her," he said.

"Tears came into my eyes. They said: 'You have to rape her. If you don't we will beat you.' I hesitated and they hit me with the butt of a rifle...

Before long, he said, he was ordered to join other brutal raids on Darfur villages.

I asked him what he was told to do with unarmed civilians who did not resist in any way.

"They told us, don't leave anybody, just kill everybody," he said.

"Even the children, if left behind in the huts, we had to kill them," he said. "People would cry and run from their huts.

"Many couldn't take all their children. If they had more than two they had to leave them behind. If you saw them you had to shoot and kill."

...

Khalid insists that he always fired over the heads of civilians and didn't kill anyone himself despite the orders he was given.

He says he could do this without his fellow soldiers noticing but he admits that there was no way he could avoid carrying out orders to torch peoples homes.

"I did take part," he admitted. "They forced me. We had no choice. If you didn't they would kill you."

Did anyone refuse?

"Two of my colleagues refused and they were shot dead."

I asked him how the Sudanese officers had justified killing unarmed civilians in cold blood. How they had explained the need to slaughter women, babies and children?

He replied: "They said they are the ones who take food and water to the rebels.

"They said that if we kill these people and burn their villages then the rebels will not have any supplies so they'll have to move out to the neighbouring country."
CSM: armed groups still competing for control of villages, and Darfuris continue to be displaced
[Mr. Hari] is one of 50,000 people displaced from the town of Muhajiriya in South Darfur after a rebel advance followed up by government and janjaweed reprisals in February.

More than 23,000 have trudged and trucked their way to the capital of North Darfur, filling already overstretched aid camps to the breaking point.

Thousands more have been arriving in Otash, on the outskirts of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur...

The town of Muhajiriya had been under the control of guerrillas loyal to Minni Minnawi, the only rebel leader to sign a 2006 peace deal with the government. However, a spate of defections and fighting saw the town switch to another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement in January amid weeks of deadly clashes.

That was the signal for the government forces to retake the town, which they did with the help of air support.

AJE: Karadzic, on trial in the Hague, refuses to enter plea
Last week, judges at The Hague tribunal in the Netherlands approved the prosecution's third amended indictment against Karadzic, which lists two genocide charges and nine of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
LAT: Stanisic, Milosevic's intelligence chief on trial at ICTY, was a CIA informant
For eight years, Stanisic was the CIA's main man in Belgrade. During secret meetings in boats and safe houses along the Sava River, he shared details on the inner workings of the Milosevic regime. He provided information on the locations of NATO hostages, aided CIA operatives in their search for grave sites and helped the agency set up a network of secret bases in Bosnia.

At the same time, Stanisic was setting up death squads for Milosevic that carried out a genocidal campaign, according to prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which was established by the U.N. Security Council in 1993 to try those responsible for serious human rights violations in the Balkan wars.

Now facing a trial at The Hague that could send him to prison for life, Stanisic has called in a marker with his American allies. In an exceedingly rare move, the CIA has submitted a classified document to the court that lists Stanisic's contributions and attests to his helpful role. The document remains sealed, but its contents were described by sources to The Times.

The CIA's Lofgren, now retired, said the agency drafted the document to show "that this allegedly evil person did a whole lot of good." Lofgren, however, doesn't claim to disprove the allegations against Stanisic...

The chief prosecutor, Dermot Groome, says that Stanisic's actions to help the CIA and counter Milosevic only underscore the power he had. In his opening argument, Groome said that the "ability to save lives is tragically the very same authority and the very same ability that [Stanisic] used . . . to take lives."...

At the time, CIA Director John M. Deutch was trying to clean up the agency's image by cracking down on contacts with human rights violators. Years later, the "Deutch rules" were cited as a reason the agency hadn't done better penetrating groups such as Al Qaeda.

But Deutch had no problems with Stanisic. He invited the Serbian to CIA headquarters in 1996, and an itinerary of the visit indicates that Stanisic got a warm welcome.

The Serbian spy chief was taken to hear jazz at the Blues Alley club in Georgetown and driven to Maryland's eastern shore for a bird hunt. Deutch even presented Stanisic with a 1937 Parker shotgun, a classic weapon admired by collectors.

Deutch, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, declined to comment.
LAT: chronology of Stanisic's alleged activities
March 1992 to 1995: Special [paramilitary] units [created by Stanisic] allegedly "committed crimes in and attacked and took control of towns and villages in the municipalities of Bijeljina, Bosanski Samac, Doboj, Sanski Most, Zvornik." Simultaneously, Stanisic cooperates with CIA, providing information on Milosevic regime and conveying communications from the U.S. to his boss.

CSM: in Kosovo, rebel leader turned politician
Limaj's own story began when he was a student leader in the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall had fallen, but Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic had revoked Kosovo's special status in Yugoslavia. The Albanian, 90 percent of the population, lived a second-class existence under brutal police-state repression – checkpoints, arbitrary killing, torture – as Serbs revived a deeply felt national myth of Kosovo as their spiritual heartland, something disallowed under Yugoslavia's longtime leader, Marshal Tito...

For a decade, Limaj and Kosovo waited as the political and spiritual leader of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, reacted to Serbian tactics with a Gandhian strategy of patience and nonviolence.

A tipping point for Kosovars arrived with the US-led Dayton peace deal on Bosnia.

"After Dayton, all our hopes and dreams fell," Limaj says. "That Milosevic could kill with impunity for years, then present himself as a man of peace ... this was totally depressing for us. There was no hope. We saw what he was doing here. It's true, if a normal person has choices, he would never choose war. But it was either leave Kosovo, or organize ourselves to resist."...

