…The dozen or more islands, some the size of football pitches, now provide sanctuary for thousands of victims of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s latest fighting.

They have taken refuge in this remote, mosquito-infested area of shallow lakes and marshes — the source of the great Congo river which snakes across the heart of Africa — to escape clashes between roaming militias, known as Mai-Mai, and the Congolese Army.

“The Mai-Mai came at night. They killed people. We fled in our canoes and came here, but we have lost everything,” said Kalenga wa Kalenga, 32, as she waded knee-deep to get an emergency package from Médecins sans Frontières, one of the few charities in the area.
timesonline.co.uk

The desire for sons has created a severe shortage of marriageable young women. As their value rises, unscrupulous men are trading them around the subcontinent and beyond as if they were a mere commodity.
independent.co.uk

All week long Hasham Mohammad Mousa Asamahain waits for Friday to come.
His reasoning, in short, is that on that day the 41 year old has a chance to go and earn a living. That is why Asamahain readied himself to travel to Beit Shemish, in the extreme north, west of Hebron. He was not in the southern West Bank to look for treasure or expensive ruins, but to find whatever he can to raise enough money to buy bread or pay the school fees for his six children. Asamahain’s punishment for this was to be buried alive in a garbage dump.

…A huge Israeli bulldozer buried Asamahain under the garbage, dumping tons of metal on his body. He was taken to an Israeli hospital, but without any hope of survival, and is now referred to as, “the martyr searching for bread.”

After several attempts PNN was able to speak with one of Asamahain’s relatives, Omar Shaqik Al Maghdour. He confirmed that the Israeli authorities continued until 9:00 pm Saturday evening to keep Asamahain’s body, continuing to detain him even after death. “It was not sufficient for the bulldozer to bury him alive under the garbage, for the Israelis are now denying his wife and children the simplest of human rights, which is to kiss their husband and father goodbye and bury him according to the Sharia.”
pnn.ps

London Review of Books stands its ground after being accused of anti-Semitism in an article attacking pro-Israeli influence on US policy

…But while Wilmers feels confident that the article examines legitimate concerns – in particular about the lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee – it is not a view shared by critics of the LRB. Among them is Professor Alan Dershowitz, a colleague of Walt at Harvard, who is criticised in the article for being an ‘apologist’ for Israel. Dershowitz denounced the authors last week as ‘liars’ and ‘bigots’ and compared their argument to neo-Nazi literature. It is a view shared by US academics Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, who wrote to the LRB: ‘Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism.’

But while some have focused on the issue of anti-Semitism, others, following Dennis Ross’s lead, have condemned the article as a shoddy piece of pseudo-academia. It is a view endorsed by journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has accused the authors of an exercise in Jewish ‘name listing’, and perhaps – most surprisingly – by Noam Chomsky, the Nobel-prize winning academic who has written on the pro-Israeli bias of the US media.

‘Recognising that Mearsheimer-Walt took a courageous stand which merits praise,’ he wrote for online magazine ZNet last week, ‘we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion.’

Wilmers rejects the accusation by Hitchens, Ross and others that the Mearsheimer-Walt article has done little more than attempt to join up a disconnected list of people and organisations lobbying on different aspects of Israeli concern into a central ‘Israel Lobby’ – capitalised by the LRB. She admits now, however, that it would have been better to use a lower case ‘l’ for the word ‘lobby’ – to have avoided the risk of being misunderstood.

‘It is not true that the authors simply lumped together a long list of people and organisations in the same piece to make their case for an “Israeli Lobby”. To say that because someone is mentioned in context in a long piece is tainted by association with any other is wrong.’

Wilmers believes, too, that the most angry denunciations of anti-Semitism – while designed to serve the purpose of censorship by those attempting to forestall criticism of Israel – may actually encourage anti-Semitism in the long run.
guardian.co.uk

Haaretz:New Christian pro-Israel lobby aims to be stronger than AIPAC

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is considering expanding bank operations in Iraq, which would put his agency at the center of rebuilding from a war he helped plan as the Pentagon’s former No. 2 official.

Senior bank officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because no final decision had been made, said key donor countries including Britain, Japan, Germany and Denmark are pressuring Wolfowitz to establish a Baghdad office.

The development agency has not had a Iraq office since an August 19, 2003, bombing at U.N. headquarters in Iraq killed a bank employee. A consultant, with a staff of seven Iraqis, is paid by the World Bank looks after its affairs in Iraq.

No World Bank staff would be forced to accept an Iraq assignment, the officials said.

In recent weeks, Wolfowitz sent a fact-finding mission to Iraq, and he was now examining security matters and several reconstruction-related issues, officials said.

The possibility of a new World Bank office revives attention to Wolfowitz’s role as an architect of the Iraq war. Many critics have accused the Bush administration and the Pentagon in particular of failing to plan for a post-invasion Iraq, as violence rages three years after Saddam Hussein’s ouster.

