<a href=reuters.com>Reuters Fri April 18, 2003 05:15 PM ET

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan troops blocked streets around the Cuban embassy in Caracas on Friday to prevent opponents of President Hugo Chavez protesting against Cuba's recent crackdown on dissidents and its meddling in their domestic politics.

Scores of opponents of Chavez, a close ally and friend of Cuban President Fidel Castro, lined a street near the embassy where they traded insults with a small group of pro-Castro demonstrators waving Cuban flags.

A clutch of National Guard troops and police formed barricades between the rally and the embassy building.

"We don't want Venezuela to be turned into another Cuba and that is what we are heading for. We have to show solidarity with the repressed Cuban people," said Marielena Adrianza, a consulting firm employee joining the opposition protest.

Opponents of Chavez, a left-wing former paratrooper elected in 1998 on a populist platform, brand him a fledgling dictator and fear he will drive Venezuela toward Cuban-style communism. He scoffs at their claims.

Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage riled foes of Chavez over the weekend when he criticized Venezuelan opposition leaders during a conference in Caracas.

Friday's small demonstration came a day after Venezuela voted against a United Nations resolution urging Cuba to accept a visit by a human rights commission following the arrest of scores of Cuban dissidents.

The U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution was approved by 24 to 20 votes with nine abstentions.

Venezuela was the only Latin American country to back Cuba.

The decision came after Havana handed out long jail terms to more than 70 dissidents in a move to stamp out opposition to Castro's one-party state on the Caribbean island.

Cuba also sparked international outcry last week when it executed three men who had hijacked a ferry with 50 people aboard and tried to sail to the United States.

Chavez, who says his own self-styled revolution aims to ease the plight of the poor, has been locked in a bitter political battle with opponents since last year, when he survived a brief military coup.

<a href=reuters.com>Reuters Sun April 13, 2003 04:15 PM ET

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (Reuters) - An official from the U.S. embassy in Guyana was abducted by gunmen Saturday while playing golf, held for several hours, and then released unharmed, government officials said Sunday.

Steve Lesniak, 37, was freed late Saturday. He was seized earlier by armed men at a golf course at Lusignan, about 10 miles east of the capital Georgetown.

The motive for the abduction was not immediately clear, but officials said armed criminal gangs have carried out several kidnappings recently around the capital of Guyana, a poor and racially divided nation located between Venezuela and Suriname.

U.S. Embassy officials were not available to comment on the incident, and it was not clear whether there had been any negotiations to secure Lesniak's release or whether any ransom had been paid.

Over the last year, armed gangs have shot dead several police and civilians in a wave of violent crime in Guyana.

04/13/03 John Hassell The Plain Dealer-Newhouse News Service

International terrorism. Famine and AIDS in Africa. Nuclear brinkmanship in North Korea and Kashmir. Civil war in Colombia. Continuing clashes between Israelis and Palestinians.

Even if the United States was not at war in Iraq, the foreign-policy issues facing the Bush administration would loom as the most forbidding since the end of the Cold War, with potential crises lurking in nearly every corner of the globe. Try Our Classifieds

The likelihood that any one of these situations might explode, now that the attention of policy-makers and the news media is riveted on Baghdad, has only increased, according to retired U.S. diplomats and regional analysts.

"The foreign-policy agenda right now is overflowing, and there is great concern that important issues are not getting the attention they deserve," said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, a think tank with headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. "These are issues that directly affect U.S. interests and security."

Asia

Perhaps the most serious challenge outside the Middle East is the situation in North Korea, where the regime of Kim Jong Il has announced its withdrawal from the international nuclear nonproliferation treaty and restarted a mothballed nuclear processing plant.

A nuclear-armed North Korea would pose several significant dangers, said Leon Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York.

First, Pyongyang's action could set off a nuclear arms race in the region. Japan, Sigal said, is capable of producing a nuclear weapon within three months, given the large supply of plutonium generated by its domestic power plants. South Korea, which halted a nuclear program in the 1970s at U.S. urging, also could build a weapon in a hurry.

Also, Taiwan could seek to become a nuclear power - a move that almost certainly would provoke China and set the stage for a showdown between Beijing and Washington, Taiwan's close ally, Sigal said.

A nuclear North Korea also raises concerns about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorist groups like al-Qaida. Given the North Korean regime's dire financial straits and its implacable hatred of the United States, the sale of nuclear weapons to terrorists is a real threat, U.S. officials have said.

Another Asian hot spot is Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, where terrorists attacked two nightclubs in Bali last October. The invasion of Iraq, analysts say, has inflamed anti-American sentiment in Indonesia where the U.S.-friendly government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri faces serious problems.

Africa

Problems in Africa do not usually top foreign-policy priority lists in Washington. "If anything," says Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria, "the continent is usually seen as a charity case."

The war on terror has changed that. Not only has the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq angered Muslim populations in northern Africa, but the continent's numerous failed or ailing states also provide fertile ground for terrorist groups.

Dealing with Africa's weaknesses, at least for the foreseeable future, will require grappling with a series of humanitarian disasters.

