Tehran's Secret War Against Its Own People

The Times, UK, October 10, 2006
By Peter Tatchell

The persecution of Ahwazi Arabs and the takeover of their land has led to accusations of 'ethnic cleansing' NEVER AGAIN is, I fear, a phrase that we may hear again all too soon but too late to warn people, let alone save lives. Under the cover of secrecy the fundamentalist regime in Tehran is waging a sustained, bloody campaign of intimidation and persecution against its Arab minority. These Arabs believe that they are victims of ethnic cleansing by Iran’s Persian majority.

Sixteen Arab rights activists have been sentenced to death, according to reports in the Iranian media. They were found guilty of insurgency in secret trials before revolutionary courts. But most of the defendants were convicted solely on the basis of confessions extracted under torture. Ten are expected to be hanged in a couple of weeks, after the end of Ramadan.

Amnesty International says that two of those sentenced to die, Abdolreza Nawaseri and Nazem Bureihi, were in prison when they were alleged to have been involved in bomb attacks. Three others Hamza Sawa- eri, Jafar Sawari and Reisan Sawari say that they were nowhere near the Zergan oilfield the day it was bombed.

The death sentences seem designed to silence protests by Iran’s persecuted ethnic Arabs. They comprise 70 per cent of the population of the south-west province of Khuzestan, known locally as Ahwaz. Many Ahwazis believe that the 16 were framed and that their real crime was campaigning against Tehran’s repression and exploitation of their oil-rich homeland.

Further show trials are planned 50 Ahwazi Arab activists have been charged with insurgency since last year. They are accused of being mohareb or enemies of God, which is a capital crime. Other allegations include sabotage and possession of home-made bombs. No material evidence has been offered to support the charges. All face possible execution.

Securing information about the impending hangings has been difficult. The authorities are notoriously secretive, often withholding information about charges, evidence and sentences. Foreign journalists are severely restricted and local reporters are intimidated with threats of imprisonment. Despite this official obfuscation, human rights groups confirm a new wave of repression against Ahwazi Arabs who accuse Tehran of ethnic cleansing and racism. Ali Afrawi, 17, and Mehdi Nawaseri, 20, were publicly hanged in March for allegedly participating in insurgency. Amnesty International condemned their trial as unfair.

They were denied access to lawyers. The Ahwazi Human Rights Organisation (AHRO) says that seven other Arab political prisoners were secretly executed at around the same time.

Tehran’s latest tactic is to hold Ahwazi children as hostages. According to Amnesty International, children as young as 2 have been jailed with their mothers to force their fugitive, political-activist fathers to surrender to the police. Protests against these abuses are brutally suppressed. Ahwazi political parties, trade unions and student groups are illegal. In the past year, 25,000 Ahwazis have been arrested, 131 executed and 150 have disappeared, reports AHRO. The bodies of many of those executed have been dumped in a place that the Government calls lanat abad, the place of the damned. They are buried in shallow graves; dogs dig up and eat the bodies.

Nearly 250,000 Arabs have been displaced from their villages after the Iranian Government’s confiscation of more than 200,000 hectares of farmland for a huge sugar-cane project. Dozens more towns and villages will be erased, making a possible further 400,000 Ahwazis homeless, by the creation of a military-industrial security zone, covering more than 3,000 sq km, along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which borders Iraq.

Ironically, the Hezbollah in Lebanon the supposed embodiment of Arab resistance in the Middle East is complicit in the displacement of Ahwazi Arabs. On confiscated Arab land Tehran has set up training camps for Hezbollah and for the Badr Brigades, the Iraqi fundamentalist militia. Badr death squads in Iraq are murdering Sunnis, unveiled women, gay people, men wearing shorts, barbers, sellers of alcohol and people listening to Western music.

Tehran has a grand plan to make the Ahwazi a minority in their own land through ethnic restructuring. Financial incentives, such as zero- interest loans, are given to ethnic Persians to settle in Ahwaz. New townships are planned, which will house 500,000 non-Arabs. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of displaced Ahwazis eke out a subsistence existence in shanty towns on the outskirts of Ahwaz city. Others have been forcibly relocated to poverty-stricken, far-flung northern regions of Iran.

Ahwaz produces 90 per cent of Iran’s oil and Tehran expropriates all the revenues. An attempt by Ahwaz MPs to secure the repatriation of 1.5 per cent of these earnings back to the region for welfare projects was rejected this year. Yet it is the third poorest region of Iran: 80 per cent of the children suffer from malnutrition, and the unemployment rate of Arabs is more than five times that of Persians.

Arab language newspapers and textbooks have been banned to crush Arab identity further. In Ahwaz schools, all instruction is in Farsi (Persian), resulting in a 30 per cent drop-out rate at primary level and 50 per cent at secondary level. Illiteracy rates among Arabs are at least four times those of non-Arabs.

Contrary to Tehran’s nationalist propaganda most Ahwazi Arabs just want a measure of self-government; they are not hellbent on independence or in league with the CIA or plotting for an American invasion. Quite the contrary, they fear that Western sabre-rattling will be used as a pretext by Tehran’s hardliners to crack down savagely on dissent. Which makes it all the more disturbing that one of the few bodies with diplomatic muscle the Arab League, which professes pan-Arab solidarity is so silent in the face of Iran’s persecution of Arabs.

Iraq: The Grand Ayatollah Behind the Curtain

Last week the Prime Minister of Iraq told President Bush that he was not "America's Man in Iraq". Bush replied back saying "no, you are not America's Puppet". Now that this has been officially made clear - should the US be dealing with Nouri al-Maliki or his boss?

This is an interesting article...

Taken from the Washington Post, October 28, 2006; Page A15
By Colbert I. King

The question directed this week to the National Security Council press office was straightforward: "Has the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani met with any American official, either military or civilian, since the U.S. invasion in 2003?" The answer reveals the extent to which the Bush administration is now, and always has been, out of its depth in Iraq.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is Iraq's most powerful figure. Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, Sistani was forced to keep a low profile, since he was part of the Shiite majority that Hussein's ruling Baath Party controlled with a heavy hand. Sistani was on the receiving end of assassination attempts by Hussein's thugs. But all that changed in the spring of 2003, when the United States toppled the Iraqi regime.

Today, Sistani's Shiites are the major political force in Iraq. They are leaders in the new government; they run the key Interior Ministry; and one of their own, Nouri al-Maliki, serves as prime minister. Were it not for Iraq's liberation from Hussein's tyranny by U.S. troops, Sistani and his followers would still be under the thumb of Sunnis.

The average Iraqi may not be happy to see the country occupied by foreigners. But if any Iraqi should feel even a tad kindly toward his American liberators, it ought to be the grand ayatollah. After all, he is the chief beneficiary of Hussein's defeat. It's not too much to think that if the president of the United States visits Iraq, Sistani would at least meet him face to face to say thank you. Think again.

Back to the question that started this column: Has Sistani met with any American official in the past 3 1/2 years? Frederick Jones, the NSC's communications director, said yesterday that no American official has ever met Sistani.

But how, you might ask, can that be? After all, since Hussein's statue was pulled down in 2003, Iraq has been visited twice by President Bush. Vice President Cheney has been there, too. Two different secretaries of state -- Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice -- have dropped in. So have Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, countless high-ranking Pentagon brass and enough U.S.

How is it possible that leaders of the world's most powerful nation - a country that has generously sent 140,000 of its finest sons and daughters to fight, suffer and die to free Iraq from the Baathist grip -- have not met the Iraqi leader with the most to gain from Hussein's defeat?

It's because the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has designated himself off-limits to Americans. He will not let Bush, Cheney, Rice and company in to see him because they are non-Muslims and thus he considers them to be kafir, or infidels. Sistani regards himself as too good to meet with those who freed him.

What's weird is to hear folks in Washington speak about Sistani's views as if they just got off the phone with him. "Sistani doesn't want clerics to have a role in government," one Washington foreign policy expert told me. "Sistani believes Islam should be the national religion," said another. "Sistani is a pragmatist," said a third. All this is asserted with confidence, when in reality these people know only what they have heard from someone else - a Muslim go-between or a Sistani envoy.

Bush and his high command have never set eyes on the man. Yet Sistani controls them as if they were puppets on a string. It's like something out of "The Wizard of Oz."

Consider what happened in 2004: Barricaded in a Najaf slum miles from Baghdad, the unseen Sistani was able single-handedly to block the United States from staging a handover of power without elections. He did so by issuing a fatwa that sent thousands into the streets. The Bush people were forced to give ground. A law was drafted that led to elections in 2005.