The former commander plays down his KLA hero status. But Limaj was the first to switch KLA tactics – characterized by guerrilla skirmishes in villages and hiding in the hills – by confronting Serb forces in the open. His units eventually held two main highways and sheltered 85,000 people, a hospital, and a radio station...

Limaj's time at The Hague remains a sensitive one. He was arrested for crimes while serving as KLA commander of the Llapushnik region. He denied guilt, but agreed to face charges. "As much as I didn't agree with the accusation, I felt it was our responsibility to respond," Limaj says. "So I said I would go to The Hague, and was sure justice would prevail."...

What Limaj took from Obama's "Audacity of Hope" was the new president's community organizing in Chicago. "He went house to house to understand the people, their hopes and dreams, so by the time he ran for president could speak to everybody."

That will be a task in Kosovo, still divided between Albanian and Serb. "Kosovo's intentions are humane… we don't want to harm or do damage to others… but allow everyone live together in a new state."

Ind: Guinea-Bissau president assassinated by soldiers
The country's 1.6 million people have endured years of instability since independence in 1974. This has been fuelled in recent years by the country's emergence as a key transit point in the smuggling of Latin American cocaine to Europe.

Vieira was a former military ruler who was ousted after a civil war in the 1990s and returned to power in a 2005 election.

He had been at odds with armed forces chief of staff General Batista Tagme Na Wai, who was killed in an attack on Sunday evening that also destroyed part of the military headquarters.

A security source said soldiers from Na Wai's Balante ethnic group led the attack on Vieira, who is from the smaller Papel community, and looted his home afterwards...

In January, the armed forces command said militiamen hired to protect Vieira had shot at Na Wai. The militia denied the shooting had been an assassination attempt but the miltiary nevertheless ordered the militia be disbanded.

The 400-strong force had been recruited as Vieira's personal bodyguard by the Interior Ministry after the president's house was targeted by heavy weapons late last year.

A policeman said soldiers loyal to Na Wai had freed people accused of that attack ahead of the president's death today.

According to the constitution, if the president dies, the speaker of parliament runs the country until new elections.

Following a bloody independence war, Guinea-Bissau's military has long been involved in politics. The military issued a statement on Monday saying that the situation was under control but it would respect democratic institutions.
AP: speaker of parliament now sworn in
CSM: some suspect link to drug trafficking
In recent years, Colombian drug cartels have begun flying small planes across the Atlantic, landing on tiny islands dotting the Guinean coastline. Since Guinea-Bissau has no navy to patrol its waters, the cartels were free to unload tons of cocaine destined for Europe. The drugs were then distributed to impoverished African migrants, who would carry the drugs north by boat to the shores of France, Italy, and Spain.

Government corruption, fed by poor government salaries at the bottom and uncertain political leadership at the top, means that Guinea Bissau has few tools to stop the drug trafficking...

"This recent set of killings can be explained [as] the action of the drug traffickers, who would not allow anything to get in the way or to obstruct their links with Europe," says David Zounmenou, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, formerly known as Pretoria.

NYT: calm in the Congo?
wronging rights: maybe, but somehow doesn't seem sustainable

Econ: the Economist plays the optimist about Somalia (in the headline at least)
The battleground is Somalia’s centre and south, which has water and food. Everywhere the complex mix of clans and sub-clans is combustible. By contrast, the arid north, peopled largely by nomadic camel-herders, is fairly peaceful. Puntland, in the north-east, is semi-autonomous, but most of its people want to be part of a federal Somalia. It hosts some of the pirates, as well as people-traffickers, kidnappers and a fair number of jihadists. But its government has disarmed freewheeling militias and more or less keeps order.

The recently ousted previous Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, a Puntland warlord, has taken several hundred gunmen back north from Mogadishu and now seems more interested in his businesses, mainly in the town of Bossaso. Somaliland, a former British territory, has been fairly stable since it declared independence in 1991. If coming elections there go well, with voters using biometric identity cards, it may slowly start to win recognition from some African countries and others farther afield. It is not clear what Mr Ahmed thinks about independence for Somaliland. But nationalists and jihadists are violently against it, as is Puntland, which disputes a border zone with it.

What is clear is that no one controls the country, neither the government, nor the Shabab. But, certainly until Mr Ahmed’s arrival, the Shabab have been in the ascendant. Its system of 20 to 30 men per cell, each one locking into larger command structures when they take a town, is hard to crack.
GQ: pirates still on patrol
Boosaaso is perfectly positioned near the mouth of the Red Sea, at the crossroads of Africa and Arabia, to supply this lawless corner of the world with all its contraband needs: guns, drugs, expired baby formula, counterfeit electronics, counterfeit dollars, even smuggled human beings. If it’s illegal and it makes money, then someone is trafficking in it here. When we arrived, the center of town was packed with people—money changers sitting sphinxlike in front of bricks of Somali shillings, waiting to convert pirate dollars into the filthy local notes; old men in skullcaps chewing camel steaks at dingy, whitewashed restaurants; boys hawking slices of watermelon from roadside carts. Several late-model Land Cruisers, trucks that cost at least $50,000, prowled the deeply rutted roads. As we moved through town, our driver jutted his finger toward a large white house with a steel gate. “C.I.A.,” he said. He may have been right. It was an open secret that the American government was working with notorious figures in northern Somalia to track Islamist terrorists. Not far from the center of town was a neighborhood called New Boosaaso, where just beyond a cluster of refugee huts made from bits of cloth and cardboard rose a colony of palatial new homes with huge walls surrounding them and satellite dishes on their roofs. Spectral figures tramped through the dust on the way to their hovels, and right next to them were some of the nicest houses I had seen anywhere in Somalia, where so many buildings have been reduced to piles of machine-gun-chewed bricks. I suspected that this was where the pirates lived...

