A girl carries the portrait of her neighbor, a two and half year old girl, who was buried after identification two weeks after her mother, both killed during the school siege in the town of Beslan, Sept. 20. (Reuters File Photo)

After the horrendous hostage-taking in Beslan and the killing of more than 300 people, an end to the bloody cycle of retaliation tied to the Chechnya conflict seems farther away than ever. Many observers fear a harsh response by Russian troops in Chechnya, and few expect the atrocity in Beslan to be the last act of terrorism linked to the conflict.
Yet the enduring desire for peace among Chechen civilians offers hope for a different future in the region. Capitalizing on that hope, however, requires a radical change in Russia's Chechnya policy.
This desire for peace provided a unique opportunity for the Russian government. But Moscow dramatically failed to capitalize on it. Instead, the government has done everything possible to undermine any trust Chechen civilians had about its intentions in 1999. In early 2000, Russian soldiers massacred more than 100 civilians in Grozny. A relative of one of the dead told me: "We were eagerly awaiting their arrival. We believed they would restore peace and stability." Far from bringing peace, Russian troops have since "disappeared" thousands of Chechens after taking them into custody. The fate of most remains unclear, but some relatives have discovered mutilated corpses in unmarked graves.
Five years of unchecked abuses have made it infinitely more difficult to build the minimum level of trust necessary for a meaningful peace process. Yet restoring trust is the only hope for breaking the cycle of evermore horrific human rights abuses by each side. Chechens' distrust of Russia is intense but so is their longing for peace. Although abuses have fueled uncompromising hatred of Russia among parts of Chechnya's population, the vast majority of Chechens were appalled by the hostage-taking in Beslan and other terrorist attacks that have occurred in Chechnya and other parts of Russia.
As the first step toward building trust, the Russian government must curb abuses by its troops and bring the perpetrators of past abuses to justice.
A meaningful effort to curb abuses and prosecute their perpetrators would gradually help convince Chechen civilians that the Russian government is now acting in good faith in its Chechnya policy. Curbing abuses by Russian troops, clarifying the fate of the "disappeared" and bringing the perpetrators of "disappearances" to justice should decrease popular support for the rebels, and begin to reverse the recent process of radicalization. (Traditionally Chechens have espoused a moderate interpretation of Islam, but extremists have increasingly gained ground in the past decade).
Finally, Russia would have to demonstrate considerable restraint in the face of almost unavoidable future attacks by extremists, who have a vested interest in today's downward spiral and would no doubt seek to derail Russia's new Chechnya policy.
Even in the best of circumstances, this vision would be exceedingly difficult to realize. Far from taking on this challenge, however, President Vladimir Putin appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Russia needs to confront its mistakes in a candid and open manner. Putin has acknowledged the corruption in Russia's security and border services, but he has rejected any notion of accountability. Instead, in his speech to the nation after the hostage crisis, he diverted blame to international terrorism and to his predecessors, saying that the breakup of the Soviet Union had facilitated terrorism (and implicitly blaming democracy for having allowed terrorist groups to infiltrate Russia and flourish). The president did not once mention Chechnya, thus consciously ignoring the fact that the roots of much of Russia's terrorism problem lie in the Chechnya conflict and the Kremlin's policies there.
MOSCOWTIMES.RU

