The Manyanga

Khan's Road

2020-12-24T02:16:00.000-08:00

Beaten, held at bottom of well: embattled contractors struggle to rebuild Afghanistan

By Todd Pitman

KABUL _ Khalid Khan stares through the dusty window pane, down across the rooftops of the capital, and wonders if they really know where he lives.

Once on the front lines of the international effort to rebuild Afghanistan, the black-bearded contractor now sits idle _ cross-legged and quiet on the floor of the small hilltop home he shares with another family after he had to sell his own.

"They called again this morning," he says of the kidnappers who once held him hostage at the bottom of a well, repeatedly threatening to execute him. "They said, 'We're watching you. Do you know what we can do to you?'"

Khan was contracted to build one of the final links of a $2.5 billion highway that circles this mountainous country, linking a massive road network to Kabul like arteries around a heart. It is one of the most important reconstruction projects launched here since the U.S. invaded to oust the Taliban in 2001.

The soft-spoken 30-year-old had hoped to make a tidy profit. But after more than a year of work and two months of captivity, he is deep in debt, traumatized, and lucky to be alive.

And the road is still not done.

Khan's story underscores the tremendous obstacles the international community faces rebuilding in an active war zone, revealing how even the best-intentioned development plans can be sidelined without security. Khan's ordeal also shows how risky it is for Afghans willing to take part in that effort, and how little help there is for them when things go wrong.

"Multiply him by 1,000, and you'll understand why the entire reconstruction effort in Afghanistan is getting so bogged down," says Craig Steffensen, Afghanistan director of the Asian Development Bank, which is funding the final stretch of the so-called Ring Road.

___

Building a highway to connect Afghanistan's major cities has been a dream of developers for decades, one born half a century ago when this Islamic nation was ruled by a king.

The Ring Road fell into disrepair through repeated wars, and the northern sections were never built. After 2001, rebuilding it became a centerpiece of the international development operation.

The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates two-thirds of Afghanistan's people live within its path. The government believes it will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, boost trade, and pave the way for schools, hospitals and cheaper goods to serve isolated villages. Once complete, the asphalt will become a 21st century Silk Road, joining markets in Afghanistan to Central Asia, China and the Persian Gulf.

Today, nearly 90 percent of the 2,227-kilometer (1,384-mile) highway is done.

Much of the road, though, has become a front line _ a two-lane gauntlet running through some of the most dangerous terrain in the country.

Hundreds have died building it. Countless more have died traveling on it: blown up by bombs, beheaded at illegal checkpoints by guerrillas who see the road as a conveyor of supplies and spies for the international coalition.

When the sun goes down, Afghans say, the Taliban own it.
___

On paper, Khan's task was easy: lay the foundation of a 6 kilometer (3.7-mile) stretch of the road between two small northwestern villages called Ghormach and Douabi.

Khan was a subcontractor for China Railways Corp., which was contracted by the Asian Development Bank. He expected to be paid around $400,000 and make a profit of $20,000-30,000 after expenses.

The job began in August 2008, and immediately became arduous: it entailed cutting through rocky hills and destroying abandoned homes to transform barely existent goat paths into a gravel highway.

The region was so poor it had neither clinics nor schools. Most people drank water from rivers because they didn't even have wells. The road crews, by contrast, made lucrative targets. Residents "saw bulldozers and SUVs worth more than entire villages could make in a lifetime," Steffensen says.

The Chinese were slow in paying fuel for rented bulldozers, graders, and dump trucks, delaying the work, according to Khan. Chinese officials could not be reached for comment, but ADB documents obtained by The Associated Press confirm they were experiencing cash flow problems.

In November 2008, Taliban-linked militants abducted five Afghans from another subcontractor working for China Railways, killing one with a gunshot to the neck.

A month later, winter set in, freezing construction for months.
___

Khan had only been back on the job three days when a dozen gunmen with rockets and machine guns stormed into the house his company was renting in Douabi in April.

"Get down! Get down!" they screamed, herding Khan and 14 of his staff into a room at gunpoint.

The assailants wore dark gray police uniforms and army camouflage _ both easy to purchase in Afghan markets. They marched the group five hours through the darkness, cramming them into an isolated farmhouse.

Over the next few weeks, most of the other hostages were freed after their families paid ransoms worth several thousand dollars each. When Khan's kidnappers realized he was a partner in the construction company, his ransom swelled to $300,000.

For 10 days, he was held at the bottom of an 8-meter (25-foot)-deep well filled with chilly water up to Khan's knees. He slept by squatting. His skin shriveled. Dry bread was lowered to him on a rope. He drank the water around him with his hands.

He was allowed out a couple times a day, but only to beg his family to meet the ransom demands.

"I couldn't tell if it was day or night," Khan recalled in an interview. "So many times I died. I never thought I'd make it out alive, or see my family again."

During another week, he was hung upside down for hours, one foot tied to a wooden beam. He was slapped and beaten.

Steffensen says the kidnappers, though linked to local Taliban factions, appeared motivated by financial gain.

Yet they justified Khan's abduction as part of the wider fight against the government. They accused Khan of working for the U.S., telling him its money was "unclean."

"Why are you working for the nonbelievers?" they asked repeatedly.