Sistani's chief competition is not the United States but an anti-American Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Mahdi Army, which has infiltrated Iraqi military and police units. The Iraqi parliament, truth be told, responds to the calls of the firebrand cleric.

What have we come to? In addition to al-Sadr, today's Iraq is under the influence of a Muslim cleric, Sistani, who, according to Newsweek, forbids music for entertainment, dancing and playing chess, and forbids women from shaking the hands of any men other than their fathers, brothers or husbands. His whole purpose is to promote Shiite theology and keep Iraq as a democratic, but decidedly Islamic, state.

Billions spent, thousands of Americans dead or maimed, U.S. armed forces exhausted, stretched thin and working around the clock - for that? Is this what George W. Bush had in mind?

Saddam To Be Hanged!

Taken from Sky News, UK, 05.11.06

• AP VIDEO: Hussein Sentenced by Iraqi Tribunal

Saddam Hussein has been found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death.

The former dictator will be hanged, a court in Baghdad's Green Zone complex ruled.

Saddam was convicted of ordering the deaths of 148 Shia men and teenage boys in the town of Dujail in 1982.

The killings followed a failed assassination attempt against him in 1982 and were intended to act as a grim warning to others not to oppose him.

Facing charges alongside him were Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice-president, Barzan Ibrahim al Tikriti - Saddam's half-brother - former judge Awad Ahmad al Bander and four party officials from Dujail.

Security was stepped up in Baghdad in anticipation of a violent reaction to the announcement of the verdict.

Saddam, who was captured by US forces in December 2003, is still seen as the figurehead of many of the insurgent Sunni groups conducting a campaign of terror against Coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.

More than 100 US troops were killed in Iraq in October, making it one of the bloodiest months for American forces since the invasion in March 2003.

The civilian death toll is estimated at somewhere between 45,000 and more than 650,000.

Defence minister Abdul Qader al Obeidi cancelled all army leave and recalled security forces already on holiday.

The trial is the first that Saddam has faced in the wake of his downfall.

It has been punctuated by walkouts, boycotts, hunger-strikes by Saddam and his co-defendants, the murder of three lawyers and the sacking of the original trial judge, who announced in court that he did not believe Saddam was a dictator.

It is possible the former Iraqi president's other trials for genocide and war crimes could now be brought forward.

The death penalty in Iraq has to be carried out by hanging, according to the country's new constitution. However, Saddam has said he would rather face a firing squad.

Abu Ghraib Soldier Barred From Returning Amid Fears For Safety

Taken from the Independent, UK, 04 November 2006
By Andrew Johnson

A soldier convicted of abusing detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has been stopped from returning to the country for a further tour of duty after news of the deployment hit the headlines in America.

US military commanders said they were concerned for the soldier's safety following the publicity.

Specialist Santos Cardona, a dog handler during his assignment at Abu Ghraib, was convicted in June of using his dog to assault a prisoner at the jail outside Baghdad.

He left Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, on Monday with the 23rd Military Police Company and had been preparing to move into Iraq from Kuwait when a reporter called to ask about the deployment.

When the news spread, senior commanders called a halt, fearing he and his unit could be targeted by insurgents because of his role at Abu Ghraib.

"The commanders in country have stopped his movement forward into Iraq," said Paul Boyce, an army spokesman at the Pentagon. "We are of course extremely concerned as well in light of the publicity about his situation for his personal situation. It could potentially endanger other soldiers in his unit."

The Army had no immediate explanation as to why Cardona's unit commanders had planned to deploy him.

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib came to light after pictures were released of the incidents in 2004.

Cardona was demoted from sergeant, sentenced to 90 days of hard labour and fined $7,200 (£3,787) by a court martial for his role in the scandal.

He was convicted of failing to handle his dog properly and using the unmuzzled Belgian shepherd to threaten an inmate with a force "likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm." The dog was allowed to bark within inches of prisoners' faces.

The Army said Cardona, who will remain in Kuwait, was no longer a member of a canine unit and his specific duties in Iraq had not been determined when his deployment was halted.

Time magazine reported that he had told friends he dreaded his redeployment.

A soldier convicted of abusing detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has been stopped from returning to the country for a further tour of duty after news of the deployment hit the headlines in America.

US military commanders said they were concerned for the soldier's safety following the publicity.

Specialist Santos Cardona, a dog handler during his assignment at Abu Ghraib, was convicted in June of using his dog to assault a prisoner at the jail outside Baghdad.

He left Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, on Monday with the 23rd Military Police Company and had been preparing to move into Iraq from Kuwait when a reporter called to ask about the deployment.

When the news spread, senior commanders called a halt, fearing he and his unit could be targeted by insurgents because of his role at Abu Ghraib.

"The commanders in country have stopped his movement forward into Iraq," said Paul Boyce, an army spokesman at the Pentagon. "We are of course extremely concerned as well in light of the publicity about his situation for his personal situation. It could potentially endanger other soldiers in his unit."The Army had no immediate explanation as to why Cardona's unit commanders had planned to deploy him.

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib came to light after pictures were released of the incidents in 2004.

Cardona was demoted from sergeant, sentenced to 90 days of hard labour and fined $7,200 (£3,787) by a court martial for his role in the scandal.

He was convicted of failing to handle his dog properly and using the unmuzzled Belgian shepherd to threaten an inmate with a force "likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm." The dog was allowed to bark within inches of prisoners' faces.

The Army said Cardona, who will remain in Kuwait, was no longer a member of a canine unit and his specific duties in Iraq had not been determined when his deployment was halted.
Time magazine reported that he had told friends he dreaded his redeployment.

US Soldiers Charged In Iraq Rape Case

Taken from Al Jazeera website, Friday 03 November 2006
Report by Reuters

A former US soldier has been charged with the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her family in March.

A civilian grand jury on Thursday charged Steven Green, 21, and four other soldiers who are still in the army.

The case concerns Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, 14, who was sexually abused and then killed with her father, mother and six-year-old sister.

Green is further accused of trying to burn the bodies to conceal the crime.

Another soldier is charged with covering up the crime which took place on March 12, 2006, in Mahmudiya, Iraq.

Among the charges brought against Green were murder, murder in perpetration of aggravated sexual abuse, conspiracy charges, sexual abuse of a minor, and obstruction of justice.

If convicted, Green, who was discharged from the army's 101st Airborne Division for a "personality disorder", could receive the death penalty, prosecutors said in a statement.

He is to appear before the US district court in Louisville, Kentucky, on Wednesday.

The others charged in the gang-rape and murder face court-martial at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division, with some facing the death penalty.

The Mahmudiya case is one of several in which US servicemen are suspected of killing Iraqi civilians. It sparked outrage among Iraqis and prompted Iraqi officials to call for a review of foreign troops' immunity from Iraqi prosecution.

US Army Monitors Soldiers' Blogs, Web Sites

Taken from Yahoo news, Oct 29, 2006
By MICHAEL FELBERBAUM, Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. - From the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to here at home, soldiers blogging about military life are under the watchful eye of some of their own.

A Virginia-based operation, the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, monitors official and unofficial blogs and other Web sites for anything that may compromise security. The team scans for official documents, personal contact information and pictures of weapons or entrances to camps.

In some cases, that information can be detrimental, said Lt. Col. Stephen Warnock, team leader and battalion commander of a Manassas-based Virginia National Guard unit working on the operation.

In one incident, a blogger was describing his duties as a guard, providing pictures of his post and discussing how to exploit its vulnerabilities. Other soldiers posted photos of an Army weapons system that was damaged by enemy attack, and another showed personal information that could have endangered his family.

"We are a nation at war," Warnock said by e-mail. "The less the enemy knows, the better it is for our soldiers."

In the early years of operations in the Middle East, no official oversight governed Web sites that sprung up to keep the families of those deployed informed about their daily lives.

The oversight mission, made up of active-duty soldiers and contractors, as well as Guard and Reserve members from Maryland, Texas and Washington state, began in 2002 and was expanded in August 2005 to include sites in the public domain, including blogs.

The Army will not disclose the methods or tools being used to find and monitor the sites. Nor will it reveal the size of the operation or the contractors involved. The Defense Department has a similar program, the Joint Web Risk Assessment Cell, but the Army program is apparently the only operation that monitors nonmilitary sites.

Now soldiers wishing to blog while deployed are required to register their sites with their commanding officers, who monitor the sites quarterly, according to a four-page document of guidelines published in April 2005 by Multi-National Corps-Iraq.

