Protests May Only Harden Chinese Line

Dialogue Over Tibet Grievances Seems Increasingly Less Likely, Analysts Say

By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 24, 2008; A09

BEIJING, March 23 -- To many Chinese, it was a brutal, unprovoked attack against innocent civilians by Tibetan hoodlums bent on breaking China apart. To many Westerners, it was an eruption of anger provoked by harsh crackdowns on peaceful protests against authoritarian Chinese rule.

The two starkly different views of the March 14 riot in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, are being reinforced each day. And a dialogue to cool the passions that sparked the demonstrations, which have spread to other Tibetan areas in western China, "seems less and less likely," said Rebecca MacKinnon, a media studies professor at the University of Hong Kong.

"There are two alternate realities that are not connecting," she said.

When the Olympic torch begins its 130-day, 85,000-mile journey on Monday from Greece's Ancient Olympia to Beijing, this clash of views is likely to be exacerbated as international advocacy groups vow to spotlight several high-profile grievances against Chinese policy in protests planned along the relay route. At least 1,000 police officers are expected to ring the 2,600-year-old Temple of Hera to protect the lighting ceremony, but controversy has already marked the run. A Thai torchbearer announced Sunday that she was pulling out to protest China's actions in Tibet.

China analysts say such protests will probably push China to adopt more hard-line positions to salve its national pride. Protests will not "spark more subtle policy debates in China," MacKinnon said. "The regime will go more and more on the offensive."

"Sovereignty and control is more important to them than international image," a Western academic who looks closely at Chinese politics said on condition of anonymity. The Tibet crackdown is a "sign to other opposition groups that this is what happens if you make problems."

Among many Chinese here and overseas, resentment is building over Western media portrayals of the Lhasa unrest. Although China blocks most of the reports, many people access them by getting around the government's online firewalls.

Rao Jin, 24, the founder of a small technology company in Beijing, said he was so angry about what he sees as foreign journalists' prejudice against China that last week he created a Web site, http://www.anti-cnn.com, to document what he calls mistakes and bias in Western media. He said more than 1,000 people have e-mailed, volunteering to spot errors.

"They said that we should hit back," Rao said. "The untrue reports triggered a lot of anger because it is not what really happened in China."

On Sunday, government-controlled media began running videotaped interviews with foreign tourists who witnessed the March 14 riot in Lhasa. The interviews included descriptions of that day's violence but did not discuss the protests led by monks and nuns that began March 10 and were broken up by police. Several monks and nuns were arrested, and police confined thousands of others to their monasteries.

"Thank you, the West, your fair news media had never stop attacking other countries' sovereignty," wrote one Internet user who posted a seven-minute video, in English, challenging the coverage. The video, titled "Tibet was, is and always will be part of China," attracted almost 1.2 million viewings and more than 72,000 comments in three days, according to a blog monitoring site.

Kang Xiaoguang, a sociology professor at Beijing's Renmin University, said, "Many foreigners understand this event in Tibet as an anti-Communist Party or anti-government event. But Chinese people don't think so. Chinese people regard this event as anti-China."

An Internet user identified as Si Si said in a comment posted on a Chinese site, http://tv.huo360.com, "Several innocent girls were burned by those mad people. We drove away people who hurt the innocent; the U.S. calls it a crackdown. When the U.S. invaded other countries, ordinary people were also killed by soldiers. Isn't this a double standard?"

As international advocacy groups step up their protests against Chinese policies, the government might soon find itself fighting over its image on several fronts.

"I have been telling my students for years that as China becomes a world power, there is going to be a lot more scrutiny and criticism," said Michael Pettis, a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. "Just as Americans have learned to deal with it, the Chinese are going to have to learn to deal with it. My hope is that after the anger there will be some reflection on the complexity of these issues."

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

As Tibet Erupted, China Wavered

By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING — In the chaotic hours after Lhasa erupted March 14, Tibetans rampaged through the city’s old quarter, waving steel scabbards and burning or looting Chinese shops. Clothes, souvenirs and other tourist trinkets were dumped outside and set afire as thick gray smoke darkened the midday sky. Tibetan fury, uncorked, boiled over.

Foreigners and Lhasa residents who witnessed the violence were stunned by what they saw, and by what they did not see: the police. Riot police officers fled after an initial skirmish and then were often nowhere to be found. Some Chinese shopkeepers begged for protection.

“The whole day I didn’t see a single police officer or soldier,” said an American woman who spent hours navigating the riot scene. “The Tibetans were just running free.”

Lhasa is now occupied by thousands of paramilitary police officers and troops of the People’s Liberation Army. But witnesses say that for almost 24 hours, the paramilitary police seemed unexpectedly paralyzed or unprepared, despite days of rising tensions with Tibetan monks.

The absence of police officers emboldened the Tibetan crowds, which terrorized Chinese residents, toppled fire trucks and hurled stones into Chinese-owned shops. In turn, escalating violence touched off a sweeping crackdown and provided fodder for a propaganda-fueled nationalist backlash against Tibetans across the rest of China that is still under way.

“I really am surprised at the speed with which these things got out of control,” said Murray Scot Tanner, a China analyst with a specialty in policing. “This place, this time, should not have surprised them. This is one of the key cities in the country that they have tried to keep a lid on for two decades.”

What happened? Analysts wonder if the authorities, possibly fearing the public relations ramifications of a confrontation before the Beijing Olympics in August, told the police to avoid engaging protesters without high-level approval.

Timing also may have contributed to indecision; Tibet’s hard-line Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, and other top officials were attending the National People’s Congress in Beijing when the violence erupted.

The full explanation could take years to emerge from China’s secretive Communist Party hierarchy. But the Lhasa unrest, not entirely unlike the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989, may be remembered as much for poor police work — faulty crowd control and political indecision followed by a large-scale response — as for the underlying grievances of protesters.

Lhasa now has created far more than a public relations problem for Beijing. It has unleashed widespread Tibetan resentment over Chinese rule. Antigovernment demonstrations have spread to Tibetan areas of western China. Military convoys and trucks of paramilitary police officers are streaming westward to quell the protests.

International leaders are alarmed at the continuing violence and have called on China to exercise restraint. But domestic opinion is inflamed with nationalist anger as state television is repeatedly showing images of Tibetans rioting in those early, unfettered hours.

“Our government should take a bloody suppression on these separatists!” blared one posting among the legion of enraged postings on Chinese Internet chat rooms. “We cannot hesitate or be too merciful, even at the cost of giving up the Olympics.”

The police hesitation did not last long. The crackdown began within 24 hours, on March 15. Witnesses described hearing the thud of tear gas projectiles and the crackle of gunshots as paramilitary police officers gradually took control of the riot area. By March 16, the paramilitary police were searching Tibetan neighborhoods and dragging away suspects. One foreigner saw four Tibetan men beaten so savagely that the police sprinkled white powder on the ground to cover the blood.

Lhasa’s death toll remains in sharp dispute. The Chinese authorities say 22 people died, including a police officer killed by a mob and shopkeepers who burned to death in the violence. The authorities also claim security forces did not carry lethal weapons or fire a shot. But the Tibetan government-in-exile, in Dharamsala, India, said at least 99 Tibetans have died in Lhasa.

Foreign journalists are now forbidden to enter Tibet. But interviews with more than 20 witnesses show that Lhasa was boiling with Tibetan resentment even as authorities believed they had the situation under control. Protests broke out at three monasteries beginning March 10, the anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, which forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India. The police arrested more than 60 monks and confined the rest inside their monasteries. Tibetans say the police also beat monks during peaceful demonstrations.

James Miles, a Beijing-based reporter for The Economist magazine, had gotten a reporting trip to Lhasa approved by authorities before the demonstrations. When the protests started, Mr. Miles wondered if he would be notified that his trip had been canceled. But no call came. He arrived March 12, and on March 13 officials took him to dinner, signaling their confidence by making no attempt to hide the recent demonstrations.

“I was assured that the situation in Lhasa was stable,” Mr. Miles recalled.

But the next day, March 14, would prove otherwise. At Ramoche Temple, monks left the monastery about midday to protest and were immediately met by police officers. Unlike the other monasteries, Ramoche is in the heart of Lhasa’s old Tibetan quarter, so the confrontation attracted a large crowd.

Unconfirmed reports about the earlier protests had been swirling among Tibetans for days, according to several people, including that monks and Buddhist nuns had been killed. Many Tibetans were angry when they saw the police clash with the Ramoche monks. Quickly, the crowd attacked the police.

Witnesses say police reinforcements who arrived with shields and riot gear were overwhelmed. “Almost immediately they were rushed by a massive group of Tibetans,” said one witness. Police officers fled, and a mob of Tibetans poured out of the old quarter onto Beijing Road, a large commercial street. A riot had begun.