"Why are you working for this government?" they demanded.

"Why are you building this road?"

"I told them we are poor people, this is just a small road," Khan recalled. "We are just trying to make a living, to build our country."

One night the kidnappers _ who had long beards, turbans and were always armed _ blindfolded Khan and took him by motorcycle to a hillside. They threw him down beside a dirt mound spattered with dried blood. It was the place, they said, where the Afghan engineer was executed and buried months before.

One of the militants leaned into his ear and whispered: "Tomorrow will be your last day on earth."

"Call your family! Tell them if they don't send the money, we're going to cut your head off and send it to them!" another screamed.

They fired gunshots past Khan's cheeks as he cringed, weeping.

Then they dragged him away.

By early June, Khan's family had begged and borrowed the ransom from friends and relatives from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Cash in hand, they drove to Ghormach in six different cars, fearing ambushes on the way. They handed the money to tribal elders with connections to the kidnappers.

And two months and five days after his abduction, Khan was finally free.

___

Khan insists the ransom was $100,000. Other project officials put the figure at $30,000.

Steffensen says the amount is beside the point. "He suffered beyond imagination. His family shelled out everything they had to get him free, every nickel, that's clear," he says.

Khan sold his home in Kabul for $18,000 and turned to everyone with a stake in finishing the road for help. But nobody in his company, China Railways Corp., the Public Works Ministry or the Asian Development Bank was willing to pay back the debt.

"They all said it's your problem, we can't help you," he says.

___

For a month, Khan weighed his fear of restarting the project against the chance he could still turn a profit.

The Public Works Ministry and the Chinese _ who Steffensen says were mostly holed up in their field compound for safety _ begged Khan to finish the job.

When the Interior Ministry announced it was sending 500 police to boost security for road crews _ with an unprecedented $2.5 million from the ADB _ he decided to go back.

The new force's strength, though, was diluted along the way.

The provincial governor and police chief diverted at least two dozen of the reinforcements to their personal security details, according to Maj. Gen. Sayed Kamal Sadat, who leads the national force tasked with protecting Afghanistan's highways. Both officials deny the allegations.

Provincial police commanders seized 400 of the 500 new Kalashnikov rifles the police were supposed to get, handing their old ones to the reinforcements, according to another Interior Ministry official, Habib Rahman. At least half the 40 new police trucks allotted for the operation were also diverted to local commanders, he said.

And because of an old dispute between Sadat and the provincial police chief, the reinforcements were not supplied with enough food, water or ammunition, Rahman said.

Some of the 500 police were deployed to guard road workers and their facilities, while others joined with local police to set up dozens of check-posts guarding the highway.

Sadat says seven of the police have been killed in rocket attacks so far. And at least one of the road posts has typically been attacked each night with grenades or small arms fire by motorcycle-bound Taliban, according to an ADB security official who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject. The official said police at a couple of posts had also deserted and joined the Taliban.

Nevertheless, Sadat insists the force has been effective. Security has improved.
___

The second ambush came in September. Up to 40 gunmen hiding in mud-brick houses along the road opened fire with rockets and machine guns, according to police Capt. Najib, who heads the newly deployed force and like many Afghans, uses only one name.

The gunbattle lasted two hours. When it was over, two police were dead and one of Khan's rented road graders was ablaze, Najib said.

Khan was about two kilometers (one mile) away, and fled at the start.

He has not gone back, and it's unclear if he ever will.

In November, ADB terminated its contract with China Railways Corp., deeming it incapable of finishing the job on time. Khan says the Chinese paid less than a quarter of his projected expenses, leaving him tens of thousands of dollars in debt for labor and machine rentals. The Public Works Ministry says it will force China Railways to pay whatever it owes its subcontractors.

Even in the best scenario, though, Khan will only break even, and still owe tens of thousands for the ransom.

He estimates only two-thirds of his tiny road is complete.

In total, only around 200 kilometers (125 miles) of the Ring Road remains to be built. But it may take three years to finish it all _ or more.

Finding a contractor willing to replace China Railways and hire somebody like Khan will be tough because "nobody in their right mind wants to work up there," Steffensen says.

The final sector, just west of Khan's road, will be even tougher: it crosses a Taliban stronghold called the Bala Murghab River Valley that is so full of militants it's likely to be "shooting gallery" for troops and road crews, Steffensen says.

With no capable contractors willing to take on the unfinished sections, Steffensen appealed for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help _ at ADB's expense. A U.S. diplomat swiftly scotched the idea, Steffensen says, telling him the Army Corps is "spread too thin."

___

In Kabul, Khan says he recognizes the voices who call him every few days: they are the ones who tortured him.

They insult him, vow to recapture him, and warn their agents are watching. Sometimes they describe what he is wearing, or where he has been.

"We told you to quit building this road," they say. "We should have killed you when we had the chance."

There are other harassing calls, from the people to whom Khan is in debt.

He keeps answering his phone because he hopes he will find a kinder voice on the line, one that will get him out of this mess. A sympathetic government official, perhaps, or help from the international development community which is driving men like Khan to help them.

"I lost my life over this road," he says bitterly. "The government insists it be built, but they don't care about the people who build it."

Asked if he will return north to finish his job, sometimes he answers yes, sometimes no.