Spc. Jean-Paul Borda, who has indexed thousands of military blogs for a site called Milblogging.com, said in an e-mail interview that the military still is adapting to changing technology.

"This is a new media — Blogging. Podcasting. Online videos," wrote Borda, 32, of Dallas, who kept a blog while he was deployed in Afghanistan with the Virginia National Guard. "The military is doing what it feels necessary to ensure the safety of the troops."

Warnock said the Web risk assessment team has reviewed hundreds of thousands of sites every month, sometimes e-mailing or calling soldiers asking them to take material down. If the blogger doesn't comply with the request, the team can work with the soldier's commanders to fix the problem — that is, if the blogger doesn't post anonymously.

"We are not a law enforcement or intelligence agency. Nor are we political correctness enforcers," Warnock said. "We are simply trying to identify harmful Internet content and make the authors aware of the possible misuse of the information by groups who may want to damage United States interests."

Some bloggers say the guidelines are too ambiguous — a sentiment that has led others to pre-emptively shut down or alter their blogs.

"It's impossible to determine when something crosses the line from not a violation to a violation. It's like trying to define what pornography is or bad taste in music," said Spc. Jason Hartley, 32, who says he was demoted from sergeant and fined for reposting a blog he created while deployed to Iraq with the New York Army National Guard.

According to Hartley, the Army had forced him to stop the blog even before the oversight operation existed, citing pictures he had posted of Iraqi detainees and discussions of how he loaded a weapon and the route his unit took to get to Iraq.

Warnock contended that soldiers should not be discouraged from blogging altogether.

Military bloggers "are simply expressing themselves in a wide open forum and want to share their life-changing experiences with the rest of the world," Warnock said. "Giving soldiers an outlet for free expression is good. American soldiers are not shy about giving their opinions and nothing the Web Risk Cell does dampens that trait."

Matthew Currier Burden, 39, a former intelligence officer who wrote "The Blog of War," a collection of entries from bloggers who served in the war, said soldiers' Web sites can go a long way toward portraying positive aspects of the war and other "stories that need to get told."
But he said it's legitimate to fear that some information could be used the wrong way.

"The enemy knows the value of the blogs," Burden said. "The biggest thing that we fear is battle damage assessment from the enemy. We want to deny them that."

U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons - Court Is Asked to Bar Detainees From Talking About Interrogations

Taken from the Washington Post, November 4, 2006; Page A01
By Carol D. Leonnig and Eric Rich

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release - even to the detainees' own attorneys - "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.

The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.

Because Khan "was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level," an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states, using the acronym for "sensitive compartmented information."

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney for Khan's family, responded in a court document yesterday that there is no evidence that Khan had top-secret information. "Rather," she said, "the executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority . . . to conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct."

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.' "Kathleen Blomquist, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said yesterday that details of the CIA program must be protected from disclosure. She said the lawyer's proposal for talking with Khan "is inadequate to protect unique and potentially highly classified information that is vital to our country's ability to fight terrorism."

Government lawyers also argue in court papers that detainees such as Khan previously held in CIA sites have no automatic right to speak to lawyers because the new Military Commissions Act, signed by President Bush last month, stripped them of access to U.S. courts. That law established separate military trials for terrorism suspects.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is considering whether Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts. The government urged Walton to defer any decision on access to lawyers until the higher court rules.

The government filing expresses concern that detainee attorneys will provide their clients with information about the outside world and relay information about detainees to others. In an affidavit, Guantanamo's staff judge advocate, Cmdr. Patrick M. McCarthy, said that in one case a detainee's attorney took questions from a BBC reporter with him into a meeting with a detainee at the camp. Such indirect interviews are "inconsistent with the purpose of counsel access" at the prison, McCarthy wrote.

Dorn said in the court papers that for lawyers to speak to former CIA detainees under the security protocol used for other Guantanamo detainees "poses an unacceptable risk of disclosure." But detainee attorneys said they have followed the protocol to the letter, and none has been accused of releasing information without government clearance.

Captives who have spent time in the secret prisons, and their advocates, have said the detainees were sometimes treated harshly with techniques that included "waterboarding," which simulates drowning. Bush has declared that the administration will not tolerate the use of torture but has pressed to retain the use of unspecified "alternative" interrogation methods.

The government argues that once rules are set for the new military commissions, the high-value detainees will have military lawyers and "unprecedented" rights to challenge charges against them in that venue.

U.S. officials say Khan, a Pakistani national who lived in the United States for seven years, took orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammed allegedly asked Khan to research poisoning U.S. reservoirs and considered him for an operation to assassinate the Pakistani president.

In a separate court document filed last night, Khan's attorneys offered declarations from Khaled al-Masri, a released detainee who said he was held with Khan in a dingy CIA prison called "the salt pit" in Afghanistan. There, prisoners slept on the floor, wore diapers and were given tainted water that made them vomit, Masri said. American interrogators treated him roughly, he said, and told him he "was in a land where there were no laws."

Khan's family did not learn of his whereabouts until Bush announced his transfer in September, more than three years after he was seized in Pakistan.

The family said Khan was staying with a brother in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2003 when men, who were not in uniform, burst into the apartment late one night and put hoods over the heads of Khan, his brother Mohammad and his brother's wife. The couple's 1-month-old son was also seized.

Another brother, Mahmood Khan, who has lived in the United States since 1989, said in an interview this week that the four were hustled into police vehicles and taken to an undisclosed location, where they were separated and held in windowless rooms. His sister-in-law and her baby remained together, he said.

According to Mahmood, Mohammad said they were questioned repeatedly by men who identified themselves as members of Pakistan's intelligence service and others who identified themselves as U.S. officials. Mohammad's wife was released after seven days, and he was released after three months, without charge. He was left on a street corner without explanation, Mahmood said.

Periodically, he said, people who identified themselves as Pakistani officials contacted Mohammad and assured him that his brother would soon be released and that they ought not contact a lawyer or speak with the news media.

"We had no way of knowing who had him or where he was," Mahmood Khan said this week at the family home outside Baltimore. He said they complied with the requests because they believed anything else could delay his brother's release.

In Maryland, Khan's family was under constant FBI surveillance from the moment of his arrest, his brother said. The FBI raided their house the day after the arrest , removing computer equipment, papers and videos. Each family member was questioned extensively and shown photographs of terrorism suspects that Mahmood Khan said none of them recognized. For much of the next year, he said, they were followed everywhere.

"Pretty much we were scared," he said. "We live in this country. We have everything here."
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

U.N.: Nearly 100,000 Flee Iraq Monthly

Taken from Yahoo News, Fri Nov 3, 2006
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA - Nearly 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing each month to Syria and Jordan, forcing the United Nations to set aside its goal of helping refugees return home after the U.S.-led invasion, officials said Friday.

Instead, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has drawn up plans to deal with the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who are desperate to escape the violence, chief spokesman Ron Redmond said.

"Much of our work in the three years since the fall of the previous regime was based on the assumption that the domestic situation would stabilize and hundreds of thousands of previously displaced Iraqis would be able to go home," Redmond said. "Now, however, we're seeing more and more displacement linked to the continuing violence."

It has been impossible to obtain accurate totals on the numbers of refugees because few Iraqis are registering with UNHCR, and most are being cared for by host families or charitable organizations, he said.

The U.N. agency has been counting those entering Syria in recent months, however, and has found an average of 2,000 a day leaving Iraq by that route.

The outflow of refugees caught the agency by surprise because it was hard to detect.

"If people flee to camps, it's quite visible," Redmond said. "This is a steady stream of people now who are leaving."

The Jordanian government says another 1,000 a day are entering Jordan, he said.

Redmond said almost all the refugees are believed to be staying in Syria and Jordan, but that a few are returning to Iraq and still others are going to other countries. He noted that Iraqis were the leading nationality seeking asylum in Europe in the first half of this year, with 8,100 applying — a 50 percent increase over the year-earlier period.

Figures were unavailable for arrivals in other neighboring countries, but the agency says an additional 50,000 Iraqis a month are fleeing their homes but remaining within Iraq, which classifies them as "internally displaced" rather than as refugees who have crossed an international border.

"We've got a displacement crisis under way here, and the international community needs to do more to chip in to support the humanitarian needs of these people," Redmond said.

The influx has been driving up prices in Syria and Jordan for housing, food and other commodities, Redmond said.

UNHCR estimates that 425,000 Iraqis have been displaced this year alone, largely due to sectarian violence sparked by the bombing of an important Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra in February, Redmond recalled that, before the 2003 invasion, UNHCR had made contingency plans for 600,000 refugees and displaced people, and had a budget of $154 million. But there was no mass exodus in the beginning, and UNHCR has long since scaled back to $29 million.