Angry Tibetans attacked a branch of the Bank of China and burned it to a blackened husk. Photos and video images show Tibetans smashing Chinese shops with stones and setting them on fire. Witnesses described Tibetans attacking Chinese on bicycles and throwing rocks at taxis driven by Chinese. Later, crowds also burned shops owned by Muslims.

“This wasn’t organized, but it was very clear that they wanted the Chinese out,” said the American woman who witnessed the riots and asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. She said Tibetan grievances exploded in anger. Crowds tied ceremonial silk scarves across the threshold of Tibetan shops to indicate they should not be damaged.

Mr. Miles, the journalist, found himself the only Western reporter on the scene. He spent the next several hours carefully walking around the old Tibetan quarter as rioters burned buildings and overturned cars. “I was looking around expecting an immediate, rapid response,” he said. “But nothing happened. I kept asking people, ‘Where are the police?’ ”

Protests are common in China and clashes can occur between demonstrators and police officers. Beginning the early 1980s China created a paramilitary force, known as the People’s Armed Police, to deal with domestic unrest and other crises. Mr. Tanner, the specialist in Chinese policing, said the People’s Armed Police had developed tactics over the years to defuse protests without resorting to violent crackdowns. But riots of this scale are rare, and if violence erupts, policy dictates a firm response, Mr. Tanner said.

“There is no suggestion that they are supposed to sit back and let a riot burn itself out,” he said.

Tibetans also say the security forces were unusually passive. One monk reached by telephone said other monks noticed that several officers, including some undercover, were more interested in shooting video of the violence than stopping it. “They were just watching,” the monk said. “They tried to make some videos and use their cameras to take some photos.”

Ultimately, the man responsible for public order in Lhasa is Mr. Zhang, Tibet’s party chief. Mr. Zhang is a protégé of President Hu Jintao, who saw his own political career take flight after he crushed the last major rebellion in Tibet in 1989.

According to one biographer, Mr. Hu actually made himself unavailable during the 1989 riots when the paramilitary police needed guidance on whether to crack down. The police did so and Mr. Hu got credit for keeping order, but he also assured himself deniability if the crackdown had failed, the biographer wrote.

Mr. Zhang also has an excuse; he was at the National People’s Congress in Beijing. When the violence started, Mr. Zhang had just completed a two-hour online discussion about China’s Supreme Court, according to a government Web site. It is unclear when Mr. Zhang was told of the violence, or if he made the final decision on how to respond.

But that decision became clear on March 15, the day after the riots. During the riots, the police had been armed with shields and batons, several witnesses said. But overnight, the People’s Armed Police had created a perimeter encircling the riot areas. Armed vehicles also were in position. By the afternoon, witnesses saw small teams of paramilitary officers armed with high-powered weapons moving into the old quarter.

The Chinese authorities have also confirmed that army troops had arrived in Lhasa by March 15, but say their role was limited to traffic control and securing military property. But many people also wonder if some of those troops were involved in the crackdown. Several armored vehicles had their license plates removed or covered in white paper.

Mr. Miles noticed that many of the People’s Armed Police officers actually appeared to be wearing irregular uniforms. One military analyst who studied photographs of the scene concluded that some armored vehicles belonged to an elite military unit. Witnesses reported hearing the sounds of gunshots throughout that Saturday afternoon.

The crackdown was only one part of the new strategy. The Chinese news media initially had not been allowed to cover the Lhasa violence. But by March 15,, that had changed. There, broadcast on state television, was video of Tibetans raging through Lhasa.

Zhang Jing, Huang Yuanxi and Chen Yang contributed research.

Peacekeeping in Darfur Hits More Obstacles

By LYDIA POLGREEN

ABU SUROUJ, Sudan — As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world’s largest, is in danger of failing even as it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by Sudan’s government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.

The force, a joint mission of the African Union and the United Nations, officially took over from an overstretched and exhausted African Union force in Darfur on Jan. 1. It now has just over 9,000 of an expected 26,000 soldiers and police officers and will not fully deploy until the end of the year, United Nations officials said.

Even the troops that are in place, the old African Union force and two other battalions, lack essential equipment, like sufficient armored personnel carriers and helicopters, to carry out even the most rudimentary of peacekeeping tasks. Some even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets United Nations blue, peacekeepers here said.

The peacekeepers’ work is more essential than ever. At least 30,000 people were displaced last month as the government and its allied militias fought to retake territory held by rebel groups fighting in the region, according to United Nations human rights officials.

For weeks after the attacks, many of the displaced were hiding in the bush nearby or living in the open along the volatile border between Sudan and Chad, inaccessible to aid workers. Most wanted to return to their scorched villages and rebuild but did not feel safe from roaming bandits and militias.

A week spent this month with the peacekeeping troops based here at the headquarters of Sector West, a wind-blown outpost at the heart of the recent violence, revealed a force struggling mightily to do better than its much-maligned predecessor, but with little new manpower or equipment.

Despite this, the force is managing to project a greater sense of security for the tens of thousands of vulnerable civilians in the vast territory it covers, mounting night patrols in displaced people’s camps and sending long-range patrols to the areas hardest hit by fighting. But these small gains are fragile, and if more troops do not arrive soon, the force will be written off as being as ineffective and compromised as the one before.

“We really don’t have much time to prove we can do better,” said Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the Senegalese commander of the roughly 2,000 troops in West Darfur, just one-third of the expected total for the area.

“God gave the prophets the ability to achieve miracles so that people would believe. So people here will believe when they see improvements on the ground. And that cannot wait for more troops. We need to do better with what we have.”

The deployment of the biggest peacekeeping force in modern history in one of the most remote, hostile and forbidding corners of the globe was bound to be a logistical nightmare. Darfur is landlocked, water is scarce, the roads are rutted tracks crossed by the mud and sand traps of dry riverbeds.

A Troubled Mission

But those problems pale in comparison with the diplomatic and political struggles the mission faces.

When previous large missions were organized in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the central governments in those countries had collapsed or were so weak that they had little choice but to accept peacekeepers. The government of Sudan agreed to accept United Nations-led peacekeepers in Darfur only after a long diplomatic tussle and under a great deal of pressure.

The progress to get the mission in place has been slow, and much of the blame for this has been placed at the feet of the Sudanese government. For months after the United Nations Security Council approved the force, Sudan insisted on limits on its makeup and independence, demanding the power to dictate which countries contributed troops, to shut down its communication systems when the government carried out offensives and to restrict the movement of peacekeepers at night.

Ultimately, the government signed a compromise agreement with the United Nations allowing the force to operate, but Sudan was successful in insisting that the vast majority of troops come from African countries, and will be supplemented by soldiers from other regions only if suitable African troops cannot be found.

This has delayed the force’s mission, because African armies are not usually able to deploy quickly with equipment and training to meet stringent United Nations standards, United Nations officials and Western diplomats said. Sudanese government officials have argued that African troops are up to the job, and that non-African troops would be seen as neocolonial interlopers.

These problems have raised fears that the United Nations force would suffer the same fate as the African Union force, which was hobbled from the start by a weak mandate, which was to observe a cease-fire, not protect civilians. The thousands of troops deployed by Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal and other nations were mainly there to protect the military observers, who were unarmed, and the unarmed civilian police, whose job it was to guard the camps for the internally displaced people.

But the original cease-fire was quickly violated, and later agreements failed to bring peace. The African troops soon were seen, perhaps unfairly, as useless note-takers who visited the scene of atrocities long after the evidence had been carried off and the dead buried, gathering testimony that seemed to disappear into a bureaucratic black hole.

A Town in Ruins

All of that has changed with the new hybrid mission. The force has a robust mandate to protect civilians. But that is easier said than done, said Maj. Sani Abdullahi, the man in charge of the single company charged with fending off roaming militias and rebels to protect tens of thousands of displaced villagers in a handful of camps and thousands more vulnerable residents of remote villages.

One Sunday morning, Major Abdullahi, 34, a wiry Nigerian officer who served in peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, led a few truckloads of troops to visit Abu Sorouj, one of the towns flattened by a recent government offensive in West Darfur.

The town is just a few dozen miles away, but the drive took three bone-crunching hours. Abu Sorouj was attacked nearly a month earlier, and most of the villagers had fled, some to Chad. They said they were blocked by the Chadian authorities from reaching refugee camps. So within days, some were returning, afraid of losing their land if they became long-term displaced people living in camps.

Before the attack, Abu Sorouj was a bustling town of hundreds of mud-brick huts roofed with thatch, clumped together in sprawling family compounds. It had a cinder-block school and clinic supported by a nongovernmental aid agency.