[Pirate spokesman] Sugule seemed happy to chat. He talked for a while about the typical pirate diet—“rice, meat, bread, spaghetti—you know, normal human-being food”—and then he explained to us his notion of Somali piracy. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

Ind: Pakistan 'at war' after attack on Sri Lankan cricket players in Lahore
The spectacular military-style raid in Lahore bore marked similarities to the assault in Mumbai last year, which left 172 people dead. Pakistani officials suggested the Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the carnage in the Indian city, also carried out the attack in Lahore.
NYT: arrests have been made
Gdn: 3 Taliban factions said to have formed alliance
The Guardian has learned that three of the most powerful warlords in the region have settled their differences and come together under a grouping calling itself Shura Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen, or Council of United Holy Warriors.

Nato officers fear that the new extremist partnership in Waziristan, Pakistan's tribal area, will significantly increase the cross-border influx of fighters and suicide bombers - a move that could undermine the US president's Afghanistan strategy before it is formulated...

The Pakistani Taliban movement was split between a powerful group led by the warlord Baitullah Mehsud and his bitter rivals, Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur. While Mehsud has targeted Pakistan itself in a campaign of violence and is accused of being behind the assassination of the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Nazir and Bahadur sent men to fight alongside other insurgents in Afghanistan.
CSM: villagers around Peshawar forming militias
In the town of Budaber, six miles from Peshawar's city center, Daud Khan makes sure his Kalashnikov is loaded before stepping into the dark street. As he walks out, seven young men join him, all armed.

Mr. Khan is a member of the nighttime civilian patrols that guard the streets and escort residents home. They usually work from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., the peak time for bomb attacks, a local says.

Do-it-yourself security teams are becoming a fixture in and around Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, as residents grow wary of the Taliban's growing presence – and doubtful of the government's ability to protect them. Some officials have backed the vigilantes, even supplied them with weapons, raising concerns they may fall into the wrong hands...

A city of more than 1.4 million people, Peshawar has long been known as a melting pot of Afghan and Pakistani cultures and a haven for musicians, artists, and intellectuals.

Gdn: registering voters in Afghanistan for August elections
[The Independent Election Commission] is preparing for new presidential elections in August and its workers have just finished registering 4.5 million voters, visiting every district in the country without suffering a single casualty.

Zekria Barakzai, the deputy head of the commission, argues this extraordinary feat is explained by the IEC's softly-softly methods. Its officials do not arrive in a big cloud of dust and convoys of heavily armed men, even in the turbulent south.

"We organise security with the elders with the help of tribal leaders. We talk to them first," Barakzai said...

Karzai, with no previous experience of administration, has tried to run it from his mobile phone. As the Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid argues in his new book on the region (depressingly titled Descent into Chaos), the president has sought to project his power through deals with a network of strong personalities, warlords mostly, rather than building enduring institutions.

The one exception is the Afghan national army, which is more than 80,000-strong and involved in 90% of the military operations around the country. But the army cannot build roads, bring electricity or teach children. That requires a functioning and energetic government.

The British and French are working on a common approach to present to Obama before the Nato summit next month that would put more emphasis on local and traditional forms of government, and less on Kabul. The Americans are reluctant to give up on Karzai.

BBC: re-establishing order on Baghdad's roads
Law and order broke down straight after the US-led invasion in March 2003.

For many Iraqis, "democracy" meant doing exactly what you felt like, when you felt like it - including behind the wheel of a car.

The few traffic police who dared remain on duty did not dare to stop drivers. It could be anyone at all in the driver's seat, and he'd certainly have a gun. Many traffic policemen lost their lives at the hands of militants, or were blown up by roadside bombs.
Slate: Obama's plan for troop withdrawal
CSM: US contractors leaving Iraq
NPR: US military closing prisons
"It seems to be hard to get this in the press, but last year we released 18,600 detainees. Only had 157 come back," [Brig. Gen. David Quantock] says.

Quantock credits that low rate of recidivism to the rehabilitation programs offered by the U.S. detention system, including education programs, health care, and religious discussions with moderate Islamic clerics.

He also says the system works because it separates the extremists from people who were not motivated by ideology.

"Most of our detainees were motivated primarily by two things — money, because they didn't have jobs, they needed to earn some money, or fear of retribution. I mean, if you're in a bad neighborhood, you join the local gang," he says.

As for the most dangerous inmates, Quantock says the U.S. is building a new prison in the northern town of Taji, which will eventually be turned over to the Iraqi government.
NYT: who won those elections, anyhow?

Ind: arrest in Bangladesh of 'mutiny' leader
AP: charges filed against 1,000 border guards

NYT: privatizing security in India
Capsi, an industry trade group, estimates that India’s $2 billion private security sector will add a million employees this year, even as other industries lay off workers while the economy cools.

Already, it employs about 5 million people, 1.3 million more than India’s police and armed forces combined. In fact, with India’s official police stretched thin (there is one officer for every 1,000 people in India, less than half the United States average and one-tenth the average in China), security guards are moving from fetchers of tea at government offices and car washers at wealthy homes to becoming corporate India’s de facto police force...

Kammesh Baboo Rathore, a 28-year-old recruit, said that Terra Force was his third choice. “I tried the army and the police and didn’t get through” he said. “This is my next choice. I want to work for the nation and am enamored by the uniform.”

WP: getting through military checkpoints in Sri Lanka
The passengers quietly exited the bus and stood behind the razor wire, identification cards in hand. The men split off into one line. A far smaller number of women went into a separate row, some cradling sleeping babies.

But it was the women's line that took twice as long to navigate. That's because female officers rummaged through women's purses and bags before moving on to their breasts, even feeling the insides of their bras for explosives.