Ten years ago, in Havana, while researching a biography of Che Guevara, I asked his widow, Aleida March de Guevara, how she felt about communist Cuba's rampant merchandising of her late husband. I pointed out how, in the tourist shops around the island, there were T-shirts, coconut shells and key rings with Che's iconic image on them, all sold for Yankee dollars. Wasn't this a betrayal of everything that Che, the ultimate Marxist revolutionary, had stood for?
Aleida shifted uncomfortably in her seat and replied defensively that she did her best to keep the Che products from becoming too vulgar. Che's face would never be seen, for instance, on an ashtray. And she told me she had recently intervened to stop a British entrepreneur from continuing production of a beer called Che Fruta. "Che didn't even drink alcohol," she added indignantly.
As the widow of Cuba's ultimate revolutionary martyr, consecrated officially by Fidel Castro's regime as a kind of latter-day saint to the cause of global socialism, Aleida was in the uncomfortable position of trying to safeguard his real-life legacy while simultaneously propagating his mythologized persona. At that time, Cuba was extremely hard pressed economically and struggling desperately to find ways to bring in hard currency.
Ernesto Guevara was a medical student, but an avid reader of philosophy as well, and he was anxious to do something large with his life. He fantasized about one day becoming a great medical researcher and finding a breakthrough cure for one of mankind's endemic maladies. In order to make the trip he skipped his junior year of medical school in Buenos Aires. On their road trip, Guevara observed first-hand the disease-ridden conditions of Latin America's peasants. With growing indignation, he began to conclude that political injustice was the root cause of all evil.
A year later, diploma in hand, he set off on the road again, this time to Guatemala, where Latin America's first socialist government had committed itself to sweeping land reform on behalf of the country's indigenous peasants. Enthused by what he heard, and fired up with plans of becoming a "revolutionary doctor," he arrived just in time to witness the CIA-sponsored overthrow of the government.
The experience radicalized and embittered him, and he ended up in Mexico, having concluded that "the Yankees," as he said later, were "the enemies of humanity." By 1955, he had found the source of mankind's maladies, and the antidote, as he saw it, was Marxist revolution, achieved through armed guerrilla warfare. Soon after, he met exiled Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, joined his campaign to oust dictator Fulgencio Batista and became "Che."
The inevitable wrangle over Che Guevara's political legacy is ongoing, but his status as a cult figure has largely consigned such arguments to irrelevancy. Che's symbolic appeal is global and wildly eclectic.
Something about Che's life-and-death story, fused with the iconography of his graven image (as in the famous Korda portrait), has transcended, for better or worse, the actual substance of his life. As a brand, "Che" has been instinctively appropriated by a new generation for which his face itself stands as a potent symbol of youthful inconformity, of defiance of the status quo.
Jon Lee Anderson
LATIMES.COM

China has dodged a bullet. The recent legislative elections in Hong Kong returned a majority that is sympathetic toward Beijing. That means that there will be no confrontation between Hong Kong's feisty democrats and the Communist Party leadership in China. Instead, the results provide a chance to test a hypothesis put forward by moderates in Hong Kong: with them in control of the legislature, Beijing will feel secure enough to permit a loosening of constraints and the extension of democracy in the special administrative region (SAR).
Hong Kong's Legislative Council has 60 seats. Half the seats are filled by votes from special constituencies, such as businesses, industry groups and professionals, some of which can consist of a relatively small number of voters; in total, the groups represent less than 6 percent of total votes cast. Their professional interests tend to make them pro-Beijing in outlook. And, in last week's vote, 23 pro-Beijing legislators were elected from these lists. Arcane rules govern allocation of the remaining 30 seats, which are selected by popular vote. As a result, despite winning 60,000 more votes in Hong Kong, democrats split six seats with pro-Beijing parties rather than claiming four.
The final result was a stronger-than-anticipated showing by pro-Beijing parties, which won 35 seats in all, retaining their majority. The largest party in the Legislative Council is now the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB), which holds 12 seats, up from 10 in the previous legislature. Pro-democracy groups hold 25 seats, up from 22, but less than the 26-28 seats they had hoped to win. The results are especially frustrating for them since voter turnout reached a record high 53 percent and a high turnout was thought to favor the democrats.
There were a number of reasons for the democrats' poor showing. Credit goes to Beijing for trying to win popular support, providing economic incentives for a pro-China vote and sending China's Olympic gold medal winners to Hong Kong to remind voters of the benefits of associating with the mainland. The success of those efforts is visible in the strong showing of pro-Beijing candidates in the popular vote; they took 12 seats, up from seven in the last ballot in 2000.
The Chinese leadership can draw several lessons from this vote. On the one hand, it should feel vindicated for putting economic issues above political ones. Beijing has long stressed that democracy was the concern of just a few "troublemakers" and that more tangible issues should be paramount.
But the results can also validate the DAB claim that Hong Kong voters are responsible; it is not that they are indifferent to politics, but that they recognize the best way to express their political preferences.
If so, then the proper response is to reward that maturity with more democracy in Hong Kong. A failure to do so could raise tensions in the SAR as Hong Kong residents come to realize that they will have no say over the future. In this sense, the election is a window of opportunity for Beijing. It can move forward with electoral reform, confirming that it too is responsible and prepared to reward its citizens for their good faith. It would defuse the democracy issue internally as well as eliminate a potentially potent international issue, given the attention focused on Hong Kong as a bellwether of Chinese intentions.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