Today, it is an apocalyptic scene of ashy ruin. The residents who have returned salvaged what they could, sifting through the blackened rubble to find cooking pots, bedsteads and buried troves of grain.

Fadila Ahmed Mahamat, a great-grandmother whose legs are withered stalks, sat amid the charred ruins of her home, digging holes in the sand with bare, gnarled hands to construct the frame of a makeshift dwelling out of branches from a pen that had been used to keep sheep.

“Everything is gone,” she said. “I have nothing.”

Surveying the scene, Major Abdullahi let out a low whistle.

“My God,” he said. “Look at this.”

A few of the town’s sheiks remained, and they clamored to tell him their complaints. Arab gunmen, whom the villagers here call janjaweed, roam the edge of town, they told Major Abdullahi, coming at dawn and dusk to steal what little remained here. The women could not go to the river to collect water. The men could not leave the town to find big branches to build shelters.

“We need security,” one said.

“Why don’t you patrol more often?” another asked. “When you come, the janjaweed stay away for two or three days.”

Major Abdullahi told them: “We don’t have the number of troops on ground we need. As soon as we do, we will spread out. We are doing everything we can to make you feel more secure.”

All talk ceased as a pickup truck loaded with government soldiers drove up. An officer jumped out, smiling with an outstretched hand. But his smile was tense, and after some pleasantries he asked why the peacekeepers had come.

“The place is secure,” said the officer, Maj. Amar Ibrahim. “Even the Arabs who ride on camels and horses and harass people, we have patrols to chase them away.”

Major Abdullahi smiled and nodded.

“We really appreciate that and commend your efforts,” he said through an interpreter. “But we really need to ask you to do more. People still do not feel safe.”

Despite the agreement giving the peacekeepers free rein, government troops complain about their presence. Major Abdullahi said he must be careful not to alienate these troops because he must rely on them to help provide security. “The reality is we need to work with them,” he said. “It does no good to antagonize them.”

Major Abdullahi checked his watch. It was noon, and already he had to think about heading back. The armored personnel carriers, which had been provided to the African Union by the Canadian government and had been battered by years of abuse in Darfur’s harsh conditions, were already acting up. Two flat tires and engine trouble had made the journey to Abu Sorouj slow. But he could not risk being stuck on the way back.

He promised the sheiks that he would return soon, but he could not say for sure how soon that might be.

The Task Ahead

It is unclear how exactly the deployment of troops in Darfur can be speeded up, give the built-in constraint that African troops be used first. Western activists concerned about Darfur say the Sudanese government is primarily responsible and have demanded that China, Sudan’s main trading partner and one of its suppliers of weapons, join other countries to press Sudan to allow troops of any origin the troops to deploy quickly.

While the Sudanese government has been blamed for some of the delay, United Nations requirements have also slowed the force, some diplomats and political analysts say.

The deployment “is not principally being delayed by the Sudanese government,” said a senior Western diplomat in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, who is not authorized to speak publicly. Other problems, like the United Nations bureaucracy and the reluctance of troop-contributing countries, were as much to blame, the diplomat said.

There is certainly no lack of money. Rodolphe Adada, of the Congo Republic, the mission’s civilian chief, said the force had a budget of $1.7 billion. What it needs is troops and equipment, and neither has been easy to get. More pressure on the Sudanese government, he said, would not help matters. “What more pressure can be put on the Sudanese government,” he said. “All the decisions have been taken. There is nothing left to say. What we need to do is act.”

Some countries are reluctant to commit troops in an active conflict with no peace agreement or even a working cease-fire.

“The international community had two choices — get a peace accord and deploy the mission after, or send the mission anyway,” Mr. Adada said. “It chose the latter. But how do you keep the peace when there is no peace to keep?”

Chinese Patrol Restive Areas Bordering Tibet

Pelosi Meets With Dalai Lama in India

By Maureen Fan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A08

BEIJING, March 21 -- Chinese troops and police continued to patrol restive areas in provinces bordering Tibet on Friday, as calls mounted for China to allow foreign observers access to affected areas.

The official New China News Agency reported that the death toll from rioting in Tibet a week ago had risen to 19. China had previously reported that 16 people were killed; the Tibetan government-in-exile, relying on witness testimony, puts the figure at 80.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a critic of Chinese rights abuses, met with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, in the Indian city of Dharmsala, "to shed the bright light of truth on what is happening in Tibet."

"If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China's oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world," Pelosi said.

Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said in an interview with the Bild newspaper that he would urge his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, to clarify the situation. "We want to know exactly what is going on in Tibet," Steinmeier said. "China is only hurting itself by preventing foreign observers from seeing what is going on."

Anti-Chinese protests exploded a week ago in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and spread to other provinces of China with large Tibetan populations. The Chinese government responded with a crackdown by security forces.

On Friday, several of the areas were calm and the heavy police presence had diminished somewhat, witnesses said.

But truckloads of troops continued to converge on the Tibetan autonomous areas in the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan.

In northwest Yunnan province's Zhongdian county, the owner of a guesthouse said police were patrolling the streets in groups of five or six; last week, they were patrolling with more than 10 officers at a time.

"Domestic tourists can enter, but foreigners cannot. Since 99 percent of my business is foreigners, my business is suffering," said the owner, who gave only his surname, Jiang.

A motorcycle shop owner in Zhongdian said many of the troops he saw Friday were passing through on the way to Tibet. "There are police patrolling the streets and many army trucks transporting soldiers," said the shop owner, who gave only his last name, Hu.

State media described a controlled situation and continued vigilance against the Dalai Lama's political supporters, whom the government calls "separatists."

The People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, reported that in Lhasa traffic had returned to normal Friday, most shops and schools had reopened and "the social order was back to normal."

Meanwhile, CCTV, the government-run network, broadcast a program Thursday night with 15 minutes of footage from the crackdown, the longest released so far by government officials.

"I personally tried to guarantee that we didn't cut any violence made by the police toward Tibetans," said Tao Yueqing, who produced the program. "We only cut scenes such as the burned bodies, which belong to five dead girls working for a clothes shop."

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

Witnesses to Tibet violence describe scenes of horror

Protesters in Lhasa randomly beat and killed ethnic Chinese, and troops fired live ammunition into mostly defenseless crowds.

By Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 22, 2008

BEIJING — On a cloudless day near the top of the world, Swiss tourist Claude Balsiger had just finished a late-morning cup of tea and stepped out onto the streets of Tibet's capital. Buddhist monks had been marching against Chinese rule all week, but today seemed calmer.

Suddenly, Tibetan youths started hurling paving stones at police, who tried to protect themselves with their riot shields.

Over the next few hours, the odor of tear gas and fires replaced the scent of incense wafting from backpacker cafes. The intense Himalayan light was blacked out by smoke. And in the days that followed, violence would spread beyond Lhasa to ethnic Tibetan villages deep inside China and to Chinese embassies worldwide.

China has barred Western journalists from entering Tibet and ethnic Tibetan areas. But interviews with foreign witnesses and Chinese residents, as well as blog postings by Tibetans too frightened to be interviewed, show that during three crucial hours on March 14, woefully unprepared police fled, allowing rioters to burn and smash much of Lhasa's commercial center.

Tibetans randomly beat and killed Chinese solely on the basis of their ethnicity: a young motorcyclist bludgeoned in the head with paving stones and probably killed; a teenage boy in school uniform being dragged by a mob. When authorities did regroup, paramilitary troops fired live ammunition into the crowds. Witnesses did not see protesters armed with anything other than stones, bottles of gasoline or a few traditional Tibetan knives.

Despite a massive deployment of Chinese forces, the protests show no signs of abating. In New Delhi on Friday, Tibetan exiles stormed the Chinese Embassy. And China posted a "most wanted" list of 21 alleged rioters, featuring grainy photographs taken from video shot by a hidden camera.

The death toll of Tibetans had risen to 99 as of Friday, with a 16-year-old girl being shot by police in China's Sichuan County, the Tibetan government in exile said.

Chinese authorities say 19 Chinese have been killed in Lhasa: one police officer and the rest civilians.

Since their homeland was invaded by Chinese communists in 1951, Tibetans have risen up periodically against Beijing's rule. Led by the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist monk and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, their movement has been largely nonviolent. There hadn't been a substantial uprising in Lhasa since the late 1980s, giving the city a reputation as a laid-back Shangri-La.

"Tibetans usually are so calm and friendly, but suddenly they were insane," said Balsiger, 25, a teacher. "They were howling like wolves. . . . It was so brutal, so violent."

March 10, Monday

Everybody is girded for demonstrations today. It is the 49th anniversary of the failed Tibetan revolt in which their leader, the Dalai Lama, fled into exile in India. This year the protests are expected to be bigger because activists hope to use the upcoming Summer Olympics in Beijing to press their case.