They didn't stop there. They patted down their groins and occasionally looked inside their underwear. Pregnant women routinely had their swollen bellies squeezed or prodded, just to make sure.

Women are often singled out for scrutiny because, in Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war, more than two-thirds of the Tamil Tiger suicide bombers have been women, according to experts from the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

AJE: 'scuffle' between opposition and ruling party in northern Malay state

LAT: Mexico sends more troops, federal police to Ciudad Juarez
The border city is in the throes of a vicious turf war between a local drug-smuggling organization and rivals from the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The feud, and the Mexican government's 2-year-old crackdown on organized crime, has sent killings soaring.

The city's police chief, Roberto Orduna Cruz, resigned almost two weeks ago after several of his officers were shot to death and anonymous signs appeared warning that an officer would be killed every 48 hours unless he stepped down.
Foreign Policy: is it really just crime? or a civil war?
The U.S. Department of State has its view of Mexico's problems: On Feb 20, it issued a travel alert to U.S. citizens, warning them about "small-unit combat," "large firefights," and "public shootouts during daylight hours" in Mexican cities along the U.S. border. According to the State Department, since January 2008 there have been 1,800 killings in Juárez, a border city with a population of 1.6 million.

Does Mexico have a really bad crime problem? Or is Mexico at war with itself and at risk of sudden societal collapse? To answer this question, we should look not just at quantitative measures of the violence (as grim as they are), but also qualitative factors...

...Mexico's struggle against the drug cartels seems more like a counterinsurgency campaign than a fight against crime. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cartels control 200 counties in Mexico, including much of the U.S. border; generate more than $10 billion in annual revenue; and can muster thousands of gunmen, including defectors from Mexico's Army Special Forces. With much of the police suborned, Calderón has now deployed the Army, exposing its soldiers to the same corruption. The outcome of this campaign remains unknown, as are its consequences for the United States.

BBC: after worst year in four decades, FARC launches 'Plan Rebirth'
Last October, security forces captured several laptop computers and memory sticks that outline the new rebel strategy and the focus of Plan Rebirth, including:

• increase urban attacks
• wage a war of attrition on two fronts. The first is military, using homemade anti-personnel mines and snipers to increase army casualties and undermine morale and secondly economically by attacking infrastructure just as the global credit crisis begins to be felt in the country
• build up finances through extortion and drug-trafficking
• expend more effort on political indoctrination to counter growing desertion
• consolidate territorial control, particularly in the areas where drugs crops are grown
• launch a campaign of political work, both nationally and internationally, to recover lost ground and increase followers, particularly in urban areas

The Farc is certainly a leaner army now, down to perhaps 8,000 fighters from more than double that in 2002.

Finances have been hit along with morale. However, a leaner Farc may well turn out to be harder to hit.

Econ: the Yakuza is even feeling the squeeze
“IN THE old days,” laments the retired mobster, with a broad smile, slicked hair and a heavily tattooed body, “the yakuza served a useful purpose in society to solve civil disputes and keep the streets clean.” He draws on his cigarette, the stub of an amputated little finger visible in his beefy hand. “Now”, he goes on, “it has lost its samurai spirit to moneymaking.”

Or perhaps, the yakuza—Japan’s organised-crime groups that date from the 17th century—are getting squeezed. For most of the post-war period they operated openly: tolerated by the public, used by politicians and protected by police. Crime will happen anyway, went the argument, so better to know whom to call when it crosses the line. In the 1950s ministers and industrialists relied on the mobsters and nationalist groups to quash unions and socialists. The gangs upheld classic Japanese virtues of manliness and loyalty—and paid for mistakes by slicing off one of their fingers in atonement.

NYT: Ukraine faces unrest over economic downturn
It is not hard to understand why world leaders are increasingly worried about the discontent and the financial crisis in Ukraine, which has 46 million people and a highly strategic location. A small country like Latvia or Iceland is one thing, but a collapse in Ukraine could wreck what little investor confidence is left in Eastern Europe, whose formerly robust economies are being badly strained.

It could also cause neighboring Russia, which has close ethnic and linguistic ties to eastern and southern Ukraine, to try to inject itself into the country’s affairs. What is more, the Kremlin would be able to hold up Ukraine as an example of what happens when former Soviet republics follow a Western model of free-market democracy.

Gdn: for first time in 29 years, nationalists lose election in Basque region

Econ: upcoming elections in Albania

NYT: the CIA destroyed 92 interrogation tapes
LAT: US pledges to reduce nuclear weapons stockpile
NYT: US sends two envoys to Syria, in play to try to isolate Iran

++
abu muquwama: civil war rivalries die hard

weapon of choice [change or continuity]

WP: Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, last enemy combatant held in the US, to face trial after seven years in captivity
Marri could face up to 15 years in prison on allegations of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists. The Qatar native journeyed to Illinois, purportedly to begin work on a master's degree, a day before terrorist strikes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

Marri's legal status had been closely watched in part because human rights advocates used him as a test case before the Supreme Court. They hope to repudiate a policy that allowed the government to indefinitely detain legal U.S. residents suspected of conspiring with al-Qaeda without charging them with a crime...

The indictment covers only two pages, although Marri's defense team will press government lawyers to fill in more details about their case in the months ahead.
NYT: ...which the Obama administration is arguing should put an end to a Supreme Court case, a move criticized by some
Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, noted that winning at the Supreme Court would affirm extraordinarily broad detention powers for a president — “a position they might not have wanted to take in the first place,” he said.