UNHCR now estimates that 1.8 million Iraqis are living in neighboring countries and 1.6 million are displaced internally, but those numbers include many who fled during the 1990s, long before the invasion, Redmond said. As of July, Iraq's population was estimated at 26.7 million.

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On th eve of the Saddam Husseins expected verdict the Iraqi PM says he hopes Saddam Hussein gets "what he deserves" - I wonder how many more people will need to flee Iraq from the violence that is about to increase.

Saudi Envoy Slams US Role In Middle East

Taken from the Jerusalem Post, 31.10.06
Article by ASSOCIATED PRESS

The US standing in the Middle East is at an all-time low and can be helped only by pressing Israel to relinquish all occupied Arab land and Jerusalem to the Palestinians, says Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States.

"We want you to remain friends with Israel," Saudi Ambassador Turki al-Faisal said during a question and answer session. "But that friendship should be used to push Israel" to relinquish the land the Arabs lost in the 1967 Six-Day War and provide the Palestinians with a state they have been denied for more than a half-century, the prince said.

"The United States is the only one that can deliver," the ambassador said. "The basic interest of the United States is for peace to reign in our part of the world."

In remarks he prepared for delivery to the National Council on US-Arab Relations, a private group that presents the Arab view on issues, Prince Turki said, "It is no secret that US standing in the Middle East is at an all-time low."

In the prepared text of his speech, distributed to reporters at the luncheon, he said, "It is not a matter of military strength or a shift in rhetoric, but rather a matter of basic understanding of the needs of the people who are affected by US political decisions."

He added, "If the US is going to help itself, its policy needs to change in the Middle East."
President George W. Bush has supported establishment of a Palestinian state on land now held by Israel. He has not attempted to define the future of Jerusalem, or say how much occupied land should be surrendered.

Prince Turki said any of several peace plans - including one by the Arab kingdom and another by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia _ is preferable to inaction. In previous plans, the Jerusalem question has been put off to be among the last contentious items decided.

"No one has put his foot forward," the ambassador said in rejecting "excuses that won't do" such as waiting for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to assert full control of the Palestinian people before launching negotiations.

Former CIA Chief: 'Oil Dependence Threatens US, Israel'

The Jerusalem Post, 03.11.06
By MICHAL LANDO

The case for reducing the United States' dependence on oil is most often argued by environmentalists concerned about global warming and ozone depletion. But a growing number of people are drawing what they consider to be a crucial link between oil and national security.

They argue that America's reliance on oil is the number one security threat facing the country.

One figure who has emerged in this debate is co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger and former director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, who spoke in New York this week at an event sponsored by the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank that seeks to define and promote America's interests in the Middle East.

Woolsey argues that America's reliance on oil as the primary source of fuel is one of the greatest barriers to national security and threatens both the US and Israel.

"The way strategically over the long run to weaken the enemies of Israel, such as Ahmadinejad, is to weaken the role of oil," Woolsey said. "Oil makes it harder to avoid genocide in Darfur because the Sudanese have a deal with China, and it makes it harder to deal with Iran, because China and Iran have an oil deal."

The problem with reliance on oil is twofold, according to Woolsey who is a strong supporter of the war in Iraq. The petroleum infrastructure is vulnerable to terrorist and environmental attacks, and the transfer of funds from oil have been used, and continue to be used, to fund terrorism or support totalitarian regimes.

"One of the ways to convince these regimes that their system won't work, is to convince them that they can't continue to just sit and pump."

The only way to do that, he argues, is by moving away from cars than run on petroleum. The US used 140 billion gallons of gas last year, and a little over 40 percent of oil consumption is used for cars and other light transportation.

Roughly two-thirds of the world's known oil reserves are in the greater Middle East. Demand is expected to increase by more than 50% in the next two decades from 78 million barrels per day (MBD) in 2002 to 118 MBD in 2025, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

"It will mean higher prices and potential supply disruptions and will put considerable leverage in the hands of governments in the greater Middle East," Woolsey said.

Woolsey pointed to the attack at Abquaiq earlier this year as an example of America's vulnerability. A well planned attack could take some six million barrels per day off the market sharply increasing petroleum prices and damaging the world economy, according to Woolsey.

"We have succeeded in constructing an international trading system for energy and everything else, that operates like a beautiful, fine, Swiss watch, and it works very well as long as there is no interference," Woolsey said.

An accident last summer in the Texas City refinery as well as hurricane damage in the Gulf, point out the potential infrastructure vulnerabilities.

"The transfer of funds from industrial countries to the Middle East is a source of enormous strength for them and particularly for autocracies, whether it be the Iranian government or Whahadi infrastructure," said Daniel Pipes director of the Middle East Forum. "Therefore cutting back on those transfers is of vital importance and high priority."

Though politicians across the political spectrum have long recognized that oil is a problem, not everyone agrees on how to solve it.

The Bush administration has largely focused on the supply side of the oil equation, trying to locate more oil reserves, according to Paul Roberts author of the book "The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World" They have not, however, expressed much interest in reducing demand.

"It is not generally helpful for the US, for example, to import less from the greater Middle East and for others then to import more from there," Woolsey wrote in a testimony to the US Senate Committee on Energy in March. "In effect, all of us oil-importing countries are in this together."

In the last five years, however, an interesting alliance has emerged between those who want to lower the use of oil for environmental reasons, and national security hawks who recognize that America can't maintain security if it is beholden to the Middle East, according to Roberts.

In the past there have been proposals to transition to other forms of fuel, such as hydrogen, but this would require major investments in infrastructure. To have an impact on the country's vulnerabilities within the two decades, any alternative will need to accommodate existing energy infrastructure, Woolsey said.

One such alternative that Woolsey is promoting is a plug-in hybrid car, which would draw power from the electricity grid. A plug-in hybrid has the advantages of an electric car without the disadvantages - electric cars cannot be recharged if their batteries run down away from electric power.

What is needed are adequate batteries that could permit all electric driving for weeks at a time without visiting a gasoline station, according to Woolsey. Such batteries already exist on a smaller scale and are used in computers.

Bringing hybrid plug-ins on the market does not require heavy government involvement, according to Woolsey.

Woolsey gave the example of railroads as a historic instance of substantial change in the American economy.

"The US government had a limited but essential role - they made sure no one could block the rights of way, but they didn't get in the business of designing the engines, and we don't need to either," Woolsey said.

Other advocates of reducing America's dependence on oil disagree, maintaining that these kind of changes require government involvement.

"The market provides energy as cheaply as it can, the problem is that there are costs involved with moving to alternative fuels," Roberts said.

Even if the necessary technology exists, the problem with plug-in hybrids is that only ten such cars exist and there are no automakers on the market making them, said Dan Becker, the director of the Sierra Club's global warming program.

According to Becker, the biggest step in reducing oil dependence is making cars go further on a gallon of gas. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAF ) enacted by Congress in 1975 reduced energy consumption by increasing the fuel economy of cars and light trucks. CAF standards cut American oil dependence by 3 million barrels a day.

"We could save an additional 4 million barrels a day if existing technologies were put on cars," Becker said. The problem, he says, is that CAF standards have not been updated since they were established.

There have been bills in both houses of Congress to update CAF standards, but they have been defeated numerous times.

"This administration will do nothing to offend the auto and oil industries," Becker said. "There are former auto industry executives running the agency that is supposed to regulate the auto industry."

And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has not been very supportive, Becker said. There is disagreement as to how a reduction in the demand for oil could change US relations to Israel.

Woolsey said he thought US ties to Israel would remain the same, as "most Americans look upon Israel as...extremely close allies in the foxhole together."

Roberts is more skeptical. Israel, he says, provides a counterweight to the other countries in the region. "How much would we feel we needed a counterweight if those countries were less important?"

The link between reducing the US's dependence on oil and national security, Roberts said, is "a no brainer."

Woolsey agrees and believes that some solutions are just around the corner if the right people are willing to look.

"We could, with systems that have been invented and are on the market in different ways, begin before too long to move decisively away from oil as our principle transportation vehicle," Woolsey said.

"I would suggest a path of that sort would be likely to get attention from the countries in the Middle East whose misbehavior constitutes a huge share of the world's difficulty as far as the future of conflict and terrorism are concerned."