Tibetan demonstrations are well-choreographed: Monks, who ran Tibet in pre-communist times, usually take the lead while laypeople try to protect them.

At 6 p.m., a parade of about 300 red-robed monks leaves the 15th century Drepung Monastery, five miles west of downtown Lhasa. Blocked by police from reaching the city, the monks sit for several hours at a checkpoint before dispersing.

At dusk, students and monks stage a second demonstration in the center of Lhasa, making a circle around Barkhor Square and joining hands. The square is filled with uniformed and plainclothes security officials. A young Dutch couple watch police take away six or seven demonstrators.

"Everybody is afraid to speak," the Dutch tourists, Steve Dubois and Ulrike Lakiere, write later on a blog. "Even us, free-born people, not for our sake, but for that of the Tibetans who can get in trouble just by speaking with us."

Balsiger recalls meeting a young Tibetan brother and sister at a cafe. Although he and they have no common language, he understands that they live in fear of Chinese undercover police. They nervously show him that they wear images of the Dalai Lama, which are banned, on strings around their necks, hidden under their clothes.

March 11, Tuesday

Nine monks emerge from the Sera Monastery north of Lhasa carrying a banned Tibetan flag and are almost immediately dragged away by police.

Several hundred more monks come out to demand their release. The paramilitary Chinese People's Liberation Army police disperses the crowd with tear gas.

March 12, Wednesday

Many stores in Lhasa are closed. Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet who writes a blog, says two monks at Drepung Monastery slit their wrists in suicide attempts, and monks at Sera Monastery start a hunger strike. Water supplies are cut to many of the monasteries.

A foreign tourist wanders into Sera Monastery at 3 p.m., just as hundreds of monks are rushing out, their hands in the air and in obvious distress. Police surround them.

"They were grabbing monks, kicking and beating them. One monk was kicked in the stomach right in front of us and then beaten on the ground," the tourist later tells BBC.

Paramilitary forces block roads leading out of the remote Ganden Monastery. The Chutsang Nunnery is also surrounded.

March 13, Thursday

Roadblocks are in place around Lhasa. Thousands of paramilitary forces are reported to be searching houses for photographs of the Dalai Lama.

March 14, Friday

Stores reopen. The trouble appears to have passed. But about 11:30 a.m., as the morning prayer finishes at Ramoche Temple, a small Buddhist shrine up a pedestrian street from the main square, police block monks from marching. This time, onlookers start throwing stones at police.

Trucks carrying reinforcements speed down Beijing East Street, the main drag. As soon as police climb out, the stones start flying again. About 20 protesters in their teens and 20s are cheered on by several hundred older Tibetans.

Rioters use their bare hands to pry paving stones loose and hurl them with such ferocity that they crack police shields. The police officers, some of them teenagers themselves, hurry into an alley for cover. The enraged crowd begins to vent its anger on ethnic Chinese passersby.

"At first it was sort of a game. You throw the rocks and you run away," Susan Witmore, a Canadian business consultant who had given herself a trip to Tibet as a 60th birthday present, later recalls. "But then the scene turned incredibly ugly."

A young Chinese motorcyclist is struck by stones. Witmore utters a silent scream to the man, "Keep moving!" but the motorcyclist stops, as if to reason with the mob. Soon his flashy gold helmet is off and the mob is pounding his head with stones and pipes. Witmore, who was watching from the lobby of her hotel, retreats into the courtyard in horror. Other tourists say later that they believe the man was killed.

Balsiger sees the crowd pull a Chinese-looking man off a bicycle. A teenage boy is bludgeoned on the head, but as he staggers, bleeding on the pavement, barely conscious, a tall foreign man steps in and pulls him to safety.

Police flee, and by early afternoon the mobs have the run of the city. They go after Chinese shopkeepers, who these days dominate the commercial life of Lhasa.

"They thought we Han Chinese people were coming to steal from their rice bowls," says the manager of Top of the World Hotel on Ramoche Street, near the temple. She cowers in her courtyard as the crowd sets fire to many of her neighbors' businesses.

The mob is more interested in destroying than looting. Witnesses see cellphones, bicycles, clothing, food and furniture smashed along Beijing East Street. Cars are overturned and set on fire, often topped with burning Chinese flags.

Riots spread to the Muslim quarter, targeting the Hui, Chinese Muslims who have been opening businesses in Tibet. Rioters smash holes through metal shop gates and pour in gasoline. A Muslim family later describes to Chinese journalists how they hid in a bathroom as flames spread around them. The main gate of the mosque is set on fire, but the mob doesn't get inside.

It is not until 4 p.m. that Chinese authorities venture back into the center of Lhasa. What happens next is unclear, because by this time the city is under a strict curfew. According to Tibetan sources, the Public Security Bureau lifts an order restricting the use of live ammunition by the paramilitary forces.

Tibetans say many people are killed in front of the main temple, the Jokhang, and that families come to collect the bodies late at night, offering prayers and strewing traditional white prayer scarves.

"Many of those killed were young Tibetans, both boys and girls," a rioter tells Radio Free Asia. "Those who are dead sacrificed their lives for 6 million Tibetans. My disappointment is that we were not armed."

Amid the raging violence, some Tibetans do step in to help the beleaguered ethnic Chinese.

A 24-year-old Chinese assistant at an optometry shop recalls how a teenage neighbor escorted her home, only to be chastised by a Tibetan security guard who asked, "How can you come back with a Han Chinese?"

The Tibetan girl "was horrified," recalled her Chinese friend. "In her eyes were confusion, perplexion, sorrow and mostly astonishment."

March 15, Saturday

Overnight, soldiers move into the center of Lhasa. By the end of the day, they have the city under control. But protests break out elsewhere. At Labrang Monastery in Xiahe, 750 miles to the northeast, more than 1,000 Tibetans march against the Chinese.

March 16, Sunday

Protesters carrying photos of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan flag stage protests in Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces. In remote Aba County in Sichuan, Tibetans attack a police station and set fire to a market, firetrucks and police cars. Police reportedly fire into the crowd, killing at least eight.

March 17, Monday

Protesters try to storm Chinese embassies and consulates around the world.

"Chinese people have to realize we can't bear any more," says Tenzin Lama, 25, a Tibetan student demonstrating in London. "We will give up our lives to fight for our beliefs. Tibetans won't stop."

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Jia Han, Cathy Gao and Eliot Gao of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

China's Patchy Tibet Blackout

Officials Control Domestic News, Hasten to Spin Outside Reports

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 20, 2008; A08

BEIJING, March 20 -- As news reverberated around the world that bloody disturbances had erupted in Tibet, a star journalist for a leading Chinese newsmagazine was asked if he had any good sources in the remote mountain region. "Why?" he asked, unaware that anything was going on.

The reporter's reaction was not unusual. When rioting by outraged Tibetans shook Lhasa last Friday, the Communist Party's censorship apparatus tamped down news of the rampage, leaving most of China's 1.3 billion people in the dark. Government-controlled television news ignored the crisis for the first few days, and Chinese newspapers were restricted to skeleton dispatches from the official New China News Agency.

The immediate clampdown illustrated the party's abiding determination to control the flow of information in China, which officials regard as an important way for President Hu Jintao and his lieutenants to retain their monopoly on power.

But the party's subsequent moves, loosening controls this week to allow officially supervised reporting, also showed how difficult traditional censorship has become in an age of cellphones, Internet connections and satellite TV.

The Tibetan crisis, which drew global attention, in some ways constituted a test case for the Chinese government, which in January last year issued a regulation allowing foreign correspondents to report without official interference until after the Beijing Olympics this August. For human rights and press freedom activists, the results were disappointing.

Domestic reporting was first blocked by censors, they noted, then carefully oriented to depict Tibetan protesters in a bad light and the exiled Dalai Lama as a hypocritical agitator willing to spill blood to further his political aims, despite his advocacy of nonviolence. Reporting by foreign correspondents, which is not censored, was nevertheless restricted by security forces, who sealed off travel to Tibet and expelled foreign reporters from other areas where ethnic Tibetans mounted protests, including Beijing's Central University for Nationalities.

A dozen Hong Kong television reporters who made it into Lhasa on the strength of their Chinese passports were expelled Sunday after local officials burst into their hotel rooms and demanded they turn over all photographs and video footage of what was going on in the streets. But by then, they had transmitted images to their stations back in Hong Kong, which were then relayed on television news around the world.

"China has not kept any of the promises it made in 2001 when it was chosen to host these Olympics," said Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based press freedom advocacy group. "Instead, the government is crushing the Tibetan protests and is imposing a news blackout."