But losing would also put the government in a difficult spot, said Stewart Baker, a former Bush administration official in the Department of Homeland Security. The administration may be leery of broad detention power but might still want to use it in the most extreme cases. “Hanging on to the possibility of using this theory in a new and different emergency,” he said, “is the sort of thing that prudent government lawyers are inclined to do.”
New Yorker: what to do with new enemy combatants?
A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.

One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)... [I]n October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.” This new system, he wrote, would give the government the “ability to temporarily detain a dangerous individual,” including in situations where “a criminal trial has failed.” There are hundreds of legal variations that could be considered, he said. In 2007, Katyal published a related essay, co-written with Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who served as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department. The essay argued that preventive detention, overseen by a congressionally authorized national-security court, was necessary to insure the “sensible” treatment of classified evidence, and to protect secret “sources and methods” of gathering intelligence. In his Web post, Katyal wrote, “I support such a security court.”
FP: "Abu Ghraib's Extreme Makeover"

NYT: Obama reveals plan for phased Iraq withdrawal
The plan will withdraw most of the 142,000 troops now in Iraq by the summer of next year, leaving 35,000 to 50,000 to train and advise Iraqi security forces, hunt terrorist cells and protect American civilian and military personnel. Those “transitional forces” will leave by 2011 in accordance with a strategic agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush before he left office.

“Let me say this as plainly as I can,” Mr. Obama said. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”
LAT: the withdrawal plan for dummies
NYT: the budget and the war
[A January report] from the Congressional Budget Office estimat[ed] how much the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts would cost from 2010 through 2019 under two assumptions. In one, the number of troops deployed in the two countries draws down fairly quickly, to about 30,000 by 2011. In the other, levels drop to 75,000 by 2013. Both cases represent a huge reduction from the roughly 180,000 troops there now. But the difference in the cost is breathtaking: the office estimates that Congress would have to appropriate $388 billion for the case of a quick withdrawal and more than double, $867 billion, for the slower one.

Because of the huge range of possible costs, and because the logistics of withdrawal are complicated and expensive, “the basic elements of that estimate are still unresolved,” said John M. Spratt Jr., a South Carolina Democrat who is the House Budget Committee chairman and a House Armed Services Committee member...

President Obama may find it hard to keep the withdrawal to a prescribed timetable, and even if he can, the savings may be a drop in the bucket economically. But if he keeps the bands playing and strikes the right note in his speeches, he just may have a chance to persuade Americans that the end of a long war means better times are on the way.
CSM: so with all this talk about withdrawal, what's the insurgency up to these days?
Ongoing violence in outlying provinces such as Diyala and Nineveh indicates that although violence has fallen and some normalcy is returning to Baghdad, the fringes of Iraq – the rural towns, farming villages, and desert outposts – have become the new fronts in the fight against the insurgent threat as extremists have fled cities and are hiding in the country's remote corners...

Still, while fighting insurgents outside major cities has often proved something of a "whack-a-mole" scenario, US forces here say they're finally beginning to make progress thanks in large part to increasingly capable Iraqi security forces and an emboldened local population...

Now after US forces clear an area, the Iraqi Army, police, or neighborhood watch groups known as Sons of Iraq set up checkpoints along the road to ensure that insurgents don't return. While roadside bombs and harassment of the local population continue, US forces say the situation has dramatically improved.

NYT: IEDs increasingly a threat in Afghanistan
More than 175 American and allied troops were killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan last year, more than twice as many as the year before, and American commanders say the 17,000 extra troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama last week will offer additional targets...

Senior military officers say Afghanistan’s topography and primitive infrastructure play to the insurgents’ advantage. Unlike Iraq, where more of the streets are paved, Afghanistan has a network of undeveloped roads where it is far easier to lay traps...

The improvised bombs — buried in roads, packed into cars or bicycles and hidden in trash cans or animal carcasses — are made from materials readily available in war zones, whether abandoned bombs, construction explosives or fertilizer. They are the weapon of choice for an insurgency: cheap and easy to build, but hard to detect and counter.

The Pentagon created the counter-I.E.D. organization in 2006, and its budget has ranged from $3.5 billion to $4.4 billion annually, but that does not include costs for armored vehicles and other systems. In part because new jamming technology has foiled some weapons triggered remotely by cellphones or garage-door openers, insurgents in Afghanistan are turning to more primitive methods, using wire or even rope as the trigger.
LAT: Afghan president to move up elections from August date...
NYT: ...as US training for Afghans using Russian helicopters reveals the challenges both behind and ahead
The program, which is projected to cost American taxpayers $5 billion into 2016, is aimed at giving Afghanistan the ability to defend itself from the skies and one day allowing the Americans to leave. But for now it reflects all the problems of getting Afghan forces to stand on their own...

Americans have in the past been taught to fly MI-17s, mostly for military exercises to teach them how to counter enemy aircraft. (The MI-17 is used all over the world, including by Iran and North Korea.) The Afghan program is modeled after an earlier American effort to build up the Iraqi Air Force, which also includes some MI-17s. But the Russian helicopters, which make up the bulk of the Afghan fleet, have an ironic resonance in a country where in the 1980s the United States supplied guerrillas with Stinger missiles to shoot Soviet helicopters down.

These days, the American pilots encounter some resentment from the Afghans who have been flying the Russian helicopters for decades — Colonel Bakhtullah has been a pilot since 1981 — and wonder why they must take instruction from Americans who just learned to fly the helicopters in a four-week course at Fort Bliss, Tex. The Americans say that the Afghans have not had a real air force since the Russians left two decades ago, and that they were often improperly trained in the first place.

NYT: cease-fire in Pakistan's Swat Valley
LAT: but none in sight in Islamabad
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may well be the most popular politician in Pakistan. So the Supreme Court's decision Wednesday banning him from holding elective office has set the stage for what could be a bitter showdown between his backers and the already shaky government of President Asif Ali Zardari...

