www.enn.com 13 March 2003 By Reuters

BRASILIA, Brazil — Brazilian environmental authorities reinforced the fight against spreading forest fires in the Amazon state of Roraima Wednesday, which has prompted fears of a repeat of the damage caused by a devastating 1998 blaze.

The government's environmental agency Ibama said two more helicopters and 55 extra firefighters have been dispatched to the northern Amazon state, bringing the total number of firefighters in the state to 500.

Environment Minister Marina Silva met with environmental authorities from the Amazon region on Wednesday and said the government was working flat out to prevent a repeat of 1998, when 185 square miles of forest was destroyed.

About 23 square miles has been destroyed so far in the current fires. "We are working with about 500 men, 5 helicopters, and 15 vehicles to prevent that (1998) from happening," Silva said.

Up to 30 percent of the world's animal and plant life is found only in the Amazon, which is larger than western Europe.

Fires typically spread out across the remote northern state of Roraima — which borders on Venezuela — during this time of year as farmers burn their land in preparation for the sowing period. Fighting fires in the state is made harder by the fact that forest is interspersed with mountain savanna which burns more easily. An unusually dry period this year has led to more fires than normal burning out of control.

Paulo Cesar Mendes Ramos, head of Ibama's national fire prevention center, said, "If we have a prolonged period of drought things could become serious." Without rain soon, the fires could become as large as in 1998, he said.

In the last week, nearly 400 so-called "hot spots" were detected in the state, indicating danger of fires, including in special conservation and Indian areas. Two towns have been put on alert. Another huge forest fire blazed in recent weeks in Roraima's neighboring state, Amazonas.

www.katu.com March 13, 2003

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - For months, Baghdad residents have tried to maintain the appearance of normalcy while the threat of war grew closer. Now the city seems to have finally dropped its business-as-usual pretense, succumbing to the reality that a U.S. attack could come soon.

Embassies are closing. The United Nations is pulling out expatriate staff. Residents are hoarding food, water and fuel, buying generators, drilling neighborhood wells and cleaning out basements to use as bomb shelters.

Throughout the city, workers are building sandbagged positions and digging trenches. Members of the ruling Baath Party are organizing neighborhood resistance cells. The dinar, Iraq's currency, is slumping and food prices - especially for canned food and bottled water - are soaring.

As recently as a few weeks ago, many Baghdad residents had at least publicly adopted a fairly laid-back attitude toward the threat of war, reflecting both fabled Arab fatalism and the experience of having lived through two wars and periodic U.S. strikes over two decades.

Now, though, store owners have begun moving their merchandise to warehouses, fearing bombing or looting. Others are not replenishing their stocks. Some residents are honing their evacuation plans, making arrangements with relatives in what they see as the relatively safe countryside.

Families can be seen moving out from central Baghdad's Soviet-style apartment blocks, loading trucks with suitcases and boxes.

On Wednesday, 35 high school students filled burlap sacks with dirt and piled them into a defense position opposite the Al-Rashidiyah Bridge over the Tigris River on Wednesday.

"This is a sensitive area and it must be defended," said Ahmed Yassin, 16. "We must defend our nation because right is on our side."

Baghdadis whisper rumors that authorities are preventing people from leaving the city, but motorists reported Wednesday that traffic in and out of the city was normal, with only routine identity checks at roadblocks.

Only wealthy Baghdadis can afford to leave the country to neighboring Jordan or Syria. Most of the city's 5 million people must face the grim prospect of war.

Their fears are accentuated by nightmarish memories of a similar situation 12 years ago.

Muwafaq Fadil, a 54-year-old taxi driver, said his son Simon, then 4, was so afraid during the six-week bombing campaign in the 1991 Gulf War that he hid under the sofa every night. Daughter Mariam, 6, fell unconscious when the bombing grew intense.

"My wife Maria prayed all night and I could not sleep until daylight, when I felt safe," Fadil said Wednesday. "I wish we could go abroad this time, but I don't have money."

Fadil said that for the past few weeks, his son has been unable to concentrate and suffers from stomach aches. Fadil blames the prospect of war.

The war jitters are also being felt in Baghdad's limited nightlife. Fewer and fewer patrons show up at restaurants. Nightclubs have been closed by presidential decree since the early 1990s.

Many of Baghdad's estimated 60 embassies - including those of Portugal, Spain, Thailand and Japan - have pulled out their staff. A rapidly shrinking number of others remain, including most countries vocally opposing a war: France, Germany, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and most Arab countries.

Grace Princesa Escalante, the Philippines' top diplomat in Iraq, remains as well.