Annan, U.S. Disagree On Cause Of Rising Violence In Gaza

By Haaretz and The Associated Press, 04/11/06

The United States and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan openly disagreed Friday on the cause of rising violence in Gaza.Annan's office said in a statement the escalation and rising death toll were caused by the Israel Defense Forces operation in northern Gaza.

At least 34 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza since Wednesday, including 19 fatalities Friday. Most of the casualties were in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun, where the IDF launched an operation Wednesday aimed at preventing Qassam rocket strikes on southern Israel.

The State Department, however, said "the reason why all of this developed in the first place is because you have continuing attacks on Israel from Palestinian Authority areas."

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack reiterated also the Bush administration's view that Israel had a right to defend itself.

The statement issued by Annan's spokesman urged Israel to exercise maximum restraint, do its utmost to protect civilians and to refrain from further escalation in an already grave situation.
"He also calls on Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets against Israeli civilian targets," the statement said.

McCormack went further, saying it was important the Palestinian Authority stop the rocket attacks and dismantle terrorist organizations and terrorist groups.

"That's a little more difficult when you have a terrorist organization is is actually at the head of the government, that holds the rein of government," he said, referring to the militant Hamas group.

"The UN has a point of view," McCormack said.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett also expressed concern Friday at the mounting death toll, calling on Israel to obey humanitarian law and for an end to Palestinian rocket strikes on Israel.

"We are concerned by increased violence in Gaza, in particular by reports of civilian deaths," said Beckett. "Israel has a right to defend itself but any action should be proportionate and in accordance with international humanitarian law.

"We call for an immediate end to the launching of rockets against Israeli civilian targets, and to all forms of violence," she said.

UN To Map Disputed Shaba Farms Area On Israel-Lebanon Border

Taken from Haaretz, 30/10/2006
By Aluf Benn

The United Nations will appoint a cartographer to map the precise location and area of the Shaba Farms, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni reported to the cabinet on Sunday.

The status of the territory on the slopes of Mount Hermon is disputed by Lebanon, Syria and Israel and its boundaries have never been precisely defined.

Livni said the cartographer would start working in mid-November from UN headquarters in New York, and not conduct surveying at the site itself at this stage.

The move was decided on following the periodical report of UN envoy Terje Larsen about the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559.

Israel took over the area in 1967 and sees it as part of the Golan Heights. The UN accepted this position following the IDF's pullout from Lebanon in May 2000 but Hezbollah and Lebanon claim that this is Lebanese territory still under Israeli occupation.

During the recent war in Lebanon, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said Israel should leave the Shaba Farms and place the area in UN custody until the sovereignty issue is settled.

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to persuade Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to agree to discuss Shaba Farms, but he refused.

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Once this issue is settled then the issue of the The Golan Heights should be addressed then Jerusalem and the remaining occupied Palestinian Land. When all of these issues are settled then the rest of the world can live in peace and get on with our lives, unfortunately the governments of Isreal and USA beg to differ and feel that illegal occupation is necessary for the survival of Isreal and a tool to control Middle East policies.

Brothers In Arms - Israel's Secret Pact With Pretoria

Following the death of PW Botha, this is a great article that illustrates the correlation of the racist regime that existed in South Africa and the one that still exists in the state of Israel.

Taken from The Guardian, February 7, 2006

Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship - A-bomb technology

Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer survived the extermination camp, married soon after the war and moved to South Africa.

Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.

Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.

Reitzer was unusual among Jewish South Africans in her open enthusiasm for apartheid and for her membership of the NP. But she was an accepted member of the Jewish community in Johannesburg, working for the Holocaust survivors association, while Jews who fought the system were frequently ostracised by their own community.

Many Israelis recoil at suggestions that their country, risen from the ashes of genocide and built on Jewish ideals, could be compared to a racist regime. Yet for years the bulk of South Africa's Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefited and thrived under its protection, even if some of their number figured prominently in the liberation movements. In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.

Afrikaner anti-semitism Apartheid sought to segregate every aspect of life from the workplace to the bedroom, even though whites in practice were dependent on black people as a workforce and servants. Segregation evolved into "separate development" and the bantustans - the five nominally "independent" homelands where millions of black people were dumped under the rule of despots beholden to Pretoria.

When the Nationalist party government first gained power in Pretoria in 1948, the Jews of South Africa - the bulk of them descendants of refugees from 19th-century pogroms in Lithuania and Latvia - had reason to be wary. A decade before Malan became the first apartheid-era prime minister, he was leading opposition to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany entering South Africa. In promoting legislation to block immigration, Malan told parliament in 1937: "I have been reproached that I am now discriminating against the Jews as Jews. Now let me say frankly that I admit that it is so."

South African anti-semitism had grown with the rise of Jews to prominence in the 1860s, during the Kimberly diamond rush. At the turn of the century, the Manchester Guardian's correspondent, JA Hobson, reflected a view that the Boer war was being fought in the interests of a "small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race".

Fifty years later, Malan's cabinet saw similar conspiracies. Hendrik Verwoerd, editor of the virulently anti-semitic newspaper, Die Transvaler, and future author of "grand apartheid", accused Jews of controlling the economy. Before the second world war, the secret Afrikaner society, the Broederbond - which included Malan and Verwoerd as members - developed ties to the Nazis. Another Broederbond member and future prime minister, John Vorster, was interned in a prison camp by Jan Smuts's government during the war for his Nazi sympathies and ties to the Grey Shirt fascist militia.

Don Krausz, chairman of Johannesburg's Holocaust survivors association, arrived in South Africa a year after the war, having survived Hitler's camps at Ravensbr?ck and Sachsenhausen when much of his extended family did not. "The Nationalists had a strongly anti-semitic platform before 1948. The Afrikaans press was viciously anti-Jewish, much like Der St?rmer in Germany under Hitler. The Jew felt himself very much threatened by the Afrikaner. The Afrikaner supported Hitler," he says. "My wife comes from Potchefstroom [in what was then the Transvaal]. Every Jewish shop in that town was blown up by the Grey Shirts. In the communities that were predominantly Afrikaans, the Jews were absolutely victimised. Now the same crowd comes to power in 1948. The Jew was a very frightened person. There were cabinet ministers who openly supported the Nazis."

Helen Suzman, a secular Jew, was for many years the only anti-apartheid voice in parliament. "They didn't fear there would be a Holocaust but they did fear there might be Nuremberg-style laws, the kind that prevented people practising their professions. The incoming government had made it clear that race differentiation was going to be intensified, and the Jews didn't know where they were going to fit into that," she says.

Many South African Jews were soon reassured that, while there would be Nuremberg-style laws, they would not be the victims. The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel's struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism.

Many Afrikaners saw the Nationalist party's election victory as liberation from bitterly hated British rule. British concentration camps in South Africa may not have matched the scale or intent of Hitler's war against the Jews, but the deaths of 25,000 women and children from disease and starvation were deeply rooted in Afrikaner nationalism, in the way the memory of the Holocaust is now central to Israel's perception of itself. The white regime said that the lesson was for Afrikaners to protect their interests or face destruction.

"What the Nats were trying to do was protect the Afrikaner," says Krausz. "Especially after what was done to them in the Boer war, where the Afrikaner was reduced almost to a beggar on returning after the war, whether it was from the battlefield or some sort of concentration camp. They did it to protect the Afrikaner, his predominance after 1948, his culture."

There was also God. The Dutch Reformed Church, prising justifications for apartheid out of the Old Testament and Afrikaner history, seized on the victory over the Zulus at the battle of Blood River as confirming that the Almighty sided with the white man.

"Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity," says Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa's intelligence minister and Jewish co-author of a petition that was circulated amongst South African Jewry protesting at the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

"This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was 'a land without people for a people without land', so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest."

Anti-semitism lingered, but within a few years of the Nationalists assuming power in 1948, many Jewish South Africans found common purpose with the rest of the white community. "We were white and even though the Afrikaner was no friend of ours, he was still white," says Krausz. "The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was 'the blacks this and the blacks that'. And I said to them, 'You know, I've heard exactly the same from the Nazis about you.' The laws were reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws. Separate entrances; 'Reserved for whites' here; 'Not for Jews' there."

For decades, the Zionist Federation and Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa honoured men such as Percy Yutar, who prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years). Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg's largest orthodox synagogue. Some Jewish leaders hailed him as a "credit to the community" and a symbol of the Jews' contribution to South Africa.

"The image of the Jews was that they were following Helen Suzman," says Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria. "I think the majority didn't like what apartheid was doing to the blacks but enjoyed the fruits of the system and thought that maybe that's the only way to run a country like South Africa."