Beside him, on the faded red carpet, Khan's phone is ringing again.

Copyright 2009 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

The Chocolate War

2020-08-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

Chocolate industry booms in world's top cocoa producer despite conflict

December 6, 2005

By TODD PITMAN

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) _ On the streets of this skyscraper-lined West African metropolis, tension and rumors of an imminent return to war are always thick in the air _ and so too, is the sweet smell of chocolate.

Despite more than half a decade of coups, fighting and failed peace deals, a $2 billion a year cocoa industry is a booming in Ivory Coast, producing more of the raw material for chocolate than any other country on the planet.
Production has ranged between 1.2 million and 1.4 million tons annually in the last half decade, or about 40 percent of world supply. The United States is the biggest importer, buying about 70 percent of the crop.

"Cocoa is Cote d'Ivoire," said Daniel Abo, a lawmaker and vice president of the national Cocoa and Coffee Board. "It has built this country."

And, some might argue, it's also helped ruin it.

At a time when most international aid has been suspended because of the conflict, profits from the industry are helping support the loyalist south and its army, as well as cocoa-smuggling rebels who control the northern half of the country. Cocoa contributes 43 percent of the gross national product.

In Abidjan's swank Zone 4 district, smoke pipes out from cocoa factories processing the beans. The heavy, thick aroma of chocolate hangs in the air.

Near one of the factories stands Adama Tarnagda, an immigrant from Burkina Faso who fled the cocoa farm he worked on in southeastern Ivory Coast three years ago, after fighting broke out there. Now he works in Abidjan, lowering and raising the barrier at train crossings.

"Today when I smell the scent of cocoa, I think of my field and it eats away at my heart,"
Tarnagda said. "Cocoa has brought us life. The day the war ends, I'll go back."

Ivory Coast's fertile farms attracted millions of immigrant laborers from across West Africa for decades _ so many, in fact, that they and their descendants are believed to account for up to 40 percent of the nation's 17 million people today.

The immigrants helped develop the nation, but also sparked xenophobic resentment that was exacerbated when world cocoa prices fell in the 1980s.

Former President Henri Konan Bedie, overthrown in the country's first coup in 1999, seized on the issue for political gain, introducing the fiercely nationalistic concept of "Ivorianess."

Today, "Ivorianess" is at the heart of a split between the loyalist-held south and the north, held by rebels since a failed 2002 coup bid.

Northerners complain they are treated as foreigners in their own country by southerners _ marginalized and discriminated against, denied passports and even national identity papers, despite being born here.

Though the country has been mostly been calm since a 2003 peace deal, violence still erupts in places like the cocoa-rich western town of Duekoue, where immigrant farmers known as Dioulas clashed with local ethnic Guere communities in June, leaving up to 100 people dead.

Abo estimated that around 10 to 15 percent of the country's 600,000 farm laborers have fled over the last few years, but he said the affect on output was minimal.

Gassou Toure, director of raw materials department at the Agriculture Ministry, production would have increased because new farms have boosted production slightly in the last few years, but since farmers have fled, production levels have stayed about the same.

According to a November U.N. report, Ivory Coast produced 1.23 million tons of cocoa in the 2004-2005 season. The 10 percent decrease from the previous year has been blamed mostly on poor weather, not the conflict, though the report did cite "the departure from the cocoa areas of large numbers of migrant workers in fear of ethnic persecution."
Susan Smith, spokeswoman for the U.S.-based Chocolate Manufacturers Association, said the decline in Ivorian production has had a negligible effect on chocolate prices so far. Cocoa market prices have not varied much the last couple of months, although they have gone up slightly the last two weeks, Smith said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The cocoa industry is a sensitive subject here. Secrecy is such a priority that the government doesn't publish official production figures. French-Canadian journalist Guy-Andre Kieffer, who wrote articles about corruption in Ivory Coast _ including its cocoa industry _ disappeared in the country in 2004 and was believed murdered.

Production estimates cited in the U.N. report do not include cocoa smuggled illegally to neighboring countries to escape high Ivorian taxes and take advantage of better prices in places like Ghana, to where the U.N. said 150,000 tons of Ivorian cocoa was smuggled last year.

The vast majority of the crop is grown in government-held territory, but the U.N. report said rebels use cocoa, along with gold, diamonds and timber, to fund "their military activities, as well as for personal profit."

On the other side, the U.N. said, the government "is dependent on the cocoa crop to maintain solvency and succeed in paying its civil servants, including the military."
Abo denied the crop was fueling the country's three-year conflict.

"Cocoa is not produced to fund war," he said. "We use this money to pay civil servants, build schools, develop the country."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Living With Polio

2018-04-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

Polio's legacy lingers in Africa, even as eradication campaign nears completion

March 7, 2006

By Todd Pitman

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) _ Philip Quaicoe had just learned to walk as a child when his legs mysteriously weakened and shriveled, forcing him to crawl again _ for the rest of his life.

Some blamed evil sprits. Others said it was karmic retribution for something his family did. In his native village in Ghana, nobody had ever seen anything like it. Nearly 20 years passed before Quaicoe found a doctor who had.

"He said, 'It's polio who made you like that,'" the 35-year-old Quaicoe recalled in an interview, speaking in choppy Ghanaian patois.

