The death of Slobodan Milosevic was shrouded in mystery and deepening controversy last night as Dutch pathologists examined his corpse and it emerged that he had claimed he was being slowly killed by doctors.
Milosevic’s body was removed from the detention centre at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague to the Netherlands forensic institute for a postmortem examination and toxicological testing.

Last night a preliminary postmortem report said that he had died of heart failure. His remains were to be released to his family today.

Yesterday the 64-year-old former Serbian and Yugoslav president’s lawyer revealed a six-page letter – dated last Friday, 24 hours before his death – that Milosevic wrote to the Russian government alleging he was being deliberately administered the wrong drugs for his illnesses.
“Persons that are giving me the drug for the treatment of leprosy surely cannot be treating me. Especially those persons against whom I have defended my country in the war and who also have an interest in silencing me can likewise not be treating me,” Milosevic said in a handwritten letter to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

Milosevic had a long history of heart disease, hypertension and high blood pressure. He was also found to be ignoring Dutch medical advice while on trial for the past four years and to be taking drugs other than those prescribed. His family has a history of suicide; his parents and a favourite uncle killed themselves.

Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor in The Hague, said yesterday that Milosevic, found dead in his cell on Saturday morning, might have killed himself. “According to our valuations, [the trial] would have ended with a verdict requesting he be shut away for life. Perhaps he wanted to avoid all that,” Ms Del Ponte told the Italian paper, la Repubblica. But tribunal sources said the most likely explanation for his death was natural causes.

While Milosevic claimed in his letter that he was being deliberately administered the wrong medicine, he also has a record of taking unprescribed drugs and refusing treatment advised by his Dutch doctors.
guardian.co.uk

Fifteen months after he was denied high office by the youthful protesters of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Viktor Yanukovich is on the brink of an extraordinary comeback.

The pro-Moscow candidate, whose presidential ambitions were dashed after the disputed December 2004 poll, scents victory in the parliamentary elections in two weeks. Arguing that Ukraine made a terrible mistake by turning its back on its traditional ally, Russia, to woo the European Union, his Party of the Regions looks set to win the most seats – making him the king-maker in an expected new coalition government.

Mr Yanukovich, who was acting prime minister from November 2002 until December 2004, is too cautious to lay claim openly to the office again, but his message is clear: he is back.

“We aim to get power and overcome Ukraine’s crisis and stabilise the country with a team of able and talented people,” he said at his campaign headquarters, a 19th-century mansion in the Ukrainian capital.

In a swipe at President Victor Yushchenko, who seeks links with the EU and Nato, he said: “The government talks about European integration and the benefits that it will bring at a time when many people in Ukraine wonder why their standards of living are deteriorating. The country is living in a state of permanent crisis.”
telegraph.co.uk

THE man likely to become Israel’s next defence minister does not shy away from talking about his past.
“I killed many Arabs, probably more than Hamas fighters killed Jews, and more than anybody else, but all in order to secure Israeli lives,” said Admiral Ami Ayalon, the Labour party’s candidate for the most difficult portfolio in Israeli politics.

There are two weeks before the general election, and victory for either Labour or the Kadima party is expected to ensure that the former commando and head of Shin Bet, the internal security service, will take over from Shaul Mofaz, the incumbent, in a coalition.

Ayalon is considered a dove despite his 32 years of military service and his near five-year stint at the helm of the intelligence agency. He is a straight talker, and wants a comprehensive peace settlement with the Palestinians even under a Hamas leadership.

“I’d be willing to negotiate with Hamas if the organisation accepts the idea of a two-state solution,” he said in an interview last week.

Ayalon, 61, is regarded as a fresh thinker: he believes Israel should establish an “axis of pragmatism” with the regional countries that have full diplomatic relations with Israel — Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey.

“This is the whole idea — to create this pragmatic axis which will be supported by the European Union and the international community,” he said. It is part of his strategy to woo the Palestinians from the more extremist policies of Hamas. “Seventy per cent of those who voted for Hamas were not Hamas believers but voted against the corruption in the Palestinian authority,” he said. “If we establish this axis it will break Hamas and we will see the pragmatist forces among the Palestinians.”

Ayalon is also open-minded on the controversy over the division of Jerusalem, which he envisages as an “open city” and capital of two states. Jerusalem should be shared between Arabs and Jews. “Arab neighbourhoods will come under Palestinian sovereignty, Jewish ones under Israeli sovereignty,” he said. He has even suggested that if a common solution could be agreed with Hamas on the future of the West Bank, the hated security wall currently under construction could be taken down.
timesonline.co.uk

Peretz: We’ll pass law to pay settlers to leave voluntarily
Labor Chairman Amir Peretz declared Saturday that a government controlled by his party would not waive the negotiating stage of West Bank withdrawal, and would begin its term by passing a law that would pay West Bank settlers who volunteer to leave the territories, in order to reduce the number of settlers prior to any evacuation plan.