The Jewish establishment shied away from confrontation with the government. The declared policy of the Board of Deputies was "neutrality" so as not to "endanger" the Jewish population. Those Jews who saw silence as collaboration with racial oppression, and did something about it outside of the mainstream political system, were shunned.

"They were mostly disapproved of very strongly because it was felt they were putting the community in danger," says Suzman. "The Board of Deputies always said that every Jew can exercise his freedom to choose his political party but bear in mind what it is doing to the community. By and large, Jews were part of the privileged white community and that led many Jews to say, 'We will not rock the boat.'"

Common aimsIsrael was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit.

Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".

Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Vorster's visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.

"We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.

"We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate."

Alongside the state-owned factories turning out materiel for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.

Going nuclearThe biggest secret of all was the nuclear one. Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bombs. Israel was embarrassed enough about its close association with a political movement rooted in racial ideology to keep the military collaboration hidden.

"All that I'm telling you was completely secret," says Liel. "The knowledge of it was extremely limited to a small number of people outside the security establishment. But it so happened that many of our prime ministers were part of it, so if you take people such as [Shimon] Peres or Rabin, certainly they knew about it because they were part of the security establishment.

"At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating."

So did many politicians. Israeli cities found twins in South Africa, and Israel was alone among western nations in allowing the black homeland of Bophuthatswana to open an "embassy".

By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts.

"There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights," says Kasrils. "The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."

There are important differences. Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.

White South Africa and Israel painted themselves as enclaves of democratic civilisation on the front line in defending western values, yet both governments often demanded to be judged by the standards of the neighbours they claimed to be protecting the free world from.

"The whites [in South Africa] always saw their fate in a way related to the fate of the Israelis because the Israelis were a white minority surrounded by 200 million fanatic Muslims assisted by communism," says Liel. "Also, there was this analysis that said Israel is a civilised western island in the midst of these 200 million barbaric Arabs and it's the same as the Afrikaners; five million Afrikaners surrounded by hundreds of millions of blacks who are also assisted by communism."

When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel's security establishment balked. "When we came to the crossroads in '86-'87, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, 'You're crazy, it's suicidal.' They were saying we wouldn't have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it's probably true," he says.

Forgetting the pastShimon Peres was defence minister at the time of Vorster's visit to Jerusalem and twice served as prime minister during the 1980s when Israel drew closest to the apartheid government. He shies away from questions about the morality of ties to the white regime. "I never think back. Since I cannot change the past, why should I deal with it?" he says.

Pressed about whether he ever had doubts about backing a government that was the antithesis of what Israel said it stood for, Peres says his country was struggling for survival. "Every decision is not between two perfect situations. Every choice is between two imperfect alternatives. At that time the movement of black South Africa was with Arafat against us. Actually, we didn't have much of a choice. But we never stopped denouncing apartheid. We never agreed with it."

And a man like Vorster? "I wouldn't put him on the list of the greatest leaders of our time," says Peres.

The deputy director general of Israel's foreign ministry, Gideon Meir, says that while he had no detailed knowledge of Israel's relationship with the apartheid government, it was driven by a sole consideration. "Our main problem is security. There is no other country in the world whose very existence is being threatened. This is since the inception of the state of Israel to this very day. Everything is an outcome of the geopolitics of Israel."

When apartheid collapsed, the South African Jewish establishment that once honoured Percy Yutar - the prosecutor who jailed Mandela - now rushed to embrace Jews who were at the forefront of the anti-apartheid struggle, such as Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and Ruth First.

"I received these awards from international Zionist organisations claiming that it was my Judaic roots that had driven me," says Suzman. "When I said I didn't have a Jewish upbringing and that I went to a convent which didn't influence me either, they said it was not actively but instinctively."

For Kasrils, the embrace was short-lived. "They spent years denouncing me for 'endangering the Jews' and then suddenly they pretend they've been at my side all through the struggle. It didn't last long. As soon as I started criticising what Israel is doing in Palestine they dropped me again," he said.

Nowadays, the language of the anti-apartheid struggle has found favour with the Jewish establishment as a means of defending Israel. South Africa's chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, has called Zionism the "national liberation movement of the Jewish people" and invoked the terminology of Pretoria's policies to uplift "previously disadvantaged" black people. "Israel is an affirmative-action state set up to protect Jews from genocide. We are previously disadvantaged and we can't rely on the goodwill of the world," he said. Rabbi Goldstein declined several requests for an interview.

In 2004, Ronnie Kasrils visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effect of Israel's assault on the West Bank two years earlier in response to a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people. "This is much worse than apartheid," he said. "The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale."

Petition of conscienceMore than 200 South African Jews signed a petition that Kasrils co-authored with another Jewish veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Max Ozinsky, denouncing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and drawing a parallel with apartheid. The document, called A Declaration of Conscience, prompted a furious debate within the community. Arthur Goldreich - one of Mandela's early comrades-in-arms who also fought for Israel's independence - was among those who signed but he attached an addendum recognising the impact of the suicide bombings on how Israelis view the Palestinians.

Kasrils acknowledges the effect of the bombers but says that Israel's "apartheid strategy" was under way long before the suicide attacks began. He notes the resemblance of the occupied territories to South Africa's patchwork of homelands - the bantustans - that were intended to divest the country of much of its black population while keeping the best of their land.

Today, about six million Israelis live on 85% of the area that was Palestine under the British mandate. Nearly 3.5 million Palestinians are confined to the remaining 15%, with their towns and cities penned between Israel's ever-expanding settlement blocks and behind a network of segregated roads, security barriers and military installations.

You might say that Israel and the old South Africa were caught out by history. The world of 1948 into which the Jewish state was born and the Afrikaners came to power cared little about the "dark peoples" who stood in the way of grand visions. Neither government was doing very much that others - including British colonists - had not done before them.

And if Israel was fighting for its life and forcing Arabs out of their homes at the same time, who in the west was going to judge the Jews after what they had endured?

But colonialism crumbled in Africa and Israel grew strong, and the world became less accepting of the justifications in Pretoria and Jerusalem. South Africa's white leadership eventually accepted another way. Israel now stands at a critical moment in its history.

With Ariel Sharon in a coma, it is unlikely that we will ever know how far he intended to carry his "unilateral disengagement" strategy after the withdrawal from Gaza and a part of the West Bank. Like FW de Klerk, who initiated the dismantling of apartheid, Sharon might have found he had set in motion forces he could not contain - forces that would have led to a deal acceptable to the Palestinians.

But to the Palestinians, Sharon appeared intent on carrying through a modified version of his longstanding plan to rid Israel of responsibility for as many Arabs as possible while keeping as much of their land as he could.

While Tony Blair was praising the Israeli prime minister for his political "courage" in leaving Gaza in August last year, Sharon was expropriating more land in the West Bank than Israel surrendered in Gaza, building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements, and accelerating construction of the 400-plus miles of concrete and barbed wire barrier that few doubt is intended as a border.

Palestinians said that whatever emasculated "state" emerged - granted only "aspects of sovereignty" with limited control over its borders, finances and foreign policy - would be disturbingly reminiscent of South Africa's defunct bantustans.

Take the roads. Israel is rapidly constructing a parallel network of roads in the West Bank for Palestinians who are barred from using many existing routes. B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, describes the system as bearing "clear similarities to the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa".

The army, which describes roads from which Palestinians are forbidden as "sterile", says the policy is driven solely by security considerations. But it is evident that the West Bank road system is a tool, along with the 400-plus miles of barrier, in entrenching the settlement blocks and carving up territory. "The road regime is not by legislation," said Goldreich. "It's by political decision and military orders. When I look at all of those maps and I look at the roads, it's like Alice in Wonderland. There are roads that Israelis can go on and roads Palestinians can go on, and roads Israelis and Palestinians can go on." The roads, the checkpoints, the fence - all "by edict. I look at it and ask, what is the thinking behind this?"

Three years ago, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the former Italian prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, as telling dinner guests at a Jerusalem hotel that, on a visit to Rome a few years earlier, Sharon had told him that the bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. When one of the guests suggested to D'Alema that he was interpreting, not repeating, Sharon's words, the former prime minister said not. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister," he said. With Sharon out of politics, his successor Ehud Olmert has pledged himself to carrying through the vision of carving out Israel's final borders deep inside the West Bank and retaining all of Jerusalem for the Jewish state.

So is it apartheid?Stepping into modern Israel, anyone who experienced the old South Africa would see few immediately visible comparisons. There are no signs segregating Jews and non-Jews. Yet, as in white South Africa then and now, there is a world of discrimination and oppression that most Israelis choose not to see.

Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate and harass Palestinians at checkpoints and settlers paint hate-filled slogans on the walls of Arab houses in Hebron. The police stop citizens who appear to be Arabs on West Jerusalem streets to demand their identity cards as a matter of routine.

Some Jewish communities refuse to allow Arabs in their midst on the grounds of cultural differences. One Jewish settlement mayor tried to require Arabs who entered to wear a tag that identified them as Palestinians. In the 1990s, rightwingers menaced shopkeepers into sacking Arab workers. Those who complied were given signs declaring their shops Arab-free.

Sometimes the hatred is explained away as religious discrimination, but the chants at the football matches go "Death to Arabs" not "Death to Muslims".

The Israeli press largely ignores the routine of occupation despite the fearless reporting of some journalists on the disturbing number of children who die under Israeli guns (more than 650 since the second intifada broke out in September 2000, of which a quarter were younger than 12 years old); the abuse of Palestinians by settlers, and the humiliations meted out at the checkpoints.

The eight-metre-high wall driven through Jerusalem is almost invisible to residents of the Jewish west of the city. Because of the geography, most of the city's Jews do not see the concrete mammoth dividing streets and families, and the demolished homes - just as most of South Africa's whites steered clear of the townships and were blind to what was being done in their name.

Shortly after arriving in Jerusalem, I was invited for dinner at the home of a liberal Israeli family. The guests included an American magazine publisher, a prominent historian and political activists. The conversation turned to the Palestinians and degenerated into a discussion of how they do not "deserve" a state. The intifada and suicide bombings were seen to justify 37 years of occupation and offset whatever crimes Israel may have committed against the Arabs under its rule.

It was all very reminiscent of conversations in South Africa, and indeed the popular Israeli view of Palestinians is not so far from how many white South Africans thought about black people. Opinion polls show that large numbers of Israelis regard Arabs as "dirty", "primitive", as not valuing human life and as violent.

Sharon recruited into his government men who openly called for wholesale ethnic cleansing that would more than match apartheid's forced removals. Among them was the tourism minister, Rehavam Ze'evi, who advocated the "transfer" of Arabs out of Israel and the occupied territories. Even the Israeli press called him a racist. Ze'evi was shot dead in 2001 by Palestinians who said his policies made him a legitimate target.

But Ze'evi's views did not die with him. An influential member of the Likud central committee, Uzi Cohen, said Israel and its western allies should demand that a part of Jordan be carved off as a Palestinian state and that Arabs in the occupied territories should be given 20 years to "leave voluntarily". "In case they don't leave, plans would have to be drawn up to expel them by force," Cohen told Israel radio. "Many people support the idea but few are willing to speak about it publicly." Cohen is among 70 Israeli MPs who have backed a bill to establish a national memorial day for Ze'evi and an institute to perpetuate his ideas.

In 2001, Sharon appointed Uzi Landau as his security minister, a position from which he openly advocated that Palestinians should be forced to move to Jordan because they were in the way of Israeli expansion in the West Bank. "For many of us, it's as though they [the Palestinians] are encroaching on our very right to be there [in the occupied territories]," he said.

Sharon rarely objected to the expression of such views, and when he did it was not because they were racist or immoral. The prime minister told Likud party members who pressed him to expel Palestinians that he could not do so because the "international situation wouldn't be conducive".

"We've always had the fanatics talking of greater Israel," says Krausz, the Holocaust survivor in Johannesburg. "There are blokes who say it says in the Bible this land is ours, God gave it to us. It's fascism."

Colonial dispossessionYossi Sarid, a leftwing Israeli MP, said of a cabinet minister who agitated for the forced removal of Arabs: "His remarks are reminiscent of other people and other lands which ultimately led to the annihilation of millions of Jews." They are also reminiscent of comments by PW Botha, who went on to become South Africa's president. Speaking to parliament in 1964 as minister for coloured affairs, he said: "I am one of those who believe that there is no permanent home for even a section of the Bantu in the white area of South Africa and the destiny of South Africa depends on this essential point. If the principle of permanent residence for the black man in the area of the white is accepted then it is the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it in this country."

There was a time when large numbers of Israelis agreed with Ze'evi and Cohen, but over the past decade they have come to support the creation of a Palestinian state as a means of ridding themselves of responsibility from the bulk of Arabs. Separation. Apartheid.

But South African apartheid was more than just separation. "Apartheid was all about land," says John Dugard, the South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor. "Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied territories], particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank."

Arthur Goldreich resists the temptation to use the comparison. "It is a viable, even attractive, analogy. I have in the past been very reluctant, and still am, to make the analogy because I think it's too convenient. I think there are striking similarities in all forms of racist discrimination," he says.

"I think to describe, let us say, the bantustanism which we see through a policy of occupation and separation: they all have their own words and their own implications and it is not necessary to go outside to find them."

Kasrils agrees. "Yes, there are enormous parallels with apartheid, but the problem with making comparisons is it actually distracts from the Palestinian context," he says. "We have to look for another definition. What struck me is dispossession, colonial dispossession. Most colonial dispossession took place over centuries through settlers and forced removals. In South Africa, that was a 300-year process. Here, it's taken place in 50 years; 1948, 1967 and the present in terms of the heightened nature of militarism in the West Bank and Gaza leading to the wall, which I don't see as a wall of security but a wall of dispossession."

Hirsh Goodman emigrated to Israel three decades ago after his national service in the South African army. His son moved to South Africa after completing his conscription in the Israeli military. "The army sent him to the occupied territories and he said he would never forgive this country for what it made him do," says Goodman, a security analyst at Tel Aviv university. He says Israel has a lot to answer for but to call it apartheid goes too far. "If Israel retains the [occupied] territories it ceases to be a democracy, and in that sense it is apartheid because it differentiates between two classes of people and separates and creates two sets of laws which is what apartheid did. It creates two standards of education, health, of dispensing funds. But you can't call Israel an apartheid state when 76% of the people want an agreement with the Palestinians. Yes, there's discrimination against the Arabs, the Ethiopians and others, but it's not a racist society. There's colonialism, but there's not apartheid. I feel very strongly about apartheid. I hate the term being abused."

Daniel Seidemann, the Israeli lawyer who is fighting Jerusalem's residency and planning laws, says that he used to reject the apartheid parallel out of hand but finds it harder to do so nowadays. "My gut reaction: 'Oh, no! Our side? My goodness, no!' I think there's a good deal to be said for that reaction to the extent that apartheid was rooted in a racial ideology which clearly fed social realities, fed the political system, fed the system of economic subjugation. As a Jew, to concede the predominance of a racial world view of subjugating Palestinians is difficult to accept," he says. "But, unfortunately, the fact of the absence of a racial ideology is not sufficient because the realities that have emerged in some ways are clearly reminiscent of some of the important trappings of an apartheid regime."

So perhaps the better question is how Israel came to a point where comparisons with apartheid could even be contemplated. Is it a victim of circumstances, forced into oppression by its need to survive? Or was the hunger for land so central to the Zionist project that domination was the inevitable result?

Krausz worked in Israel for several years soon after the birth of the state. "I recognised the conflict in trying to take land that the Palestinians had lived on for centuries. I realise the 1948 war of independence wasn't a right-and-wrong situation: a lot of Arabs not only fled voluntarily but were also encouraged to do so. What they would have done if there hadn't been a war, I don't know," he says.

"I know that where I drilled for oil was the site of an Arab village. Being South African, I used to go and visit family and friends on a kibbutz that was started by South Africans, including my cousin. I used to go roaming about the countryside there and I went through one abandoned and blown up Arab village after another."

States of fearIn Israel, at least until the late 1970s, the threat from its Arab neighbours was all too real. But fear also played a role among white South Africans, who watched with growing horror, and then terror, the tide of empire receding and black rule sweeping Africa. The accounts of white women raped in newly independent Congo and, years later, the scenes of whites fleeing Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia, were used by South Africa to terrify its white citizens into accepting increasingly oppressive measures against black people. Nevertheless, the fear among whites was real. They, like Israelis, saw themselves as in a struggle for their very existence.

Israel's critics say that as the threats to the Jewish state receded it came more and more to resemble the apartheid model - particularly in its use of land and residency laws - until the similarities outweighed the differences. Liel says that was never the intent.

"The existential problems of Israel were real," he says. "Of the injustice we did, we're always ashamed. We always tried to behave democratically. Of course, on the private level there was a lot of discrimination - a lot, a lot. By the government also. But it was not a philosophy that was built on racism. A lot of it was security-oriented."