The most urgent is the famine that threatens the lives of about 30 million people. From southern Africa, where 14.4 million people face imminent starvation, to the African Horn, where another 10 million are at risk, "the need for humanitarian assistance is real and immediate," said Gwendolyn Mikell, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and an expert on African politics and economics.

Causes of the famine include government mismanagement, climatic change and the devastation wrought by AIDS, which has destroyed the agricultural work force and left tens of millions of people weakened and more susceptible to hunger, Mikell said.

Europe

After several years of relative calm in the Balkans, the assassination of Serbia's reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic on March 12 served notice to the world that the area remains unsettled. Djindjic's murder has been blamed on organized-crime figures loyal to former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

The influence of organized-crime bosses in Serbia, coupled with the fact that elements of the military remain outside civilian control, poses a threat to the whole region, said Peter Palmer, a longtime Balkan analyst for the International Crisis Group. "The progress of reforms in Serbia has ramifications for Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania and beyond," he said.

Latin America

Closer to home, Washington faces a diplomatic test in dealing with the new wave of left-wing and center-left movements that have come to power in Venezuela and Brazil and gained strength in Argentina, Peru and Ecuador.

The phenomenon, analysts say, has been driven by economic collapse throughout much of Latin America.

The situation in Venezuela, where the populist president, Hugo Chavez, has presided over a debilitating national strike, is perhaps most worrisome, given that the country produces 15 percent of the oil consumed in the United States.

Venezuela's woes have helped drive fuel prices up as the Iraq war threatens Middle East production.

The Sunday Herald

As elections begin, a poverty-stricken nation hangs in the balance between peace and anarchy. Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg reports

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, went to the polls yesterday in the first stage of all-important presidential and parliamentary elections marred by assassinations, commonplace massacres, allegations of vote-rigging, and deeply based ethnic and religious rivalries resulting in a confusion of mini-wars.

Nigeria's rulers and its people can consolidate a fragile democracy or they can throw it all to the wind, triggering more chaos in a west African region that has become an 'arc of crisis' mired in conflict and poverty, where rich resources are wasted and squandered, and where old autocrats too often refuse to give way to new, enlightened leadership.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, seeking re-election in the presidential poll next Saturday that follows yesterday's parliamentary voting, has issued a stark warning. Failure in the electoral process among Nigeria's 126 million people could spell 'disaster of monumental proportion' for the country's precarious unity, he said.

More than 10,000 people have died in outbreaks of ethnic, religious and political bloodletting since Obasanjo's election in 1999's military-supervised vote. Many Niger ians fear chaotic organisation, overwhelming logistical problems, mounting ethnic tensions and disputes over poll results could trigger wider mayhem across the country. The apprehension stems mainly from Nigeria's failure to ever transfer power from one elected government to another. Disputes over results and ethnic rivalries unleashed violence after elections conducted by civilian rulers in the mid-1960s and in 1983, leading to coups by power- hungry soldiers.

The 1960s' disturbances led directly to an attempt at secession by the Ibo-dominated, oil-rich southeast region of Biafra. It declared itself an independent republic in 1967 and more than one million people died in a terrible three-year civil war before government forces crushed the separatists.

After 15 years of traumatic military rule between 1983 and 1999, Nigerians overwhelmingly welcomed a return to democracy with Obasanjo despite the dire failures and corruption of all elected leaders since independence from Britain in 1960. The country has been ruled by military dictators for 30 of its 43 years of independence.

Nigeria in 1960 was more a geographical expression than a united nation. It was created in 1914 by Britain's Royal Niger Company. The British constructed a country that is multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with 300 tribal groups speaking more than 250 languages. There are three major ethnic groups: the Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo. With the artificial country's huge population, Nigerians count for one out of every six people on the African continent.

Partly because it is an unnatural state, corruption pervades Nigerian society so deeply that it has, in the words of Transparency International's Nigerian representative Bilikisu Yusuf, reached 'the degree of insanity'.

Despite their hatred of past military dictators, Nigerians now express open disenchantment with Obasanjo's failure to end a prolonged stagnation of the oil-dependent economy and to create jobs for millions of youths. The oil industry, on which Nigeria depends for more than 90% of its budget revenues, has been severely battered by tribal disputes in the oil-rich Niger delta.

American lobbyists were hyping Nigerian oil as a secure alternative source to supplies from the Middle East. But the pre-election violence in the world's sixth largest oil exporter has highlighted the dangers of putting faith in the stability of an extremely frail country.

Fuel shortages -- endemic in Nigeria despite the abundant oil because of gross corruption and misgovernment -- have worsened in the past two weeks after dissidents blew up the country's main crude oil pipeline. The damage set off huge fires and cut supplies to Nigeria's most important oil refineries close to the Niger delta city of Warri, the country's biggest oil centre. Militant youths from the Ijaw community in and around Warri threatened to blow up more oil facilities unless their tribe was given greater political representation in national and provincial governments.