Analysts characterized Wednesday's court ruling as a drawing of battle lines between Zardari's Pakistan People's Party and its onetime ally, Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N. The two parties teamed up last February to take on Musharraf, soundly defeating his party in parliamentary elections and ousting him from office six months later. But having gained power, they fell out with each other...

The prospect of a resurgent Sharif, who has the loyalty of many religious conservatives, may make some officials in Washington nervous. Zardari's government is considered much more Western-friendly, whereas Sharif, as prime minister in the 1990s, defied U.S. admonitions and presided over Pakistan's first nuclear test.

LAT: India brings charges against suspected Mumbai "smiling assassin," as Pakistan seeks domestic trials
Authorities on Wednesday filed charges of murder and "waging war" on India against who they say is the lone known surviving gunman in the Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 170 people in November... The others charged include two suspected Pakistani soldiers and Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India says was behind the attacks, as well as senior Lashkar members Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, Zarar Shah and Abu Hamza.

LAT: paramilitary mutiny in Bangladesh leaves 76 dead, 72 missing
The dispute reportedly erupted Wednesday inside the Dhaka headquarters of the Bangladesh Rifles paramilitary force during a meeting between junior members and their superiors, who are with the nation's army...

Bangladesh, an impoverished Muslim-majority nation with a population of 153 million, has a history of coups and of deep-seated corruption. The country ranks 147th out of 180 nations on watchdog Transparency International's corruption perception index.

Analysts say resentment has run deep among the Rifles for years because they are paid less than the military and must take orders from army officers. In addition to higher pay, leaders of the rebellion demanded that they be allowed to participate in lucrative United Nations peacekeeping operations.
WP: now back to the barracks, although the problem is far from over
The government decided at a late night Cabinet meeting Saturday to form a special tribunal to try those behind the mutiny, ruling party spokesman Syed Ashraful Islam said. Islam said initial evidence suggested the guards who rebelled may have had outside assistance. He did not elaborate...

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who took office in January, sought to act decisively and quash questions about stability in the poor South Asian nation during the first major challenge her administration has faced. Hasina ended the revolt in two days by persuading the guards to surrender Thursday with promises of an amnesty coupled with threats of military force.

NYT: US training Palestinian security forces in the West Bank
Some 1,600 have been through American-financed courses in Jordan. In coordination with Israeli defense officials, Palestinian troops and police officers have taken over much of the patrolling in the West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and parts of Hebron.

Last month, as Israel carried out a war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, some in the Muslim world called on the West Bank to stage a violent uprising in protest. But while there were demonstrations, no such uprising occurred, partly because the Palestinian Authority troops maintained tight order.

All the while, these state-of-the-art facilities were being built, employing hundreds of Palestinian workers. The Presidential Guard College here has been functioning for several weeks, while the National Security Force Operations Camp elsewhere in Jericho will open at the end of next month. Along with police training facilities here supported by the European Union, they represent a new phase in the security plan: sophisticated training under Palestinian command has begun in Palestinian territory.
WP: Syria-based Hamas leader slips into Gaza in midst of discussions with Fatah...
Hamas' leadership is divided between the Gaza Strip, which the group rules, and its top officials living in Damascus. Abu Marzouk is number two in the Hamas hierarchy. He was born in Gaza and grew up in a refugee camp in the southern part of the strip, but hasn't been back in several decades. The purpose of his visit was unknown. Hamas denied he entered Gaza and Abu Marzouk's Gaza relatives say they had not seen him.

Hamas leadership has been holding talks in Cairo seeking reconciliation with its Fatah rival. Both sides are working toward forming a unity government but have been unable to bridge their gaps...

On Monday, international donors will meet in Egypt for a conference on Gaza's reconstruction. The Palestinians are seeking $2.8 billion. Solana said Saturday the donor money will be sent to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, bypassing Hamas' Gaza leadership.
LAT: ...the success of which is important to leaders in the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt
A key question to be answered as negotiations proceed in the coming weeks is how much Hamas is willing to relax its tight political control over Gaza or modify its militant stance against Israel in return for an arrangement easing the flow of reconstruction aid to the enclave's 1.5 million people...

Reconciliation would serve both groups' aims and perhaps remove a major obstacle to rebuilding Gaza: an Israeli blockade backed by Egypt that has kept the enclave's borders all but sealed since Hamas took over Gaza. Without open borders, heavy construction materials cannot enter the strip.

Egypt has pushed hard to bring Hamas and Fatah together, hoping to restore a Palestinian Authority role in policing Gaza's borders. That would enable Egypt to reopen its crossing with Gaza without violating a border control agreement with Israel.

More broadly, a rapprochement of the Palestinian rivals would help revive Egypt's shaken position as a regional power and an influential voice in the Middle East.
AJE: meanwhile, rockets keep flowing into Israel from Gaza
AJE: and an Israeli order to demolish homes in Jerusalem leads to debilitating West Bank strike
A general strike to protest against Israel's plans to evict 1,500 Palestinians from their homes in the Silwan district of Jerusalem has paralysed much of the occupied West Bank. Shops and schools were closed and the streets were deserted as the strike was observed on Saturday...

Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital and has annexed the Arab east of the city. Some 500,000 Israelis live there in settlements. Under international law, east Jerusalem is considered to be occupied and the city has not been recognised by world powers as the Israeli capital.

WP: Hariri assassination trial to start in the Netherlands
Despite the start of proceedings in the Netherlands, it is still not known who will be accused in the suicide truck bombing that killed [former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri and 22 other people on a seaside street in Beirut on Feb. 14, 2005.