Goldreich disagrees. "It's a gross distortion. I'm surprised at Liel. In 1967, in the six day war, in this climate of euphoria - by intent, not by will of God or accident - the Israeli government occupied the territories of the West Bank and Gaza with a captive Palestinian population obviously in order to extend the area of Israel and to push the borders more distant from where they were," he says.

"I and others like me, active after the six day war on public platforms, tried desperately to convince audiences throughout this country that peace agreements between Israel and Palestine [offer] greater security than occupation of territory and settlements. But the government wanted territory more than it wanted security.

"I am certain that it was in the minds of many in the leadership of this country that what we needed to do was make this place Arab-free. Mandela said to me once at Rivonia, 'You know, they want to make us unpeople, not seen.'"

But, as ordinary Israelis discovered, such a system cannot survive unchallenged. Apartheid collapsed in part because South African society was exhausted by its demands and the myth of victimhood among whites fell away. Israel has not got there yet. Many Israelis still think they are the primary victims of the occupation.

For Seidemann, the crucial issue is not how the apartheid system worked but how it began to disintegrate. "It unravelled because it couldn't be done. Apartheid drained so much energy from South African society that this was one of the compelling reasons beyond the economic sanctions and pressures that convinced De Klerk that this was not sustainable. This is what is coming to Israel."

Or perhaps the conflict will evolve into something worse; something that will produce parallels even more shocking than that with apartheid.

Arnon Soffer has spent years advising the government on the "demographic threat" posed by the Arabs. The Haifa university geographer paints a bleak vision of how he sees the Gaza strip a generation after Israel's withdrawal.

"When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day," he told the Jerusalem Post.

"If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."

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The article was great to read but should have mentioned more on how some South African Jews detested the apartheid regime and were championing the release of Nelson Mandela and trying to make the country more democratic. It must also be noted that there are some very good Jewish people inside and outside of Israel that detest what is happening to the Palestinians and would welcome change but are stopped by the Zionist regime. The regimes and the some of its believers see nothing wrong with what is happening at the moment.

Apartheid still exists in Isreal. It has been reported in US state department's annual human rights report - that there is "institutionalised legal and societal discrimination against Israel's Christian, Muslim and Druze citizens". "The government," it says, "does not provide Israeli Arabs, who constitute 20% of the population, with the same quality of education, housing, employment and social services as Jews."

Soon after this article was published in the Guradian, the newspaper received a complaint from a pro-Israel professional American lobby organisation called Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. It had been rejected by the British Press Complaints Commission in an adjudication - a win for freedom of expression. CAMERA stepped in because the Guardian newspaper on the internet is widely read by American citizens.

The fact is CAMERA and APAIC are some of the most dangerous organisation in the world that try and dictate how the media should report the coverage of the Middle East crisis. Any coverage that shows the truth behind the regime in Israel is condemned very quickly and this is not good for journalism, not good for news agencies and not good for the public. – We should demand to know the truth and not another what these organisations want us to hear.

PW Botha, Unrepentant Defender Of Apartheid, Dies Aged 90

Taken from The Independent, 01 November 2006
By Alex Duval Smith

The former South African president P W Botha, who never publicly repented of his hardline stance during the country's worst years of racial violence, died last night aged 90 at his seaside home in the Western Cape.

According to a security guard at the apartheid-era president's home at Wilderness, near George on the east coast, Botha died "peacefully" yesterday evening after suffering a heart attack.

Known for his violent temper and finger wagging, Botha was nicknamed die Groot Krokodil (the Great Crocodile). As prime minister from 1978 to 1984 and state president from 1984 to 1989, he staunchly resisted international pressure to release Nelson Mandela. Nevertheless, he eventually saw the writing on the wall for the racist apartheid system and initiated political changes that would ultimately enable the peaceful transition to majority rule. His successor, F W de Klerk, eventually released Mr Mandela in 1990.

Pieter Willem Botha retired to almost complete reclusion at his cottage, De Anker, after 1998, when he was found guilty and given a suspended jail sentence for refusing to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He called the TRC "a circus" . In its final report, the commission said Botha ordered the 1988 bombing of a Johannesburg building that was housing an anti-apartheid group, and that he was also directly accountable for the 1987 bombing of the ANC's London headquarters.

But in March this year, he made a rare appearance at the launch of a DVD collection of interviews with a South African journalist which all the major South African broadcasters had turned down.

At the launch, which was attended by about 70 people, Botha, who had been rumoured to be suffering from dementia, disproved gossips with a snide remark almost certainly aimed at Mandela. "I know of other people in South Africa who are not compos mentis and I will not discuss them," he said.

Questioned about his career, he expressed no regrets, saying that he did not believe in the "Rainbow Nation" and that he remained opposed to affirmative action. He said he had no regrets about not having released Mandela: "I told him to renounce violence, which he did not do. He kept himself in jail at that stage."

Throughout his years in power, Botha underlined the importance of security to prevent a "total onslaught" by communists. He insisted on maintaining racial segregation and made it clear his prime loyalty was towards the broader white population of just under three million people, or 8 per cent of the total.

The son of a farmer in the rural Orange Free State, Botha left university in 1935 to become a full-time organiser for the National Party. After supporting the pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag (Ox Wagon Fire Guard) during the Second World War, he was elected to parliament in 1948, the year the National Party came to power. He helped to draft much of the early apartheid legislation and became defence minister in 1966.

Botha suffered a stroke in January 1989 and a week later resigned as leader of the National Party. He was replaced by his rival de Klerk, the education minister.

He stayed on as president and in July arranged a secret meeting with Mandela in what critics said was a display of one-upmanship over de Klerk.

The ANC said last night: "The African National Congress extends its sympathies and condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of former President P W Botha. The ANC wishes his family strength and comfort at this time."

In his own words (this section taken from the Guardian Newspaper, UK)
Compiled by Piter-Dirk Uys, published by Penguin (1987)

· Where in the whole wide world today can you find a more just society than South Africa has?' (1976)

· The separation of races happened long before the nationalist government. God separated the races' (1984)

· 'I'll keep order in South Africa and nobody in the world is going to stop me' (1985)

· I switch off the lights and sleep within a few minutes. I never take a guilty conscience with me to bed' (1987)

Hundreds Of Pagan Criminals Have Given A Day Off Prison Work To Celebrate Halloween

Taken from the Daily Mail, 31st October 2006
by JAMES SLACK

The convicts, who included Devil worshippers and Satanists, were spared duties all day - despite only celebrating the start of the Celtic New Year during the evening.

The decision was described as farcical 'political correctness' at a time when the Prison Service is in the middle of an overcrowding crisis. Home Secretary John Reid was accused of 'fiddling while Rome burns' over the measure.

The 282 Pagans in jails in England and Wales were allowed to use rune stones, flexible twigs and hoodless robes to mark the festival.

The step was taken to protect the Prison Service from being sued for discriminating against the religion while allowing other inmates time-off to mark their own religious celebrations.
Christian prisoners are allowed three days off on Good Friday, Easter Day and Christmas Day.

Muslims are entitled to the most time off - 26 days to pray, including the fast of Ramadan. Buddhists get three days, Hindus ten and Jews seven.

But Brian Caton, general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association, said: "It does seem once again the Prison Service is fiddling while Rome burns. With everything that is going on, and a huge prison population, the Prison Service decides to be pink and fluffy with all kinds of gifts to prisoners."

He added: "Pagans celebrate this in the evening. They do not celebrate during the day. Again, I think it is a little bit of political correctness gone wrong. They do not talk to pagans about what they prefer."

Home Office documents reveal that Pagans can choose a day off work on two dates from eight of their festivals each year.

These include the Spring Equinox on March 20, the Midsummer Solstice on June 21 and Hallowe'en the Samhain, or Summer's End, as it was known in Celtic times on October 31.

Cerridwen Connelly, a spokesman for Druids, said the Home Office had made the right decision. Mrs Connelly, known as 'dragon oak', added: "The main issue in this country today is getting more religious tolerance.

"We can't say it is OK for Muslims and Hindus but Pagans are second-class citizens. It has to be done fairly and this is one way of doing it."

Home Office guidelines say the measures are crucial for reducing 'exposure to litigation'. Officials said: "The Prison Service is committed to treating all prisoners with decency and humanity, which includes respecting those of all religions."

The Home Secretary is currently struggling to deal with record overcrowding in jails, which has led to convicts being housed in police cells. The crisis measure, known as Operation Safeguard, is costing the public tens of thousands of pounds.