Wars, conflict--it's all business, sighs Monsieur Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin's 1947 film of the same name. Many will not need to be convinced of the link between US corporations now busily helping themselves to Iraqi state assets and the military machine that prised Iraq open for global business. But what is less widely known is that a similar process is already well under way in a part of the world where B52s were not so long ago dropping bombs in another "liberation" mission.
The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was, according to the standard western version of history, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has Iraq responsible for last year's invasion by not cooperating with weapons inspectors.
The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet accord--which provided for the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia--was, as the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the defence select committee, deliberately inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade.
But equally revealing about the west's wider motives is chapter four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan economy. Article I called for a "free-market economy", and article II for privatisation of all government-owned assets. At the time, the rump Yugoslavia--then not a member of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development--was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital.
Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75% of industry was state or socially owned. In 1997, a privatisation law had stipulated that in sell-offs, at least 60% of shares had to be allocated to a company's workers.
In the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, it was state-owned companies--rather than military sites--that were specifically targeted by the world's richest nations. NATO only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit--including the Zastava car plant at Kragujevac, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.
After the removal of Slobodan Milosevic, the west got the "fast-track" reforming government in Belgrade it had long desired. One of the first steps of the new administration was to repeal the 1997 privatisation law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors--with just 15% reserved for workers. The government then signed up to the World Bank's programmes--effectively ending the country's financial independence.
Five years on from the NATO attack, the Kosovo Trust Agency (KTA), the body that operates under the jurisdiction of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)--is "pleased to announce" the programme to privatise the first 500 or so socially owned enterprises (SOEs) under its control.
To make the SOEs more attractive to foreign investors, UNMIK has altered the way land is owned in Kosovo, allowing the KTA to sell 99-year leases with the businesses, which can be transferred or used as loans or security. Even Belgrade's pro-western government has called this a "robbery of state-owned land". For western companies waiting to swoop, there will be rich pickings indeed in what the KTA assures us is a "very investor-friendly" environment. But there is little talk of the rights of the moral owners of the enterprises--the workers, managers and citizens of the former Yugoslavia, whose property was effectively seized in the name of the "international community" and "economic reform".
As the corporate takeover of the ruins of Baghdad and Pristina proceeds apace, neither the "liberation" of Iraq nor the "humanitarian" bombing of Yugoslavia has proved Chaplin's cynical anti-hero to be wrong.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

The way his enemies and even his allies are talking, you'd think that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had suggested giving the country back to the Arabs. Early last week, 70,000 people, including many members of his own Likud Party, rallied in Beit-ul-Moqaddas to denounce him as a "traitor" and a "dictator". His chief rival within the Likud Party and the government, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has demanded a referendum on Sharon's Gaza pullout plan. And a settler-rabbi, Yael Dayan, has announced that he is prepared to put a death curse on Sharon.
Dayan has a track record in this matter. He conducted a similar mystical ceremony to put a death curse on then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shortly before he was murdered by an ultra-nationalist Israeli Jew in 1995. The thought of Sharon being murdered because he is soft on the Arabs boggles the mind, but right now he probably is more at risk of being assassinated by a fanatical Jewish settler than by a suicide bomber from Hamas. Can this be the Sharon we all know? Relax, he hasn't really gone soft on us. He's just not as totally blind to inconvenient realities as the more extremist Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. In the West Bank, which is over a third as large as Israel itself and quite close to the most densely settled areas of that country, the 230,000 Jewish settlers make up over a tenth of the total population and effectively control about half the land. With few exceptions, their settlements are relatively easy to protect from the Palestinian majority around them.
The Gaza Strip is different. It is a tiny, mostly barren strip of land, right on the Egyptian border and far from Israel's main population centres, packed tight with 1.3 million Palestinians whose parents or grandparents fled or were driven from their homes further north in Israel proper in 1948. Amid them live only 8,000 Jewish settlers.
The Gaza settlements make no economic or military sense, and while many of the Jewish settlers there are driven by a religious vision, the enclaves were probably always seen by the secular Israeli governments that authorised them as bargaining chips in some potential future deal with the Palestinians. Sharon is certainly using them as bargaining chips, though he has no intention of making a deal with the Palestinians.
Sharon's strategy aims to separate Israelis from Palestinians as much as possible, while still retaining almost all the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and carving the Palestinian areas up into enclaves separated by Israeli-patrolled roads and military checkpoints. The Gaza pullout saves Israel money and troops while also letting him throw the world a bone: look, Israel is withdrawing voluntarily from some settlements.
But about 96 per cent of the Jewish settler population, up in the West Bank, will remain. If Dayan hadn't volunteered to put a death curse on him, Sharon would gladly have paid him to do it.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist
JORDANTIMES.COM