People's Daily, the main party newspaper, set the tone for the first stage of censorship. On Saturday, the day after 13 Han Chinese were killed by pillaging Tibetan monks and lay youths in Lhasa, it published two paragraphs on its back page under the headline, "Tibet Autonomous Region's authorities respond to New China News Agency reporter's questions."

"In the last few days, an extremely small minority of people in Lhasa carried out beating, smashing, robbery and burning activities, disrupting social order, endangering the lives, property and safety of the people and the masses," the dispatch quoted officials as saying. "There is ample proof that this was organized, plotted and masterminded by the Dalai Lama clique."

The next day's People's Daily carried no news at all on Tibet. China Daily, the party's English-language newspaper aimed at foreign residents, followed suit in its weekend edition, blaming the Dalai Lama and quoting an official saying, "The sabotage has aroused the indignation of, and is strongly condemned by, the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet."

Many Chinese, including those who had learned of the extent of the violence from foreign reports, seemed to take the censorship as a matter of course. Inured after years of such controls, most Chinese long ago lost any sense of indignation at being deprived of straight news by party censors.

Those who want more information -- and who have the means -- have learned to seek outside reporting on the Internet or to watch the news on Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based satellite station that broadcasts into China in Mandarin. Phoenix news programs have traditionally maneuvered between Hong Kong's free press atmosphere and the realities of Beijing's power over the owners. The result has been broadcasts that skirt the most sensitive issues but report more thoroughly than mainland television.

"We saw it all on Phoenix TV, burned shops and everything," said a retired hospital director whose Beijing home has cable service on a limited basis and who, like others questioned about censorship, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Despite the party's strictures at home, reporting from abroad filtered into China swiftly. Broadcasts by CNN and the BBC, available in hotels and in apartment complexes housing foreigners, were cut off only sporadically by Chinese authorities, including a news conference by the Dalai Lama on Sunday from Dharmsala, India.

By Monday, in the face of the crescendo of news from abroad over the weekend, the party had changed tactics and gone on the offensive.

Champa Phuntsok, the Tibetan regional governor, was flown to Beijing to meet with reporters in a hastily organized news conference. He blamed the Dalai Lama for the outburst and urged those who had committed arson and pillaging to turn themselves in.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao held a second news conference Monday evening, using identical language to excoriate the Dalai Lama and reiterate that the issue was not Tibetan human rights and freedom of expression but Chinese territorial sovereignty.

Newspapers were authorized to report on the comments by Champa Phuntsok and Liu, and the official Central China Television began broadcasting images of the damage, with emphasis on the injuries to Han Chinese and the damage to their businesses. By Thursday, Chinese state media were reporting that protests had spread to provinces beyond Tibet.

Resorting again to what appeared to be coordinated language by Beijing officials stepping up to the cameras, Premier Wen Jiabao pressed the offensive Tuesday in his annual news conference at the close of the National People's Congress's two-week session. "They wanted to incite the sabotage of the Olympic Games to achieve their unspeakable goal," he said of the rioters.

Asked by a foreign correspondent why journalists were not allowed to travel to Tibet to cover what was happening, Wen assured his questioner that everything was returning to normal and suggested that, soon, the government would organize a reporting trip for correspondents.

China plays victim for its audience

Government media images of Tibetans as the aggressors stoke support at home.

By Mark Magnier
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 17, 2008

LANZHOU, CHINA — Even as China faces global criticism for its crackdown on Tibetan Buddhists, it's winning the battle that it most cares about: support for its policies among Chinese back home.

One key factor is a media strategy that, while still blunt and heavily reliant on censorship and propaganda, shows more nuance than usual for the lumbering Communist Party.

This last week the government has used something it traditionally viewed as a big negative, any suggestion that it's not in total control, to its advantage by going large with print, still and video coverage of Tibetans attacking Han Chinese in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and destroying their property.

Not only does this rather ironically paint the Chinese state and its massive police force as something of a victim, analysts said, but it also stirs up feelings of fear and anger among many Han, the nation's majority population, that add a personal dimension to the riots.

At a political level, the coverage has also bolstered the government's assertion that its archenemy, the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, is masterminding the protests from abroad and the atheist government's long-standing contention that Tibetan monks are anything but neutral, nonpolitical and peace-loving.

Many of the videos of the riots on the state-run CCTV website have been shot and edited to point up crimson-robed monks bashing and burning with the best of the mob. And to the extent the Dalai Lama has stopped short of outright condemning the monks and the protest, China gains points.

"In this crisis, their strategy has been pretty effective," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley. "They've been able to portray it as 'we Chinese' versus 'they Tibetans' and seen public opinion go their way."

This policy is a case of making a virtue of necessity given that absolute control of information has become increasingly difficult.

The state's information guardians have also picked up a few other tricks. They're using more individual stories of Han families who were victimized in Tibet, aware that a personal narrative is far more powerful than vague propaganda language. And they've sprinkled their official dispatches with such terminology as "bloggers," "netizens" and "blogosphere" to look more current and inclusive.

At the same time, the approach is more of a paint job than a renovation as China's propaganda ministry continues to use many traditional tactics honed in dusty Soviet offices decades ago.

Unrest is blamed on "outside" elements, Tibetans are urged to report on other "troublemakers" and there are hints, although no guarantees, of leniency for those who turn themselves in.

On other fronts, the "Great Firewall," China's Internet filtering and monitoring system, has been in overdrive during the last week, deleting comments furiously and blocking Internet searches of such terms as "Tibet," "Lhasa," "demonstration" and "March 14" -- the day of protests in which at least 10 people were killed.

Some pro-government comments have found their way onto the Internet, though many are anonymous and there is no fast way to determine their origin.

"I strongly condemn the Dalai clique trying to undermine China's prosperity," said an anonymous posting from the southern city of Guangzhou on the popular Sohu portal.

Independent views opposing the government are strongly discouraged. The government has banned travel by foreigners to Tibet.

"The control strategy comes from the very top and it's well orchestrated," Xiao said. "It's more intense than I've ever seen."

Although international opinion is important, particularly as Beijing prepares to hold the Olympics in August, all politics are local, even in China. And for the party, maintaining its monopoly political grip on its far-flung empire is central to its strategy and continued existence, underscoring its vow that Tibet will never be allowed independence.

The strategy has been well received among members of the country's often strongly nationalist Chinese-language community. The government "should send more auxiliary police and arm each one with a rubber stick" against protesters, said a post on the Internet bulletin board Douban.

The themes of national unity and respect for the integrity of the motherland have also struck a chord with many in the more sophisticated overseas Chinese Internet community.

"The government has done well," said Robert Liu, a blogger who has been studying economics in the U.S. for the last six months. "They're doing better and have a more mature approach, although they still have a long way to go."

Growing domestic support of its policies gives the Chinese government political cover to restore order to the restive ethnically Tibetan areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai and Gansu provinces as it sees fit, knowing that accounts of heavy-handed tactics will inevitably surface in an increasingly porous society.

This is a different dynamic than in 1989 when many Chinese identified with the students rather than the government in Tiananmen Square.

Images of Tibetan rioting are also being employed to bolster the government's core message that foreign human rights groups and activists such as the Dalai Lama are bent on ruining the Olympics to keep China down. The Dalai Lama said Sunday that China deserves to host the Olympics and that the Games should not be boycotted.

Although China lacks the democratic institutions, vocal critics or opinion polls that would gauge the effectiveness of its strategy and public perception of its Tibet policies, one indicator may be its censorship of coverage by television networks BBC and CNN inside the country.

Instead of blacking out all such Tibet reports, leading to long and annoying instances of blank screens early in the week, the government allowed more of them to air as the week wore on. A BBC report that aired Sunday in Beijing ran 20 minutes, including a five-minute excerpt with the Dalai Lama.

"The government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin," said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard. "They've learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it."

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Gao Jing of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

Kosovo's women suffer

Stemming domestic violence and human trafficking remains a challenge in the newly independent nation.
By Tracy Wilkinson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 10, 2008

PRISTINA, KOSOVO — She purses her lips in a "tsk-tsk" when asked difficult questions. Questions about her life, about the husband who beats her, the father who denies her an inheritance and a place to live.

Slightly hunchbacked, her thin frame barely fills the several layers of donated clothing she wears. At 26, she looks 15. She has three children and an elementary-school education. When she showed up at the door of a women's shelter here, purple bruises blotched her face and framed her shattered, crooked nose. Chunks of her hair had been ripped out.

"I've been beaten a lot," said Fatima. "They beat me so badly the last time, I could not care for my children."

In the last couple of years, she says, she has spent more time at the shelter, hiding, than in her husband's house. It is only a slight exaggeration.

Fatima is actually luckier than many women in Kosovo, a harsh region weighted by twin burdens of poverty and unenlightened tradition. A United Nations study in 2000 estimated that one-fourth of the female population of Kosovo suffered physical or psychological abuse; Kosovo police last year recorded 1,077 cases of domestic violence.

