Panic grips Congo as rebels advance on town of Goma
• Forces loyal to warlord declare unilateral ceasefire
• UN warns of 'catastrophic' humanitarian crisis
Xan Rice in Nairobi
Congolese rebels closed in on the eastern town of Goma yesterday, causing panic among residents and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of international aid workers and UN staff.
Around 45,000 internal refugees, most of whom had only arrived on foot a day earlier, fled a displaced persons' camp near Goma as forces loyal to Tutsi warlord Laurent Nkunda battled international peacekeepers and government troops. After UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, warned of a humanitarian crisis of "catastrophic dimensions", the rebels announced last night they were declaring a unilateral ceasefire "to avoid panicking the population of Goma".
Nkunda's men have already captured several key towns near Goma in North Kivu province and raised fears of a return to full-scale war in Democratic Republic of Congo. The national army has been routed, and troops were reported to be fleeing Goma yesterday. Tension between Congo and Rwanda, which it accuses of supporting Nkunda, also increased sharply, as they traded accusations yesterday over cross-border artillery attacks. The US said while Rwanda was not directly involved in the fighting, its territory was being used to support rebels.
The rebel advance has caused alarm in the international community. The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, called for the deployment of a hundreds-strong EU force to eastern Congo, while the UN security council expressed "grave concern" at the fighting and called an emergency meeting to discuss an urgent request for more troops for the UN peacekeeping force.
The US has dispatched its top Africa envoy, Jendayi Frazer, for talks in the Congolese capital Kinshasa. Louis Michel, the EU's development aid commissioner, was also there to meet President Joseph Kabila. Congo's previous wars between 1997 and 2003, which sucked in several neighbouring countries, caused the greatest loss of life anywhere since the second world war, with more than five million deaths, mainly from hunger and illness. Since then the mineral-rich east region has remained restive, despite a peace agreement signed by all main rebel groups in January this year.
Nkunda, who is though to have 5,000 fighters in his National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), claims to be protecting the minority Tutsi population in the east from Hutu militias linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Despite signing the deal he refuses to disarm, accusing government forces of breaking the ceasefire and collaborating with Hutu rebels.
Both the army and the CNDP rebels have a deep mistrust of Monuc (the UN mission to Congo), the 17,000-strong peacekeeping force, and have separately attacked it in recent days. Monuc has pledged to defend the North Kivu towns of Goma, Sake, Masisi and Rutshuru, which was abandoned by the Congolese forces. But Alain Doss, Monuc's chief, said the force was "stretched to the limit", and has requested additional support.
After coming under much criticism for failing to protect civilians, Monuc attack helicopters yesterday fired on Nkunda's forces in Kibumba, 19 miles north of Goma, stalling the rebel progress.
"We were positioned just 15km from town, but Monuc engaged us with their helicopter gunships," Amani Babu, a senior CNDP officer told Agence France Presse. "We think in two or three days we will be able to take the town of Goma."
Aid agencies say that would be a disaster. Around 250,000 people have been forced from their homes in North Kivu this year. Tens of thousands have fled their homes or shelters on foot this week. Around 30,000 arrived at a camp in Kibati, six miles north of Goma, in recent days, "exhausted and traumatised".
But the camp emptied yesterday when refugees saw government forces retreating south "fairly fast, and in fairly large numbers", according to Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency.
Before the ceasefire announcement last night the atmosphere in Goma was tense. There were reports of government troops firing into the air and commandeering vehicles. Civilians hurled rocks at a UN compound near the airport as rumours swirled that the town was about to be overrun.
Emmanuel de Merode, the director of Virunga National Park, said: "There has been movement of government troops out of the town, which caused panic among the population."
Friday, 31 October 2008
Patrolling al-Qaida’s last Baghdad stronghold
- A suspect is forced to sit facing a wall and await questioning by soldiers who had just discovered him near a secret bomb-making factory in an unfinished house in al-HadarDavid Smith.
- A suspect is forced to sit facing a wall and await questioning by soldiers who had just discovered him near a secret bomb-making factory in an unfinished house in al-HadarDavid Smith
Congo pictures 2
- A woman cries as displaced people march into GomaPhotograph: Walter Astrada/AFP/Getty Images,
- An internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in KibatiPhotograph: Walter Astrada/AFP
- A woman and her children arrive at GomaPhotograph: Walter Astrada/AFP/Getty Images
- Government soldiers on patrol after inspecting damage to Rumangabo base camp, about 25 miles north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu provincePhotograph: Sarah Elliott/EPA
Congo pictures
A woman carries a child on the main road to GomaPhotograph: Michael Arunga/World Vision/Reuters
Phillip Sands Op Ed
The torture time bomb
The Bush administration's approval of the abuse of detainees is a toxic legacy for the next US president
As the US presidential election reaches a climax against the background of the financial crisis, another silent, dark, time bomb of an issue hangs over the two candidates: torture. For now, there seems to be a shared desire not to delve too deeply into the circumstances in which the Bush administration allowed the US military and the CIA to embrace abusive techniques of interrogation - including waterboarding, in the case of the CIA - which violate the Geneva conventions and the 1984 UN torture convention.
The torture issue's cancerous consequences go deep, and will cause headaches for the next president. New evidence has emerged in Congressional inquiries that throw more light on the extent to which early knowledge and approval of the abuse went to the highest levels. What does a country do when compelling evidence shows its leaders have authorised international crimes?
For three years I have followed a trail which leads unambiguously to the conclusion that the real bad eggs were not Lyndie England or others on the ground in Abu Ghraib, but the most senior officials in the White House, the Pentagon and the department of justice. Over recent months, Congress has been looking into the role of senior officials involved in the development of interrogation rules. These have attracted relatively scant attention; little by little, however, senators and congressmen have uncovered the outlines of a potentially far-reaching criminal conspiracy.
The first hearings were convened before the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, at the instance of its chairman, Congressman John Conyers, apparently off the back of my book Torture Team. Parallel hearings have been held before the Senate armed services committee.
The evidence that has emerged is potentially devastating. It confirms, for instance, that the search for new interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo began not with the local military but in the offices of Donald Rumsfeld and his chief lawyer, Jim Haynes. It shows that when the career military expressed objections on legal grounds, Haynes intervened to stop the normal process of review. And it shows a previously unknown interplay between the department of defence and the CIA: a visit to Guantánamo in September 2002 by the administration's most senior lawyers was followed days later by a senior CIA lawyer, to brief on the new techniques. "If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used," he explained, "the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental."
Last month the Senate armed services committee received new material from Condoleezza Rice, the first cabinet-level official to confirm high-level involvement in discussions on interrogation techniques. "I participated in a number of meetings in 2002 and 2003 ... at which issues relating to detainees in US custody, including interrogation issues, were discussed," she said. Those present at such meetings included Rumsfeld, attorney general John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and CIA director George Tenet. The meetings, which concerned the CIA programme, "occurred inside the White House". Rice confirmed she was aware of the existence of, but did not read, the justice department legal advice of August 1 2002 that abandoned the international definition of torture and replaced it with a definition drawn from a US Medicare statute.
Buried away in this testimony lies the most dangerous material of all: evidence which may establish that abuses on detainees in Iraq in September 2003, in the period perhaps including the events at Abu Ghraib, were the result of decisions taken at the highest levels of the administration. The administration has long proclaimed it did not allow aggressive interrogations in Iraq, since the Geneva conventions applied. Last month we learned this was false: not everyone had protection under Geneva. If you were considered to be a terrorist, you had no protection at all. A senior US intelligence officer visited Iraq in September 2003. He witnessed abusive interrogation techniques that violated Geneva and complained. The response? He was told the techniques "were pre-approved by DoD GC or higher". DoD GC is the general counsel at the department of defence, Jim Haynes. Who could be higher? His boss: Rumsfeld.
I have testified before Congress on these issues, and have been asked if there should be criminal investigations and prosecutions. At the very least, the next US president must ensure the full facts are established. It will then be for others to decide what follows. But if the US doesn't get its own house in order and restore its reputation for the rule of law, others will surely step in.
The Bush administration's approval of the abuse of detainees is a toxic legacy for the next US president
As the US presidential election reaches a climax against the background of the financial crisis, another silent, dark, time bomb of an issue hangs over the two candidates: torture. For now, there seems to be a shared desire not to delve too deeply into the circumstances in which the Bush administration allowed the US military and the CIA to embrace abusive techniques of interrogation - including waterboarding, in the case of the CIA - which violate the Geneva conventions and the 1984 UN torture convention.
The torture issue's cancerous consequences go deep, and will cause headaches for the next president. New evidence has emerged in Congressional inquiries that throw more light on the extent to which early knowledge and approval of the abuse went to the highest levels. What does a country do when compelling evidence shows its leaders have authorised international crimes?
For three years I have followed a trail which leads unambiguously to the conclusion that the real bad eggs were not Lyndie England or others on the ground in Abu Ghraib, but the most senior officials in the White House, the Pentagon and the department of justice. Over recent months, Congress has been looking into the role of senior officials involved in the development of interrogation rules. These have attracted relatively scant attention; little by little, however, senators and congressmen have uncovered the outlines of a potentially far-reaching criminal conspiracy.
The first hearings were convened before the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, at the instance of its chairman, Congressman John Conyers, apparently off the back of my book Torture Team. Parallel hearings have been held before the Senate armed services committee.
The evidence that has emerged is potentially devastating. It confirms, for instance, that the search for new interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo began not with the local military but in the offices of Donald Rumsfeld and his chief lawyer, Jim Haynes. It shows that when the career military expressed objections on legal grounds, Haynes intervened to stop the normal process of review. And it shows a previously unknown interplay between the department of defence and the CIA: a visit to Guantánamo in September 2002 by the administration's most senior lawyers was followed days later by a senior CIA lawyer, to brief on the new techniques. "If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used," he explained, "the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental."
Last month the Senate armed services committee received new material from Condoleezza Rice, the first cabinet-level official to confirm high-level involvement in discussions on interrogation techniques. "I participated in a number of meetings in 2002 and 2003 ... at which issues relating to detainees in US custody, including interrogation issues, were discussed," she said. Those present at such meetings included Rumsfeld, attorney general John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and CIA director George Tenet. The meetings, which concerned the CIA programme, "occurred inside the White House". Rice confirmed she was aware of the existence of, but did not read, the justice department legal advice of August 1 2002 that abandoned the international definition of torture and replaced it with a definition drawn from a US Medicare statute.
Buried away in this testimony lies the most dangerous material of all: evidence which may establish that abuses on detainees in Iraq in September 2003, in the period perhaps including the events at Abu Ghraib, were the result of decisions taken at the highest levels of the administration. The administration has long proclaimed it did not allow aggressive interrogations in Iraq, since the Geneva conventions applied. Last month we learned this was false: not everyone had protection under Geneva. If you were considered to be a terrorist, you had no protection at all. A senior US intelligence officer visited Iraq in September 2003. He witnessed abusive interrogation techniques that violated Geneva and complained. The response? He was told the techniques "were pre-approved by DoD GC or higher". DoD GC is the general counsel at the department of defence, Jim Haynes. Who could be higher? His boss: Rumsfeld.
I have testified before Congress on these issues, and have been asked if there should be criminal investigations and prosecutions. At the very least, the next US president must ensure the full facts are established. It will then be for others to decide what follows. But if the US doesn't get its own house in order and restore its reputation for the rule of law, others will surely step in.
Stella Rimington feature
Free agent
Former MI5 chief and spy novelist Stella Rimington speaks her mind - on Iraq, the 'huge overreaction' to 9/11, and why the secret service is much more liberal than we think
Stella Rimington has condemned the politicisation of national security since she left the secret service. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
When guide dogs are retired from service, it is common for them to enter a state best described as old-aged adolescence. As they begin to understand that they're no longer responsible for the safety of their owner, the dogs can become almost puppyish, amazed by the unfamiliar freedom of irresponsibility.
It's now 12 years since the first ever female, publicly named director general of MI5 retired from duty, and when we meet this week she is unrecognisable from then. The severe-looking woman with the brutally sensible crop and the dry, institutionalised reserve has softened into velvety folds of laughter, and a warmly engaging ease. Stella Rimington has just published her fourth novel, Dead Line, an elegantly pacy thriller starring a female MI5 agent, and at 73 she gives the impression of someone enjoying the novelty of speaking her mind. The effect is not strident so much as touching. Usually when people are being interviewed, you can see them telling themselves not to say too much, but before Rimington answers a question she often seems to be reminding herself that she really can let go.
"Yes, it is a gradual process," she agrees, smiling. "The shades of one's former existence do hang around for quite a long time. It takes a long time to get rid of that. And I still haven't entirely got rid of it."
She isn't doing badly though. She spoke out against 42-day detention last month, and this week welcomes the government's climb-down unequivocally. "We shouldn't introduce new intrusions into our civil liberties unless they are absolutely necessary - and nobody had demonstrated that they were necessary. If there isn't any need, then don't move the boundaries." She argues that we should "treat terrorism as a crime, and deal with it under the law - not as something extra, that you have to invent new rules to deal with." She is opposed to ID cards, because she can't see how they could be "a significant counter-terrorist measure", and although she admits she's "had more time to think about it since I left the service", she says her attitude to civil liberties has always been liberal. The big change, she argues, has been not her position, but the politicisation of the issue.
"One of the things I have observed in the last few years, since I left, is that national security has become much more of a political issue. And that parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know," she adopts a mocking playground tone, "'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly.
"After the vote in the House of Lords, one heard the home secretary saying something like, 'Well nobody can say I'm not tough on terrorism'. As though the implication was there are people who aren't. Which strikes me as very odd. Because most of the people in the House of Lords whose contributions to that debate I'd read were serious people, who'd possibly spent a life, as I have, trying to protect the country from serious threats. So the implication that, you know, a politician was going to say 'I'm tougher on terrorism than you are' struck me as ... " and she flicks a wrist, batting away the boast with the back of her hand like a fly. "And it's happened broadly since 9/11."
The response to 9/11 was "a huge overreaction", she says. "You know, it was another terrorist incident. It was huge, and horrible, and seemed worse because we all watched it unfold on television. So yes, 9/11 was bigger, but not ... not ..." Not qualitatively different? "No. That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life, and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one."
Rimington hopes President Bush's successor will stop using the phrase "war on terror". "It got us off on the wrong foot, because it made people think terrorism was something you could deal with by force of arms primarily. And from that flowed Guantánamo, and extraordinary rendition, and ..." And Iraq, I suggest. "Well yes," she says drily. "Iraq."
Jacqui Smith gave a speech this week on international terrorism which rather remarkably failed to mention the war in Iraq at all. I ask Rimington what importance she would place on the war, in terms of its impact on the terrorist threat. She pauses for a second, then replies quietly but firmly: "Look at what those people who've been arrested or have left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I'm aware, say that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right course of action to take. So I think you can't write the war in Iraq out of history. If what we're looking at is groups of disaffected young men born in this country who turn to terrorism, then I think to ignore the effect of the war in Iraq is misleading."
These might not be unremarkable views for most Guardian readers - of whom Rimington is one. But according to Rimington, they are widely held within the intelligence service - much more so than most members of the public, and perhaps particularly Guardian readers, ever suspect.
"I don't think I'm unusual, frankly. It's the general public's, or whoever's it is, view that's out of date." She points out that Baroness Manningham-Buller, another former head of MI5, has been "saying broadly the same things. I think what that reflects is that the caricature of the service is out of date now.
"People [in the intelligence service] are very conscious of the possibility of intrusions into civil liberties - and therefore the importance of restricting that to the extent of what's strictly necessary. I think people are fully aware that the more you intrude into people's civil liberties, the more you set up grievances for people to, you know, encourage people to do all the unpleasant things that are going on."
At times the picture Rimington paints of MI5 seems almost too good to be true. She has always said she never carried a gun; none of her agents were ever killed; MI5 does not kill people; it does not spy on the prime minister - not even Harold Wilson - or even vet BBC journalists (even though the BBC has admitted submitting names for vetting). As I run through the list, she anticipates the next question, and grins: "So what do we do?" No, I say. My point was going to be that, well, you would say that, wouldn't you?
What I mean is that we all know she's not at liberty to tell the whole, unedited truth about her old job - so how can we know how much of her account to trust? She looks hurt, and then insulted.
"Why would I wish to engage in this and tell you a load of garbage? It would be a waste of everyone's time, including my own. Maybe what you ought to be looking at is, are you pursuing a myth about what British intelligence does? Are you still back in the days when people thought that we were like the Stasi? If that's where you're coming from then you shouldn't be surprised when my answer to your questions is no that doesn't happen. Because it doesn't.
"The point I'm making is that if journalists ask me certain questions and get the answer no, could it be that they're asking the wrong questions? You're assuming if you get the answer no, I'm saying we don't do anything - so I must be lying. But the thing is subtle. If the answer's no, it's because the question isn't the right question." Has she ever given an untrue answer to a question? "I'm not in the business of giving untrue answers," she says coolly. "I don't think it's helpful."
Rimington has herself, though, been on the receiving end of some deliberate unpleasantness from her old service, and admits it shook her. In 2001 she wrote her autobiography, infuriating her former employer - and when she submitted the manuscript for clearance, someone put it in a taxi and sent it to the Sun. Suddenly, she discovered what it felt like to be on the wrong side. I ask if the experience had ever made her reconsider or doubt anything she'd done in office.
"I don't think I doubted anything we'd done," she says quickly. "But - well, I think I maybe did think more about people's reaction to the secret state. When you're in the secret state you are, hopefully, pretty confident of the probity of everything you're doing, and the reason for it. And perhaps you don't think that much about how it looks to people outside. Not that I think you necessarily should be thinking that - because it's not your role.
"But I think I had this sense suddenly that, having been in the heart of it, here I was on the outside submitting this manuscript to the system and I had no control or knowledge of what was going on in that system. And I thought, hmm, I think this must be how people feel when they're dealing with the state machine in many of its manifestations - this Kafka-esque thing."
Former MI5 chief and spy novelist Stella Rimington speaks her mind - on Iraq, the 'huge overreaction' to 9/11, and why the secret service is much more liberal than we think
Stella Rimington has condemned the politicisation of national security since she left the secret service. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
When guide dogs are retired from service, it is common for them to enter a state best described as old-aged adolescence. As they begin to understand that they're no longer responsible for the safety of their owner, the dogs can become almost puppyish, amazed by the unfamiliar freedom of irresponsibility.