The World Health Organization launched a global immunization drive 17 years ago in hopes that one day no one would have to live like Quaicoe. But while great strides have been made, polio persists past the 2005 target set for eradicating the disease.

Lack of basic knowledge once fueled polio's spread in Africa, and in some places still does. Last year, 1,889 people were infected with polio worldwide, 775 of them in Africa, according to WHO.

Almost all of Africa's cases were registered in Nigeria, where authorities in that country's mostly Muslim north ordered an immunization boycott in 2003, claiming the vaccine was part of a U.S.-led plot to render Muslims infertile or infect them with AIDS.

Vaccination programs restarted in Nigeria in 2004, but the boycott had a global impact _ a strain of the polio virus that originated in Nigeria cropped up as far away as Indonesia last year.

Despite the setbacks, WHO said in a January report that polio is now endemic in only four countries _ fewer than ever.

WHO hopes to eradicate polio by the end of this year, but even if it succeeds, the disease's legacy will live on: Victims in wheelchairs are common sights on the streets of most African cities, begging for a living in countries too poor to provide social services.

Growing up in the seaside Ghanaian village of Takorda, a scattering of huts with a population of about 1,000, Quaicoe attended school like other children and played soccer in sandy fields with friends _ who allowed him to use his hands.

Not everyone was kind. Quaicoe's parents _ part protective, part ashamed _ tried to keep him home.

"People looked and laughed. They didn't want to be near me," Quaicoe said. "They asked, 'Why are you crawling on the ground? Why are you not like us?'"

He had no answer. Being handicapped was a deep source of pain.

"I asked my parents, why? Why am I alone? Why this sickness catch me?" Quaicoe said.

They had no answer, either.

Polio is spread when people who aren't vaccinated come into contact with the feces of those with the virus, often through polluted water. The virus usually targets vulnerable children younger than 5, attacking the central nervous system. It can cause paralysis within hours _ though only 1 percent of polio victims suffer that fate. It can also cause death.

Quaicoe's baffled parents took him to traditional witch doctors and more modern clinics, but found no cure. Some spoke of an expensive operation that could fix everything _ there isn't _ but it was financially out of reach.

When Quaicoe was 20, a team of nurses came to his village on a vaccination drive. A doctor with them saw Quaicoe and diagnosed him as having the disease.

Ashamed of begging in his own village, Quaicoe left Ghana not long after to break a lifelong dependence on his parents and escape the embarrassment the disease had wrought.

Here in Abidjan, a magnet for migrants from all over West Africa, he found dozens of polio sufferers begging in the streets.

Quaicoe wanted to be an electrician, a carpenter, even a shoemaker, but training cost money, and jobs are scarce.

So he spends most days at his favored intersection in the shadow of Abidjan's skyscrapers, crawling crab-like, walking on two powerful forearms with hands tucked into a pair of worn blue flip-flops.

Ivorians in smart suits stream by in BMWs and SUVs, trying not to look at the polio victims begging in the grime and heat.

Quaicoe's wide smile is a potent asset, though. One man greets it with a wink, flipping a coin into his outstretched hand. "Papa, my respects," Quaicoe said, hobbling back to the strategic downtown corner he has worked for a decade.

As night falls, he heads to the flimsy shack that is home on Abidjan's outskirts, usually by bus. Some polio sufferers get around in three-wheel, hand-peddled bikes, but it's easier to gain sympathy _ and handouts _ without them.

At night, Quaicoe says he sometimes dreams of "walking like the others."

More often, he dreams of getting married _ not easy in a traditional world where men are expected to be a family's primary breadwinner. He once had an Ivorian girlfriend, but the relationship ended after several years because of her family's disapproval.

"If you are a man with nothing to do, if you are disabled, handicapped, it is difficult to find a woman," Quaicoe said.

He wants to have children, too, and says he would ensure they're vaccinated against the wretched virus that paralyzed him.

After a life spent living with polio, he still has burning questions.

Rumpling his brow, Quaicoe leans forward at an interview's end and asks a reporter: "Tell me, please, what causes this disease?"

Copyright 2006 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

What's In a Name

2018-03-15T18:48:00.000-07:00

March 17, 2008

"From 'Happiness' to 'I fear them,' Burundian names tell a history of bad times and good"

By TODD PITMAN

BUJUMBURA, Burundi (AP) _ Her first son was born 10 years ago on a Bujumbura street while fighting raged. She named him Nzikobanyanka, or "I know they hate us."

Two successive sons were also christened with names reflecting weariness with Burundi's long war: Tugiramahoro ("Let's have peace") and Nduwimana ("I'm in God's hands"). But when the fighting finally stopped and Daphrose Miburu's youngest son was born a year ago, the 35-year-old mother chose something a little more uplifting: Furaha _ "Happiness."

The history of this battered nation can be told through names like these, given to reflect the world as parents see it at the time. Some hail historical moments or a child's most conspicuous trait. But they can also deliver terse commentaries in an unsafe world.

"Names here are individual and have individual meanings," says Philippe Ntahombaye, a university professor and linguistics expert in Bujumbura, the capital. "They can reflect a situation of conflict, but they can also serve as a means of dialogue _ a means of resolving conflict."