Also unknown is the most politically explosive question _ whether the proceedings will implicate Syria's government, which many Lebanese believe was behind the murder of a man who broke with Syria to oppose its long military dominance of Lebanon. Syria has denied involvement.

Most likely the first defendants before the court will be four pro-Syria generals who led Lebanon's police, intelligence service and an elite army unit at the time of the assassination. They are the only people in custody, though they have not been formally charged.

LAT: United Arab Emirates hosts massive arms fair for the region

NYT: new leader brings new strategy to violent Russian republic of Ingushetia
The new president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, has ordered security barriers removed from most government offices, reasoning that authorities should not need protection from their own people. He rents a modest house from a retired state prosecutor, expressing some discomfort with the gold-domed presidential palace.

And in a region where criticism of the government has been all but forbidden, Mr. Yevkurov seems to be soliciting it. In his first 100 days in office, he met at least seven times, three times in private, with a human rights activist who dogged his predecessor, and he established a telephone line for citizens to air their grievances.

Whether this new approach can bring Ingushetia under control is another question — and a crucial one for Russia. Soon it will be spring, marking a new season of war between armed Ingush militants and the federal forces struggling to control them. Left to deteriorate, Ingushetia could become another Chechnya, spreading chaos on Russia’s southern border.

NYT: Kosovo war crimes trial finds 5 Serbs guilty, minus wartime president Milan Milutinovic
Citing their reasons for acquitting Mr. Milutinovic, the judges said that in practice “it was Milosevic, sometimes termed the Supreme Commander, who exercised actual command authority” over Serbian troops and security police officers in 1999.

The judges convicted the five others for their roles in “a broad campaign of violence directed against the Kosovo Albanian population,” which at the time made up 90 percent of Kosovo. They said Serbia had initiated a state-organized campaign to keep control over Kosovo through deporting or forcibly transferring a large part of the population of about two million.
NYT: Bosnian Serb leaders threaten secession, highlighting tensions
Bosnian Serb officials, Western diplomats and the police said the crisis began last week when the country’s state police agency sent a report to the State Prosecutor’s Office with allegations involving the Serb Republic’s prime minister, Milorad Dodik.

The case outlined in the State Investigation and Protection Agency report related to corruption, fraud and misuse of finances involving several important government contracts in the Bosnian Serb Republic. They included allegations concerning a $146 million government building in Banja Luka...

Mr. Dodik expressed indignation last weekend, saying he was the victim of a witch hunt aimed at undermining him and the Bosnian Serb Republic. “Even the little faith I had in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now lost due to this farce with the criminal charges against me,” he said last week. “They have made this country pointless.”

WP: Rwandan army withdraws from month-long joint military offensive with DR Congo, despite unclear success
The operation has merely scattered the 6,000 or so Hutu rebels belonging to the FDLR farther west. Only one rebel leader -- a spokesman -- has been captured, while two dozen others, including some wanted for participating in the genocide, remain in the bush or are in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa or Europe. The task of disarming the rebels is now up to the infamously inept Congolese army, which once collaborated with the Hutu rebels, and an overstretched U.N. peacekeeping force.

Human rights groups warn that the FDLR could regroup within weeks and launch reprisal attacks against villagers as it seeks to retake lost ground that includes the lucrative mineral mines it has controlled for years...

Although the 17,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force was largely left out of the operation, it is now rushing to secure strategic areas that the Rwandan troops cleared of rebels before they return. The peacekeepers are also supposed to assist the Congolese army as it continues to hunt down rebels -- many of whom are now in small pockets of 20 and 30 -- across the dense forests of eastern Congo.
BBC: Hutu rebels retaking Congolese territory already?

CSM: UN tribunal convicts three RUF commanders for crimes against humanity, including amputation, murder, enlistment of child soldiers and sexual slavery...
But the ripples of the international tribunal's decision on Wednesday in Freetown, Sierra Leone – finding rebel leaders Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon, and Augustine Gbao guilty on more than a dozen counts each of crimes against humanity – are already reaching around the continent and the world. Coming just a week before the expected arrest warrant for Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, and in the middle of the ongoing trial of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, this trial sets a very tough tone about the consequences of cruelty in wartime.
WP: ...in the first forced-marriage conviction in an international court of law
CSM: Sudan's Bashir ups diplomacy in bid to stall ICC warrant ruling
[W]hile Bashir may actually have the numbers on his side, with much of the developing world voicing concern that the ICC has overreached its mandate, the ICC is showing no signs of relenting.

"The only alternative the judge can look at is to stagger or to postpone the decision to issue an arrest warrant," says Godfrey Musila, a legal expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, South Africa (formerly known as Pretoria). "What Sudan is doing is trying to get enough diplomatic voices on its side, but the idea is not to affect the decision of whether to issue an arrest warrant or not, but when to do it."

Coming just a week after the Khartoum government signed a "confidence-building" agreement to start talks with the key Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, Bashir's diplomatic roadshow is a clear last-minute dash to stall the inevitable.
BBC: clashes in southern Sudan between army and militias in Malakal

WP: Somali government and major insurgent group agree to a cease-fire
Some of the worst fighting in Mogadishu has taken place in recent weeks. Islamist insurgents battled government and African Union troops for two consecutive days this week and the independent Elman Human Rights Organization said at least 49 civilians were killed... The Islamic Party opposes the presence of AU troops in Somalia and has vowed to fight them until they leave the Horn of Africa nation.
FP: still, what on earth to do with Somalia?
The hardest challenge of all might be simply preventing the worst-case scenario. Among the best suggestions I’ve heard is to play to Somalia’s strengths as a fluid, decentralized society with local mechanisms to resolve conflicts. The foundation of order would be clan-based governments in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. These tiny fiefdoms could stack together to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that coordinated, say, currency issues or antipiracy efforts, but did not sideline local leaders...