It's now 12 years since the first ever female, publicly named director general of MI5 retired from duty, and when we meet this week she is unrecognisable from then. The severe-looking woman with the brutally sensible crop and the dry, institutionalised reserve has softened into velvety folds of laughter, and a warmly engaging ease. Stella Rimington has just published her fourth novel, Dead Line, an elegantly pacy thriller starring a female MI5 agent, and at 73 she gives the impression of someone enjoying the novelty of speaking her mind. The effect is not strident so much as touching. Usually when people are being interviewed, you can see them telling themselves not to say too much, but before Rimington answers a question she often seems to be reminding herself that she really can let go.
"Yes, it is a gradual process," she agrees, smiling. "The shades of one's former existence do hang around for quite a long time. It takes a long time to get rid of that. And I still haven't entirely got rid of it."
She isn't doing badly though. She spoke out against 42-day detention last month, and this week welcomes the government's climb-down unequivocally. "We shouldn't introduce new intrusions into our civil liberties unless they are absolutely necessary - and nobody had demonstrated that they were necessary. If there isn't any need, then don't move the boundaries." She argues that we should "treat terrorism as a crime, and deal with it under the law - not as something extra, that you have to invent new rules to deal with." She is opposed to ID cards, because she can't see how they could be "a significant counter-terrorist measure", and although she admits she's "had more time to think about it since I left the service", she says her attitude to civil liberties has always been liberal. The big change, she argues, has been not her position, but the politicisation of the issue.
"One of the things I have observed in the last few years, since I left, is that national security has become much more of a political issue. And that parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know," she adopts a mocking playground tone, "'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly.
"After the vote in the House of Lords, one heard the home secretary saying something like, 'Well nobody can say I'm not tough on terrorism'. As though the implication was there are people who aren't. Which strikes me as very odd. Because most of the people in the House of Lords whose contributions to that debate I'd read were serious people, who'd possibly spent a life, as I have, trying to protect the country from serious threats. So the implication that, you know, a politician was going to say 'I'm tougher on terrorism than you are' struck me as ... " and she flicks a wrist, batting away the boast with the back of her hand like a fly. "And it's happened broadly since 9/11."
The response to 9/11 was "a huge overreaction", she says. "You know, it was another terrorist incident. It was huge, and horrible, and seemed worse because we all watched it unfold on television. So yes, 9/11 was bigger, but not ... not ..." Not qualitatively different? "No. That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life, and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one."
Rimington hopes President Bush's successor will stop using the phrase "war on terror". "It got us off on the wrong foot, because it made people think terrorism was something you could deal with by force of arms primarily. And from that flowed Guantánamo, and extraordinary rendition, and ..." And Iraq, I suggest. "Well yes," she says drily. "Iraq."
Jacqui Smith gave a speech this week on international terrorism which rather remarkably failed to mention the war in Iraq at all. I ask Rimington what importance she would place on the war, in terms of its impact on the terrorist threat. She pauses for a second, then replies quietly but firmly: "Look at what those people who've been arrested or have left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I'm aware, say that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right course of action to take. So I think you can't write the war in Iraq out of history. If what we're looking at is groups of disaffected young men born in this country who turn to terrorism, then I think to ignore the effect of the war in Iraq is misleading."
These might not be unremarkable views for most Guardian readers - of whom Rimington is one. But according to Rimington, they are widely held within the intelligence service - much more so than most members of the public, and perhaps particularly Guardian readers, ever suspect.
"I don't think I'm unusual, frankly. It's the general public's, or whoever's it is, view that's out of date." She points out that Baroness Manningham-Buller, another former head of MI5, has been "saying broadly the same things. I think what that reflects is that the caricature of the service is out of date now.
"People [in the intelligence service] are very conscious of the possibility of intrusions into civil liberties - and therefore the importance of restricting that to the extent of what's strictly necessary. I think people are fully aware that the more you intrude into people's civil liberties, the more you set up grievances for people to, you know, encourage people to do all the unpleasant things that are going on."
At times the picture Rimington paints of MI5 seems almost too good to be true. She has always said she never carried a gun; none of her agents were ever killed; MI5 does not kill people; it does not spy on the prime minister - not even Harold Wilson - or even vet BBC journalists (even though the BBC has admitted submitting names for vetting). As I run through the list, she anticipates the next question, and grins: "So what do we do?" No, I say. My point was going to be that, well, you would say that, wouldn't you?
What I mean is that we all know she's not at liberty to tell the whole, unedited truth about her old job - so how can we know how much of her account to trust? She looks hurt, and then insulted.
"Why would I wish to engage in this and tell you a load of garbage? It would be a waste of everyone's time, including my own. Maybe what you ought to be looking at is, are you pursuing a myth about what British intelligence does? Are you still back in the days when people thought that we were like the Stasi? If that's where you're coming from then you shouldn't be surprised when my answer to your questions is no that doesn't happen. Because it doesn't.
"The point I'm making is that if journalists ask me certain questions and get the answer no, could it be that they're asking the wrong questions? You're assuming if you get the answer no, I'm saying we don't do anything - so I must be lying. But the thing is subtle. If the answer's no, it's because the question isn't the right question." Has she ever given an untrue answer to a question? "I'm not in the business of giving untrue answers," she says coolly. "I don't think it's helpful."
Rimington has herself, though, been on the receiving end of some deliberate unpleasantness from her old service, and admits it shook her. In 2001 she wrote her autobiography, infuriating her former employer - and when she submitted the manuscript for clearance, someone put it in a taxi and sent it to the Sun. Suddenly, she discovered what it felt like to be on the wrong side. I ask if the experience had ever made her reconsider or doubt anything she'd done in office.
"I don't think I doubted anything we'd done," she says quickly. "But - well, I think I maybe did think more about people's reaction to the secret state. When you're in the secret state you are, hopefully, pretty confident of the probity of everything you're doing, and the reason for it. And perhaps you don't think that much about how it looks to people outside. Not that I think you necessarily should be thinking that - because it's not your role.
"But I think I had this sense suddenly that, having been in the heart of it, here I was on the outside submitting this manuscript to the system and I had no control or knowledge of what was going on in that system. And I thought, hmm, I think this must be how people feel when they're dealing with the state machine in many of its manifestations - this Kafka-esque thing."
Haider the far right Austrian Politian
In their hundreds they stand in line, waiting to pay tribute to their hero. Girls with iPods, skinheads in leather jackets, elderly women with shopping trollies and tanned athletic types in Prada sunglasses shuffle silently forward.
"We wanted the kids to feel the enormity of the occasion. After all, he is our Lady Di and this is our 9/11," says Anton Krem, 45, who is here to pay his last respects to Jörg Haider, the Austrian rightwing populist politician who died in a drunken, high-speed car crash a week ago and whose coffin sits on a pedestal in the Landhaus, seat of Carinthia's regional parliament, the southern province where he was governor.
An after-work crowd of about 300 makes its way through an avenue of huge wreaths. Everyone from the Chamber of Carinthian Chemists to the regional tourist board has sent a display. Klagenfurt, the state capital, is busy preparing itself for today's ceremony, the most emotional state funeral since that of the last Austrian empress, Zita von Bourbon-Parma, in 1989.
Amid a sea of red candles one teenager has written: "To a great man of the nation who fought for his land. Our hero, our fighter, our sunshine." Another note reads: "Our king of hearts". Slipped in between are pictures of Haider, an orange sweater - the colour of his breakaway Alliance for the Future of Austria party (BZO) - draped over his shoulders, glass of beer in hand; another shows the maverick fascist bungee jumping off a bridge.
Behind the scenes, functionaries and volunteers have been working around the clock sending invitations. Austria's political elite are expected to attend tomorrow. But the 50,000 mourners are also expected to include Belgian nationalist Filip Dewinter, French extremist Jean-Marie le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the Italian wartime fascist leader, Umberto Bossi from Italy's Northern League, Swiss industrialist Christoph Blocher, and a handful of Waffen-SS veterans, whom Haider once described as "men of character". Younger far-right figures have also hinted they will turn up, though Austrian intelligence is on alert to turn away groups of skinheads or neo-fascists, to stop the event turning into a rally.
With state broadcaster ORF planning live coverage, President Heinz Fischer, who will give the main speech, and other politicians have asked for assurances that they will not appear in the same frames as anyone from the far right. "They realise it could get very embarrassing," says Hans Rauscher, veteran writer for Der Standard newspaper.
The fear gripping the elite shows the extent to which Haider managed to impose himself on Austria's political scene, becoming a figurehead for an array of far-right European groups. Particularly at such a sensitive economic moment, when parallels with 1929 and the great depression are drawn every day, the fear is that the extreme right may seek to exploit the symbolic power of such a gathering.
"The possibilities for a rise of the far right in the light of the financial and economic crisis are there," warns Anton Pelinka, professor of politics at the Central European University in Budapest and author of The Haider Phenomenon.
In fact the extreme right is already in the ascendant in several European countries. In Italy the Northern League is enjoying its place in Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition. Blocher's Swiss People's party is the biggest political force in the country, Belgium's Vlaams Belang maintains its strength in Flanders, while in Denmark Pia Kjærsgaard's anti-immigrant Danish People's party is the third largest in the parliament. Racism has risen in Europe in recent years, with polls showing widespread antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment.
But the far right does not seem to be finding it any easier to work together. "In the European parliament there's a strong incentive to do this - if you establish a party group you get funds and more opportunities," Pelinka says. "But the far-right parties have contradicting nationalistic narratives and this makes it very difficult to form one group."
"Denmark and the Netherlands suffered under the Nazis so their far-right groups would never consider joining forces with far-right groups from Austria and Germany," says Richard Brem, editor in chief of a Vienna-based online youth culture magazine. The same goes for the far-right movements of Poland and the Czech Republic. Like Bossi and Blocher, the Netherlands' late Pim Fortuyn might well have seen the well-dressed, perma-tanned Haider as a visual model for his own brand of populist politics, but in fact they had little in common beyond their anti-immigrant rhetoric. Fortuyn, who was openly gay, saw himself as a libertarian whose rights were being curtailed by the immigrant Muslim population. Haider's ethos grew out of an old-time fascism, his country's Nazi past and a psychological need to defend the Nazi generation - including his parents - who he thought were unjustly treated after the war.
"Official Austrian state doctrine after the war was that the Allies liberated Austria from Nazi Germany in 1945 and that Austria had been a victim of the Nazis in 1938," says Pelinka. "This overlooks the fact that the percentage of Austrians who participated in the Nazi regime was the same as in Germany. In contrast, Germany was forced to confront its past directly and did so. Austria was not and didn't."
In Germany, Haider - famous for his outbursts lauding SS veterans, his description of Austria as an "ideological miscarriage", his labelling of Nazi death camps as "punishment camps" and admiration for the Third Reich's "sensible employment policies" - could never have achieved the same success.
Haider himself was frustrated in his attempts to form a pan-European far-right club, though he was successful at least in his intention of provoking European leaders after they slapped sanctions on Austria following the electoral success of his Freedom party (FPO) in 2000.
Nonetheless he is credited with having injected new life into far-right politics. "He was one of the first in Europe to grasp that it's not about issues or a rational discourse, but about emotion," says Brem. "He understood that politics was about marketing and you need to be marketing savvy to succeed."
"What Haider did was to bring Austria's SS and Nazi history out of the past and put it in the present and because he was such a charismatic politician he got away with it," says Rauscher. "But his lasting legacy is the way that he poisoned the political atmosphere in Austria in the process."
Throughout Carinthia there is hardly a person who says Haider has not shaken their hand, or bought them a schnapps. Others talk of receiving €100 handouts from him, a campaign which earned him the nickname "Robin Hood", or speak of the time he lowered petrol prices and introduced free kindergartens.
In the Pumpe pub on Benediktiner Platz in Klagenfurt, drinkers sit around whispering about how Haider died. The figure "142" is repeated often. That is the speed (in kilometres an hour) at which he was driving when he crashed his VW Phaeton on Saturday night. The news has by now filtered down that he was drunk at the wheel.
"Some say he was criminal because he was drunk, but that's an insult," says Christa, a 17-year-old who was among the country's new young voters (the voting age is 16), who gave her support to Haider's BZO in elections two weeks ago. "He did so much for everyone."
Does she think he belittled national socialism? "Well, I don't really know what that is," she replies. "If you mean, was he right to lock up foreigners, yes, because people with a criminal tendency have no place here."
The "Lady Di" comparison is repeated often, along with references to James Dean, Austrian rock star Falco and even the Dalai Lama ("for his ability to reach out to everyone", says one man). Many voice their suspicion that Haider was in fact murdered by Mossad, despite the scientific tests that show he was several times over the alcohol limit.
The television newsreader who announced his death ended her report with the message: "Dear Carinthians, I wish you as much strength as you need to get through this," while Haider's right-hand man Stefan Petzner, the new leader of the BZO, said the "sun has fallen from the sky".
"It's not, it's still there," says Carinthian writer Egyd Gstättner, who observed Haider for two decades. He talks in disgust of a "führer cult" surrounding Haider. On Monday morning, like every Carinthian schoolchild, his 10-year-old daughter was told by her religious affairs teacher to fill up a page of her exercise book with a black cross and Haider's name.
One of Haider's last acts was the establishment of what he called a sonderlager - a special camp for old, sick, and criminal asylum seekers, set on an isolated, 1,200-metre-high alpine pasture. He told his voters he planned to "concentrate" Chechens there, enabling the "final goal" of their extradition to be carried out more smoothly. In other countries politicians would be forced to resign over such issues. According to Florian Klenk, deputy editor of news magazine Falter, "In Austria the typical reaction was, "Well, that's just Haider. And actually he's right."
Last month he won 10% of the vote in national elections, following his victory in Carinthian elections last March.
Commentators suggest it is too early to predict the effect Haider's death may have on far-right politics in Austria. Heinz-Christian Strache, his former ally and more hardline successor as leader of the FPO, has not ruled out a merger with Haider's BZO. That would give the combined far-right parties the same strength they had when Austria was ostracised for that very reason eight years ago.
Today's gathering might well set alarm bells ringing that Europe's extreme right is gathering steam at a time of economic turmoil. "Strache, Bossi and Le Pen will do everything to exploit the crisis," says Pelinka. "And they will have some success. But at the moment there is no indication that they can and will be able to get the amount of power Mussolini, Hitler and co enjoyed in the interwar period."
But the real test, Pelinka says, will come if the economic situation worsens and unemployment rises. He will be watching to see the extent to which countries such as Germany - whose high unemployment in the 1930s led to the rise of Hitler - have really changed. "The question is whether we can assume that in the decades since 1945 countries like Austria, Germany and Italy have been able to create a different, more stable democratic political culture."
"We wanted the kids to feel the enormity of the occasion. After all, he is our Lady Di and this is our 9/11," says Anton Krem, 45, who is here to pay his last respects to Jörg Haider, the Austrian rightwing populist politician who died in a drunken, high-speed car crash a week ago and whose coffin sits on a pedestal in the Landhaus, seat of Carinthia's regional parliament, the southern province where he was governor.
An after-work crowd of about 300 makes its way through an avenue of huge wreaths. Everyone from the Chamber of Carinthian Chemists to the regional tourist board has sent a display. Klagenfurt, the state capital, is busy preparing itself for today's ceremony, the most emotional state funeral since that of the last Austrian empress, Zita von Bourbon-Parma, in 1989.
Amid a sea of red candles one teenager has written: "To a great man of the nation who fought for his land. Our hero, our fighter, our sunshine." Another note reads: "Our king of hearts". Slipped in between are pictures of Haider, an orange sweater - the colour of his breakaway Alliance for the Future of Austria party (BZO) - draped over his shoulders, glass of beer in hand; another shows the maverick fascist bungee jumping off a bridge.
Behind the scenes, functionaries and volunteers have been working around the clock sending invitations. Austria's political elite are expected to attend tomorrow. But the 50,000 mourners are also expected to include Belgian nationalist Filip Dewinter, French extremist Jean-Marie le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the Italian wartime fascist leader, Umberto Bossi from Italy's Northern League, Swiss industrialist Christoph Blocher, and a handful of Waffen-SS veterans, whom Haider once described as "men of character". Younger far-right figures have also hinted they will turn up, though Austrian intelligence is on alert to turn away groups of skinheads or neo-fascists, to stop the event turning into a rally.
With state broadcaster ORF planning live coverage, President Heinz Fischer, who will give the main speech, and other politicians have asked for assurances that they will not appear in the same frames as anyone from the far right. "They realise it could get very embarrassing," says Hans Rauscher, veteran writer for Der Standard newspaper.
The fear gripping the elite shows the extent to which Haider managed to impose himself on Austria's political scene, becoming a figurehead for an array of far-right European groups. Particularly at such a sensitive economic moment, when parallels with 1929 and the great depression are drawn every day, the fear is that the extreme right may seek to exploit the symbolic power of such a gathering.
"The possibilities for a rise of the far right in the light of the financial and economic crisis are there," warns Anton Pelinka, professor of politics at the Central European University in Budapest and author of The Haider Phenomenon.
In fact the extreme right is already in the ascendant in several European countries. In Italy the Northern League is enjoying its place in Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition. Blocher's Swiss People's party is the biggest political force in the country, Belgium's Vlaams Belang maintains its strength in Flanders, while in Denmark Pia Kjærsgaard's anti-immigrant Danish People's party is the third largest in the parliament. Racism has risen in Europe in recent years, with polls showing widespread antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment.
But the far right does not seem to be finding it any easier to work together. "In the European parliament there's a strong incentive to do this - if you establish a party group you get funds and more opportunities," Pelinka says. "But the far-right parties have contradicting nationalistic narratives and this makes it very difficult to form one group."
"Denmark and the Netherlands suffered under the Nazis so their far-right groups would never consider joining forces with far-right groups from Austria and Germany," says Richard Brem, editor in chief of a Vienna-based online youth culture magazine. The same goes for the far-right movements of Poland and the Czech Republic. Like Bossi and Blocher, the Netherlands' late Pim Fortuyn might well have seen the well-dressed, perma-tanned Haider as a visual model for his own brand of populist politics, but in fact they had little in common beyond their anti-immigrant rhetoric. Fortuyn, who was openly gay, saw himself as a libertarian whose rights were being curtailed by the immigrant Muslim population. Haider's ethos grew out of an old-time fascism, his country's Nazi past and a psychological need to defend the Nazi generation - including his parents - who he thought were unjustly treated after the war.
"Official Austrian state doctrine after the war was that the Allies liberated Austria from Nazi Germany in 1945 and that Austria had been a victim of the Nazis in 1938," says Pelinka. "This overlooks the fact that the percentage of Austrians who participated in the Nazi regime was the same as in Germany. In contrast, Germany was forced to confront its past directly and did so. Austria was not and didn't."