Like its neighbor, Rwanda, Burundi is a tiny country haunted by devastating bloodshed between two ethnic groups, majority Hutus and minority Tutsis. This land of breathtaking hills in the heart of Africa is recovering from a 1993-2005 civil war that killed hundreds of thousands. Tensions between Hutus and Tutsis trace back decades.

Every name has a story to tell.

Coffee dealer Charles Ntezahorigwa, an ethnic Tutsi, grew up in the 1950s in a rural area dominated by Hutus who wanted them to leave. "They used witchcraft against us and danced nude so our crops wouldn't grow," he said.

The hostile environment was borne out in his name _ Nteza ("I'm expecting"), Kugwa ("To fall"), Ibara ("Something bad"), or, joined together, "I'm expecting something bad to happen."

Tensions were also recorded in the names of his brothers and sisters: Nkinahamira ("I'm playing on quicksand"), Nicayenzi (I'm quiet, but aware I'm in danger") and Bakanibona ("They're planning bad things, but God will protect me").

In Burundi's fatalistic nomenclature, and in a language that can say much in a few syllables, there's Barayampiema ("They're not telling the truth"), Bangurambona ("They're plotting against me"), Barandagiye ("They're following me"), Nzobatinya ("I fear them"), Ndikumagenge ("I'm in danger"), Ntamahungiro ("There is no place to hide").

There is even Hicuburundi ("Burundians kill"), a name linguists say could memorialize tragedy, or warn the child who bears it to be careful _ some countrymen can pose a threat.

Ntahombaye (meaning "I live nowhere") says such appellations aren't meant to express hatred, but to encourage social cohesion.

"It's a way to say to your neighbors, you know their intentions, their bad intentions," he said. "But it's also a way of telling them, 'We're aware of these sentiments you have, and we invite you to change.'"

Other families may respond with names of their own, creating a kind of dialogue played out over years or generations.

Plenty are positive: Ndikatubane ("Let us live together"), Ndizeye ("I trust"), Rukundo ("Love").

Or mundane: Bitwi ("Big ears"), Bitonde ("Big nose"). Giswi means "you look like a small chicken," Ntezahorigwa says.

Others memorialize historic moments. One prominent politician is named Mukasi, meaning "scissors," in celebration of his family's first pair. Burundi's independence from Belgium in 1962 occasioned Burikukiye ("Burundi is becoming independent").

Famines gave rise to Ndikiminwe ("I have very little in my hands to give"); locust plagues _ Nzige ("Grasshopper"); conflicts _ Kibiriti ("Match box"), an allusion to combatants who set village huts ablaze.

Children are traditionally given two unique names in Kirundi, the national language. But colonialism ushered in a taste for European first names, like the ex-rebel leader-turned-president Pierre Nkurunziza, whose surname means "good news." The missionaries who brought Christianity gave rise to names like Nahimana ("Whatever happens is up to God").

Some families have adopted the Western custom of passing on the father's family name. The practice is rare, though, and at least one learned the benefits of keeping to tradition.

A judge, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said his Tutsi uncle had killed "many" Hutus in 1972, when a spasm of bloodletting shook the nation. His children carried the family name and were easily identifiable because of it.

"People always said, 'you're the son of that guy, you did this and that to our family,'" the judge said. "So when they grew up, they all changed their names."

Copyright 2008 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

A list of some Burundian names and their translations

2018-03-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

A list of some Burundian names and their translations:

_Baranyanka: "They hate me"
_Bankumuhari: "They hate those people"
_Nzikobanyanka: "I know they hate us"

_Nzobatinya: "I will be very careful around them"
_Barambona: "They're looking at me"
_Barandagiye: "They're following me"
_Baranyanka: "They hate me"
_Bankumuhari: "They hate those people"
_Nzikobanyanka: "I know they hate us"
_Nzobatinya: "I will be very careful around them"
_Barambona: "They're looking at me"
_Barandagiye: "They're following me"
_Bangurambona: "They're plotting against me"
_Barayagwiza: "They're talking about me"
_Bazengayabo: "They talk about things that don't concern them"
_Barayampiema: "They're not telling the truth"
_Rukorikibi: "The tongue can destroy"
_Ntezahorigwa: "I'm expecting something bad to happen"
_Bakanibona "They're planning bad things, but God will protect me"
_Rukorikibi: "He does bad things"
_Nkinahamira: "I'm playing on quicksand"
_Nicayenzi: "I'm quiet, but aware I'm in danger"
_Ndikumagenge "I'm in danger"
_Ntamahungiro: "There is no place to hide"
_Hicuburundi: "Burundian's kill"
_Ntahombaye: "I live nowhere"
_Ndikatubane: "Let us live together"
_Ndekangende: "Let me go"
_Tugiramahoro: "Let's have peace"
_Nahimana: "Whatever happens is up to God"

Unpublished

2017-08-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

The following stories never made it on the wire. Don't ask me why.

Sunglasses, Berets and 'the Revolution'

2016-08-10T18:06:00.000-07:00

11Sep1998 DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: Congo rebels battle for hearts and minds in Goma.