Peretz was responding to an interview in Friday’s Haaretz with Acting Prime Minister and Kadima head Yossi Olmert, who promised to draw permanent borders for the state.

“In contrast to Olmert, we do not intend to waive the negotiations stage,” Peretz said. “Kadima and Olmert say that Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] is irrelevant and sanctify unilateralism. We prefer to hold negotiations and to use unilateralism as a last resort. A unilateral step on the West Bank will not achieve international support either, since there won’t be a return to the 1967 borders and the world will view it as an attempt to set boundaries unilaterally.”

Peretz emphasized that a government led by him would bring about the rapid evacuation of the illegal West Bank outposts and the completion of the separation fence. In parallel, it would pass an “evacuation-compensation” law to pay settlers who leave the West Bank voluntarily. The idea is to thin out the settler population even before a disengagement plan is approved.

Police: Hamas is seeking control of East Jerusalem villages
Hamas is attempting to turn the Arab villages in East Jerusalem into “Hamas villages,” according to Jerusalem police.

Police officials said Hamas is seeking to increase its control of these villages in order to hold coordinated demonstrations there, among other things. This is only one of a series of measures being taken by the organization in order to heighten its presence in the capital in light of its election victory.

The Jerusalem police are already planning to counter Hamas intentions to establish an “alternative Orient House” in the Arab eastern city. Orient House, which had served as a Palestinian Authority government center, was closed by the Israeli government a few years ago for breaking the law.

“Hamas is a terror organization,” Jerusalem Police Chief Ilan Franco said last week. “It is still classified as a terror organization, and that is how the Jerusalem Police relates to it. Hamas’ activities in general, and in Jerusalem in particular, are prohibited.”

Franco said the police would not permit the reestablishment of Orient House or the creation of Hamas villages in East Jerusalem.

ISTANBUL (AFP) – Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals have gathered under tight security for a major conference to discuss a peaceful resolution to the 22-year-old Kurdish conflict in the country’s southeast.

Police imposed strict security measures after nationalists threatened to disrupt the two-day event, designed to promote ways of ending a conflict that has long impeded Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union.

Officers searched participants at the entrance of the venue Saturday, the private Bilgi University, and several dozen riot police were on guard outside the campus.

More than 45 Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals, politicians and journalists of various political convictions were taking part in the conference, entitled “The Kurdish question in Turkey: ways for a democratic settlement”.

Organizers said the conference could adopt a final declaration on Sunday, appealing to the government for more reforms to resolve the conflict, which has claimed some 37,000 lives since the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began fighting for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast in 1984.

The conflict has led to allegations of gross human rights violations on both sides, ravaged the already meager economy of the region and forced hundreds of thousands of already poor peasants to migrate into urban slum areas.
news.yahoo.com

BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 6 — Nearly a year ago, not long after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, who was twice prime minister of Lebanon, Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon, unleashing a wave of patriotism here that prompted many to say that the Lebanese might finally be able to take control of their destiny.

But the intensity of the moment and the rush of emotions eclipsed at least one important and largely unanswerable question: With Syria gone, or at least its troops gone, who would fill the power vacuum?

At the time, Iran did not appear to be the answer. But that is what is happening, according to government officials, political leaders and political analysts here.

Iran, long a powerful player in Lebanon, has been able to increase its influence, partly through its ties to the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. That has given Tehran a stronger hand to play in its confrontation with the United States and Europe over its nuclear program.

Should the nuclear showdown go badly for Iran, the government could rely on its surrogates in Lebanon as well as its influence in Iraq, or use oil for a weapon. In Lebanon, the Iranians could contribute to the kind of retribution they have promised as a payback, from a strike across the border into Israel, to a more forceful flexing that could paralyze the Lebanese government, political analysts and government officials said.
nytimes.com

The Times is war pimpin’.

Syria ignores US sanction on its bank
Syria on Friday brushed aside the U.S. decision to sever links to the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria (CBS).

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday barred American financial institutions from opening or maintaining an account for or on behalf of CBS because the bank “has been used by terrorists” to move funds and has laundered money from the “illicit sale of Iraqi oil”.