In Germany, Haider - famous for his outbursts lauding SS veterans, his description of Austria as an "ideological miscarriage", his labelling of Nazi death camps as "punishment camps" and admiration for the Third Reich's "sensible employment policies" - could never have achieved the same success.
Haider himself was frustrated in his attempts to form a pan-European far-right club, though he was successful at least in his intention of provoking European leaders after they slapped sanctions on Austria following the electoral success of his Freedom party (FPO) in 2000.
Nonetheless he is credited with having injected new life into far-right politics. "He was one of the first in Europe to grasp that it's not about issues or a rational discourse, but about emotion," says Brem. "He understood that politics was about marketing and you need to be marketing savvy to succeed."
"What Haider did was to bring Austria's SS and Nazi history out of the past and put it in the present and because he was such a charismatic politician he got away with it," says Rauscher. "But his lasting legacy is the way that he poisoned the political atmosphere in Austria in the process."
Throughout Carinthia there is hardly a person who says Haider has not shaken their hand, or bought them a schnapps. Others talk of receiving €100 handouts from him, a campaign which earned him the nickname "Robin Hood", or speak of the time he lowered petrol prices and introduced free kindergartens.
In the Pumpe pub on Benediktiner Platz in Klagenfurt, drinkers sit around whispering about how Haider died. The figure "142" is repeated often. That is the speed (in kilometres an hour) at which he was driving when he crashed his VW Phaeton on Saturday night. The news has by now filtered down that he was drunk at the wheel.
"Some say he was criminal because he was drunk, but that's an insult," says Christa, a 17-year-old who was among the country's new young voters (the voting age is 16), who gave her support to Haider's BZO in elections two weeks ago. "He did so much for everyone."
Does she think he belittled national socialism? "Well, I don't really know what that is," she replies. "If you mean, was he right to lock up foreigners, yes, because people with a criminal tendency have no place here."
The "Lady Di" comparison is repeated often, along with references to James Dean, Austrian rock star Falco and even the Dalai Lama ("for his ability to reach out to everyone", says one man). Many voice their suspicion that Haider was in fact murdered by Mossad, despite the scientific tests that show he was several times over the alcohol limit.
The television newsreader who announced his death ended her report with the message: "Dear Carinthians, I wish you as much strength as you need to get through this," while Haider's right-hand man Stefan Petzner, the new leader of the BZO, said the "sun has fallen from the sky".
"It's not, it's still there," says Carinthian writer Egyd Gstättner, who observed Haider for two decades. He talks in disgust of a "führer cult" surrounding Haider. On Monday morning, like every Carinthian schoolchild, his 10-year-old daughter was told by her religious affairs teacher to fill up a page of her exercise book with a black cross and Haider's name.
One of Haider's last acts was the establishment of what he called a sonderlager - a special camp for old, sick, and criminal asylum seekers, set on an isolated, 1,200-metre-high alpine pasture. He told his voters he planned to "concentrate" Chechens there, enabling the "final goal" of their extradition to be carried out more smoothly. In other countries politicians would be forced to resign over such issues. According to Florian Klenk, deputy editor of news magazine Falter, "In Austria the typical reaction was, "Well, that's just Haider. And actually he's right."
Last month he won 10% of the vote in national elections, following his victory in Carinthian elections last March.
Commentators suggest it is too early to predict the effect Haider's death may have on far-right politics in Austria. Heinz-Christian Strache, his former ally and more hardline successor as leader of the FPO, has not ruled out a merger with Haider's BZO. That would give the combined far-right parties the same strength they had when Austria was ostracised for that very reason eight years ago.
Today's gathering might well set alarm bells ringing that Europe's extreme right is gathering steam at a time of economic turmoil. "Strache, Bossi and Le Pen will do everything to exploit the crisis," says Pelinka. "And they will have some success. But at the moment there is no indication that they can and will be able to get the amount of power Mussolini, Hitler and co enjoyed in the interwar period."
But the real test, Pelinka says, will come if the economic situation worsens and unemployment rises. He will be watching to see the extent to which countries such as Germany - whose high unemployment in the 1930s led to the rise of Hitler - have really changed. "The question is whether we can assume that in the decades since 1945 countries like Austria, Germany and Italy have been able to create a different, more stable democratic political culture."
Conflict over Bolano novel
One of the world's most aggressive literary agencies, overseen by super-agent Andrew Wylie, scored a double coup by taking over representation of deceased Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño just as an unpublished novel by him was discovered.
Wylie's agency has been offering the manuscript of The Third Reich at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. Publishers were said to be fighting over the novel from an author whose stock hit new highs in the English-speaking world after the success of The Savage Detectives, said by the New York Times to be one of the best 10 books last year.
The Bolaño estate's previous agent, Carmen Balcells, reportedly had no idea that the new, unpublished novel existed and said that it certainly had not been on his computer when he died in 2003. His Spanish publisher, Jorge Herralde, also had no knowledge of it.
The Third Reich is said to have been written in the early 1990s before Bolaño began to work on a computer. The Wylie agency was touting the book at Frankfurt as "a type-written, completed novel that is meticulously corrected by hand", according to Spain's El Periodico.
Described as "a man's descent into a nightmare", the book features a German wargames champion who travels to the Costa Brava to take on an American opponent. He is pursued by a private detective while a friend disappears after encountering two sinister characters.
Wylie's agency has been offering the manuscript of The Third Reich at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. Publishers were said to be fighting over the novel from an author whose stock hit new highs in the English-speaking world after the success of The Savage Detectives, said by the New York Times to be one of the best 10 books last year.
The Bolaño estate's previous agent, Carmen Balcells, reportedly had no idea that the new, unpublished novel existed and said that it certainly had not been on his computer when he died in 2003. His Spanish publisher, Jorge Herralde, also had no knowledge of it.
The Third Reich is said to have been written in the early 1990s before Bolaño began to work on a computer. The Wylie agency was touting the book at Frankfurt as "a type-written, completed novel that is meticulously corrected by hand", according to Spain's El Periodico.
Described as "a man's descent into a nightmare", the book features a German wargames champion who travels to the Costa Brava to take on an American opponent. He is pursued by a private detective while a friend disappears after encountering two sinister characters.
Tensions flare between Jewsish and Palestinian settlers
Israeli city braced for further rioting
Toni O'Loughlin in Jerusalem
The northern Israeli city of Acre is braced for another outbreak of rioting between Jewish and Arab residents after police arrested three more people in connection with recent disturbances.
Seventy-eight people have been arrested since rioting began more than a week ago on Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day. While the mobs have dispersed, tensions remain amid fears that violence could erupt again next week after the end of the seven-day festival of Sukkot, which follows Yom Kippur.
Hostilities have marred Jewish festivals in Acre in the past and 1,000 officers have been deployed over the weekend.
The fighting began when Tawfik Jamal, an Arab Israeli, drove into Burla, a poor neighbourhood of Jews and Arabs, after the start of Yom Kippur's stringent fast, which also includes a prohibition on driving and smoking. Jewish youths attacked the car, and Jamal fled with his son and his friends into the home of a relative and called the police.
Hundreds of Arab residents, many of them masked, then took to the streets, smashing windows of Jewish shops, attacking cars and stoning Jewish homes as false rumours spread of Jamal's death.
By the end of Yom Kippur the following day, thousands of Jewish residents had begun torching and vandalising property, as well as throwing stones at Arabs.
Israeli police said Jewish instigators were the "dominant elements" in the rioting, but around half of those arrested were Arabs, including Jamal. His driving licence has been revoked for a month and he was placed under house arrest for "hurting religious sentiments".
Twenty Arab families were also evacuated and only returned to their homes at the end of this week.
Adalah, a legal centre for Arab rights, said the tensions between the Jewish and Arab residents had been festering ever since Jewish settlers established a religious school in the city in 2002.
Toni O'Loughlin in Jerusalem
The northern Israeli city of Acre is braced for another outbreak of rioting between Jewish and Arab residents after police arrested three more people in connection with recent disturbances.
Seventy-eight people have been arrested since rioting began more than a week ago on Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day. While the mobs have dispersed, tensions remain amid fears that violence could erupt again next week after the end of the seven-day festival of Sukkot, which follows Yom Kippur.
Hostilities have marred Jewish festivals in Acre in the past and 1,000 officers have been deployed over the weekend.
The fighting began when Tawfik Jamal, an Arab Israeli, drove into Burla, a poor neighbourhood of Jews and Arabs, after the start of Yom Kippur's stringent fast, which also includes a prohibition on driving and smoking. Jewish youths attacked the car, and Jamal fled with his son and his friends into the home of a relative and called the police.
Hundreds of Arab residents, many of them masked, then took to the streets, smashing windows of Jewish shops, attacking cars and stoning Jewish homes as false rumours spread of Jamal's death.
By the end of Yom Kippur the following day, thousands of Jewish residents had begun torching and vandalising property, as well as throwing stones at Arabs.
Israeli police said Jewish instigators were the "dominant elements" in the rioting, but around half of those arrested were Arabs, including Jamal. His driving licence has been revoked for a month and he was placed under house arrest for "hurting religious sentiments".
Twenty Arab families were also evacuated and only returned to their homes at the end of this week.
Adalah, a legal centre for Arab rights, said the tensions between the Jewish and Arab residents had been festering ever since Jewish settlers established a religious school in the city in 2002.
Accusations of links to mafia from an Italian MP
Minister urged to quit over alleged link to mafiosi whose threats sent writer into exile
by John Hooper
The leader of the Italian opposition called yesterday for the resignation of a minister in Silvio Berlusconi's government after the publication of new accusations that he collaborated with mobsters whose death threats have driven the writer Roberto Saviano into exile.
Nicola Cosentino, a junior finance minister in the Berlusconi government who comes from the same town as Saviano, is also a senior official in Berlusconi's rightwing Freedom People movement and its chief organiser in Campania, the region around Naples.
He is under investigation by the anti-mafia branch of the city's prosecution service on the basis of evidence provided by a string of former mafiosi who have claimed he received money from, and supplied help to, the Casalese family of the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra.
Saviano, whose book about the close-knit criminal network inspired the film Gomorra, revealed this week that he was fleeing abroad following reports that the Casalese family had drawn up plans to murder him by Christmas after repeatedly threatening his life.
Salman Rushdie, the British author put under a death sentence by Iranian religious leaders, said Saviano was in an even more perilous situation than he himself had been. In Paris for the presentation of his latest novel, Rushdie was quoted as saying the young author "must leave Italy. But he should choose his destination very carefully. The mafia poses a problem a good deal more serious than the one I had to cope with."
Saviano was last seen at the Frankfurt book fair where he met another writer under armed guard, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.
Saviano grew up on the Casalese clan's turf and much of his book is devoted to exposing its activities. Cosentino has repeatedly denied the allegations. He has also stressed the existence of testimony by another super-grass who has contradicted the evidence of one witness who accused him of mafia collusion.
After the publication by the news magazine L'Espresso of leaked statements from the latest and fifth former Mafioso to accuse him, he said: "I shall resign, not as a junior minister, but from politics, when just one of these allegations is proved."
by John Hooper
The leader of the Italian opposition called yesterday for the resignation of a minister in Silvio Berlusconi's government after the publication of new accusations that he collaborated with mobsters whose death threats have driven the writer Roberto Saviano into exile.
Nicola Cosentino, a junior finance minister in the Berlusconi government who comes from the same town as Saviano, is also a senior official in Berlusconi's rightwing Freedom People movement and its chief organiser in Campania, the region around Naples.
He is under investigation by the anti-mafia branch of the city's prosecution service on the basis of evidence provided by a string of former mafiosi who have claimed he received money from, and supplied help to, the Casalese family of the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra.
Saviano, whose book about the close-knit criminal network inspired the film Gomorra, revealed this week that he was fleeing abroad following reports that the Casalese family had drawn up plans to murder him by Christmas after repeatedly threatening his life.
Salman Rushdie, the British author put under a death sentence by Iranian religious leaders, said Saviano was in an even more perilous situation than he himself had been. In Paris for the presentation of his latest novel, Rushdie was quoted as saying the young author "must leave Italy. But he should choose his destination very carefully. The mafia poses a problem a good deal more serious than the one I had to cope with."
Saviano was last seen at the Frankfurt book fair where he met another writer under armed guard, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.
Saviano grew up on the Casalese clan's turf and much of his book is devoted to exposing its activities. Cosentino has repeatedly denied the allegations. He has also stressed the existence of testimony by another super-grass who has contradicted the evidence of one witness who accused him of mafia collusion.
After the publication by the news magazine L'Espresso of leaked statements from the latest and fifth former Mafioso to accuse him, he said: "I shall resign, not as a junior minister, but from politics, when just one of these allegations is proved."
Cuba 's oil reserves
20bn barrel oil discovery puts Cuba in the big league
• Self-reliance beckons for communist state • Estimate means reserves are on a par with US
Friends and foes have called Cuba many things - a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny - but no one has called it lucky, until now .
Mother nature, it emerged this week, appears to have blessed the island with enough oil reserves to vault it into the ranks of energy powers. The government announced there may be more than 20bn barrels of recoverable oil in offshore fields in Cuba's share of the Gulf of Mexico, more than twice the previous estimate.
If confirmed, it puts Cuba's reserves on par with those of the US and into the world's top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba's state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet.
"It would change their whole equation. The government would have more money and no longer be dependent on foreign oil," said Kirby Jones, founder of the Washington-based US-Cuba Trade Association. "It could join the club of oil exporting nations."
"We have more data. I'm almost certain that if they ask for all the data we have, (their estimate) is going to grow considerably," said Cupet's exploration manager, Rafael Tenreyro Perez.
Havana based its dramatically higher estimate mainly on comparisons with oil output from similar geological structures off the coasts of Mexico and the US. Cuba's undersea geology was "very similar" to Mexico's giant Cantarell oil field in the Bay of Campeche, said Tenreyro.
A consortium of companies led by Spain's Repsol had tested wells and were expected to begin drilling the first production well in mid-2009, and possibly several more later in the year, he said.
Cuba currently produces about 60,000 barrels of oil daily, covering almost half of its needs, and imports the rest from Venezuela in return for Cuban doctors and sports instructors. Even that barter system puts a strain on an impoverished economy in which Cubans earn an average monthly salary of $20.
Subsidised grocery staples, health care and education help make ends meet but an old joke - that the three biggest failings of the revolution are breakfast, lunch and dinner - still does the rounds. Last month hardships were compounded by tropical storms that shredded crops and devastated coastal towns.
"This news about the oil reserves could not have come at a better time for the regime," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a Cuba energy specialist at the University of Nebraska.
However there is little prospect of Cuba becoming a communist version of Kuwait. Its oil is more than a mile deep under the ocean and difficult and expensive to extract. The four-decade-old US economic embargo prevents several of Cuba's potential oil partners - notably Brazil, Norway and Spain - from using valuable first-generation technology.
"You're looking at three to five years minimum before any meaningful returns," said Benjamin-Alvarado.
Even so, Cuba is a master at stretching resources. President Raul Castro, who took over from brother Fidel, has promised to deliver improvements to daily life to shore up the legitimacy of the revolution as it approaches its 50th anniversary.
Cuba's unexpected arrival into the big oil league could increase pressure on the next administration to loosen the embargo to let US oil companies participate in the bonanza and reduce US dependency on the middle east, said Jones. "Up until now the embargo did not really impact on us in a substantive, strategic way. Oil is different. It's something we need and want."
• Self-reliance beckons for communist state • Estimate means reserves are on a par with US
Friends and foes have called Cuba many things - a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny - but no one has called it lucky, until now .
Mother nature, it emerged this week, appears to have blessed the island with enough oil reserves to vault it into the ranks of energy powers. The government announced there may be more than 20bn barrels of recoverable oil in offshore fields in Cuba's share of the Gulf of Mexico, more than twice the previous estimate.
If confirmed, it puts Cuba's reserves on par with those of the US and into the world's top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba's state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet.
"It would change their whole equation. The government would have more money and no longer be dependent on foreign oil," said Kirby Jones, founder of the Washington-based US-Cuba Trade Association. "It could join the club of oil exporting nations."
"We have more data. I'm almost certain that if they ask for all the data we have, (their estimate) is going to grow considerably," said Cupet's exploration manager, Rafael Tenreyro Perez.
Havana based its dramatically higher estimate mainly on comparisons with oil output from similar geological structures off the coasts of Mexico and the US. Cuba's undersea geology was "very similar" to Mexico's giant Cantarell oil field in the Bay of Campeche, said Tenreyro.
A consortium of companies led by Spain's Repsol had tested wells and were expected to begin drilling the first production well in mid-2009, and possibly several more later in the year, he said.
Cuba currently produces about 60,000 barrels of oil daily, covering almost half of its needs, and imports the rest from Venezuela in return for Cuban doctors and sports instructors. Even that barter system puts a strain on an impoverished economy in which Cubans earn an average monthly salary of $20.
Subsidised grocery staples, health care and education help make ends meet but an old joke - that the three biggest failings of the revolution are breakfast, lunch and dinner - still does the rounds. Last month hardships were compounded by tropical storms that shredded crops and devastated coastal towns.
"This news about the oil reserves could not have come at a better time for the regime," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a Cuba energy specialist at the University of Nebraska.
However there is little prospect of Cuba becoming a communist version of Kuwait. Its oil is more than a mile deep under the ocean and difficult and expensive to extract. The four-decade-old US economic embargo prevents several of Cuba's potential oil partners - notably Brazil, Norway and Spain - from using valuable first-generation technology.
"You're looking at three to five years minimum before any meaningful returns," said Benjamin-Alvarado.
Even so, Cuba is a master at stretching resources. President Raul Castro, who took over from brother Fidel, has promised to deliver improvements to daily life to shore up the legitimacy of the revolution as it approaches its 50th anniversary.
Cuba's unexpected arrival into the big oil league could increase pressure on the next administration to loosen the embargo to let US oil companies participate in the bonanza and reduce US dependency on the middle east, said Jones. "Up until now the embargo did not really impact on us in a substantive, strategic way. Oil is different. It's something we need and want."
Unemployment in Britain
"Boom turns to bust in Britain's jobs blackspot"
by Aida Edemariam in the Guardian
Doncaster Central has the fastest growing number of benefit claimants of any constituency in the UK, despite big regeneration projects employing local people. Photograph: Christopher Thomond
It's only been a couple of weeks since the Doncaster Trades Union & Labour Club moved into its new premises, and it still feels as if the members are settling in. Part of the issue might be that the surroundings are so unexpected: no battered, dark snug, but a shiny, brightly-lit bar in the also shiny, brightly-lit Frenchgate shopping centre.