By Todd Pitman

GOMA, Congo, Sept 11 (Reuters) - Camouflaged four-wheel drive vehicles packed with rebels, rifles and grenade launchers cruise through the twilight of this dusty frontier town perched on the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Sporting sun glasses and red berets, the rebels call themselves liberators - but for most of this city's residents they are anything but.

"We're hostages," says Emmanuel, a shopkeeper motioning toward two rebel soldiers on a foot patrol through town.
"We never asked to be liberated. We never asked for war."

The rebels - a coalition of disgruntled soldiers, opposition politicians and exiled academics backed by neighbouring Rwanda - launched the revolt last month to topple President Laurent Kabila, who rose to power in May 1997 after a seven-month bush war against dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.Residents say the war against Mobutu was largely a popular affair but this time the rebels enjoy less popular support.

"People are tired of all this fighting. Two wars in two years - it's too much," says Alfred Mahuka, a Europe-trained dentist at Goma Hospital.

The city is no stranger to surprise.

Two decades ago, the immense Nyiragongo volcano, which broods over the horizon just north of Goma, spilled rivers of molten lava toward the town, changing - in the words of one resident - "hundreds of cattle and people to stone".

In early 1993, the city was plundered by its own soldiers after the army received its salary - long in arrears - in banknotes the government had declared illegal tender. Then came the refugees.

In 1994, one million Hutus from neighbouring Rwanda flooded Kivu provinces as Tutsi-led rebels fought their way to power, ending a state-sponsored genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were slaughtered.

A subsequent cholera outbreak in the Goma refugee camps littered the volcanic landscape with 30,000 corpses, overwhelming aid workers and providing shocking images of suffering. The refugees returned home two years later when Rwandan troops lobbed mortar bombs across the border into Goma at the start of the rebellion that brought Kabila to power.

Few inhabitants thought they'd see another rebellion less than two years later. They were wrong.

"We don't care who runs this country, we just want peace," said one man running a sidewalk photocopy machine.

In the fertile hills of North Kivu tensions have been brewing for years between the Nande, Hunde and Nyanga tribes on one side and the ethnic Tutsi Banyarwanda on the other.

In part because of political pressure, the Banyarwanda who migrated to eastern Congo hundreds of years ago are still perceived by "native" tribes as foreigners.

The question of their right to citizenship in the former Zaire helped spark Kabila's rebellion in October 1996.

It's no surprise that these days many Goma residents see their new masters - the rebels who launched the latest uprising - as a foreign force of Tutsi invaders from Rwanda.

Added to the mix is the very real presence of Rwandan intelligence and military officers, who witnesses and independent sources say provide logistical and military support in the form of ammunition and equipment.

"This is not a Congolese rebellion, it's an invasion," said one businessman running a roadside kiosk built of wood.

"You don't see the Rwandans here because they are hiding themselves. They are running things from behind, pushing our (Congolese) soldiers on like a herd of cattle."

All is not well in rebel-held territory.

On roads radiating outside of Goma, travellers report ambushes by bandits, Hutu Interahamwe militia and soldiers from the former Rwandan army, as well as clashes between traditional Mai-Mai warriors and the rebels.

When the rebellion got underway, most civil servants, including the mayor and the provincial governor, simply switched sides and joined the rebels to retain their positions. But winning the hearts and minds of the population at large is proving more difficult.

(C) Reuters Limited 1998.

Rwanda, Uganda and a Congo trampled underfoot

2015-08-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

Fighting rages into night in Congo's diamond city

Rwanda and Uganda fought in Kisangani for a week in the summer of 2000, trading artillery fire from rear positions and shooting e in town. The ICRC said at least 518 people died and 1,668 were wounded. It was the third time the former allies fought in Congo in less than a year. My good friend, AP correspondent Hrvoje Hranjski, was shot in the chest in Kisangani during previous fighting there on Aug. 18, 1999.

June 7, 2000

By Todd Pitman

KISANGANI, Congo, June 8 (Reuters) - Rockets lit the sky over the Congolese city of Kisangani on Wednesday night as Rwandan and Ugandan troops traded fire in a third day of battles during which more than 50 civilians have died.

Explosions rocked the city centre as dozens of rockets traced red lines across the sky, silhouetted by palm trees, and the clatter of small arms fire sent residents running for cover or kept them crouching in their homes.

"We had a ceasefire tonight - for 15 minutes," said Colonel Karenze Karake, operational commander of the Rwandan army.

Listen to Ugandan artillery shells whistle overhead and explode, and Rwanda fire back from a position on a bank of the Congo River.

Another ceasefire, brokered by the United Nations earlier on Wednesday, was also quickly shattered - within half an hour - as the two sides resumed battle for control of the city, the centre of the diamond trade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"There are many civilian casualties and casualties among the soldiers.

What do you expect after three days of fighting with RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and with light and heavy mortars," said Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Kalyongo, another Rwandan officer.

U.N. officials and aid workers earlier on Wednesday put the death toll at more than 50 civilians, including at least 19 children, since fighting began on Monday.

"The current toll is more than 100 wounded and above 50 dead among the civilian population since the fighting began," said Alexandre Liebeskind of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kisangani.

Mortar bombs landed on a school on the northwestern outskirts of the town, hit the cathedral by the banks of the Congo river in the south and also landed in the adjacent U.N. headquarters.