She has enjoyed a reputation for giving the best parties in Baghdad since she arrived two years ago. They have become a symbol of normalcy in a city where such symbols are increasingly in short supply.

But she may have given her last party this week - and even that didn't prevent war talk from dominating the conversation. It wasn't until she switched on the karaoke machine that the pace picked up.

Guests sang a rendition of the Eagles' 1970s hit "Hotel California," replacing the chorus with "Hotel Al Rasheed," the name of Baghdad's most famous hotel. They sang especially loudly when they came to the line: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

The evening's finale was another apropos 1970's classic: Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive."

www.economist.com Mar 6th 2003 | BOGOTA, LA PAZ AND LIMA From The Economist print edition

The “success” of Plan Colombia in cutting coca production has started to undermine governments farther south

“A TURNING point” is how John Walters, the director of the United States' office for drug control, jubilantly described figures released by his government last week, which claimed a 15% fall in 2002 in Colombia's crop of coca, the plant used to make cocaine. This follows eight years of steady increases in the amount of land under coca in Colombia, the source of three-quarters of the world's cocaine.

For American officials, last year's fall is evidence that “Plan Colombia”, a programme of mainly military aid begun by Bill Clinton and continued by George Bush, is starting to pay off. Under this plan, the United States has provided Colombia with extra helicopters and crop-dusting planes to spray coca with herbicides. Most of these have finally arrived, and Álvaro Uribe, who became Colombia's president last August, has been happy to use them: he has unleashed a massive spraying campaign which officials say is at last outpacing the ability of coca farmers to replant.

Yet there is a hollow quality to this victory. Over the past three decades, rich-country demand for cocaine has created a monster in the Andean countries. The illegal-drug industry has corrupted institutions, distorted economies, wrecked forests, and financed armed groups such as Colombia's FARC guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries. But the “drug war” has imposed its own costs. One is known as the “balloon effect”: local squeezes simply move the industry elsewhere, spreading violence and corruption with it.

Thus, in a reversal of a trend begun a decade ago, drug production is rising in Bolivia and Peru, and this year coca farmers there have mounted new challenges to governments; this “politicisation” of the coca industry is “most troubling” admitted Mr Walters. This shift comes at a delicate juncture: weak economies, weak governments in several countries, political conflict in Venezuela and Bolivia, and Colombia's intensifying wars have all aroused fears about the Andean region's stability.

A second worry concerns the figures themselves. Mapping the coca crop is difficult, and not everyone trusts the American figures. But the trend is clear enough. The UN will next week publish its annual coca census, which is more comprehensive than America's sampling. Having reported an 11% fall in Colombia's coca area in 2001 to 145,000 hectares (358,000 acres), the UN is expected to reveal an even steeper fall for 2002. But its estimate for Peru (46,700 hectares in 2001, with a small increase last year) is higher than America's. The UN also reports that more productive coca varieties are being used in both countries; in Peru it reckons that fields may be producing 10% more coca than a year ago.

Nevertheless, the shrinking of coca land in Colombia will comfort the United States' Congress. It is anxious to see some return from aid to Colombia of around $500m a year. That is especially true after FARC last month shot down an American spy plane apparently on an anti-drug mission, killing one American and taking three hostage. Even so, American officials believe this year will be better still: Mr Uribe has pledged to spray 200,000 hectares. If that happens, Mr Walters thinks, coca farmers will despair of profit and give up. He told Congress that America had “an unprecedented opportunity to seriously reduce the availability of illegal drugs”. Klaus Nyholm, the UN's drugs man in Colombia, says better prices for legal crops are helping: excluding drug crops, the country's farm output expanded by 3.5% last year, double the growth of GDP.

The results are a fillip, too, for Mr Uribe, who faces mounting urban terrorism by the FARC. Some of Colombia's most drug-infested areas are close to giving up coca. Putumayo, where the UN reported 66,000 hectares in 2000, can eliminate the crop by December, says a local official. But the UN reckons it is spreading to smaller plots (to evade spraying) and that output is rising in other areas, such as Guaviare. Mr Nyholm says coca will not be eradicated until Colombia's wars end. Fears of retreat

The guarded optimism in Colombia is mirrored by increasing problems farther south. In recent years, Bolivia was the drug warriors' success story. Between 1997 and 2001, its government eradicated 40,000 hectares of coca in the Chapare, the main growing area; aid money trickled in for alternatives, such as bananas. But American officials are now nervous about a retreat. In the past two years, new planting has outstripped eradication. And increasing amounts of Peruvian semi-processed cocaine-base are now being smuggled through Bolivia to Brazil and thence to Europe. Cobija, a poor northern outpost, has acquired sudden wealth; locals report an influx of heavily-laden, armed “backpackers” from Peru on the logging trails in the surrounding forest.