Grizzled men in work clothes and fluorescent bibs perch experimentally on pristine banquettes and watch the ladies' darts team take on Balby Bridge. The only overt sense of 111-years of history comes from the photographs of old Doncaster on the walls, and the lock boxes under the snooker tables containing the regular players' cues. The woman behind the bar likes this better than their old haunt. "Bit classier."
Doncaster generally feels like a town still uneasily trying to meld old and new. It came of age as an industrial centre. Seventeen pits produced coal for the steel factories of Rotherham, Scunthorpe and Sheffield; the Flying Scotsman was built here (London Underground trains are still manufactured here, by a company called Wabtec). And then came Margaret Thatcher, and the closure of the pits.
"Twenty to 25 years ago, there was almost like a social mourning going on," says Steven Shaw, the chief executive of Doncaster Chamber. "You'd lost a huge chunk of the rail industry, virtually all the mining and virtually all the steel." It became a byword for unemployment and economic depression, and took nearly 15 years, says Shaw, before a strategy for the future emerged.
You can see that process physically, in the townscape: narrow brick streets and alleyways at the centre, bumping into the Frenchgate; or on the outskirts of Doncaster Central, the 16,000-seat new Keepmoat stadium, the new racecourse, the new bloodstock sales centre, the brand new Robin Hood international airport, and the counter-intuitively wood-clad new fire station.
"Doncaster's like a boomtown," says the town's first elected mayor, Martin Winter. He has dispensed with his driver and is showing the Guardian around himself, a big ex-rugby league player hunched over the wheel of a car that seems too small.
Between 2000 and 2007 £1.4bn was invested in Doncaster, creating more than 22,000 jobs. (Long-term worklessness is still high, however. About 20,000 people claim incapacity benefit, often due to physical injuries from mining, although about 7,000 are stress related).
Most of this money is private, but the council contributed about £5m to the Frenchgate and £30m of taxpayers' money went into the Lakeside sports complex; the New Deal for Communities has, over 10 years, put £52m into crime reduction, education, job training, health and housing in deprived areas, which includes Doncaster Central, whose MP, Rosie Winterton is minister of state for pensions reform at the Department for Work and Pensions. (This area seems to provide a disproportionate number of cabinet members: there is also Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, in Doncaster North, and Caroline Flint, minister of state for Europe and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, who is MP for the Don Valley.)
Regardless of who was paying, there was a deliberate attempt to have Doncaster people trained and working on the big projects; there were strictures that materials be locally sourced. The airport alone is predicted to create employment for 1,500 people by 2016.
But things seem to be changing. Last week government figures showed that Doncaster Central had the fastest increase in benefit claimants of any English constituency in the 12 months to September. There are now 2,343 claimants, a rise of 537 since last year. The mayor and his staff say they don't recognise this picture, but elsewhere the story is a little different. Even the employed start straight in with "It's too many foreigners willing to work for minimum wage", and concern is rising, the harbinger, perhaps, of how the expected recession might look.
At the Trades Club, Peter Buckenham, 52, still in work clothes after a day driving timber lorries through Derbyshire, is nursing a pint. For the first time he only got two days of work this week. The company he works for is feeling the pinch, and laying people off. "I'm worried." Other people he knows are too.
No-one's been made redundant quite yet, but a friend has shut his computer shop. When he joined the club they asked, "Are you working?" and told him he was one of the few.
Unless you count the 600 workers laid off last week at Sheffield car parts supplier LSUK (which has a knock-on effect in Doncaster as many people commute), or McCormick tractor factory, which closed in 2006, with the loss of 325 jobs, there haven't yet been huge redundancies. Rather it's a case of a little here and a little there, "a creep of lots of things," as Graeme Huston, editor of the Doncaster Free Press, puts it. At the local Jobcentre Plus, Jonathan Kay, 23, who's just moved back after finishing a degree in Leicester, is finding it slow. "There doesn't seem to be a lot going on, unless you want to work in a call centre." Most of the job losses so far seem to be a direct result of the bank crisis - and thus in new building and home sales. "Probably the first tranche of heavy losses were in the legal sector," says Shaw. "A lot of the conveyancing lawyers were the first people to notice." One high street practice had to lay off 60 of its 360 staff in April.
Colin Wright, managing director of Wright Investments, which specialises in property, transport and storage, has just had to liquidate his building division, and lay off 20 people. "What's happening with the housing market started affecting us last Christmas," he says. "I carried on funding projects myself, thinking it'll come back - and then all this happened a few weeks ago." He says the bigger national builders were closing down their sites six months ago. "The thing with the construction industry is that most of the guys are quite highly paid. When they go out of work it has quite an affect in the economy. They're big spenders and don't tend to save."
The Chamber is a membership organisation, and they have noticed a spike in companies failing to renew because they've gone bust - 10 in August alone, mainly in retail and the service sector. The pubs are quieter and the volunteering organisation CVS has seen a sharp rise in inquiries, mostly unemployed people looking for work experience as opposed to people looking to help, says manager Julie Cox. Last year the largest group was under 25s; this year they are between 29 and 34 years old.
What's interesting is that the effect hasn't been felt across the board. "This economic downturn has been like nothing I've experienced," says Shaw. "It's been much much quicker, and less indiscriminate than in the early 1990s. Then everybody suffered. It was universal.
"In this current cycle we're still seeing areas that are doing exceptionally well - the Primarks, the Nettos. In the early 90s the engineering sector was absolutely decimated. But we're still seeing engineers and manufacturers of hi-tech products - aviation, hi-tech metals, fibre optics - doing exceptionally well."
They have been so battered over the last 25 years "that if you're still in business you're probably a lean mean business anyway". But the large-scale job-creating investments, New Deal or otherwise, seem to be holding up OK too. "The jobs that they've created are real jobs and they're still there."
Shaw is keen to stress Doncaster's potential: its transport links, development space and the national firms that have been moving in. "It's a much nicer place to be than 20 years ago." But they have to be realistic too. A lot of the really big projects are now finished, says Wright, and "the new big projects won't start for a long time. I think it'll get a lot worse before it gets better".
by Aida Edemariam in the Guardian
Doncaster Central has the fastest growing number of benefit claimants of any constituency in the UK, despite big regeneration projects employing local people. Photograph: Christopher Thomond
It's only been a couple of weeks since the Doncaster Trades Union & Labour Club moved into its new premises, and it still feels as if the members are settling in. Part of the issue might be that the surroundings are so unexpected: no battered, dark snug, but a shiny, brightly-lit bar in the also shiny, brightly-lit Frenchgate shopping centre.
Grizzled men in work clothes and fluorescent bibs perch experimentally on pristine banquettes and watch the ladies' darts team take on Balby Bridge. The only overt sense of 111-years of history comes from the photographs of old Doncaster on the walls, and the lock boxes under the snooker tables containing the regular players' cues. The woman behind the bar likes this better than their old haunt. "Bit classier."
Doncaster generally feels like a town still uneasily trying to meld old and new. It came of age as an industrial centre. Seventeen pits produced coal for the steel factories of Rotherham, Scunthorpe and Sheffield; the Flying Scotsman was built here (London Underground trains are still manufactured here, by a company called Wabtec). And then came Margaret Thatcher, and the closure of the pits.
"Twenty to 25 years ago, there was almost like a social mourning going on," says Steven Shaw, the chief executive of Doncaster Chamber. "You'd lost a huge chunk of the rail industry, virtually all the mining and virtually all the steel." It became a byword for unemployment and economic depression, and took nearly 15 years, says Shaw, before a strategy for the future emerged.
You can see that process physically, in the townscape: narrow brick streets and alleyways at the centre, bumping into the Frenchgate; or on the outskirts of Doncaster Central, the 16,000-seat new Keepmoat stadium, the new racecourse, the new bloodstock sales centre, the brand new Robin Hood international airport, and the counter-intuitively wood-clad new fire station.
"Doncaster's like a boomtown," says the town's first elected mayor, Martin Winter. He has dispensed with his driver and is showing the Guardian around himself, a big ex-rugby league player hunched over the wheel of a car that seems too small.
Between 2000 and 2007 £1.4bn was invested in Doncaster, creating more than 22,000 jobs. (Long-term worklessness is still high, however. About 20,000 people claim incapacity benefit, often due to physical injuries from mining, although about 7,000 are stress related).
Most of this money is private, but the council contributed about £5m to the Frenchgate and £30m of taxpayers' money went into the Lakeside sports complex; the New Deal for Communities has, over 10 years, put £52m into crime reduction, education, job training, health and housing in deprived areas, which includes Doncaster Central, whose MP, Rosie Winterton is minister of state for pensions reform at the Department for Work and Pensions. (This area seems to provide a disproportionate number of cabinet members: there is also Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, in Doncaster North, and Caroline Flint, minister of state for Europe and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, who is MP for the Don Valley.)
Regardless of who was paying, there was a deliberate attempt to have Doncaster people trained and working on the big projects; there were strictures that materials be locally sourced. The airport alone is predicted to create employment for 1,500 people by 2016.
But things seem to be changing. Last week government figures showed that Doncaster Central had the fastest increase in benefit claimants of any English constituency in the 12 months to September. There are now 2,343 claimants, a rise of 537 since last year. The mayor and his staff say they don't recognise this picture, but elsewhere the story is a little different. Even the employed start straight in with "It's too many foreigners willing to work for minimum wage", and concern is rising, the harbinger, perhaps, of how the expected recession might look.
At the Trades Club, Peter Buckenham, 52, still in work clothes after a day driving timber lorries through Derbyshire, is nursing a pint. For the first time he only got two days of work this week. The company he works for is feeling the pinch, and laying people off. "I'm worried." Other people he knows are too.
No-one's been made redundant quite yet, but a friend has shut his computer shop. When he joined the club they asked, "Are you working?" and told him he was one of the few.
Unless you count the 600 workers laid off last week at Sheffield car parts supplier LSUK (which has a knock-on effect in Doncaster as many people commute), or McCormick tractor factory, which closed in 2006, with the loss of 325 jobs, there haven't yet been huge redundancies. Rather it's a case of a little here and a little there, "a creep of lots of things," as Graeme Huston, editor of the Doncaster Free Press, puts it. At the local Jobcentre Plus, Jonathan Kay, 23, who's just moved back after finishing a degree in Leicester, is finding it slow. "There doesn't seem to be a lot going on, unless you want to work in a call centre." Most of the job losses so far seem to be a direct result of the bank crisis - and thus in new building and home sales. "Probably the first tranche of heavy losses were in the legal sector," says Shaw. "A lot of the conveyancing lawyers were the first people to notice." One high street practice had to lay off 60 of its 360 staff in April.
Colin Wright, managing director of Wright Investments, which specialises in property, transport and storage, has just had to liquidate his building division, and lay off 20 people. "What's happening with the housing market started affecting us last Christmas," he says. "I carried on funding projects myself, thinking it'll come back - and then all this happened a few weeks ago." He says the bigger national builders were closing down their sites six months ago. "The thing with the construction industry is that most of the guys are quite highly paid. When they go out of work it has quite an affect in the economy. They're big spenders and don't tend to save."
The Chamber is a membership organisation, and they have noticed a spike in companies failing to renew because they've gone bust - 10 in August alone, mainly in retail and the service sector. The pubs are quieter and the volunteering organisation CVS has seen a sharp rise in inquiries, mostly unemployed people looking for work experience as opposed to people looking to help, says manager Julie Cox. Last year the largest group was under 25s; this year they are between 29 and 34 years old.
What's interesting is that the effect hasn't been felt across the board. "This economic downturn has been like nothing I've experienced," says Shaw. "It's been much much quicker, and less indiscriminate than in the early 1990s. Then everybody suffered. It was universal.
"In this current cycle we're still seeing areas that are doing exceptionally well - the Primarks, the Nettos. In the early 90s the engineering sector was absolutely decimated. But we're still seeing engineers and manufacturers of hi-tech products - aviation, hi-tech metals, fibre optics - doing exceptionally well."
They have been so battered over the last 25 years "that if you're still in business you're probably a lean mean business anyway". But the large-scale job-creating investments, New Deal or otherwise, seem to be holding up OK too. "The jobs that they've created are real jobs and they're still there."
Shaw is keen to stress Doncaster's potential: its transport links, development space and the national firms that have been moving in. "It's a much nicer place to be than 20 years ago." But they have to be realistic too. A lot of the really big projects are now finished, says Wright, and "the new big projects won't start for a long time. I think it'll get a lot worse before it gets better".
An urban arms race
Seven shootings one murder: Exhibit Rs1
By Sarah Laville (Guardian)
The Guardian can today reveal that in less than two years this gun was used in at least seven shootings, including one murder, as it was passed between hoods, rented out or stolen by rival street gangs in the UK. Its discovery has added much needed information to senior police officers who admit there is a significant intelligence gap on criminal weaponry.
Unlike many firearms used in London, Manchester and Birmingham, cities that account for 60% of serious gun crime by gangs, RS1 is a real weapon, not a converted replica. Its magazine held commercially manufactured ammunition, rather than "homemade" bullets - something often seen by detectives - and the ageing weapon was probably purchased for between £500 and £1,000.
The trail left by the firearm can be reported following the life sentences handed down yesterday to two street gangsters for murder.
It was discovered on a November morning in 2006 when a teenage boy set off for school telling his mother not to look in his room.
Whether it was something in his tone, or just a mother's instinct, she ignored him. In his bedroom he kept a toy safe for his belongings, and inside she found the gun. She called the police and the firearm was taken away to a forensics laboratory where it was identified as a CZ .32 Colt Model 1927, manufactured by Ceska Zbrojovka of Strakonice, Czechoslovakia.
The gun was loaded, with three live rounds in the magazine. A bullet was lodged in the barrel.
A few weeks later Detective Inspector Dave Manning, of the Metropolitan police's Trident unit, received a telephone call. After more than eight months investigating the murder of a notorious drug dealer, killer and kidnapper called Andrew Wanogho, he had all but given up on receiving such a contact.
His inquiry was fraught with difficulties. At 26, the victim was running a syndicate of teenage armed robbers who would also do his drug running. Shortly before his murder Wanogho complained to the woman he called his "baby mother" - the mother of his child - that he did not have a friend left in the world.
His killing was, on the face of it, just another inner city gangland shooting; the sort officers from Trident deal with all the time but which pass almost un-noticed by the media.
But this inquiry opened a window on to a criminal subculture which exists cheek by jowl with ordinary families in ordinary neighbourhoods; the class A drug dealing, the incredible reach of the criminal networks, the threatening and taking of lives, the kidnappings, sexual violence, extortion and witness intimidation.
And at the heart of it all, the tool used to enforce and protect: the gun.
Wanogho, known as Sparks, was a powerful amateur boxer who had fought successfully in the United States. Held in awe and fear in equal measure by his peers, he was seen as a protector by some but a mercurial and extremely violent man by others.
A Pentecostal pastor described to the 350 people at his funeral in Brockley, south London, how he would push his disabled brother to church each week in a wheelchair. Less was said of his history of violence.
"He was a formidable boxer and would beat people to a pulp and get pleasure out of it," said one source.
He once kidnapped and tortured a bus driver whose brother was a rival drug dealer.
The man was driven to a flat and chained to a radiator before Wanogho held a hot iron against his face. It was all done to intimidate the man's brother into giving up his drug stash. Four years before his murder Wanogho was charged with the murder of a man shot dead outside an east London nightclub. He escaped conviction after two witnesses withdrew their evidence because they were in fear of their lives.
In August 2005, Wanogho survived an assassination attempt as he left a courtroom where he had watched a girlfriend plead guilty to possession of one of his guns in order to save him from jail. Eight months later he was not so lucky.
Manning was convinced the hit on Wanogho in April 2006 had been organised by an inmate at HMP Belmarsh on a mobile phone that was smuggled into the prison system and which, investigations revealed, had made 17,000 calls in seven months.
But facing a wall of silence, Trident officers spent months scanning thousands of pages of mobile records until a pattern emerged. The inmate, Delphon Nicholas, had made a flurry of calls in the hours before the killing to his best friend, a gunman, rapist and drug trafficker called Trevor Dennie.
Both men had fallen out with Wanogho over drugs and women and Dennie was heard telling a friend: "I've had enough of Andy, he's gone too far. He's barred from the ends."
At 1.30am on April 8 2006 Wanogho stepped out of a car outside the home of Nicholas's former girlfriend.
He told Sean Albert, who had driven him, that he was "up for a bit of a shagging".
Albert drove a discreet distance away to wait until he was called again. But Dennie was lying in wait and as Albert pulled up a few houses down the road he heard a series of gun shots in rapid succession.
He looked in his rear view mirror and saw Wanogho, head down, sprinting towards him. But just as he reached the car he crumpled to the ground, hit in the back by a bullet that pierced his heart.
On Wanogho's body police found the incongruous possessions of a Class A drug dealer and gangster - a £17,000 diamond encrusted Cartier watch and £1.11 in cash. They also recovered two of the four bullets fired, including one that had ricocheted off a parked car and landed in a front garden.
The closest they got to the gun, however, was a witness who described seeing Dennie brandishing it over his head at an east London nightclub a few hours later and boasting that he had killed Wanogho.
Eight months on Manning was told that the gun found in a 14-year-old boy's bedroom was his murder weapon. Somehow it had passed from Dennie through several hands to being stored by the boy on the orders of an older hood, probably as some kind of initiation rite. Ballistics tests showed that the .32 caliber handgun had been used in at least seven shootings in less than two years, six in south London and one in Sussex.
On New Year's Eve in 2004 a police officer was responding to a 999 call from a victim of a robbery in Brockley Cross, in the heart of what Dennie described as his "manor". He arrived to find three men nearby, and as he walked up to speak to them, the trio ran. But one man turned, pulled a gun and shot at the constable as he fled.
This time the bullet missed its target. Police made inquiries but never made any headway. No arrests were made and the firearm disappeared back into the shadows.
It emerged 10 months later at the Cube nightclub in Camberwell Green, south London, in a petty dispute. The victim happened to bump into a man as he went to the toilet and was shot in the thigh for his clumsiness.
In April 2006 the handgun reached its zenith with the murder of Wanogho, leaving a bullet lodged in his heart and two others at the scene which provided the vital link. Three weeks after the murder the firearm emerged once more at M-Blax nightclub in Peckham. At around 5.40am in the final hour of clubbing, a group of young men from a north London gang burst into the venue carrying weapons, intent on shooting up their south London rivals.
Clubbers screamed and ran as a gunfight broke out in the crowded club. At least 21 shots were fired and three men were taken to hospital. Cartridges found at the scene matched the firearm found in the boy's bedroom.
By June 2006 the gun had been passed on or stolen once more, its value by now diminished because of its use in a murder. It appeared again at the unlikely venue of Pontins in Camber Sands, when a group of teenagers from the capital travelled to the Sussex holiday camp for an urban music weekend.