Michael O’Hanlon, a reconstruction expert at Washington’s Brookings Institute, said Wolfowitz’s history with Iraq “complicates everything.”

“He is a very smart man,” O’Hanlon said, “but he is also obviously very controversial in his basic support of the Iraq invasion.”

Wolfowitz’s predecessor as World Bank president, Jim Wolfensohn, resisted pressure from U.S. lawmakers to return bank reconstruction experts to Iraq after the 2003 bombing.
news.yahoo.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq — For the director of a shuttered museum in a country at war, the imaginary can be a welcome refuge. Condemned to contemplate his own and his country’s fate in great halls emptied of visitors, Donny George paces past showcases of ancient vessels and jars and clay tablets, and he dreams.

In his mind’s eye, the museum director sees the grand opening: the courtyard filled with 1,000 guests, succulent lamb and sumptuous dates on tables beneath the palms, a Baghdad chamber quartet playing, the spirited talk of civilized people in the land where, several thousand years ago, the emergence of writing first permitted the considered transfer of ideas from one epoch to the next.

Mr. George smiles. It is a relief to dream when explosions greet the dawn. His genial brown eyes express both hope and the burden of living in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, he learned to live a double life: praising the dictator in public, worrying in private. He was a member of Mr. Hussein’s now-disbanded Baath Party. Not to be, he says, would have meant dismissal and the abandonment of archaeological excavations, his great love. Compromise is woven into the texture of his life.

Now, as the director general of Iraqi museums, his new title, he inhabits a labyrinth. The Interior Ministry has been urging him to reopen the National Museum, saying it will provide him with 1,000 guards if necessary. “But then it’s no longer a museum,” Mr. George said. “It’s a barracks.”
nytimes.com

WASHINGTON, April 3, 2006 – Eight Marines and a sailor died in two separate incidents in Iraq yesterday. Three servicemembers also are missing after a vehicle accident in floodwaters, military officials reported today.

A U.S. Marine Corps 7-ton truck rolled over in a flash flood near Asad, resulting in five Marines dead, one injured, and two Marines and one sailor missing. The vehicle was on a combat logistics convoy in Anbar province with eight Marines and one Navy corpsman on board.
defenselink.mil

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Indonesian police increased security throughout the country Sunday in response to a warning of a possible terrorist attack issued last week by Australia and the United States, police officials said.

Australia and the United States had warned their citizens living in Indonesia that Sunday was a potential date for a terrorist attack in the country, possibly directed at Western targets. Indonesian authorities said they had no specific information of a possible attack and the security measures were precautionary.
news.yahoo.com

Suspected Taliban-linked militants set on fire 10 oil tankers carrying fuel to U.S. military base in south Afghanistan Saturday, a local official said Sunday.

“Taliban militants attacked a logistic convoy in Grishk district of Helmand province yesterday at noon and set ablaze 10 petrol tankers in Haiderabad area,” acting district police chief Amanullah Khan told Xinhua.

Contingents of troops, he said had been sent to the area but the militants fled away to the nearby mountains.

However, he confirmed that the drivers of the ill-fated oil tankers are safe.

Meantime, Taliban’s purported spokesman Qari Yusuf Ahmadi accepted responsibility for the incident and added the Taliban set free the drivers after they committed not to cooperate with the U. S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban in south Afghanistan, has been the scene of increasing insurgency over the past two weeks during which around 50 people including one American and one Canadian soldiers and more than 30 militants have lost their lives in conflicts.

Taliban-led insurgency has claimed the lives of over 200 people since the beginning of 2006.
peopledaily.com.cn

…What, then, should we do? There is, after all, a danger that military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities might boost support for Ahmadinejad – indeed, some Iranian dissidents believe that his wild rhetoric is designed to provoke precisely such an attack. Unlike Iraq, whose nuclear programme was wiped out with a single raid in 1981, Iran is attempting the more complex procedure of centrifuge separation of uranium hexafluoride gas in installations spread throughout the country.

A direct strike might be a necessary last resort. But our earlier objective should be to support the opposition groups. The enemies of the ayatollahs are divided: some are monarchists, some communists, some representatives of Iran’s national minorities. Some are in exile, some in Iranian campuses. Around 40,000 are trained soldiers based in Iraq, where they have been disarmed by the Americans. But, together, these groups speak for perhaps 85 per cent of the population. They hold the key to replacing this wicked regime.
telegraph.co.uk

US will Find Another Excuse to Target Iran
The United States is firm in its plans to launch a military operation against Iran, said Kazim Jalali, a spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s Commission of Foreign Affairs, adding the United States would find another reason for its military operation even if the nuclear plants were immediately shut down.