In a statement to the official SANA news agency, CBS Director General Dureid Dorgham said the U.S. decision “was taken for political reasons to affect Syria” without “logical evidence”.

Dorgham pointed out that it has been a “binding decision” to the U.S. banks even before the official announcement.

Meanwhile, he expressed confidence in some other friendly banks which had rejected the U.S. decision to sanction the Syrian bank, noting that these banks would not submit to it.

“Those banks consider the U.S. decision as a political one and is binding to the U.S. banks,” he said.

Syria switched state institutions’ foreign currency from U.S. dollar to the euro for all transactions a month ago in case Washington imposes more sanctions on it, Dorgham said.

Regarding money laundering, Dorgham said that the bank has formed a specialized committee for this matter and applied all procedures accredited in different countries of the world.

On the Iraqi money, Dorgham said: ” The bank has performed its work in this regard and we consider that the Iraqi official circles are the only authorized party to discuss such issue for they are careful on their interests.”

Washington seeks explanation for Spain’s Syria talks
MADRID (AFP) – Washington is demanding to know why Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos held a meeting in Damascus with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Mouallem.

El Pais quoted “diplomatic sources” as saying US ambassador in Madrid Eduardo Aguirre and another high-ranking US diplomat, Shirin Tahir Kheli, had expressed concern about the rare visit by a senior member of a Western government to Syria.

The Spanish government responded by saying it was “opposed to the strategy of isolating Damascus”, El Pais reported Saturday.

“Washington seeks explanation…Washington is demanding to know why…”

ASADABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Four U.S. soldiers were killed on Sunday after a blast ripped through their armoured vehicle in Afghanistan, the U.S. military said.

The soldiers were killed during a patrol in the eastern province of Kunar, which lies close to the border with Pakistan, in an attack claimed by Taliban insurgents.

“The extremists that initiated this senseless attack create a significant danger and threat to the Afghan people,” said Major General Benjamin C. Freakely for the U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.

The attack marked the U.S. military’s single biggest loss in a day in the country for several months and brought to 10 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year.
reuters.com

Afghan president survives suicide attack
A FORMER Afghan president who heads a government commission seeking to encourage Taliban defections has survived a suicide car bomb attack today that killed two bombers and two civilians, officials said.

Sibghatullah Mojadidi, who also chairs the upper house of parliament, or senate, was in a car being driven on a busy main road when attackers detonated a car laden with explosives near his vehicle.

“The aim of the attack was Mr Mojadidi,” Zalmai Oryakhel, the senior police officer for the area, said.

Witnesses said two vehicles in Mojadidi’s convoy were damaged but an official of President Hamid Karzai’s office said Mojadidi was not injured.

Pakistan accused of Afghan terror attack
The head of the upper-house of the Afghan parliament has accused the Pakistani secret service of being behind a suicide bombing which injured him and killed four other people in Kabul. The attack came during a weekend of violence in which four US servicemen died in the deadliest roadside bomb attack on Americans in a month and six Afghan policemen were killed, two of them beheaded, after being abducted from their homes. Elsewhere an armed gang abducted four Albanians working for a German company and their four Afghan bodyguards.

The charge against Pakistan by Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, a former president of the country, who is now leading a reconciliation programme with the Taliban, is the latest round in bitter feud between the two countries over insurgent attacks in Afghanistan.

President Hamid Karzai has claimed that senior Taliban figures, including the former head Mullah Mohammed Omar, are living in Pakistan and using the country as a base to infiltrate fighters across the border. His officials accuse the Pakistani intelligence serevice, ISI, of recruiting and training suicide bombers.

Pakistan Army Kills 30 Militants on Border
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistani soldiers backed by helicopter gunships attacked a suspected militant hideout in Pakistan’s volatile tribal region near the Afghan border and killed about 30 fighters, an army spokesman said Saturday.

But residents and hardline clerics disputed the military’s claim, saying most of the dead were local villagers, including women and children.

* BAGHDAD – At least 40 people were killed and 95 wounded in three car bombs that exploded almost simultaneously in two markets in the Shi’ite Sadr district of Baghdad on Sunday. Police dismantled a fourth bomb in the same area, they said.
* LATIFIYA – Gunmen ambushed and killed a local football player (Mohammad Najah) in Latifiya 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, local police said.
* BAGHDAD – Two civilians were killed and four wounded when a mortar round landed on a paint shop in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Eight bodies were found with their hands tied and gun shot wounds to the head in Rustamiya, a suburb in eastern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Six people were killed and 14 wounded, including policemen, when a roadside bomb exploded as a U.S convoy passed by in southern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Gunmen killed two police officers in separate incidents in Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Two soldiers were killed and four wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Five soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb went off near an Iraqi army patrol in eastern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad received at least twenty bodies overnight, some with gun shot wounds, a source in the hospital said.
DHULUIYA – Gunmen killed two army officers who work in the Joint Coordination Centre in Dhuluiya, 40 km (25 miles) north of Baghdad, the Joint Coordination Centre of Dhuluiya said.
alertnet.org