Large crowds gathered on the Sunday at the main hip hop stage, but in the midst off the rave the sound of gunshots sent young people running for cover. By the time local police arrived with firearms teams the elusive weapon had melted away into the background once more.
A month later it was back in south London again, when shots were fired at a car. The gun was probably last used in the autumn of 2006 when it was accidentally fired by a would-be gangster.
In the remaining four weeks of its criminal life the firearm was passed into the hands of the teenage boy, who according to sources, was bullied by the hoods because he suffered from Asperger's syndrome.
It provided a forensic treasure trove. "It is quite rare to recover guns at all, so to recover a weapon that is linked to seven shootings is unusual," said Manning. "Everyone talks about guns being available on street corners, but it's not quite as easy as that to get hold of one. It's even more difficult to get hold of real ammunition."
The boy's experience gave credence to anecdotal evidence that criminals are forcing younger boys to store their guns to test their mettle and once the gun was found the teenager was said to be terrified of repercussions. But his mother's actions in calling the police perhaps saved him from being sucked into a life of crime.
Nicholas and Dennie began life sentences for the murder of Wanogho yesterday, closing the final chapter on the story of a gun that ended the life of one veteran gangster before initiating a young boy to follow in his footsteps.
History of gun crime
Intelligence on how many illegal firearms are in use on Britain's streets is limited and sometimes contradictory. Senior officers believe that weapons are often rented out and are therefore linked to multiple offences but in recent times there has been an influx of weapons from eastern Europe, particularly the Russian made 9mm Baikal, a self defence pistol used for firing CS gas which is converted to carry real bullets in factories in Lithuania.
Sources close to the new National Ballistics Intelligence Service, which contains intelligence and ballistic reports on every recovered illegal firearm, say at least 250 Baikals have been recovered in the last two years. But at around £2,500 on the street, the Russian pistol is out of reach for some members of urban gangs. Many of the weapons held in the NBIS armory are pre-war semi automatic pistols, which despite their decrepit state have still killed and wounded. It is these type of weapons - which can be bought for a few hundred pounds - that are often used by young men in London, Manchester, and Liverpool. In Manchester, where certain areas are not penetrated by police, getting hold of a gun is easier than in London.
Home Office data shows gun crime is up since last year, despite the doubling of the sentence, to a five year minimum, for possessing or supplying firearms.
The last three years have seen the ages of those carrying and using weapons fall dramatically from around 27 to 16 and 17 year olds. A 13-year-old boy became the youngest to be charged with possession of a firearm this year.
· This article was amended on Tuesday October 21 2008. Homophone corner: "The boy's experience gave credence to anecdotal evidence that criminals are forcing younger boys to store their guns to test their metal ... ". This has been corrected.
By Sarah Laville (Guardian)
The Guardian can today reveal that in less than two years this gun was used in at least seven shootings, including one murder, as it was passed between hoods, rented out or stolen by rival street gangs in the UK. Its discovery has added much needed information to senior police officers who admit there is a significant intelligence gap on criminal weaponry.
Unlike many firearms used in London, Manchester and Birmingham, cities that account for 60% of serious gun crime by gangs, RS1 is a real weapon, not a converted replica. Its magazine held commercially manufactured ammunition, rather than "homemade" bullets - something often seen by detectives - and the ageing weapon was probably purchased for between £500 and £1,000.
The trail left by the firearm can be reported following the life sentences handed down yesterday to two street gangsters for murder.
It was discovered on a November morning in 2006 when a teenage boy set off for school telling his mother not to look in his room.
Whether it was something in his tone, or just a mother's instinct, she ignored him. In his bedroom he kept a toy safe for his belongings, and inside she found the gun. She called the police and the firearm was taken away to a forensics laboratory where it was identified as a CZ .32 Colt Model 1927, manufactured by Ceska Zbrojovka of Strakonice, Czechoslovakia.
The gun was loaded, with three live rounds in the magazine. A bullet was lodged in the barrel.
A few weeks later Detective Inspector Dave Manning, of the Metropolitan police's Trident unit, received a telephone call. After more than eight months investigating the murder of a notorious drug dealer, killer and kidnapper called Andrew Wanogho, he had all but given up on receiving such a contact.
His inquiry was fraught with difficulties. At 26, the victim was running a syndicate of teenage armed robbers who would also do his drug running. Shortly before his murder Wanogho complained to the woman he called his "baby mother" - the mother of his child - that he did not have a friend left in the world.
His killing was, on the face of it, just another inner city gangland shooting; the sort officers from Trident deal with all the time but which pass almost un-noticed by the media.
But this inquiry opened a window on to a criminal subculture which exists cheek by jowl with ordinary families in ordinary neighbourhoods; the class A drug dealing, the incredible reach of the criminal networks, the threatening and taking of lives, the kidnappings, sexual violence, extortion and witness intimidation.
And at the heart of it all, the tool used to enforce and protect: the gun.
Wanogho, known as Sparks, was a powerful amateur boxer who had fought successfully in the United States. Held in awe and fear in equal measure by his peers, he was seen as a protector by some but a mercurial and extremely violent man by others.
A Pentecostal pastor described to the 350 people at his funeral in Brockley, south London, how he would push his disabled brother to church each week in a wheelchair. Less was said of his history of violence.
"He was a formidable boxer and would beat people to a pulp and get pleasure out of it," said one source.
He once kidnapped and tortured a bus driver whose brother was a rival drug dealer.
The man was driven to a flat and chained to a radiator before Wanogho held a hot iron against his face. It was all done to intimidate the man's brother into giving up his drug stash. Four years before his murder Wanogho was charged with the murder of a man shot dead outside an east London nightclub. He escaped conviction after two witnesses withdrew their evidence because they were in fear of their lives.
In August 2005, Wanogho survived an assassination attempt as he left a courtroom where he had watched a girlfriend plead guilty to possession of one of his guns in order to save him from jail. Eight months later he was not so lucky.
Manning was convinced the hit on Wanogho in April 2006 had been organised by an inmate at HMP Belmarsh on a mobile phone that was smuggled into the prison system and which, investigations revealed, had made 17,000 calls in seven months.
But facing a wall of silence, Trident officers spent months scanning thousands of pages of mobile records until a pattern emerged. The inmate, Delphon Nicholas, had made a flurry of calls in the hours before the killing to his best friend, a gunman, rapist and drug trafficker called Trevor Dennie.
Both men had fallen out with Wanogho over drugs and women and Dennie was heard telling a friend: "I've had enough of Andy, he's gone too far. He's barred from the ends."
At 1.30am on April 8 2006 Wanogho stepped out of a car outside the home of Nicholas's former girlfriend.
He told Sean Albert, who had driven him, that he was "up for a bit of a shagging".
Albert drove a discreet distance away to wait until he was called again. But Dennie was lying in wait and as Albert pulled up a few houses down the road he heard a series of gun shots in rapid succession.
He looked in his rear view mirror and saw Wanogho, head down, sprinting towards him. But just as he reached the car he crumpled to the ground, hit in the back by a bullet that pierced his heart.
On Wanogho's body police found the incongruous possessions of a Class A drug dealer and gangster - a £17,000 diamond encrusted Cartier watch and £1.11 in cash. They also recovered two of the four bullets fired, including one that had ricocheted off a parked car and landed in a front garden.
The closest they got to the gun, however, was a witness who described seeing Dennie brandishing it over his head at an east London nightclub a few hours later and boasting that he had killed Wanogho.
Eight months on Manning was told that the gun found in a 14-year-old boy's bedroom was his murder weapon. Somehow it had passed from Dennie through several hands to being stored by the boy on the orders of an older hood, probably as some kind of initiation rite. Ballistics tests showed that the .32 caliber handgun had been used in at least seven shootings in less than two years, six in south London and one in Sussex.
On New Year's Eve in 2004 a police officer was responding to a 999 call from a victim of a robbery in Brockley Cross, in the heart of what Dennie described as his "manor". He arrived to find three men nearby, and as he walked up to speak to them, the trio ran. But one man turned, pulled a gun and shot at the constable as he fled.
This time the bullet missed its target. Police made inquiries but never made any headway. No arrests were made and the firearm disappeared back into the shadows.
It emerged 10 months later at the Cube nightclub in Camberwell Green, south London, in a petty dispute. The victim happened to bump into a man as he went to the toilet and was shot in the thigh for his clumsiness.
In April 2006 the handgun reached its zenith with the murder of Wanogho, leaving a bullet lodged in his heart and two others at the scene which provided the vital link. Three weeks after the murder the firearm emerged once more at M-Blax nightclub in Peckham. At around 5.40am in the final hour of clubbing, a group of young men from a north London gang burst into the venue carrying weapons, intent on shooting up their south London rivals.
Clubbers screamed and ran as a gunfight broke out in the crowded club. At least 21 shots were fired and three men were taken to hospital. Cartridges found at the scene matched the firearm found in the boy's bedroom.
By June 2006 the gun had been passed on or stolen once more, its value by now diminished because of its use in a murder. It appeared again at the unlikely venue of Pontins in Camber Sands, when a group of teenagers from the capital travelled to the Sussex holiday camp for an urban music weekend.
Large crowds gathered on the Sunday at the main hip hop stage, but in the midst off the rave the sound of gunshots sent young people running for cover. By the time local police arrived with firearms teams the elusive weapon had melted away into the background once more.
A month later it was back in south London again, when shots were fired at a car. The gun was probably last used in the autumn of 2006 when it was accidentally fired by a would-be gangster.
In the remaining four weeks of its criminal life the firearm was passed into the hands of the teenage boy, who according to sources, was bullied by the hoods because he suffered from Asperger's syndrome.
It provided a forensic treasure trove. "It is quite rare to recover guns at all, so to recover a weapon that is linked to seven shootings is unusual," said Manning. "Everyone talks about guns being available on street corners, but it's not quite as easy as that to get hold of one. It's even more difficult to get hold of real ammunition."
The boy's experience gave credence to anecdotal evidence that criminals are forcing younger boys to store their guns to test their mettle and once the gun was found the teenager was said to be terrified of repercussions. But his mother's actions in calling the police perhaps saved him from being sucked into a life of crime.
Nicholas and Dennie began life sentences for the murder of Wanogho yesterday, closing the final chapter on the story of a gun that ended the life of one veteran gangster before initiating a young boy to follow in his footsteps.
History of gun crime
Intelligence on how many illegal firearms are in use on Britain's streets is limited and sometimes contradictory. Senior officers believe that weapons are often rented out and are therefore linked to multiple offences but in recent times there has been an influx of weapons from eastern Europe, particularly the Russian made 9mm Baikal, a self defence pistol used for firing CS gas which is converted to carry real bullets in factories in Lithuania.
Sources close to the new National Ballistics Intelligence Service, which contains intelligence and ballistic reports on every recovered illegal firearm, say at least 250 Baikals have been recovered in the last two years. But at around £2,500 on the street, the Russian pistol is out of reach for some members of urban gangs. Many of the weapons held in the NBIS armory are pre-war semi automatic pistols, which despite their decrepit state have still killed and wounded. It is these type of weapons - which can be bought for a few hundred pounds - that are often used by young men in London, Manchester, and Liverpool. In Manchester, where certain areas are not penetrated by police, getting hold of a gun is easier than in London.
Home Office data shows gun crime is up since last year, despite the doubling of the sentence, to a five year minimum, for possessing or supplying firearms.
The last three years have seen the ages of those carrying and using weapons fall dramatically from around 27 to 16 and 17 year olds. A 13-year-old boy became the youngest to be charged with possession of a firearm this year.
· This article was amended on Tuesday October 21 2008. Homophone corner: "The boy's experience gave credence to anecdotal evidence that criminals are forcing younger boys to store their guns to test their metal ... ". This has been corrected.
Thursday, 30 October 2008
Freed Colombian MP hostage
Colombian MP flees captivity after eight years
video link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/oct/28/oscar-lizcano-kidnap-colombia
A former Colombian politician kidnapped more than eight years ago by leftwing Farc guerrillas escaped through the jungle with one of his rebel captors in another blow to Latin America's oldest insurgency.
Wearing a tattered black T-shirt and sporting a tangled grey beard, ex-congressman Oscar Lizcano, 63, marched for three days with his jailer before reaching an army post yesterday where the guerrilla surrendered to troops. Speaking to reporters, Lizcano apologised for his incoherent speech, saying his captors had forbidden him to speak.
His escape followed the rescue of French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three Americans and a group of other hostages who were freed in a surprise military operation in July after years in jungle camps. Lizcano's flight illustrated the military pressure facing Farc who have been hurt by informants, bounties for deserters and improved intelligence under Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, who has received billions of dollars in US aid.
Farc, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, was once a powerful army that controlled large areas of the country. But the rebels lost three leaders this year and hundreds of fighters have deserted.
Juan Manuel Santos, the defence minister, said a rebel, known by his alias Moroco, from the group holding Lizcano escaped earlier this month and provided details about his camp.
Troops and police began a rescue operation over the weekend but Lizcano was already on the run.
Lizcano, snatched in 2000 and suffering from jungle diseases, was Farc's longest-held politician. Rebels still hold scores of hostages for political leverage and ransom.
video link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/oct/28/oscar-lizcano-kidnap-colombia
A former Colombian politician kidnapped more than eight years ago by leftwing Farc guerrillas escaped through the jungle with one of his rebel captors in another blow to Latin America's oldest insurgency.
Wearing a tattered black T-shirt and sporting a tangled grey beard, ex-congressman Oscar Lizcano, 63, marched for three days with his jailer before reaching an army post yesterday where the guerrilla surrendered to troops. Speaking to reporters, Lizcano apologised for his incoherent speech, saying his captors had forbidden him to speak.
His escape followed the rescue of French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three Americans and a group of other hostages who were freed in a surprise military operation in July after years in jungle camps. Lizcano's flight illustrated the military pressure facing Farc who have been hurt by informants, bounties for deserters and improved intelligence under Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, who has received billions of dollars in US aid.
Farc, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, was once a powerful army that controlled large areas of the country. But the rebels lost three leaders this year and hundreds of fighters have deserted.
Juan Manuel Santos, the defence minister, said a rebel, known by his alias Moroco, from the group holding Lizcano escaped earlier this month and provided details about his camp.
Troops and police began a rescue operation over the weekend but Lizcano was already on the run.
Lizcano, snatched in 2000 and suffering from jungle diseases, was Farc's longest-held politician. Rebels still hold scores of hostages for political leverage and ransom.
Pilger in the New Statesman
Exercise your rights
John Pilger
Published 23 October 2008
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Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have been "maintaining the fiction" for decades on all aspects of foreign policy. It's time we demanded the truth
In 1992, Mark Higson, the Foreign Office official responsible for Iraq, appeared before the Scott inquiry into the scandal of arms sold illegally to Saddam Hussein. He described a "culture of lying" at the heart of British foreign policymaking. I asked him how frequently ministers and officials lied to parliament.
"It's systemic," he said. "The draft letters I wrote for various ministers were saying that nothing had changed, the embargo on the sale of arms to Iraq was the same."
"Was that true?" I asked.
"No, it wasn't true."
"And your superiors knew it wasn't true?"
"Yes."
"So how much truth did the public get?"
"The public got as much truth as we could squeeze out, given that we told downright lies."
From British involvement with the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to the supply of warplanes to the Indonesian dictator Suharto, knowing he was bombing civilians in East Timor, to the denial of vaccines and other humanitarian aid to the children of Iraq, my experience with the Foreign Office is that Higson was right and remains right.
As I write this, the dispossessed people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean await the decision of the Law Lords, hoping for a repetition of four previous judgments that their brutal expulsion to make way for a US military base was "outrageous", "illegal" and "repugnant". That they must endure yet another appeal is thanks to the Foreign Office - whose legal adviser in 1968, one Anthony Ivall Aust (pronounced "oarst" and since knighted), wrote a secret document headed "Maintaining the fiction". This advised the then Labour government to "argue" the "fiction" that the Chagossians were "only a floating population". Today, the depopulated main island, Diego Garcia, over which the Union Jack flies, serves the "war on terror" as an American interrogation and torture centre.
Obama’s job is to present a benign, even progressive face that will revive America’s democratic pretensions, while ensuring that nothing changes
When you bear this in mind, the US presidential race becomes surreal. The beatification of President Barack Obama is already under way; for it is he who "challenges America to rise up [and] summon 'the better angels of our nature'", says Rolling Stone magazine, reminiscent of the mating calls of Guardian writers to the "mystical" Blair. As ever, the Orwell Inversion Test is necessary. Obama claims that his vast campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, yet he has also received funds from some of the most notorious looters on Wall Street. Moreover, the "dove" and "candidate of change" has voted repeatedly to fund George W Bush's rapacious wars, and now demands more war in Afghanistan while he threatens to bomb Pakistan.
Dismissing the popular democracies in Latin America as a "vacuum" to be filled by the United States, he has endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of the criminal regime in that country to invade its neighbours, notably uppity Venezuela, on Washington's behalf. The British human rights group Justice for Colombia has just published a study concerning Anglo-American backing for the Colombian regime of Álvaro Uribe, which is responsible for more than 90 per cent of all cases of torture. The principal torturers, the "security forces", are trained by the Americans and the British. The Foreign Office replies that it is "improving the human rights record of the military and combating drug trafficking". The study finds not a shred of evidence to support this. Colombian officers with barbaric records, such as those implicated in the murder of a trade union leader, are welcomed to Britain for "seminars".
As in many parts of the world, the British role is that of subcontractor to Washington. The bloody "Plan Colombia" was the design of Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president and inspiration for Blair's and Brown's new Labour. Clinton's administration was at least as violent as Bush's - see Unicef's report that 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of the Anglo-American blockade in the 1990s.
The lesson learned is that no presidential candidate, least of all a Democrat awash with money from America's "banksters", as Franklin Roosevelt called them, can or will challenge a militarised system that controls and rewards him. Obama's job is to present a benign, even progressive face that will revive America's democratic pretensions, internationally and domestically, while ensuring nothing of substance changes.
Among ordinary Americans desperate for a secure life, his skin colour may help him regain this unjustified "trust", even though it is of a similar hue to that of Colin Powell, who lied to the United Nations for Bush and now endorses Obama. As for the rest of us, is it not time we opened our eyes and exercised our right not to be lied to, yet again?
"Heroes: the Films of John Pilger (1970-2007)" is released on DVD on 27 October
www.johnpilger.com
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John Pilger
Published 23 October 2008
21 comments
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Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have been "maintaining the fiction" for decades on all aspects of foreign policy. It's time we demanded the truth
In 1992, Mark Higson, the Foreign Office official responsible for Iraq, appeared before the Scott inquiry into the scandal of arms sold illegally to Saddam Hussein. He described a "culture of lying" at the heart of British foreign policymaking. I asked him how frequently ministers and officials lied to parliament.