Fatima and her children were able to escape to a shelter, one of a dozen or so that now operate here. It has given her refuge from the violent men of her family and an alternative to an even darker fate: being sold into the expansive networks that traffic women like chattel in this part of the world.

But for every woman in Kosovo who is saved, an untold number do not make it, according to women's advocates and social workers.

Dominated by ethnic Albanians, Kosovo broke away from Serbia last month, proclaiming itself an independent nation, with fervent backing from Washington. Among Kosovo's many challenges, from building state institutions to combating rampant corruption, is improving its historically unjust and often criminal treatment of women.

Like much of the surrounding, rugged Balkans, Kosovo has long served as a notorious transit point for the international trafficking of women, mostly from Eastern Europe, who are forced into prostitution or slavery.

After a brutal crackdown by Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, Kosovo came under the stewardship of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations. During the years since, Kosovo evolved from a transit point into both a source of and destination for trafficked women. Often, Kosovo officials and former guerrilla commanders were complicit in the lucrative trade -- and the resident international community, including peacekeepers and civilian consultants, its market.

Unemployment problem

The question now is whether independence, which is still in an embryonic stage and not universally recognized, will result in a change of status for women and eradication of the trafficking networks. Or whether organized criminal gangs, with allies in the new government, will be given an even freer hand.

"The first thing our government must do, and they've promised a lot, is to fight unemployment. The violence is linked directly to economic conditions," said Naime Sherifa, director of the Center for the Protection of Women and Children in Pristina, the first such organization here. "People are very tired of being poor."

Tired, she said, and ready to explode. Roughly half of Kosovo's generally young population is out of work; the World Bank and other experts believe it could take a decade to dramatically reduce unemployment. Poverty strains Kosovo's families, which tend to be large. Add to that the dislocations of war: Thousands of people were killed and entire villages razed, their residents forced to move to urban areas. There, many live in cramped conditions, disoriented, unsettled in an unfamiliar environment.

The breakdown of family structure and the transfer of populations to cities created an anonymity in Kosovo society that did not exist before the war; as one consequence, it left women vulnerable to traffickers and other abuse, said Wanda Troszczynska, a Kosovo specialist with the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Women used to be relegated to restrictive lives at home, guarded behind the high-walled compounds that traditionally housed extended ethnic Albanian families, or clans. It wasn't freedom, but it was out of the reach of outside exploitation. Traffickers brought women from elsewhere, such as Moldova and Romania, initially to be shuttled to Italy or other parts of Europe and, after the war, to remain in Kosovo to "service" a growing international population.

Eventually, more and more Kosovo women, ripped from their traditional home life, also fell prey to traffickers and found themselves lured by promises of work, marriage or their own cellphone, only to end up in seedy bars, strip joints and brothels.

Need to enforce laws

In their long march to prove themselves ready to run a state, Kosovo Albanians set up a police force under United Nations tutelage that gradually took up the mission of raiding bars and rescuing victims of sexual exploitation. In 2006, the Kosovo police conducted 99 raids, arrested 28 suspected traffickers and "identified" 50 victims, according to statistics provided by the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

By all accounts, the work by the Kosovo police is an improvement but targets only the tip of the iceberg.

More insidious than the trafficking are the domestic abuse cases. Perhaps tens of thousands of women suffer violence at home or the denial of basic rights, according to human rights activists and social workers. Experts say the problem crosses ethnic lines -- Albanians, Serbs, Roma and others are victims -- and remains vastly underreported.

Igballe Rogova, head of the Kosova Women's Network, an umbrella coalition of about 40 groups, said she was hopeful the government, with the independence issue more or less settled, could put into practice laws that exist on paper.

"Today we have really incredibly good mechanisms on gender equality," she told a European Parliament committee on women's issues in Brussels late last month. "We have a law on gender equality, we have an office on gender equality at the prime minister level and, in every ministry, gender equality officers. We are not happy with the implementation of these mechanisms, but we are very optimistic."

Sherifa said laws grant women the rights to own and inherit property on the same terms as men. But it often does not happen that way.

In the case of Fatima, for example, her father owns nearly nine acres of land, which he has divided among her brothers. But he refuses to give Fatima any, forcing her to live with her husband and children in her father-in-law's tiny house. Seven people live, cramped and unhappily, in the two-room shack.

Both her husband and her father-in-law beat her, Fatima said. Her "offenses" ranged from asking for money to buy medicine for a sick child, or asking for food. Sometimes, she said, she goes days without eating. Fatima has ended up in the shelter three times in the last two years, each time after a beating so severe she could not stand the pain any longer.

Haven for abused

The shelter, run by Sherifa's organization, was the first one in Kosovo. It is a three-story house behind a gate on a quiet street of Pristina. Police patrol it regularly. (The Times was granted rare access to the shelter and its residents on the condition that neither the location nor the victims be identified. "Fatima" is a pseudonym.)

The good news in Fatima's story is that when, bruised and bloodied, she called the police, they came. They took her to the shelter. She returned to the family after the men were briefly detained by the police and ordered not to touch her again. Now, however, it is clear the intervention has failed, Sherifa said, and she will look for a permanent place for Fatima and her children to live.

More than anything, Fatima seems weary. "I just feel sorry for my children," she said. "They see all this violence all the time. I'm afraid it will affect them."

The bad news is the shelters are full, unable to meet the demand; abusers are rarely prosecuted, witnesses too terrified to come forward.

Said Sherifa: "This is something we, and the next generation, will have to work on."

wilkinson@latimes.com

Wilkinson, The Times' Rome Bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Kosovo.

Gates praises Indonesian military but cautions on human rights

The Defense secretary says the U.S. is willing to sell weapons to the key Southeast Asian ally.
By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

12:12 PM PST, February 25, 2008

JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today that the U.S. was still willing to sell Indonesia new weaponry, particularly for its navy and air force. But he cautioned that democracies must have firm civilian control of their militaries, which must be disciplined for human rights abuses.

Gates praised Jakarta for moving to professionalize its military, which for decades under former President Suharto ruled the archipelago with an iron fist until the late dictator was deposed a decade ago.

Although Gates did not criticize the Indonesian military's current conduct, he made a point to emphasize that democracies must investigate and prosecute allegations of corruption or abuse within their armed forces.

"In addition to the importance of civilian control of the military, there cannot be even a taint of corruption or a hint of tolerance for human rights abuses," Gates told the Indonesian Council on World Affairs.

During the last three years, the Bush administration has moved to lift restrictions on military ties between the two countries that were first cut after Indonesian military atrocities committed in East Timor in 1991.

Congress has moved to withhold some of the aid until past abuses by the Indonesian military were accounted for, and human rights groups have argued that the armed forces still are not fully answerable to civilian authorities.

Gates' address followed his afternoon meetings with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono. U.S. officials traveling with Gates said he pushed to deepen security ties with Indonesia, which as the world's largest Muslim country has become a key ally in the region and a model of the kind of secular Muslim state the Bush administration hopes to replicate elsewhere.

Although Indonesia has become the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the region, at about $15.7 million this year, Indonesian government officials have expressed repeated frustration with the slow pace of U.S. military sales.

In recent months, Indonesia has discussed acquiring weapons from China and Russia, with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin vowing during a visit here in September to sell Jakarta $1 billion of advanced weaponry.

The discussions with the Russians and Chinese were seen by analysts as a hedge against inaction, but Gates emphasized that all U.S. restrictions on arms sales to Indonesia were lifted by the Bush administration in November 2005. At a news conference with Gates after their talks, Indonesia's defense minister said his consideration of non-U.S. weaponry was sound acquisition policy.

"We review all equipment from all countries, including the United States, in a balanced and very fair-minded way," Sudarsono said.

peter.spiegel@latimes.com

U.S. Policy in Africa Faulted on Priorities

Security Is Stressed Over Democracy

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 22, 2008; A17

NAIROBI, Feb. 21 -- In his tour of Africa, President Bush steered clear of countries where stability, human rights and progress toward democracy have degenerated during his tenure, among them Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Uganda and Kenya.

In those countries, Bush's focus on counterterrorism has overtaken his other stated foreign policy goals of promoting democracy and human rights, according to analysts.

"While democratization has clearly been one of the three major stated objectives of the Bush administration -- the others being security and development -- democratization probably ranks third," said Joel Barkan, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "You can see it in several ways, but it's mainly the subordination of democratization to the so-called war on terror."

Money for once-robust programs aimed at strengthening democratic institutions such as courts and parliaments has dried up, Barkan said. And critics say that several less-than-democratic African leaders have skillfully played the anti-terrorism card to earn a relationship with the United States that has helped keep them in power.