The trouble in the delta -- pitching tribe against tribe, as well as against the government -- has reduced Nigeria's oil flow into international markets from two million to fewer than 800,000 barrels a day. Normally tenacious oil giants like Chevron, Texas and Shell have evacuated all staff and their families.

With stocks of crude oil in the United States at the lowest in years, the shutdown has come at the worst possible moment for Washington, which has increasingly turned to Nigeria and Angola to diversify its oil supplies sources beyond the Gulf.

The Niger delta disruption has shaken already twitchy global oil markets crestfallen at the prospect of absorbing the Nigerian shock as war continues in Iraq and as political tensions hobble another major supplier, Venezuela. While the Ijaw fight Big Oil, so do a neighbouring tribe, the Itsekeri. But the Ijaw and the Itsekeri are also fighting one another. In a bewildering local war, the Itsekeri accuse marauding Ijaw of trying to exterminate them in order to gain control of the oil-producing regions. Countless hundreds have died in this battle of the Delta. In one recent Ijaw attack, Itsekeri villages were set ablaze by rocket-propelled grenades and their residents decapitated or sprayed with machine- gun fire.

Thirty parties were yesterday vying for the 360 seats in the lower house of representatives and 109 seats in the senate. Results will be known only on Tuesday at the earliest. With more than 60 million people casting votes at 120,000 polling stations, it will be Africa's biggest democratic election ever and a key test of the continent's progress towards truly representative government.

Despite aspirations towards democracy, Nigeria's military men are still at the forefront of power. The presidential election will be a hard-fought battle between four former army generals. The two main contenders are Obasanjo and General Muhammadu Buhari, who have both previously seized absolute power -- Obasanjo in 1976 and Buhari in 1984. Obasanjo voluntarily relinquished power in 1979 before being elected as a civilian president in 1999. General Buhari was forcibly removed from office after 18 months.

Buhari is the presidential candidate of the main opposition All Nigeria People's Party. Buhari is a Muslim Hausa-Fulani from the Islamic north. Obasanjo, of the ruling People's Democratic Party, is a Yoruba Christian from the southwest, where various groups are calling for a sovereign state for the Yoruba, the country's second biggest ethnic group. Breakaway Yoruba nationalists say independence has become imperative because the Yoruba have been held back by Nigeria's Muslim and conservative north.

<a href=usinfo.state.gov>News from the Washington File 02 April 2003 (Promotion of democracy, security and development are priorities) (6970)

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) works with other U.S. agencies and departments to promote political and economic freedom for all nations, particularly among those in the Western Hemisphere, says USAID Assistant Administrator for LatinAmerica and the Caribbean Adolfo Franco.

"The United States is committed to helping build a hemisphere that lives in liberty and trades in freedom," Franco said in April 2 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Noting that President Bush has said that the strength of the hemispheric commitment to democracy, security and market-based development will shape the region's future, Franco outlined USAID'sefforts to bolster these commitments.

Through its programs that help governments strengthen democratic processes, promote equitable economic growth and improve health and education standards, USAID is bolstering the region's will to reform, Franco said. In turn, these reforms will move nations in the hemisphere toward eligibility for additional development assistance under the auspices of the Millennium Challenge Account.

USAID efforts to strengthen democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean include anti-corruption, rule of law, municipal governance and civil society strengthening programs, Franco noted. "USAID-supported training and technical assistance help strengthen the capacity of national and local government to demonstrate that responsible leaders can deliver benefits to communities," he added.

Sustained development, Franco said, depends on "market-based economies, sound monetary and fiscal policies, and increased trade and investment." He indicated that through support for legal, policy and regulatory reforms, USAID has worked with regional governments to enhance the environment for trade and investment -- the "twin engines for economic growth and poverty reduction."

Franco said that USAID support for trade capacity building in Latin America and the Caribbean has increased from $5 million in 2001 to more than $23.5 million in 2002, with plans to increase future funding. Among the current examples of USAID trade capacity building assistance he cited was support for eight Caribbean nations that are preparing national trade capacity building strategies.

Franco said USAID's Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean has also placed great emphasis on health and education in the region -- two of President Bush's other stated priorities.

The USAID official noted that there has been significant progress in raising hemispheric vaccination coverage and in reducing or eliminating major childhood illness. He said USAID assistance has also fostered greater discussion of the region's HIV/AIDS problem.

Because "diseases do not respect geographic boundaries," Franco said USAID health care assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean is "critical" to the health and security of the United States itself.

Addressing the state of education in the region, Franco said the quality and relevance of primary and secondary schooling "continue to cause concern."

Franco explained that USAID education and training programs "aim to improve the poor state of public education systems," adding that "USAID will continue to provide support for education reform, enhancing the skills of teachers and administrators and improving training for application in the workplace." In part, this will be accomplished through continued support for the newly-launched Centers of Excellence for Teacher Training.

In addition to the aforementioned regional efforts, USAID also works with other U.S. government agencies to address issues confronting fragile democracies in the hemisphere. Franco identified problems in Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Haiti as being of particular concern.

Read the following Link for the <a href=usinfo.state.gov>complete text.