"It's systemic," he said. "The draft letters I wrote for various ministers were saying that nothing had changed, the embargo on the sale of arms to Iraq was the same."
"Was that true?" I asked.
"No, it wasn't true."
"And your superiors knew it wasn't true?"
"Yes."
"So how much truth did the public get?"
"The public got as much truth as we could squeeze out, given that we told downright lies."
From British involvement with the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to the supply of warplanes to the Indonesian dictator Suharto, knowing he was bombing civilians in East Timor, to the denial of vaccines and other humanitarian aid to the children of Iraq, my experience with the Foreign Office is that Higson was right and remains right.
As I write this, the dispossessed people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean await the decision of the Law Lords, hoping for a repetition of four previous judgments that their brutal expulsion to make way for a US military base was "outrageous", "illegal" and "repugnant". That they must endure yet another appeal is thanks to the Foreign Office - whose legal adviser in 1968, one Anthony Ivall Aust (pronounced "oarst" and since knighted), wrote a secret document headed "Maintaining the fiction". This advised the then Labour government to "argue" the "fiction" that the Chagossians were "only a floating population". Today, the depopulated main island, Diego Garcia, over which the Union Jack flies, serves the "war on terror" as an American interrogation and torture centre.
Obama’s job is to present a benign, even progressive face that will revive America’s democratic pretensions, while ensuring that nothing changes
When you bear this in mind, the US presidential race becomes surreal. The beatification of President Barack Obama is already under way; for it is he who "challenges America to rise up [and] summon 'the better angels of our nature'", says Rolling Stone magazine, reminiscent of the mating calls of Guardian writers to the "mystical" Blair. As ever, the Orwell Inversion Test is necessary. Obama claims that his vast campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, yet he has also received funds from some of the most notorious looters on Wall Street. Moreover, the "dove" and "candidate of change" has voted repeatedly to fund George W Bush's rapacious wars, and now demands more war in Afghanistan while he threatens to bomb Pakistan.
Dismissing the popular democracies in Latin America as a "vacuum" to be filled by the United States, he has endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of the criminal regime in that country to invade its neighbours, notably uppity Venezuela, on Washington's behalf. The British human rights group Justice for Colombia has just published a study concerning Anglo-American backing for the Colombian regime of Álvaro Uribe, which is responsible for more than 90 per cent of all cases of torture. The principal torturers, the "security forces", are trained by the Americans and the British. The Foreign Office replies that it is "improving the human rights record of the military and combating drug trafficking". The study finds not a shred of evidence to support this. Colombian officers with barbaric records, such as those implicated in the murder of a trade union leader, are welcomed to Britain for "seminars".
As in many parts of the world, the British role is that of subcontractor to Washington. The bloody "Plan Colombia" was the design of Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president and inspiration for Blair's and Brown's new Labour. Clinton's administration was at least as violent as Bush's - see Unicef's report that 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of the Anglo-American blockade in the 1990s.
The lesson learned is that no presidential candidate, least of all a Democrat awash with money from America's "banksters", as Franklin Roosevelt called them, can or will challenge a militarised system that controls and rewards him. Obama's job is to present a benign, even progressive face that will revive America's democratic pretensions, internationally and domestically, while ensuring nothing of substance changes.
Among ordinary Americans desperate for a secure life, his skin colour may help him regain this unjustified "trust", even though it is of a similar hue to that of Colin Powell, who lied to the United Nations for Bush and now endorses Obama. As for the rest of us, is it not time we opened our eyes and exercised our right not to be lied to, yet again?
"Heroes: the Films of John Pilger (1970-2007)" is released on DVD on 27 October
www.johnpilger.com
Post this article to
Israel and Hamas, form New statesman
Israel v Hamas
Edward Platt
Published 30 October 2008
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Schools in Hebron are being closed and other charitable organisations put under pressure by an Israeli state convinced they are the conduits for Hamas funding and propaganda. But the result is more fear and hatred
Arm of the state: Israeli soldiers stop children and their teacher (in red cap) from reaching their school in Hebron.
The Israeli soldiers came to raid the sewing workshop in the middle of the night. Lorne Friesen, a 66-year-old Canadian man who used to be chaplain in a psychiatric hospital in Winkler, Manitoba, was one of two representatives of the Hebron branch of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who were staying in the building. The nightwatchman rang him at 1.30am and he and his colleague walked across the playground from their quarters in the girls’ school to the orphanage, where 120 girls were sleeping in the dormitories on the third and fourth floors. By the time they arrived, the soldiers had entered the sewing workshop in the basement. There was nothing that Friesen could do to stop them emptying the building, but he deployed the weapon favoured by the so-called “internationals” who attempt to keep the peace in the West Bank city of Hebron: he took out a camera and began to film and photograph the operation.
The Israeli army claimed that ICS’s charitable activities were only a front; its true aim was to “strengthen the terror organisation Hamas”
The raid, which took place on 30 April this year, was the latest stage in the Israeli army's campaign against an organisation called the Islamic Charitable Society of Hebron (ICS). It had begun on 26 February, when soldiers visited its premises and left military orders confiscating its assets and transferring ownership to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The news was greeted with shock and dismay in Hebron, where ICS is a significant presence. It runs two orphanages and three schools in Hebron, which provide for 1,940 children, 240 of whom are orphans. In October, it was planning to open a new girls' school, which had cost $2m to build. In the villages outside the city, it maintains other orphanages and kindergartens. In total, it employs 450 people. To support its charitable work, it runs a series of revenue-generating projects - a dairy, two bakeries, and a range of properties in Hebron including a warehouse that stores imported goods, a mall in the city centre and an apartment building with 30 flats.
Its income is supplemented by charitable donations. The practice of zakat, or charitable giving, is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the five duties a Muslim must observe. Every Muslim is obliged to donate 2.5 per cent of his or her income each year, and ICS received donations from the same range of sources as most Islamic charities - local groups, wealthy individuals in the Palestinian diaspora or the Gulf States, and international charities, including several in Britain.
Yet the Israeli army claimed that ICS's charitable activities were only a front; its true aim was to "strengthen the terror organisation Hamas", and it accused ICS of being the "largest group in Hamas's network of charitable committees". ICS's schools and orphanages had educated generations of children in the spirit of jihad and instilled "the mentality of Hamas as a superior value". Major Oron Mincha, of the Israeli Central Command in Judea and Samaria - the biblical term that the IDF uses to describe the West Bank - maintains that most of the suicide bombers that have attacked Israel in the past 15 years have been sent by Hamas, and many of them have come from Hebron. Even its summer schools are considered breeding grounds for terrorists: "Some of the biggest terrorists in the West Bank in the past few years learned terrorism at summer schools organised by these charitable institutions," he says.
The Israelis placed the school governor under "administrative detention", which means he has been arrested without charge. In his absence, I spoke to an English teacher at ICS's boys' school in Hebron. Rasheed Rasheed denies that ICS is connected to Hamas in any way, and points out that it was founded in 1962, 25 years before Hamas was established. "Just because some employees there are Hamas-affiliated, it doesn't mean the whole society is Hamas," he told me, when I visited the girls' orphanage in August. "You can find Hamas members in Hebron Municipality, in Hebron University - everywhere: so why pick on this charity?"
Rasheed, at 37 years old, is a short, intense man, with close-cropped dark hair. He is plainly furious at the way his school has been treated. He denies that it teaches hatred or incites violence against Israel; he says they are doing a difficult job "in the most moderate way they can", and he adds that all 56 teachers at the schools signed a statement saying they were willing to undergo an investigation by a credible objective organisation. It was the summer holidays, and the classrooms and kitchens on the ground floor were empty, but he invited me to return in term time. "Come and see our curriculum," he said. "Come and see our classes. Question our students. What are we teaching them? My curriculum is made by Macmillan: is Macmillan a terrorist group?"
ICS's lawyer, Jawad Bulos, used all the measures available to him. First, he appealed against the closure notices to the civil administration of Judea and Samaria - the branch of the Israeli government which runs the occupied territories of the West Bank - but it dismissed the case. Then he took the case to the Israeli High Court, which set a hearing for 23 October, but rejected the request for a "prohibiting order", which would have prevented the army from carrying out its orders. The court has now postponed the hearing; the Israeli army notes that the court "does not see any special urgency in the matter" and concedes that the hearing might be delayed indefinitely. If it is ever heard, then Jawad Bulos has no doubt that it will uphold the army's actions. "I applied to the court because it's the only legal procedure I have, but I don't have the tiniest shred of hope that they will remedy the situation."
Earlier this year, on 5 March, the IDF raided the large warehouse ICS owned in the al-Harayeq district of the city. The army had cut a hole in the front door and removed its contents on to eight lorries. When I visited, the long stretches of shelving on the ground floor were bare when I visited, except for two packs of pink pencils – all that remained of an estimated $250,000 worth of clothing and stationery. Upstairs, there were shoes strewn across the floor, and odds and ends of clothing had been dumped inside a case made of cellophane wrapped around a metal frame – the one pallet that they hadn’t been able to take.
Outside, the army had knocked down a wall of the warehouse next door. They had removed two industrial refrigerators and ransacked the workers' kitchens. The cupboard doors were standing open and the tins and packets inside had been opened and upended - the sink was full of beans and chickpeas and there were dark trails of ground spices winding across the floor. A rich, faintly rancid smell hung in the air.
“We went to that school for two years, and in that time I never heard anyone talk about Hamas or Fatah – you just went to school and you learnt”
On the same night the army raided the bakery and the new girls' school, which stands at the end of a deserted road, on the crest of the hill above the warehouses. It was finished, except for the playgrounds which needed surfacing, but the gates had been welded shut. "We told them that this school was paid for by Hamas and we won't let you open a Hamas school," says Oron Mincha. "We don't want them to study the Hamas way, because we don't want them to be terrorists. We want them to be regular people."
The raids were condemned within Israel - "the Israeli occupation has not been seen for a long time in such a ludicrous and inhumane light," said the columnist Gideon Levy - and attracted the attention of Hebron's resident "internationals". The city is the only place in the West Bank where Palestinans and settlers live side by side. The Hebron Protocol, which was signed in 1997 as part of the Oslo Accords, divided it in two. Israel ceded control of an area known as H1, which covers 80 per cent of the city and is home to 130,000 Palestinians, but it retained control of a smaller section designated H2, where as many as 600 settlers, guarded by a detachment of 3,000 soldiers, live among 20,000 Palestinians. Relations between the two are extremely tense, and during the past ten years many foreign organisations have taken up residence in Hebron - there is a quasi-official observers' mission, called the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, which is made up of volunteers from six participating countries, and three organisations which believe in non-violent direct action, including the Christian Peacemaker Teams.
CPT, which calls on Christians of all denominations to devote "the same discipline and self-sacrifice to non-violent peacemaking that armies devote to war", is based in H2, in the old city of Hebron. Its volunteers, who are often elderly or retired, patrol the streets in red caps, attempting to defuse confrontations between settlers, soldiers and Palestinians. In March, they turned their attention to the plight of Hebron's orphans. To begin with, they enlisted the help of Israeli human rights groups and foreign peace campaigners, such as the Irish Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and the former US president Jimmy Carter, yet they found it harder to enlist the help of Palestinians. "Everyone was afraid that if they were seen as helping this organisation, they would be closed down or sent to prison," says Dianne Roe, a CPT peace campaigner who has been based in Hebron since 1995.
CPT members slept in the orphanages on the night of 31 March and 1 April, in the hope of deterring the threatened raid. Roe was impressed by what she saw: "All the children that we talked with were well cared for, they were bright - we went into the classrooms and it was obvious that this was a well-run institution. There was no evidence of any kind of hate material - just big signs in the cafeteria about giving thanks before a meal and after a meal."
During her visits to the orphanage, Roe also found the perfect figurehead for her attempts to publicise the story. Rabiha Abusnineh is a Texan-Palestinian girl who grew up in Houston and moved back to Hebron with her family in August 2006, when she was 15. Her father, Najaf, left Hebron 30 years ago and worked as a chemical engineer and in property. By his own account, he made a lot of money, and when he came back to Hebron two years ago, he built his "dream house" on the top of a hill overlooking the city centre.
It didn't take him long to choose a school for his two teenage daughters, Muna and Rabiha. The al-Shari'ya Secondary School for Girls had the highest academic standards in the city and the lowest student-teacher ratio. What's more, it was open - many of the state schools, which are administered by the PA, were closed because of a teachers' strike. "Implicitly, there was a religious reason, too," Najaf says. "We're Muslims and we tend to go to Islamic schools. But the main reason was that it's academically strong."
In Houston, Rabiha was treasurer of the student council and liked going to the mall with her friends. She found it difficult adapting to a different culture and learning a new language, but with her classmates’ help, she managed it. “I hated my situation, but they helped me through it,” she recalls. By the beginning of this year, she was top of her class, and she had begun to feel settled at school. She was horrified when she discovered that the Israeli authorities were planning to close it. “We went to that school for two years, and in that time I never heard anyone talk about Hamas or Fatah, nothing. You just went to school and you learnt. And because it’s so much harder than in the United States, everyone just focused on learning. I never heard that our school had any association with Hamas.”
She and her fellow students believed that ICS had fulfilled all its legal obligations: its accounts were open for inspection and all its funds were properly accounted for. "If they said that they were going to spend this amount of money on food or clothes for the orphans, that's what they did. Everyone thought that once they'd checked the records, they'd leave the school alone. But it shows that they're doing this for no reason - just so they can put 4,000 orphans on the street, with no homes, no food, nothing. That's the really inhumane part of it. There's really no solid reason."
A few days before the deadline of 1 April, Dianne Roe filmed Rabiha Abusnineh making a plea on behalf of her school. She sent the tape and an accompanying letter to the Oprah Winfrey Show. "I have been taught to stand up for what I believe in and what I believe has nothing to do with politics because I've always been neutral. But Oprah, by studying at this school and seeing everything that is provided, I cannot imagine what life is going to be like if it closes down, so I will stand by them to the very end until they get back their rights," she wrote, in the inimitably breathless style of the American teenager she used to be. Rabiha wanted to repay the kindness of the girls who had helped her when she arrived at the school, and she said she wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that there are 4,000 orphans "who won't have anywhere to go, and won't have food to eat".
Had everything gone to plan, Rabiha would have become an international celebrity – the public face of the campaign to save the schools and orphanages. Unfortunately, her tape and letter were not picked up by the international media. The video was posted on YouTube, but four months later, it had been watched only 90 times.
The Israeli high court delayed the closure and confiscation orders for several days, but on 7 April, it granted the Israeli military an "indefinite delay" to provide full justification for its actions. On 10 April, two Israeli officers visited the sewing workshop, where the orphans and students of the girls' school produce women's clothing with the aim of learning a craft, and earning some extra income. A week later, it raided the second bakery, and destroyed the oven. It also evicted the tenants of al-Huda mall, which lies at the bottom of Ain Sara Street, close to the two green towers that dominate the centre of Hebron. Signs on the street frontage advertise the businesses that used to occupy the mall - a physiotherapist, a computer store and a bookshop or library - but the shops in the atrium beyond the entrance from the street are sealed and the floor is littered with discarded cardboard boxes.
The only units still occupied are the linked pair of shops that face the street, called Mama Care and Pretty Woman. The proprietor, who doesn't want to be named for fear of antagonising the Israelis, hired the same lawyer as ICS. Jawad Bulos presented documents proving the commercial contracts had been signed before 2000, when the Israelis first declared the organisation illegal. The day before the mall was due to close, she learnt that Jawad Bulos had secured their right to stay open.
By 1 April, almost all of the other occupants had left the building. The only one to remain was an English-trained cardiologist who runs a private clinic on the first floor. After seven years of building up his patient list and establishing his reputation, Dr Al Ashab didn't want to have to move and start again elsewhere. He knew he was committing an offence by remaining in the building, but he seemed prepared to rely on the fact that the Israeli soldiers have always visited the mall in the morning, while he only works there in the afternoon. He had no interest in the legal and political wranglings that had emptied the building and he had no idea whether his landlord is affiliated to Hamas or not. "I'm busy and I'm not interested in politics. And it's not my fault if they are. I just pay them the rent and they don't interfere with me. I would pay rent to the military authority if I had to."
On Wednesday 16 April, the IDF said that the sewing workshop would be closed within a fortnight. Lorne Friesen thought that they might not raid the workshop during term time, but the army was punctilious in observing its deadline – the soldiers arrived at the orphanage on the night it expired. When Friesen went outside the building, he discovered that they had closed off the street and were loading the contents of the sewing workshop on to three 40ft-long trailers parked outside among the jeeps and personnel carriers. As well as the racks of finished clothes, the bolts of cloth and the sewing machines, they took the phone and desk from the office and the paintings from the walls. They brought in grinders to cut up the long tables which were used for measuring cloth, and they carried the parts outside on a forklift truck that they had brought on one of the trailers.
During the course of the operation, Friesen looked up at the dormitories on the third and fourth floors and saw faces of the staff or children silhouetted in the windows. Given that some of the soldiers were wearing camouflage paint, he was surprised that they didn't object to him filming them at work, but most of the time, they ignored the two elderly Canadian men who were moving between them. He posted the video on YouTube and at one point it captures his colleague shouting at the soldiers. "So this is what you call fighting terrorism?" he says, as they pass bolts of cloth from hand to hand through the hall and the front door of the orphanage. "You guys are the ones who are terrorising people."
Friesen believes that the soldiers were so convinced that the organisation was affiliated with Hamas, and thus posed a threat to Israeli security, that they had no choice but to destroy it. Yet Friesen saw no evidence that they were right. During the time he spent at the schools and orphanages, he never saw any "hate material", and he said the conduct of the students was "admirable". He got the impression that ICS ran a "superior-quality service". "There is an atmosphere of deep devotion and dedication and the staff have a strong commitment to caring for the needy. The buildings were excellent quality and the grounds were neatly kept. So to have their property systematically and deliberately vandalised is deeply demoralising."
By the time the soldiers left the building, it was getting light. Soon afterwards, the first teachers arrived to assess the damage. The soldiers had confiscated $45,000 worth of goods; two days later the staff of ICS found out what they had done with them. "They had driven the trucks to the city dump and thrown everything into the garbage," says Friesen.