While Bush has received praise across the continent for his fight against malaria and AIDS, many Africans who hoped that the United States would support their struggle for more just and open societies have been disappointed. They include opposition groups, human rights activists, intellectuals, professionals and, significantly in Kenya and Somalia, moderate Muslims who've felt unjustly targeted in the U.S.-driven hunt for terrorism suspects.

"There was a time when Muslims here would trust the U.S.," said Ibrahim Ahmed, a lawyer who ran for Kenya's parliament last year. "As a Muslim, I can say that U.S. foreign policy has really destroyed the trust that existed."

Ethiopia, with U.S. backing, invaded Somalia in December 2006 to oust the Islamic movement, which the United States accused of having ties to al-Qaeda. Ethiopia then installed a U.S.-backed transitional government headed by Abdullahi Yusuf, who analysts say has used the fight against terrorism as an excuse to attack his political and business enemies.

More than a year later, no high-level terrorism suspects have been killed or captured. Yusuf and the Ethiopian government are accused of committing war crimes against Somali civilians. And analysts say a more radicalized contingent of Islamic fighters has joined an insurgency battling for control of the capital, Mogadishu.

By some measures, Somalia is now the worst humanitarian crisis on the continent, with more than 1 million people displaced by fighting that has left thousands dead in the past year.

"I actually think it's paradoxical: America is advocating democracy and at the same time using ruthless and brutal warlords in Somalia that have no democratic credentials at all," said Sheikhdon Salad, a doctor in Mogadishu.

The Bush administration's policy in Somalia has had ramifications across the region, especially in Ethiopia.

The 2005 elections there were initially praised as among the country's most open and democratic. But when the opposition leveled accusations of vote-rigging, protesters took to the streets. Ethiopian security forces fired into the crowd, leaving at least 193 people dead. Many opposition leaders were jailed.

U.S. criticism soon flagged, analysts say, because the United States was relying on Ethiopia as its key military ally in the region and later needed Ethiopian military and intelligence cooperation in Somalia.

"Dictators are using and abusing the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign for their own ends," said Marara Gudina, a member of Parliament who chairs an opposition party in Ethiopia. "I think democracy is secondary on the list of U.S. policy priorities."

In Sudan, analysts have suggested that U.S. reliance on Sudanese counterterrorism intelligence has prevented a tougher stance on the crisis in the country's western Darfur region, where a government crackdown on rebels has left as many as 450,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced.

Charles Onyango-Obbo, a columnist in Kenya who writes about the region, said some African leaders with good relations with the United States often feel so powerful that they see no need to engage with opposition groups.

He cited Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who cast himself as a staunch U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism at a time when he was facing growing criticism for his increasingly dictatorial rule. Museveni, who has been in power for more than 20 years, changed the constitution ahead of the 2006 election to allow himself a third term, and jailed a leading opposition candidate.

As U.S. ambassador, James Kolker was critical of Museveni's government, but his successor was less vocal as the United States pressed Museveni to send peacekeepers to Somalia. Uganda sent 1,500 troops as part of an African Union force that has had trouble pulling in other participants.

"Museveni has very cleverly played the U.S. like a violin," said Barkan, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Barkan noted that the Bush administration's response to Kenya's post-election crisis has been a welcome exception to the pattern.

The Bush administration initially congratulated President Mwai Kibaki, who is accused of rigging the vote, but diplomats have since become increasingly critical of his government's refusal to compromise with opposition leader Raila Odinga. On Monday, Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said the United States would not conduct "business as usual" with Kenya unless a settlement is reached.

Critics say that sort of pressure has been lacking at crucial moments in other African countries over the past several years.

Rep. Donald M. Payne (D-N.J.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, said that by ignoring electoral problems and human rights violations, the United States often winds up dealing with the consequences of political chaos.

"Turning a blind eye to government abuses and wanton disregard for human dignity often leads to political instability and massive humanitarian disasters," Payne said. "And we always end up paying for it."

Special correspondents Kassahun Addis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Mohamed Ibrahim in Mogadishu contributed to this report.

Drug Gangs Use Violence to Sway Guatemala Vote

By MARC LACEY

GUATEMALA CITY — It is election time in Guatemala and that means rallies and banners — and body bags.

In the campaigning leading up to elections on Sept. 9, the authorities have reported 61 violent attacks on candidates and political activists. The death toll is 26, including seven national congressmen and numerous other office seekers.

The flurry of bullets, and the occasional machete attack, make this the bloodiest campaign season in the history of a country with a long tradition of political violence, including 36 years of civil war that ended in 1996. But what makes the bloodletting different this time is that it has been attributed to narcotics traffickers and their allies intent on infiltrating Guatemala’s political system.

So dangerous is campaigning that Álvaro Colom, the leading presidential candidate, flies in a helicopter to avoid being ambushed and travels with a physician with extensive experience in bullet wounds. He is careful what he eats, lest someone poison it. “I hate to say this, but it’s more violent now than during the war,” he said.

It is not only South America’s drug-producing countries that are at risk these days from the impact of the drug trade, or even of becoming narcostates. More and more, corrosive effects are being felt in the countries where the drugs transit, like Guatemala, Mexico and Haiti, as competition grows, in effect, to set up toll roads on the drug routes to the United States.

Somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of the South American cocaine that enters the United States now comes through Central America, American officials say, pulling rising levels of political instability, violence and corruption in its wake.

The most popular trafficking routes shift constantly to stay one step ahead of law enforcement efforts, the officials say. “If you attack the cockroach in one corner, the son of a gun shows up in another,” said a senior American counternarcotics official in the region, who spoke on background to avoid compromising future investigations.

Cartels active in Colombia, where much of the region’s cocaine is produced, have connections with politicians, military officers and others throughout the area to assist them in getting drugs and drug profits out, whether on small planes or boats.

Guatemala provides an increasingly important transit point, American officials say, as traffickers take advantage of the country’s dire poverty and lawlessness. They have already made considerable progress over the years, political analysts and law enforcement officials say, by installing sympathetic politicians in Congress and in local city halls.

“Controlling the political system is their goal,” said Iduvina Hernandez, an analyst at a Guatemalan research group called Security in Democracy. “If they can control a small town, they can build a landing strip there and use it as a base. If they have someone in Congress, all the better.”

With plenty of money to spend, drug dealers finance as many campaigns as they can and put forward candidates who are on the take. Resistance is met with gunfire.

José Carlos Marroquín, Mr. Colom’s chief strategist, might have joined the list of victims as well. Last year, as campaigning got under way, assailants lobbed three grenades at his motorcade and opened fire on the vehicles with automatic weapons. He survived but the threats against him and his family have not let up.

“Politics is dangerous here,” said Mr. Marroquín, a former newspaper editor. “Along with the regular campaigns, there is a campaign of fear.”

In addition to the traffickers, an array of other heavily armed groups, including rogue soldiers, paramilitary groups, street gangs and smugglers, are fueling the violence. None of them are trigger shy.

Street violence is part of life in Guatemala even when an election is not around the corner. People are shot by muggers, caught in the cross fire of rival gangs and taken out by hit men as a matter of course.

Campaign season brings a spike in the killing, although homicides are only rarely solved here and political crime is no exception. [Guatemala’s Congress voted Aug. 1 to approve an initiative backed by President Óscar Berger’s administration that would allow United Nations investigators to aid in the prosecution of armed groups. It is being called the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala.]

In one example of how hard it is to crack a case here, three Salvadoran members of the Central American Parliament and their driver were murdered in Guatemala in February. The suspected killers, four police officers, were themselves later murdered in prison. A police officer and five men with links to a drug cartel have been arrested, although the motive for the attacks and counterattacks remains unknown. Mr. Berger’s security minister resigned in the wake of the killings.

The effect of all the violence on the candidates is profound. They move around with their own private armies, usually in bullet-proof vehicles loaded with small arsenals.

One of those who feel most vulnerable is Mr. Colom, a businessman who is leading the pack in the presidential race. People affiliated with his party have suffered more attacks, 16 of the 61, than any other.

Besides the recent attacks on members of his party, he is haunted by the past. His uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, was a leading presidential candidate in 1979, when he was gunned down.

One candidate forced out of Mr. Colom’s National Unity for Hope party in 2005 was Manuel de Jesús Castillo, a congressman who has been accused but never convicted of links to drug interests.

He is running for mayor of the provincial town of Jutiapa as an independent. It is a campaign he is expected to win, largely because of his precampaign giveaways of everything from farming tools to livestock. The raffles he sponsors even offer free plots of land to lucky residents — but only if he wins.