Explosion rocks market in Shiite slum, killing at least 39 in Baghdad; parliament to convene Thursday
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – A suicide bomber and a car bomb ripped apart a market Sunday in a Shiite slum in Baghdad, killing at least 39 people and wounding more than 100. The carnage came shortly after Iraqi politicians decided to convene parliament three days earlier than planned, suggesting some progress in efforts to form a unity government.

The death toll in Sadr City was sure to rise as residents, many firing Kalashnikov rifles into the air, raced to and fro to collect charred corpses from among burning vehicles and shops.

Angry residents kicked the head of the suicide bomber, apparently an African, as it lay in the street of the al-Hay market in the east Baghdad neighborhood.

US vows no permanent bases in Iraq
BAGHDAD (AFP) – US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said that his country did not want permanent military bases in Iraq and that he was willing to talk to Iran about the war-torn country’s future.

“We want Iraq to stand on its own feet, we have no goal of establishing permanent bases here,” he said in an interview with Iraq’s Ash-Sharqiya television, according to a transcript obtained by AFP.

“Our goal is a working, a workable government, so that we can leave Iraq and let Iraqis handle all their circumstance themselves. That’s our goal, and were very serious about this, we mean it,” he said.

Liars

U.S. Has No Immediate Plans to Close Abu Ghraib Prison
WASHINGTON, March 9, 2006 – The United States always has planned to transfer authority for all detention facilities in Iraq to the Iraqis, but announcements regarding the imminent closure at the Abu Ghraib prison are premature, defense officials said today.
News reports that the U.S. military intends to close Abu Ghraib within the next few months and to transfer its prisoners to other jails are inaccurate, officials said.

There’s no specific timetable for that transfer or for closure of the Baghdad prison, they said. Decisions regarding Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq will be based largely on two factors: the readiness of Iraq’s security forces to assume control of them and infrastructure improvements at the facilities.

The War Dividend: The British companies making a fortune out of conflict-riven Iraq
British businesses have profited by at least £1.1bn since coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein three years ago, the first comprehensive investigation into UK corporate investment in Iraq has found.

The company roll-call of post-war profiteers includes some of the best known names in Britain’s boardrooms as well many who would prefer to remain anonymous. They come from private security services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums, oil companies, architects offices and energy advisory bodies.

Among the top earners is the construction firm Amec, which has made an estimated £500m from a series of contracts restoring electrical systems and maintaining power generation facilities during the past two years. Aegis, which provides private security has earned more than £246m from a three-year contract with the Pentagon to co-ordinate military and security companies in Iraq. Erinys, which specialises in the same area, has made more than £86m, a substantial portion from the protection of oilfields.

The findings show how much is stake if Britain were to withdraw military protection from Iraq. British company involvement at the top of Iraq’s new political and economic structures means Iraq will be forced to rely on British business for many years to come.

Would Bob Marley have made it without his distinctive bouncy basslines? The question will be put to a judge this week as a protracted legal wrangle between the Marley family and the bassist in his backing band, the Wailers, finally comes to the High Court.

Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett is suing the Marleys and the Universal Island record label, claiming that neither he nor his deceased brother Carlton, the band’s drummer, have received any royalties since Marley’s death in 1981. If he is successful, Barrett, now in his sixties and father to 52 children, could receive a payout of up to £60 million.

Barrett claims that he and his brother signed a contract, alongside Marley, with Island in 1974, which entitled them to royalties as ‘partners’ in the group. Barrett also co-wrote several songs with Marley, for which he claims he was never paid publishing fees.

Lawyers for Universal Island and the Marley family, headed by the singer’s widow Rita, are expected to argue that Barrett gave up his right to royalties when he signed a legal settlement for several hundred thousand dollars in 1994.
observor.guardian.co.uk

SANTIAGO, Chile — The mansion was used as a domestic spying center by the feared secret police of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now it will house artwork and be dedicated to the Marxist foe overthrown by the general’s bloody 1973 coup.

The Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, due to open next month, will exhibit work by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Roberto Matta and Joan Miro.

“This is Salvador Allende’s revenge,” said Jose Balmes, the Spanish-born director of the museum.