There was no evidence of hate material – just big signs in the cafeteria about giving thanks before a meal and after a meal
In the west, Hamas is regarded as a terrorist organisation, but to many Palestinians it has a very different image. Its origins lie in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928, with the aim of establishing Islamic rule in all Muslim countries, and eventually uniting them in a single state, representing the umma, or Muslim nation. According to Khaled Hroub, author of Hamas: a Beginner's Guide and director of the Cambridge Arab Media Project, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1946 in Jerusalem. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, it divided into two parts - one in the West Bank, which was under Jordanian control, and one in Gaza, which was governed by Egypt. After the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel gained control of all of historic Palestine, the two halves of the organisation began to merge.
At the time, Palestinian politics was dominated by the secular nationalism of Yasser Arafat's PLO, but during the Eighties, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood began to establish a foothold. When the first intifada broke out in 1987, its leaders in Gaza set up the Islamic Resistance Movement, otherwise known as Hamas; they were responding to pressure from within their organisation to confront Israel, and at the same time, they were hoping to direct and lead the uprising.
The new organisation shared the Muslim Brotherhood's aim of Islamicising Palestinian society, but it differed from its philosophy in one crucial respect: it reserved the right to commit violence. "The movement struggles against Israel because it is the aggressing, usurping and oppressing state that day and night hoists the rifle in the face of our sons and daughters," said Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of Hamas's founders, who was assassinated by an Israeli helicopter gunship in Gaza in 2004. Yassin, who was paraplegic and confined to a wheel-chair, was regarded as Hamas's spiritual leader, though the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, called him the "mastermind of Palestinian terror".
In the past eight years, according to the Israeli authorities, Hamas has killed 373 Israelis in the West Bank and Israel, including 48 members of the security forces. Yet at the same time as sending suicide bombers to attack Israeli civilians, it has continued the charitable work that forms the other part of its remit. It sponsors schools, medical centres and orphanages, and it has built up a reputation for fairness and incorruptibility. According to Hroub, the pattern is repeated across the Arab world – the “official” zakat institutions established by governments to collect and redistribute charitable money are generally regarded as corrupt, whereas the organisations run by Islamist movements, such as Hamas, are seen as “clean-handed and trustworthy”.
Mincha says the IDF moved against charitable institutions such as ICS because it had found "a very tight connection between the charity movement and terror, and the connection is money". In fact, the connection is complicated, and far from clear. Hroub says that Hamas has two sorts of income - one for the movement, which includes its military wing, and one for its charities and social work that goes directly to the organisations without passing through Hamas channels. "Those organisations have public bank accounts and work transparently. Their affiliation to Hamas is moral, but not official. Hamas is happy with the distance between itself and those organisations, so they function without the threat of being closed," says Hroub. The claim that the charities fund Hamas's military activity is weak and unfounded, he adds: "It simply doesn't need to jeopardise the charities for things that it could do in a much simpler way."
Yet it is not the first time that Israel has attempted to shut down the network of Islamic charities that do so much to sustain life in the West Bank. They moved against the "zakat committees" in 1995, after the signing of the Oslo Accords which led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The campaign was derailed by the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, but Hamas's unexpected victory in the legislative elections in the West Bank in January 2006 provided an opportunity to renew it. Although the elections were widely acknowledged to be free and fair, neither Israel nor the so-called Quartet on the Middle East - the United States, Russia, the EU and the United Nations - were prepared to recognise a Palestinian Authority run by what they regard as a terrorist organisation. Its first year in office was beset by problems: Fatah-affiliated militias, backed by Israel and the US, attempted to overthrow the government, and the internecine struggle erupted into violence in Gaza in June 2007. When "the Battle for Gaza" was over, the dividing lines in Palestinian society had been drawn: Hamas retained control of Gaza, and Fatah regained power in the West Bank. The campaign against Hamas, in all its forms, was soon renewed.
On 18 June 2007, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, outlawed the executive and military wings of Hamas and, in August, the PA dissolved 103 charities and non-governmental organisations, on the grounds that they had “committed administrative, financial or legal violations”. In October 2007, it decided to dismantle all the West Bank’s charitable organisations. The PA said Hamas had been using the zakat committees as a means of transferring funds to its supporters in the West Bank, and said they had become financial empires, serving their own corrupt political ends. In December, the PA closed dozens of charities, and announced the creation of 11 new committees to replace them. Hamas called it a “declaration of war on the poor and needy”.
On 17 December, an Israeli military court sentenced Husseini Awad, the former head of the Ramallah Charity Foundation, to three years in prison; it was the first time that anyone had been sentenced to jail for their involvement in "civilian support of the Hamas terror organisation". The verdict of the military court was reported in an IDF briefing. It said that Awad, a 62-year-old paediatrician, "stood at the head of an organisation that had many branches", and controlled a budget of millions of shekels a year. He "received money from Hamas financing overseas" and made monthly payments to 3,200 orphans and 15,000 impoverished families. "Any group that assists a terrorist organisation to recruit support . . . and carry out terrorist attacks is a dangerous group," said the judgment. "The fact that the committee recruits this support by means of assisting the needy does not negate the danger of these actions." It didn't matter that Awad had not "committed violence"; he did not "protest the way in which Hamas had used his organisation".
The closures soon spread to other cities in the West Bank. In July this year, the IDF raided and closed various institutions in Nablus, including a medical centre and Nablus Mall, which was said to be owned by a company with ties to the city's former mayor, Adli Yaish - a Mercedes dealer turned politician who has been in prison for a year. A week later, the army arrested Abdul Rahim Hanbali, the head of the largest zakat committee in the West Bank. Hanbali's organisation distributed $2m in alms in 2006 - a figure that fell to $1.2m in 2007, partly because of a drop in donations from American-Palestinians, who were concerned that they would be breaking anti-terrorism legislation by sending money. Neither Hanbali nor the Nablus zakat organisation appears on any public US government terrorist blacklist, but in the world after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the fact that it was a Muslim charity was enough to arouse concern.
In Hebron, the closures continued throughout the summer. In May, the Palestinian Authority froze the bank accounts of an orphanage in the village of Beit Ummar, outside Hebron, and the Israeli army arrested two of its employees. In June, ICS schools and kindergartens in two other villages outside Hebron were closed, and on 6 August, the Palestinian Authority sent 45 police officers armed with guns and teargas into the orphanage in Beit Ummar. When one employee asked to see a written order authorising the raid, soldiers beat him with an electric rod. Another volunteer told the Christian Peacemaker Teams that the forces conducted the raid "in a savage way": "Even the Israeli soldiers do not treat the employees like this."
The PA says that it is merely implementing the law, but its actions confirmed what many Palestinians already believe: that it is just another layer of the occupation. Rabiha’s father, a well-built man who wears the hammer-loop jeans and faded work jackets of the classic American labourer, maintains that the Palestinians are wrong to regard the creation of the state of Israel as the naqba that blighted their future. He believes that the real catastrophe was the signing of the Oslo Accords that led to the creation of the PA. He doesn’t have to look far for evidence of what he regards as its endemic corruption. His four-storey house has its own internal lift and windows modelled on a design from a French chateau, yet it is overshadowed by the vast concrete shell of a half-built basketball stadium that stands next door.
So far, the project has cost $17m of aid money provided by the French government, but Najaf Abusnineh says it will never be completed because it was built in the wrong place for a spectator venue, on a small plot on a hilltop, with no parking. To make matters worse, it overlooks a government compound that might attract gunfire in the event of fighting. "You cannot say that this is a government," says Najaf, scornfully. "They are a puppet government, a pawn in the hands of Olmert and George Bush, and whatever they do, isn't for the benefit of the Palestinian people - it's with the aim of making themselves rich and holding on to the chair."
Meanwhile the ICS's lawyer, Jawad Bulos, is placing his hopes on the negotiations he is conducting between the PA and the Israelis. "We have to find a way of addressing their fears - we have to find an acceptable solution that will save the association and put an end to the suffering of the people who need its services. Otherwise, it will be a disaster in Hebron."
Speaking for the Israelis, Major Mincha points out that they haven't closed any open schools in Hebron or elsewhere, and insists that they wouldn't close a school without ensuring there was adequate provision elsewhere. "I can assure you that there are enough classrooms and enough teachers in the West Bank for every single Palestinian child. Our civil command checks this sort of thing all the time: we make sure that all the children are studying."
Such arguments count for little in Hebron. The ICS schools opened at the beginning of the term on 24 August, but Rasheed Rasheed says they are not likely to survive for long. "I'm sure that the Israelis won't come near the schools and orphanages again, because they don't want to cause themselves headaches with the western media, but I can assure you that they will die automatically, due to a shortage of money." None of the teachers and other staff has been paid for six months, and Rasheed predicts that at least ten will leave in the next school year. He is planning to stay on for a year, but he has a wife and two daughters to support and eventually he will be forced to look for another job. He is tired of the political disputes that have brought his school to the brink of closure. "It's not Hamas or Israel that's going to pay the price - it's my students. What does a child have to do with Hamas or Fatah or Israel? He doesn't know anything yet. Why should a six-year-old boy pay for Hamas's agenda, or Fatah's agenda, or Israel's agenda?"
For the time being, the Palestinian Authority has appointed nine people to the board of ICS who are not affiliated to any party, but they have refused to take up the posts until they receive guarantees that they will not be arrested, and the organisation can no longer access its own bank accounts or reach its funds. The army claims it is undermining Hamas's ability to raise funds, making it more difficult for the organisation to attack Israel, and yet it acknowledges that the group is far from beaten. In a briefing document released to the press, it says that Hamas is building "its forces in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley in preparation for a potential takeover and to broaden its influence in Israel and throughout the region".
He believes the real catastrophe was the signing of the Oslo Accords that led to
the creation of the Palestinian Authority
There is a danger that the current campaign might backfire - each time Israel or the PA dismantles a charity committee and destroys a source of essential services that cannot be replicated, it increases dissatisfaction with Israel and its so-called "partner for peace". Rasheed Rasheed believes that the army's actions are the best advertisement that Hamas could hope for. "If Israel thinks they are destroying Hamas by doing things like this, then they are mistaken," he says. "If there is someone to be blamed for supporting Hamas, I blame Israel. What are they going to get out of this? More pain for the Palestinians - and then what? More hatred of Israel. The Palestinian children don't need a curriculum of incitement and hatred - the Israeli killings and shootings and checkpoints are their curriculum."
Edward Platt is the author of "Leadville" and a contributing writer of the New Statesman
hebron timeline
1962 Islamic Charitable Society of Hebron (ICS) formed with Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian authorisation
September 2006 A Birzeit University poll shows Muslim NGOs and charities provide 20 per cent of food and financial assistance to Palestine's poor
June/July 2006 The UN records four raids on ICS buildings by the Israel Defence Forces
17 July 2007 The Islamic Society for Orphan Sponsorship, a charity in Hebron not affiliated with the ICS, is raided and closed
18 June 2007 Mahmoud Abbas dissolves 103 charities and NGOs
26 February 2008 The Israeli army issues closure and confiscation notices against the ICS
5 March 2008 An ICS warehouse, bakery, and girls' school are raided
April 2008 Tenants of al-Huda mall evicted;
destruction of a second ICS bakery; and the Hebron girls' orphanage sewing workshop ransacked
8 May 2008 International human rights organisations endorse ICS
4 June 2008 Closure of ICS schools and kindergartens outside Hebron
July 2008: Closures and raids spread to other West Bank cities.
6 August 2008 The Palestinian Authority raids ICS orphanage in Beit Ummar
Research by Samira Shackle
Edward Platt
Published 30 October 2008
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Schools in Hebron are being closed and other charitable organisations put under pressure by an Israeli state convinced they are the conduits for Hamas funding and propaganda. But the result is more fear and hatred
Arm of the state: Israeli soldiers stop children and their teacher (in red cap) from reaching their school in Hebron.
The Israeli soldiers came to raid the sewing workshop in the middle of the night. Lorne Friesen, a 66-year-old Canadian man who used to be chaplain in a psychiatric hospital in Winkler, Manitoba, was one of two representatives of the Hebron branch of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who were staying in the building. The nightwatchman rang him at 1.30am and he and his colleague walked across the playground from their quarters in the girls’ school to the orphanage, where 120 girls were sleeping in the dormitories on the third and fourth floors. By the time they arrived, the soldiers had entered the sewing workshop in the basement. There was nothing that Friesen could do to stop them emptying the building, but he deployed the weapon favoured by the so-called “internationals” who attempt to keep the peace in the West Bank city of Hebron: he took out a camera and began to film and photograph the operation.
The Israeli army claimed that ICS’s charitable activities were only a front; its true aim was to “strengthen the terror organisation Hamas”
The raid, which took place on 30 April this year, was the latest stage in the Israeli army's campaign against an organisation called the Islamic Charitable Society of Hebron (ICS). It had begun on 26 February, when soldiers visited its premises and left military orders confiscating its assets and transferring ownership to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The news was greeted with shock and dismay in Hebron, where ICS is a significant presence. It runs two orphanages and three schools in Hebron, which provide for 1,940 children, 240 of whom are orphans. In October, it was planning to open a new girls' school, which had cost $2m to build. In the villages outside the city, it maintains other orphanages and kindergartens. In total, it employs 450 people. To support its charitable work, it runs a series of revenue-generating projects - a dairy, two bakeries, and a range of properties in Hebron including a warehouse that stores imported goods, a mall in the city centre and an apartment building with 30 flats.
Its income is supplemented by charitable donations. The practice of zakat, or charitable giving, is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the five duties a Muslim must observe. Every Muslim is obliged to donate 2.5 per cent of his or her income each year, and ICS received donations from the same range of sources as most Islamic charities - local groups, wealthy individuals in the Palestinian diaspora or the Gulf States, and international charities, including several in Britain.
Yet the Israeli army claimed that ICS's charitable activities were only a front; its true aim was to "strengthen the terror organisation Hamas", and it accused ICS of being the "largest group in Hamas's network of charitable committees". ICS's schools and orphanages had educated generations of children in the spirit of jihad and instilled "the mentality of Hamas as a superior value". Major Oron Mincha, of the Israeli Central Command in Judea and Samaria - the biblical term that the IDF uses to describe the West Bank - maintains that most of the suicide bombers that have attacked Israel in the past 15 years have been sent by Hamas, and many of them have come from Hebron. Even its summer schools are considered breeding grounds for terrorists: "Some of the biggest terrorists in the West Bank in the past few years learned terrorism at summer schools organised by these charitable institutions," he says.
The Israelis placed the school governor under "administrative detention", which means he has been arrested without charge. In his absence, I spoke to an English teacher at ICS's boys' school in Hebron. Rasheed Rasheed denies that ICS is connected to Hamas in any way, and points out that it was founded in 1962, 25 years before Hamas was established. "Just because some employees there are Hamas-affiliated, it doesn't mean the whole society is Hamas," he told me, when I visited the girls' orphanage in August. "You can find Hamas members in Hebron Municipality, in Hebron University - everywhere: so why pick on this charity?"
Rasheed, at 37 years old, is a short, intense man, with close-cropped dark hair. He is plainly furious at the way his school has been treated. He denies that it teaches hatred or incites violence against Israel; he says they are doing a difficult job "in the most moderate way they can", and he adds that all 56 teachers at the schools signed a statement saying they were willing to undergo an investigation by a credible objective organisation. It was the summer holidays, and the classrooms and kitchens on the ground floor were empty, but he invited me to return in term time. "Come and see our curriculum," he said. "Come and see our classes. Question our students. What are we teaching them? My curriculum is made by Macmillan: is Macmillan a terrorist group?"
ICS's lawyer, Jawad Bulos, used all the measures available to him. First, he appealed against the closure notices to the civil administration of Judea and Samaria - the branch of the Israeli government which runs the occupied territories of the West Bank - but it dismissed the case. Then he took the case to the Israeli High Court, which set a hearing for 23 October, but rejected the request for a "prohibiting order", which would have prevented the army from carrying out its orders. The court has now postponed the hearing; the Israeli army notes that the court "does not see any special urgency in the matter" and concedes that the hearing might be delayed indefinitely. If it is ever heard, then Jawad Bulos has no doubt that it will uphold the army's actions. "I applied to the court because it's the only legal procedure I have, but I don't have the tiniest shred of hope that they will remedy the situation."
Earlier this year, on 5 March, the IDF raided the large warehouse ICS owned in the al-Harayeq district of the city. The army had cut a hole in the front door and removed its contents on to eight lorries. When I visited, the long stretches of shelving on the ground floor were bare when I visited, except for two packs of pink pencils – all that remained of an estimated $250,000 worth of clothing and stationery. Upstairs, there were shoes strewn across the floor, and odds and ends of clothing had been dumped inside a case made of cellophane wrapped around a metal frame – the one pallet that they hadn’t been able to take.
Outside, the army had knocked down a wall of the warehouse next door. They had removed two industrial refrigerators and ransacked the workers' kitchens. The cupboard doors were standing open and the tins and packets inside had been opened and upended - the sink was full of beans and chickpeas and there were dark trails of ground spices winding across the floor. A rich, faintly rancid smell hung in the air.
“We went to that school for two years, and in that time I never heard anyone talk about Hamas or Fatah – you just went to school and you learnt”
On the same night the army raided the bakery and the new girls' school, which stands at the end of a deserted road, on the crest of the hill above the warehouses. It was finished, except for the playgrounds which needed surfacing, but the gates had been welded shut. "We told them that this school was paid for by Hamas and we won't let you open a Hamas school," says Oron Mincha. "We don't want them to study the Hamas way, because we don't want them to be terrorists. We want them to be regular people."
The raids were condemned within Israel - "the Israeli occupation has not been seen for a long time in such a ludicrous and inhumane light," said the columnist Gideon Levy - and attracted the attention of Hebron's resident "internationals". The city is the only place in the West Bank where Palestinans and settlers live side by side. The Hebron Protocol, which was signed in 1997 as part of the Oslo Accords, divided it in two. Israel ceded control of an area known as H1, which covers 80 per cent of the city and is home to 130,000 Palestinians, but it retained control of a smaller section designated H2, where as many as 600 settlers, guarded by a detachment of 3,000 soldiers, live among 20,000 Palestinians. Relations between the two are extremely tense, and during the past ten years many foreign organisations have taken up residence in Hebron - there is a quasi-official observers' mission, called the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, which is made up of volunteers from six participating countries, and three organisations which believe in non-violent direct action, including the Christian Peacemaker Teams.
CPT, which calls on Christians of all denominations to devote "the same discipline and self-sacrifice to non-violent peacemaking that armies devote to war", is based in H2, in the old city of Hebron. Its volunteers, who are often elderly or retired, patrol the streets in red caps, attempting to defuse confrontations between settlers, soldiers and Palestinians. In March, they turned their attention to the plight of Hebron's orphans. To begin with, they enlisted the help of Israeli human rights groups and foreign peace campaigners, such as the Irish Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and the former US president Jimmy Carter, yet they found it harder to enlist the help of Palestinians. "Everyone was afraid that if they were seen as helping this organisation, they would be closed down or sent to prison," says Dianne Roe, a CPT peace campaigner who has been based in Hebron since 1995.