“I’m clean, and it’s a lie what they say about me,” Mr. Castillo, who has formed his own civic organization called El Castillo, or the Castle, has told reporters. He travels his rural district in a yellow Hummer and has burly men nearby to protect him.

With the murder rate at roughly 6,000 deaths a year, it is not hard to understand why security has emerged as the chief issue of the campaign.

“There are presidential candidates who are trying to scare the people,” Mr. Colom said the other day, an indirect attack at Otto Pérez Molina, a tough-talking former general who is considered to be No. 2 in the polls. “We have a plan to bring security but also health and education and jobs.”

Mr. Pérez Molina’s campaign symbol is a fist. He is all about “mano dura,” or “strong hand,” his shorthand for a no-holds-barred crackdown on delinquency. The tough message has appeal among crime-weary Guatemalans, who were shown in a recent survey to back extreme methods, even vigilantism, to cut the country’s murder rate.

The population applauded Alejandro Giammattei, a former director of prisons and the candidate of the ruling party, when he ordered a raid on a notorious prison last year that had become a center for organized crime. Subsequently, gunmen tried to end his life, Mr. Giammattei said.

After that, Guatemala’s top human rights official said there was evidence that the police had shot and killed seven prisoners after they had been detained in the raid. Mr. Giammattei denied that account, although public sympathy for the prisoners who were killed has been minimal.

Even the candidacy of Efraín Ríos Montt, a former dictator who is running for a congressional seat, has not prompted much of an uproar here. Mr. Ríos Montt is expected to win a seat, which will make it harder to prosecute him on charges of violating human rights during the country’s long civil war.

In April, 31 members of the United States Congress sent a letter to Guatemala’s attorney general calling for the immediate arrest of Mr. Ríos Montt, who ruled the country from 1982 to 1983, which was considered the bloodiest period of the civil war.

Warrants for Mr. Ríos Montt’s arrest, issued by a Spanish judge, stem from complaints filed by another presidential candidate, Rigoberta Menchú, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of Guatemala’s marginalized indigenous communities, which bore the brunt of the violence during the war.

With little in the way of resources, her campaign is struggling, despite its message of breaking with the country’s violent past. A Quiche Indian, she would be the first woman and the first indigenous person to serve as president.

As a symbol of the peace he wants, Mr. Colom, who is in his third bid for the presidency, threw a dove in the air at a recent campaign rally. It went up for a moment, its wings flapping furiously, then quickly plummeted to the ground.

Born and raised in a North Korean gulag

Born and raised in a North Korean gulag
By Choe Sang-Hun
Monday, July 9, 2007

SEOUL: On Nov. 29, 1996, 14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp's torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among those to be put to death.

Instead, the guards brought out his mother and his 22-year-old brother. The mother was hanged, the brother was shot by a firing squad.

"Before she was executed, my mother looked at me," Shin said in a recent interview. "I don't know if she wanted to say something, because she was bound and gagged. But I avoided her eyes.

"My father was weeping, but I didn't cry," he said. "I had no love for her. Even today I hate her for what I had to go through because of her."

Shin's story provides a rare glimpse into one of the least-known prison camps in North Korea.

Shin, now 24, was a political prisoner by birth. From the day he was born in 1982 in Camp No. 14 in Kaechon until he escaped in 2005, Shin had known no other life. Guards beat children, tortured grandparents and, in cases like Shin's, executed family members. But Shin said it did not occur to him to hate the authorities. He assumed everyone lived this way.

He had never heard of Pyongyang, the capital city 90 kilometers, or 55 miles, to the south, or even of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.

"I didn't know about America, or China or the fact that the Korean Peninsula was divided and there was a place called South Korea," he said. "I thought it was natural that I was in the camp because of my ancestors' crime, though I never even wondered what that crime was. I never thought it was unfair."

Since 1992, about a dozen former North Korean prison camp inmates have fled to South Korea. But most were held in the "revolutionizing zone" at Camp No. 15 in Yodok in eastern North Korea. This means that the emphasis was on "re-educating" the prisoners. If they survived long enough to complete their sentences, they were released.

Shin is the first North Korean who came south who is known to have escaped from a prison camp. Moreover, he was confined to a "total-control zone."

According to a report released in June by the government-run Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul: "Prisoners sent to a total-control zone can never come out. They are put to work in mines or logging camps until they die. Thus the authorities don't even bother to give them ideological education. They only teach them skills necessary for mining and farming."

Thanks to the stories of former Yodok inmates, the camp's name has become synonymous with human rights abuses. But there are at least four other prison camps in North Korea, including Camp No. 14 in Kaechon. These others are far less known because so few have emerged to describe them.

Shin "is a living example of the most brutal form of human rights abuse," said Yoon Yeo Sang, president of Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul, where Shin is taking temporary shelter. "He comes from a place where people are deprived of their ability to have the most basic human feelings, such as love, hatred and even a sense of being sad or mistreated."

A North Korean named Kim Yong who came south in 1999 and now lives in the United States said he spent two years in Kaechon, but some refugees have questioned his claim.

Ahn Myeong Cheol, who worked as a driver and guard at four camps before reaching South Korea in 1994, has no doubts that Shin was in a total-control zone. Ahn said that when he met Shin in June, he immediately noticed the telltale signs: the avoidance of eye contact and arms warped by heavy labor from childhood.

"An instruction drilled into every guard's head is: Don't treat them like humans," Ahn said.

According to Shin, the prison authorities matched his father, Shin Kyong Sup, with his mother, Chang Hye Kyong, and made them spend five days together before separating them. This sort of arrangement was known as "award marriage," a privilege given only to outstanding inmates. An exemplary worker might be allowed to visit the woman chosen as his wife a few times a year.

Shin's brother was born in 1974 and Shin in 1982. Young children lived with their mothers, who worked from 5 a.m. to midnight. Once they turned 11, children were moved to communal barracks but were allowed to visit their mothers if they excelled at their work.

"I got to visit my mother only once or twice a year," Shin said. "I never saw my whole family together. I don't think I saw my brother more than a few times."

There were up to 1,000 children but no textbooks in the school at Valley No. 2, the part of the camp where Shin lived. Pupils were taught to read and write, and to add and subtract, but little more. After school, children worked in the fields or mines. In most of North Korea, villages are decorated with Communist slogans and portraits of Kim Jong Il. Valley No. 2 had only one slogan carved into a wooden plaque: "Everyone obey the regulations!"

Inmates were fed the same meal three times a day: a bowl of steamed corn and a salty vegetable broth. They scavenged whatever else they could find: cucumbers and potatoes from the fields, frogs, mice, dragonflies and locusts. Shin said he once ate corn kernels he found in cow droppings. When a teacher found a girl had hidden wheat grains in her pocket, he beat her on the head with a stick. She died the next day.

Shin's life changed in 1996, when his mother and brother were accused of trying to escape. Guards interrogated him in an underground torture cell about a suspected family plot to flee the camp. They stripped and hung him by his arms and legs from the ceiling, and held him over hot charcoal.

During the interrogations he learned for the first time that his father's family belonged to a "hostile class" - a category that entailed punishment over three generations - because his uncles had collaborated with the South Korean Army during the Korean War.

Shin owed his unusual escape to two friends: an older cellmate who helped him recover from his torture wounds, and a man he met in the garment factory where he worked in 2004 who told him about life beyond the camp.

"Everything he told me about the outside world - the food, China - was fascinating," Shin said. "I loved his stories. Once I heard about the outside, I thought I would go crazy. I wanted to get out. I couldn't focus on work. Every day was an agony."

On Jan. 2, 2005, when Shin and his co-worker were collecting firewood near the camp's electrified fence and could not see any guards, they ran.

Shin is still struggling to understand what happened next: his friend fell against the high-voltage fence, his body creating an opening.

"I climbed over him, through the hole," Shin said. "I ran down the hill like a madman. I looked back and he wasn't moving."

In July 2005, Shin reached China. In February 2006, a South Korean helped him seek asylum at the South Korean Consulate in Shanghai. He arrived in Seoul last August.

Today, Shin bears burn scars from the torture and the electrified fence, and walks with a slight limp. He says he has recurring nightmares about being back in Camp No. 14. Awake, he wonders what happened to his father and about the man he left behind at the fence. Did he sacrifice himself to help Shin escape?

Now in Seoul, he said he sometimes finds life "more burdensome than the hardest labor in the prison camp, where I only had to do what I was told." His limited vocabulary has caused him to fail twice the written driver's license test. And there is his struggle to reconcile with his dead mother.

"However I try, I can't forgive her," he said. "She and my brother severely hurt me and my father by trying to escape. Didn't she think what would happen to us?"

Shin said he sometimes wished he could return to the time before he learned about the greater world, "without knowing that we were in a prison camp, without knowing that there was a place called South Korea."