Rwanda and Uganda used to be staunch allies but now support different rebel factions fighting in the former Zaire and have clashed several times for control of Kisangani.

"Rwandans are firing from this side," said Lieutenant-Colonel Danilo Paiva, commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces in the town, pointing south, "and Ugandans are firing from that side. The problem is that we are stuck in the middle."

Local people clambered onto the wooden roof of the church to extinguish the flames after the mortar round hit, while others ran into the building to bring out bibles, pews, flowers, clothes and an electronic keyboard.

In the streets earlier, civilians ran with their heads down as bullets whipped through the trees.

"What are they going to leave us with?" one woman said. "They are destroying everything. What did we do to deserve this?"

Rwandan officers, who control the part of town around the cathedral, accused Ugandans of starting Wednesday's fighting and said Uganda already had five battalions on the northwestern outskirts of town.

Paiva s aid the United Nations was trying to get the Ugandans to withdraw to 700 metres (yards) north of the Tshopo river bridge and the Rwandans to pull back 700 metres to the south, so the U.N. could establish a checkpoint at the bridge.

"The problem is that the commanders on the ground have no clear orders from their countries (to withdraw)," he said.

The latest fighting began on Monday morning when Ugandan troops shelled Rwandan positions in response to an attack on a Ugandan army vehicle by unidentified assailants.

In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, echoing an appeal by the Security Council, called on Rwanda and Uganda on Wednesday to immediately stop fighting in Kisangani and withdraw their forces.

Despite repeated U.N. efforts to organise a ceasefire, "the two sides have continued to exchange artillery, mortar and small arms fire" and several U.N. workers had been wounded, the statement added.

An agreement signed last year in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, was meant to end a many-sided conflict in which the government of Congolese President Laurent Kabila is backed by Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia against the rebel groups and their Rwandan and Ugandan backers.

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.

Gunfight Countdown

2014-08-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

In Ramadi, gunbattles on schedule

Listen to the first volley of bullets crack over Capt. Joseph "Crazy Joe" Claburn's head.

April 25, 2006

By TODD PITMAN

RAMADI, Iraq (AP) _ As U.S. and Iraqi troops marched through alleyways and families retreated indoors, Army Capt. Joe Claburn glanced at his watch and predicted exactly how long it would take for insurgents to attack.

"Within 15 minutes the spotters usually come out and they'll identify your position," Claburn said at the start of a patrol in this troubled Iraqi city, explaining that guerrillas were probably maneuvering unseen in the surrounding villas.

"Within 30 minutes the weapons get brought in," he said. "And usually about 45 minutes after being on the ground, you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to get shot at."

War is often said to be unpredictable. But in Ramadi, Iraq's most dangerous city for American forces, Sunni Arab insurgents are so active that U.S. troops are learning gunbattles often come right on schedule.

Claburn, it turned out, was three minutes off.

Watch US soldiers firing from a rooftop in Ramadi, leaving "one KIA behind the trashcan."
"Did I call it or what?" the 29-year-old asked with a grin as automatic weapons-fire snapped overhead. "Forty-two minutes on the ground. It's a science."

Lt. Col. Ronald Clark, commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, said his units average "five or six" firefights with insurgents per day in eastern Ramadi.

And that's not counting roadside bombs, mortar attacks _ or the Marine-patrolled western part of town, much less the suburbs of the city, 70 miles west of Baghdad.

"It's surreal," said Clark, 39, of Leesville, La., using a green laser pointer to tick off recent engagements on a large satellite map of Ramadi on the wall of his office.

"Here we have an enemy that does not mind coming out and fighting with us," he said. "We always have the advantage when that happens. They take heavy losses, but the bottom line is, it doesn't change things."

Listen to Capt. Joseph "Crazy Joe" Claburn's talk about how long it takes to get shot at in Ramadi (xx seconds).

Estimates differ on how long it typically takes for insurgents to start shooting. Claburn's Charlie company figures 45 minutes is the norm. Delta company reckons they'll be fired at within 37 minutes, Clark said. Some Marines in western Ramadi say attacks can come in eight minutes.

That doesn't mean there's a gunbattle every time troops go out.

One Marine tasked to help train the Iraqi army, Lt. Ryan Brannon, said he's been on 30 to 40 patrols in central Ramadi in the last three months. Asked how many times there had been exchanges of fire, the 26-year-old native of Gulf Breeze, Fla., shrugged and said: "Oh, about half."

Guard towers at the U.S. Army's Camp Corregidor base are shot at daily _ on Tuesday, one was hit by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Across the city, Army and Marine observation posts _ entire buildings taken over by U.S. forces _ are regularly attacked.

Ramadi is "a lot more kinetic than what we see or read about other areas. It's just very violent," Clark said, adding that even trips to check on U.S.-funded projects to refurbish schools attracted violence.

"We'll go on school visits ... and be involved in direct fire almost every time," he said. "A lot of it is based on the fact that there's a lot of lawless behavior, no Iraqi police on this side of town."

Until a few weeks ago, east Ramadi had no Iraqi army units.