The remodeling of the mansion was a journey through the inner workings of the shadowy agency responsible for many of the dictatorship’s worst abuses. Workers found passports, papers with instructions to agents, and diagrams of places under surveillance or targeted for operations.

“In the basement, we found a communications center used to tap telephones around the country,” Balmes said. “There was evidence many phones were tapped.”

Some of the rooms in the big, two-story house in a middle-class neighborhood near downtown Santiago were used for interrogating detainees, although the place was not a jail, Balmes said.

The mansion served as the Spanish Embassy in the 1950s but then stood empty until the secret police took it over in 1973.

Another large house, Villa Grimaldi, served as a detention and torture center. That site, in a southern suburb of the capital, has been turned into a memorial to victims. Among those held there were Chile’s incoming president, Michelle Bachelet, and her mother, Angela Jeria.

The mansion converted into the Allende museum was purchased and remodeled with financial support from the Chilean government and European countries including Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden.

Spy equipment found there is being left untouched, as a reminder of what the house was before, said Balmes, 79, who came to Chile in 1939 to get away from Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. “The place is a memorial,” he said.

Documents that the workers found were turned over to Hugo Dolmetsch, one of several judges investigating human rights abuses under Pinochet.

Many of the artworks to be exhibited come from a museum established by Allende in 1972. Artists and intellectuals from around the world, such as Ecuadoran painter Oswaldo Guayasamin and Argentine author Julio Cortazar, contributed.

After the coup, the art disappeared. It was not until civilian rule was restored in 1990 that the collection was traced to a basement at another Santiago museum.
washingtonpost.com

O’Higgins the Liberator Is Reclaimed From the Military
SANTIAGO, Chile, March 9 — Not long after seizing power in 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet built an Altar of the Fatherland and had the remains of Bernardo O’Higgins, the hero of Chilean independence, moved there. Chilean democrats have been struggling ever since to wrest O’Higgins from the military and restore his legacy to the entire nation, and on Thursday they finally succeeded.

In an emotional one-hour ceremony at a downtown square just off a boulevard named for O’Higgins and barely a stone’s throw from the presidential palace, President Ricardo Lagos symbolically reclaimed “the Father of the Nation” for Chile’s 15 million people.

He did so, he said, in the name of “Chile re-encountering its democratic values and traditions” and establishing “a new relationship between civilians and the military.”

After delivering speeches beneath a statue of O’Higgins on horseback, Mr. Lagos and Gen. Emilio Cheyre, the armed forces commander, visited the new mausoleum, still smelling faintly of fresh paint and damp granite before it opens to public visits. It was as if the tomb of George Washington were returned to Mount Vernon after being sequestered at the Pentagon for 30-odd years.

The restoration of O’Higgins’s tomb to civilian control is the culmination of a series of symbolic gestures that Mr. Lagos, a Socialist who leaves office on Saturday, has made during his six years in office. He began by reopening a side entrance to the palace that had often been used by Salvador Allende, the only other Socialist to govern Chile, and allowed the public to move through the main entrance and courtyard.

Then, just before the 30th anniversary of the Pinochet coup, a statue of Mr. Allende was unveiled on the main square that is just behind the palace, known as La Moneda, where he committed suicide on Sept. 11, 1973, after air force planes bombed it. As a parting gesture, Mr. Lagos plans this week to dedicate a small plaque inside the palace to officials killed with Mr. Allende in the coup.

“A lot of my friends died, either there or a few days later,” Mr. Lagos said during an interview last weekend, asked about his fondness for such symbolic acts. The common thread, he said, is “to be able to recover a piece of the nation’s history” but in a way that “does not divide Chileans again, but unites them.”

March 10 (Bloomberg) — Haitian President-elect Rene Preval called on Brazil-led peacekeeping forces to remain in the country to help provide security as it restores democracy and order.

Preval, speaking at a news conference in Brasilia, said Brazilian troops have also helped provide education and health to Haiti’s poor population. He said the Caribbean country will need time to reinforce its own police and justice system.

“Our justice system and police are extremely frail,” Preval, a former ally of ousted leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, said. “The presence of the forces should continue and be renewed.”

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest county, is trying to reorganize a government two years after a rebellion drove Aristide from power and the country into chaos, calling for the United Nations to send forces to help restore security.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim on Feb. 16 said Brazil will maintain support for Haiti, though he declined to say how long Brazil plans to keep its 1,222 soldiers there, where the UN has about 9,000 troops.

Haiti’s daily average income is about $1.
bloomberg.com