A more radical idea is to have the United Nations take over the government and administer Somalia with an East Timor-style mandate. Because Somalia has already been an independent country, this option might be too much for Somalis to stomach. To make it work, the United Nations would need to delegate authority to clan leaders who have measurable clout on the ground. Either way, the diplomats should be working with the moneylords more and the warlords less.

But the problem with Somalia is that after 18 years of chaos, with so many people killed, with so many gun-toting men rising up and then getting cut down, it is exceedingly difficult to identify who the country’s real leaders are, if they exist at all.
GQ: leaders may be difficult to find, but pirates are out, commanding attention
With their black scarves covering their faces and submachine guns slung over their arms, Somalia’s pirates are the real Jack Sparrows of the twenty-first century, minus the eyeliner. One young woman who lives near Boosaaso bragged about going to a pirate wedding that lasted two days. A band was flown in from neighboring Djibouti. There was nonstop dancing and an endless supply of goat meat. “They drive the best cars, they throw the best parties,” she gushed. “We all want to marry them.” She claimed that her own pirate boyfriend had just given her a small gift—$350,000 in cash. For young Somali men, pirate life is becoming too much to resist. Fishermen all along the coast have traded in their ragged fishing nets for rocket-propelled grenades.

NYT: Kenya having a hard time, one year after violent protests
Ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear...

On Wednesday, United Nations officials called for the country’s police chief and attorney general to resign after a United Nations investigation revealed that more than 500 people had been killed by police death squads. One of the Kenyan whistle-blowers himself was shot to death after providing detailed evidence...

The only thing Kenya’s ruling class seems to agree on is refusing to pay most of its taxes, even though Kenyan politicians are already among the highest paid in the world, a stunning fact in one of the world’s poorest countries...

Kenya’s legendary safari business, an engine of the economy, has not bounced back either. Tourist arrivals were down about 35 percent in 2008 compared with 2007, leading to thousands of layoffs and a steady stream of unemployed youths marching back to the already teeming slums.

WP: worrying explosion at Guinnea-Bissau armed forces HQ wounds three

CSM: grim conditions for displaced Sri Lankans
NYT: Tigers offer truce, which government rejects...
With their guerrilla fighters pinned down by Sri Lankan troops in a small patch of jungle, ethnic Tamil separatists announced Monday that they were willing to accept an internationally brokered cease-fire, although they said they would not surrender their weapons as part of any truce...

In January 2008, the government pulled out of a cease-fire agreement that had been brokered by Norway in 2002, saying the rebels had used the period of the truce to rearm and regroup. Government leaders vowed to crush the rebels within the year.

Government troops have cornered the principal group of rebel fighters in a small strip of land on the country’s northeastern coast. The government says the Tamil Tigers, fighting from their last remaining enclave, now control less than about 33 square miles.
AJE: ...arguing it's days from winning

WP: North Korea claims US overstepping boundaries along demilitarized zone, while preparing to test-fire long-range missile

CSM: Chinese government seeks to close troublesome human rights firm

LAT: Mexico to send 5,000 more troops to Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said the added troops would give the military a higher profile by taking control of police functions, including street patrols. Currently, soldiers tend highway checkpoints, guard crime scenes and take part in special operations, such as house searches.

The city is without a police chief. Roberto Orduña Cruz quit last week after several officers were slain and someone posted threats saying more would be killed unless he stepped down...

A little more than 2,000 soldiers and 425 federal police officers are assigned to Juarez in addition to local police, army spokesman Enrique Torres said. He said the reinforcements could begin to arrive in two weeks.

Newsweek: explosion of private security in Brazil reflects international trend
Gardênia Azul, a flatland slum in the scruffy west end of Rio de Janeiro, isn't much to look at. But don't tell that to Juliana. She moved there from Cidade de Deus (City of God)... At least in Gardênia there were no teenagers with Kalashnikovs or vendors hawking cocaine in the street. To Juliana, a manicurist with a four-year-old son, those things matter. "We can walk the streets any time of day or night," she says. "I feel safe."

In Gardênia Azul safety is relative, and comes at a price... No one is fond of the militia, which is often the corrupt twin of legitimate law enforcement with rogue cops acting as judge, jury and occasionally executioner. (Juliana won't soon forget her neighbor's 16-year-old, who was shot dead for smoking marijuana, his body dumped in the main square.) But to millions of people trying to get by in some of the meanest streets in the hemisphere, life involves hedging your bets by grabbing at whatever safety net you can...

Analysts estimate that policing is a $100 billion to $200 billion global business and a growth industry in the developing world. In Russia, private cops outnumber regular ones by 10 to 1. So ubiquitous are they in South Africa, militias are even tasked with guarding regular police stations. Private security generates an estimated million jobs a year in India. Even Uganda has 20,000 private police on the streets, as many as Iraq had in 2006, at the height of the war.

CSM: Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines masters the art of kidnapping, reaps some $1.5 million in ransom annually

WP: change of policy at Baltimore police made even more problematic by weak role of local media
In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman -- a refugee from the Bush administration -- came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone. (Similar policies have been established by several other police departments in the United States as well as by the FBI.)

Anthony Guglielmi, the department's director of public affairs, informed Baltimoreans that, henceforth, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld would decide unilaterally whether citizens would know the names of those who had used their weapons on civilians. If they did something illegal or unwarranted -- in the commissioner's judgment -- they would be named. Otherwise, the Baltimore department would no longer regard the decision to shoot someone as the sort of responsibility for which officers might be required to stand before the public.