This year, Bolivia's powerful coca growers' movement has drawn blood against a weak government. Evo Morales, the movement's leader, was emboldened by winning 21% of the vote in last year's presidential election. To head off protests, President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada offered to expand the area in which coca can be legally grown for traditional uses (such as chewing and tea) if a study of demand showed this to be justified. To no avail: in January, protests by coca farmers brought much of the country to a standstill for two weeks. Mr Morales played no direct role in violence last month, in which 33 people were killed in riots and clashes between striking police and the army. But these events have left Mr Sánchez (who claims there was a plot to kill him) in no position to take the offensive against coca.

In Peru, too, the politics of coca has become more confrontational. Until the mid-1990s, Peru was the world's main source of the shrub. But the price of coca has been climbing again since 1998, and production rising. Worried about the backflow from Plan Colombia, American officials have stepped up aid to Peru, while also pressing for a tougher policy. In September, the government said it would begin forcible eradication in hard-core coca areas, a policy Peru eschewed in the late-1980s, after Shining Path terrorists exploited discontent over it.

The response was a wave of violent unrest in traditional coca-growing areas. More than 70 people were injured in an 11-day “strike” last month; in Aguaytía, protestors smashed up the government's anti-drug office, burning equipment. For the first time, the coca growers may have a political leader, albeit not with the clout of Mr Morales in Bolivia: Nelson Palomino, who was recently arrested on charges of supporting the (much weakened) Shining Path, something he denies. His arrest was greeted by a protest by thousands of coca farmers in Ayacucho, the Shining Path's birthplace. Such protests are a novelty for Peru. The farmers have now called a three-week “truce”: they want the government to agree to an end to forced eradication and more money for development schemes.

Further afield, there are other worrying signs. This week, Rio de Janeiro's carnival took place under the eye of the army: on its eve, the city's leading drug gang bombed buses and buildings, its second such show of strength against an ineffective state government in five months. And following tougher action by Mexico, more drugs now flow to the United States through Caribbean islands, as they did in the 1980s. The drug industry has an unerring eye for institutional weaknesses. As long as cocaine is demanded, victories over it involve defeats elsewhere.

www.wfn.org From dmack@episcopalchurch.org Date Thu, 13 Mar 2003 11:02:12 -0500 March 12, 2003 2003-055

Pakistani says Islamic leaders should thank Christians for opposition to war

Children of Abraham should seek peace, Griswold tells Muslim website

Former house of torture in Kenya to undergo spiritual cleansing

Clergy and church workers targets in intensified Colombian war

(ENI) Churches have increasingly become targets of violence perpetrated by both left-wing and right-wing groups in Colombia, said eyewitnesses to the worsening situation in rural areas.

"The churches were once removed from the conflict. But no more," said Luz Marina Gomez, a human rights activist and member of a small independent Protestant church, at a March forum at New York City's Interchurch Center. Gomez and Luis Teodoro Gonzalez Bustacara, a Roman Catholic priest, said increased militarization was raising the level of bloodshed and crippling Colombian society. The activists spoke as the guests of US-based groups active in issues related to Colombia, and echoed concerns made by other Colombian church representatives who have visited the United States in the past year.

In some ways, the war in Colombia today differs from Latin American conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. In those clashes, activist clergy and church workers influenced by liberation theology, a teaching that included Marxist economic analysis and elements of social activism, were often targets of right-wing groups and military units.

Today various clergy, including pastors of small independent Protestant or Pentecostal churches in rural areas who claim to be apolitical, have become targets of violence from both leftist guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitary units. Clergy who simply offer safe haven to those fleeing from the intensifying war can be interpreted as taking sides in the conflict, observers say.

The situation is especially tense in Arauca, an oil-rich region in the north bordering Venezuela that is the home province of Gonzalez and Gomez. Leftist forces--most prominently the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has been labeled terrorist by Washington--have for years been attacking a 500-mile pipeline in Arauca used for US-bound oil. In recent months, FARC has stepped up its military campaign with periods of daily bombing. At the same time, as part of a "counter-terrorism" effort, 70 US Army Special Forces have been training Colombian military personnel to protect the pipeline, which is used by Occidental Petroleum, a US firm.

The militarization has crippled the region, Gomez and Gonzalez said, paralyzing Arauca's economy and forcing people from their homes. "We have two options: either wait for death or leave," Gomez said. The activists called for a renewal of peace negotiations to end the nearly 40-year conflict and a redirection of military funding to assist with education in the region.

African refugees face severe food shortages

Dominican Episcopalians promote national conversation on values