CPT members slept in the orphanages on the night of 31 March and 1 April, in the hope of deterring the threatened raid. Roe was impressed by what she saw: "All the children that we talked with were well cared for, they were bright - we went into the classrooms and it was obvious that this was a well-run institution. There was no evidence of any kind of hate material - just big signs in the cafeteria about giving thanks before a meal and after a meal."
During her visits to the orphanage, Roe also found the perfect figurehead for her attempts to publicise the story. Rabiha Abusnineh is a Texan-Palestinian girl who grew up in Houston and moved back to Hebron with her family in August 2006, when she was 15. Her father, Najaf, left Hebron 30 years ago and worked as a chemical engineer and in property. By his own account, he made a lot of money, and when he came back to Hebron two years ago, he built his "dream house" on the top of a hill overlooking the city centre.
It didn't take him long to choose a school for his two teenage daughters, Muna and Rabiha. The al-Shari'ya Secondary School for Girls had the highest academic standards in the city and the lowest student-teacher ratio. What's more, it was open - many of the state schools, which are administered by the PA, were closed because of a teachers' strike. "Implicitly, there was a religious reason, too," Najaf says. "We're Muslims and we tend to go to Islamic schools. But the main reason was that it's academically strong."
In Houston, Rabiha was treasurer of the student council and liked going to the mall with her friends. She found it difficult adapting to a different culture and learning a new language, but with her classmates’ help, she managed it. “I hated my situation, but they helped me through it,” she recalls. By the beginning of this year, she was top of her class, and she had begun to feel settled at school. She was horrified when she discovered that the Israeli authorities were planning to close it. “We went to that school for two years, and in that time I never heard anyone talk about Hamas or Fatah, nothing. You just went to school and you learnt. And because it’s so much harder than in the United States, everyone just focused on learning. I never heard that our school had any association with Hamas.”
She and her fellow students believed that ICS had fulfilled all its legal obligations: its accounts were open for inspection and all its funds were properly accounted for. "If they said that they were going to spend this amount of money on food or clothes for the orphans, that's what they did. Everyone thought that once they'd checked the records, they'd leave the school alone. But it shows that they're doing this for no reason - just so they can put 4,000 orphans on the street, with no homes, no food, nothing. That's the really inhumane part of it. There's really no solid reason."
A few days before the deadline of 1 April, Dianne Roe filmed Rabiha Abusnineh making a plea on behalf of her school. She sent the tape and an accompanying letter to the Oprah Winfrey Show. "I have been taught to stand up for what I believe in and what I believe has nothing to do with politics because I've always been neutral. But Oprah, by studying at this school and seeing everything that is provided, I cannot imagine what life is going to be like if it closes down, so I will stand by them to the very end until they get back their rights," she wrote, in the inimitably breathless style of the American teenager she used to be. Rabiha wanted to repay the kindness of the girls who had helped her when she arrived at the school, and she said she wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that there are 4,000 orphans "who won't have anywhere to go, and won't have food to eat".
Had everything gone to plan, Rabiha would have become an international celebrity – the public face of the campaign to save the schools and orphanages. Unfortunately, her tape and letter were not picked up by the international media. The video was posted on YouTube, but four months later, it had been watched only 90 times.
The Israeli high court delayed the closure and confiscation orders for several days, but on 7 April, it granted the Israeli military an "indefinite delay" to provide full justification for its actions. On 10 April, two Israeli officers visited the sewing workshop, where the orphans and students of the girls' school produce women's clothing with the aim of learning a craft, and earning some extra income. A week later, it raided the second bakery, and destroyed the oven. It also evicted the tenants of al-Huda mall, which lies at the bottom of Ain Sara Street, close to the two green towers that dominate the centre of Hebron. Signs on the street frontage advertise the businesses that used to occupy the mall - a physiotherapist, a computer store and a bookshop or library - but the shops in the atrium beyond the entrance from the street are sealed and the floor is littered with discarded cardboard boxes.
The only units still occupied are the linked pair of shops that face the street, called Mama Care and Pretty Woman. The proprietor, who doesn't want to be named for fear of antagonising the Israelis, hired the same lawyer as ICS. Jawad Bulos presented documents proving the commercial contracts had been signed before 2000, when the Israelis first declared the organisation illegal. The day before the mall was due to close, she learnt that Jawad Bulos had secured their right to stay open.
By 1 April, almost all of the other occupants had left the building. The only one to remain was an English-trained cardiologist who runs a private clinic on the first floor. After seven years of building up his patient list and establishing his reputation, Dr Al Ashab didn't want to have to move and start again elsewhere. He knew he was committing an offence by remaining in the building, but he seemed prepared to rely on the fact that the Israeli soldiers have always visited the mall in the morning, while he only works there in the afternoon. He had no interest in the legal and political wranglings that had emptied the building and he had no idea whether his landlord is affiliated to Hamas or not. "I'm busy and I'm not interested in politics. And it's not my fault if they are. I just pay them the rent and they don't interfere with me. I would pay rent to the military authority if I had to."
On Wednesday 16 April, the IDF said that the sewing workshop would be closed within a fortnight. Lorne Friesen thought that they might not raid the workshop during term time, but the army was punctilious in observing its deadline – the soldiers arrived at the orphanage on the night it expired. When Friesen went outside the building, he discovered that they had closed off the street and were loading the contents of the sewing workshop on to three 40ft-long trailers parked outside among the jeeps and personnel carriers. As well as the racks of finished clothes, the bolts of cloth and the sewing machines, they took the phone and desk from the office and the paintings from the walls. They brought in grinders to cut up the long tables which were used for measuring cloth, and they carried the parts outside on a forklift truck that they had brought on one of the trailers.
During the course of the operation, Friesen looked up at the dormitories on the third and fourth floors and saw faces of the staff or children silhouetted in the windows. Given that some of the soldiers were wearing camouflage paint, he was surprised that they didn't object to him filming them at work, but most of the time, they ignored the two elderly Canadian men who were moving between them. He posted the video on YouTube and at one point it captures his colleague shouting at the soldiers. "So this is what you call fighting terrorism?" he says, as they pass bolts of cloth from hand to hand through the hall and the front door of the orphanage. "You guys are the ones who are terrorising people."
Friesen believes that the soldiers were so convinced that the organisation was affiliated with Hamas, and thus posed a threat to Israeli security, that they had no choice but to destroy it. Yet Friesen saw no evidence that they were right. During the time he spent at the schools and orphanages, he never saw any "hate material", and he said the conduct of the students was "admirable". He got the impression that ICS ran a "superior-quality service". "There is an atmosphere of deep devotion and dedication and the staff have a strong commitment to caring for the needy. The buildings were excellent quality and the grounds were neatly kept. So to have their property systematically and deliberately vandalised is deeply demoralising."
By the time the soldiers left the building, it was getting light. Soon afterwards, the first teachers arrived to assess the damage. The soldiers had confiscated $45,000 worth of goods; two days later the staff of ICS found out what they had done with them. "They had driven the trucks to the city dump and thrown everything into the garbage," says Friesen.
There was no evidence of hate material – just big signs in the cafeteria about giving thanks before a meal and after a meal
In the west, Hamas is regarded as a terrorist organisation, but to many Palestinians it has a very different image. Its origins lie in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928, with the aim of establishing Islamic rule in all Muslim countries, and eventually uniting them in a single state, representing the umma, or Muslim nation. According to Khaled Hroub, author of Hamas: a Beginner's Guide and director of the Cambridge Arab Media Project, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1946 in Jerusalem. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, it divided into two parts - one in the West Bank, which was under Jordanian control, and one in Gaza, which was governed by Egypt. After the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel gained control of all of historic Palestine, the two halves of the organisation began to merge.
At the time, Palestinian politics was dominated by the secular nationalism of Yasser Arafat's PLO, but during the Eighties, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood began to establish a foothold. When the first intifada broke out in 1987, its leaders in Gaza set up the Islamic Resistance Movement, otherwise known as Hamas; they were responding to pressure from within their organisation to confront Israel, and at the same time, they were hoping to direct and lead the uprising.
The new organisation shared the Muslim Brotherhood's aim of Islamicising Palestinian society, but it differed from its philosophy in one crucial respect: it reserved the right to commit violence. "The movement struggles against Israel because it is the aggressing, usurping and oppressing state that day and night hoists the rifle in the face of our sons and daughters," said Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of Hamas's founders, who was assassinated by an Israeli helicopter gunship in Gaza in 2004. Yassin, who was paraplegic and confined to a wheel-chair, was regarded as Hamas's spiritual leader, though the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, called him the "mastermind of Palestinian terror".
In the past eight years, according to the Israeli authorities, Hamas has killed 373 Israelis in the West Bank and Israel, including 48 members of the security forces. Yet at the same time as sending suicide bombers to attack Israeli civilians, it has continued the charitable work that forms the other part of its remit. It sponsors schools, medical centres and orphanages, and it has built up a reputation for fairness and incorruptibility. According to Hroub, the pattern is repeated across the Arab world – the “official” zakat institutions established by governments to collect and redistribute charitable money are generally regarded as corrupt, whereas the organisations run by Islamist movements, such as Hamas, are seen as “clean-handed and trustworthy”.
Mincha says the IDF moved against charitable institutions such as ICS because it had found "a very tight connection between the charity movement and terror, and the connection is money". In fact, the connection is complicated, and far from clear. Hroub says that Hamas has two sorts of income - one for the movement, which includes its military wing, and one for its charities and social work that goes directly to the organisations without passing through Hamas channels. "Those organisations have public bank accounts and work transparently. Their affiliation to Hamas is moral, but not official. Hamas is happy with the distance between itself and those organisations, so they function without the threat of being closed," says Hroub. The claim that the charities fund Hamas's military activity is weak and unfounded, he adds: "It simply doesn't need to jeopardise the charities for things that it could do in a much simpler way."
Yet it is not the first time that Israel has attempted to shut down the network of Islamic charities that do so much to sustain life in the West Bank. They moved against the "zakat committees" in 1995, after the signing of the Oslo Accords which led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The campaign was derailed by the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, but Hamas's unexpected victory in the legislative elections in the West Bank in January 2006 provided an opportunity to renew it. Although the elections were widely acknowledged to be free and fair, neither Israel nor the so-called Quartet on the Middle East - the United States, Russia, the EU and the United Nations - were prepared to recognise a Palestinian Authority run by what they regard as a terrorist organisation. Its first year in office was beset by problems: Fatah-affiliated militias, backed by Israel and the US, attempted to overthrow the government, and the internecine struggle erupted into violence in Gaza in June 2007. When "the Battle for Gaza" was over, the dividing lines in Palestinian society had been drawn: Hamas retained control of Gaza, and Fatah regained power in the West Bank. The campaign against Hamas, in all its forms, was soon renewed.
On 18 June 2007, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, outlawed the executive and military wings of Hamas and, in August, the PA dissolved 103 charities and non-governmental organisations, on the grounds that they had “committed administrative, financial or legal violations”. In October 2007, it decided to dismantle all the West Bank’s charitable organisations. The PA said Hamas had been using the zakat committees as a means of transferring funds to its supporters in the West Bank, and said they had become financial empires, serving their own corrupt political ends. In December, the PA closed dozens of charities, and announced the creation of 11 new committees to replace them. Hamas called it a “declaration of war on the poor and needy”.
On 17 December, an Israeli military court sentenced Husseini Awad, the former head of the Ramallah Charity Foundation, to three years in prison; it was the first time that anyone had been sentenced to jail for their involvement in "civilian support of the Hamas terror organisation". The verdict of the military court was reported in an IDF briefing. It said that Awad, a 62-year-old paediatrician, "stood at the head of an organisation that had many branches", and controlled a budget of millions of shekels a year. He "received money from Hamas financing overseas" and made monthly payments to 3,200 orphans and 15,000 impoverished families. "Any group that assists a terrorist organisation to recruit support . . . and carry out terrorist attacks is a dangerous group," said the judgment. "The fact that the committee recruits this support by means of assisting the needy does not negate the danger of these actions." It didn't matter that Awad had not "committed violence"; he did not "protest the way in which Hamas had used his organisation".
The closures soon spread to other cities in the West Bank. In July this year, the IDF raided and closed various institutions in Nablus, including a medical centre and Nablus Mall, which was said to be owned by a company with ties to the city's former mayor, Adli Yaish - a Mercedes dealer turned politician who has been in prison for a year. A week later, the army arrested Abdul Rahim Hanbali, the head of the largest zakat committee in the West Bank. Hanbali's organisation distributed $2m in alms in 2006 - a figure that fell to $1.2m in 2007, partly because of a drop in donations from American-Palestinians, who were concerned that they would be breaking anti-terrorism legislation by sending money. Neither Hanbali nor the Nablus zakat organisation appears on any public US government terrorist blacklist, but in the world after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the fact that it was a Muslim charity was enough to arouse concern.
In Hebron, the closures continued throughout the summer. In May, the Palestinian Authority froze the bank accounts of an orphanage in the village of Beit Ummar, outside Hebron, and the Israeli army arrested two of its employees. In June, ICS schools and kindergartens in two other villages outside Hebron were closed, and on 6 August, the Palestinian Authority sent 45 police officers armed with guns and teargas into the orphanage in Beit Ummar. When one employee asked to see a written order authorising the raid, soldiers beat him with an electric rod. Another volunteer told the Christian Peacemaker Teams that the forces conducted the raid "in a savage way": "Even the Israeli soldiers do not treat the employees like this."
The PA says that it is merely implementing the law, but its actions confirmed what many Palestinians already believe: that it is just another layer of the occupation. Rabiha’s father, a well-built man who wears the hammer-loop jeans and faded work jackets of the classic American labourer, maintains that the Palestinians are wrong to regard the creation of the state of Israel as the naqba that blighted their future. He believes that the real catastrophe was the signing of the Oslo Accords that led to the creation of the PA. He doesn’t have to look far for evidence of what he regards as its endemic corruption. His four-storey house has its own internal lift and windows modelled on a design from a French chateau, yet it is overshadowed by the vast concrete shell of a half-built basketball stadium that stands next door.
So far, the project has cost $17m of aid money provided by the French government, but Najaf Abusnineh says it will never be completed because it was built in the wrong place for a spectator venue, on a small plot on a hilltop, with no parking. To make matters worse, it overlooks a government compound that might attract gunfire in the event of fighting. "You cannot say that this is a government," says Najaf, scornfully. "They are a puppet government, a pawn in the hands of Olmert and George Bush, and whatever they do, isn't for the benefit of the Palestinian people - it's with the aim of making themselves rich and holding on to the chair."
Meanwhile the ICS's lawyer, Jawad Bulos, is placing his hopes on the negotiations he is conducting between the PA and the Israelis. "We have to find a way of addressing their fears - we have to find an acceptable solution that will save the association and put an end to the suffering of the people who need its services. Otherwise, it will be a disaster in Hebron."
Speaking for the Israelis, Major Mincha points out that they haven't closed any open schools in Hebron or elsewhere, and insists that they wouldn't close a school without ensuring there was adequate provision elsewhere. "I can assure you that there are enough classrooms and enough teachers in the West Bank for every single Palestinian child. Our civil command checks this sort of thing all the time: we make sure that all the children are studying."
Such arguments count for little in Hebron. The ICS schools opened at the beginning of the term on 24 August, but Rasheed Rasheed says they are not likely to survive for long. "I'm sure that the Israelis won't come near the schools and orphanages again, because they don't want to cause themselves headaches with the western media, but I can assure you that they will die automatically, due to a shortage of money." None of the teachers and other staff has been paid for six months, and Rasheed predicts that at least ten will leave in the next school year. He is planning to stay on for a year, but he has a wife and two daughters to support and eventually he will be forced to look for another job. He is tired of the political disputes that have brought his school to the brink of closure. "It's not Hamas or Israel that's going to pay the price - it's my students. What does a child have to do with Hamas or Fatah or Israel? He doesn't know anything yet. Why should a six-year-old boy pay for Hamas's agenda, or Fatah's agenda, or Israel's agenda?"
For the time being, the Palestinian Authority has appointed nine people to the board of ICS who are not affiliated to any party, but they have refused to take up the posts until they receive guarantees that they will not be arrested, and the organisation can no longer access its own bank accounts or reach its funds. The army claims it is undermining Hamas's ability to raise funds, making it more difficult for the organisation to attack Israel, and yet it acknowledges that the group is far from beaten. In a briefing document released to the press, it says that Hamas is building "its forces in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley in preparation for a potential takeover and to broaden its influence in Israel and throughout the region".
He believes the real catastrophe was the signing of the Oslo Accords that led to
the creation of the Palestinian Authority
There is a danger that the current campaign might backfire - each time Israel or the PA dismantles a charity committee and destroys a source of essential services that cannot be replicated, it increases dissatisfaction with Israel and its so-called "partner for peace". Rasheed Rasheed believes that the army's actions are the best advertisement that Hamas could hope for. "If Israel thinks they are destroying Hamas by doing things like this, then they are mistaken," he says. "If there is someone to be blamed for supporting Hamas, I blame Israel. What are they going to get out of this? More pain for the Palestinians - and then what? More hatred of Israel. The Palestinian children don't need a curriculum of incitement and hatred - the Israeli killings and shootings and checkpoints are their curriculum."
Edward Platt is the author of "Leadville" and a contributing writer of the New Statesman
hebron timeline
1962 Islamic Charitable Society of Hebron (ICS) formed with Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian authorisation
September 2006 A Birzeit University poll shows Muslim NGOs and charities provide 20 per cent of food and financial assistance to Palestine's poor
June/July 2006 The UN records four raids on ICS buildings by the Israel Defence Forces
17 July 2007 The Islamic Society for Orphan Sponsorship, a charity in Hebron not affiliated with the ICS, is raided and closed
18 June 2007 Mahmoud Abbas dissolves 103 charities and NGOs
26 February 2008 The Israeli army issues closure and confiscation notices against the ICS
5 March 2008 An ICS warehouse, bakery, and girls' school are raided
April 2008 Tenants of al-Huda mall evicted;
destruction of a second ICS bakery; and the Hebron girls' orphanage sewing workshop ransacked
8 May 2008 International human rights organisations endorse ICS
4 June 2008 Closure of ICS schools and kindergartens outside Hebron
July 2008: Closures and raids spread to other West Bank cities.
6 August 2008 The Palestinian Authority raids ICS orphanage in Beit Ummar
Research by Samira Shackle
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