Clark and his commanders welcomed the arrival of a combat-experienced Iraqi brigade, hoping their numbers and familiarity with Iraqi culture could help turn the tide. U.S. forces also are helping set up new police stations _ insurgents destroyed the old ones _ for a new city police force.

As U.S. and Iraqi forces moved in Friday for a sweep of a troubled district, residents ran inside.

"Hmmm," noted Claburn, who grew up as an orphan and calls Alabama home. "You see all those people clearing out? That's usually a a bad sign."

U.S. Navy SEALs and Iraqi soldiers carrying rockets and boxes of ammunition walked slowly, eyes alert for insurgents, clearing house after house.

Forty-two minutes into the operation, a man in a white sedan at the end of one alley fired off a round from his rifle, retreating immediately under a return volley from Iraqi soldiers on a nearby rooftop.

One street over, another insurgent sprayed machine-gun fire that cracked over Claburn's head as he stepped into a courtyard with other troops. A U.S. Humvee shot back with a heavy .50-caliber gun.

Minutes later, Claburn and a dozen SEALs scrambled to the roof, laid their guns on a chest-high wall and began firing toward another insurgent team _ four gunmen in a blue truck. Two Iraqi soldiers on another rooftop also opened fire.

The SEALs' fire riddled the truck, and 40 mm grenades destroyed its engine as the gunmen fled. Job done, rooftop littered with spent shell casings, the Americans withdrew.

Asked why U.S. or coalition forces didn't pursue the attackers, Claburn _ whose radio call sign is "Gunfighter 6" _ said it wouldn't be prudent.

Insurgents often try to lure troops into danger, he said, exposing themselves in hopes they would be chased down a street where explosives had been laid.

"You have to out-insurgent the insurgent. You have to think about what he's trying to make you do ... and do the complete opposite," the Army captain said, riding in a Humvee along a road lined with palm trees as two helicopters clattered overhead.

"Unfortunately nothing in Army doctrine teaches you to fight an enemy like this."

Copyright 2006 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Easy Targets

2011-08-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

On road that winds through Afghan war, fighting fazes few

April 15, 2002

By TODD PITMAN

KHOJA KOTKAI, Afghanistan (AP) _ They would have made an easy target: a steady stream of buses and trucks, minivans and taxis, spewing up a trail of dust as they trundled down the valley road.

Explosions and bursts of anti-aircraft fire rang through nearby hills, and two tanks fired shells toward a mountainside.

In most places, factional fighting on the road ahead would have been enough to make a driver pull over. But in war-ravaged Afghanistan, few seemed to mind.

Not the dozens of passing vehicles. Not the children herding goats. Not the bored-looking soldiers watching the battle between two rival commanders from the top of a red shipping container partially buried in the dirt.

"I don't think anything about it. I don't care," said 23-year-old Sherali, who was busy changing a flat tire. "This is Afghanistan. We're used to it."

Sherali spoke just minutes before a tank rumbled past his car, turned onto the valley floor, and began pounding an enemy position in the distance. Like many Afghans, he only uses one name.

It's unclear what sparked the weekend clashes between Gen. Zafar Uddin and Ghulam Rohani Nangialai in the valley around Khoja Kotkai, about 30 miles west of Kabul.

Government officials called it an isolated turf battle between two longtime rivals and said it posed no threat to interim leader Hamid Karzai's fragile administration.
Karzai's government, which came to power in December soon after the fall of the Taliban, is faced with trying to secure peace in a country battered by 23 years of war.

But government authority is uncertain in hills like these just outside the capital. Much of the countryside remains under the control of local warlords, who sometimes take up arms against each other for patches of territory.

On Saturday in Khoja Kotkai, soldiers totting rocket-launchers at a crumbling roadside mud hut peaked around a corner to watch a duel between two trucks mounted with heavy guns _ one from each faction.

One of the trucks fired from the top of a hill toward Uddin's men, then quickly disappeared from view. An artillery shell ripped into the dirt about 150 feet from one of Uddin's trucks, prompting a blast of return fire.

Asked why authorities let civilian traffic drive through a battle-zone, Haji Aqa Gul, who is loyal to Uddin, shrugged.

"This is not serious fighting," he said. "If it really gets heavy, we'll close the road."
Much of the highway from Kabul to Kandahar is unpaved and racing through gunfire is not an option, particularly for large trucks so laden with cargo they sway from side to side as they roll over the ruts.

Abdul Gani, a 28-year-old hauling a load of tea, made the trip through Khoja Kotkai with a young nephew aboard and said his truck's top speed was only three miles an hour. The green Mercedes Benz truck was intricately painted with yellow and blue flowers, and had a string of iron chimes hanging off the back.

Gani said the fighting "wasn't too bad," but said he had to pull over for about two hours some three miles from Khoja Kotkai.

"I heard bullets whipping past and saw some people running across the plain. So I stopped until the fighting died down."

Gani dismissed the brief delay, saying he was once obliged to stop on the same road for 20 days during a particularly heavy round of factional fighting in 1994.

At Khoja Kotkai, many of the vehicles drove through as if no skirmish was taking place. Some were probably unaware.

None of Uddin's soldiers, deployed at several checkpoints along the road, had bothered to mention the fighting as they waved him through, Gani said.

Perhaps it was hard to tell.

About two dozen yards off of one stretch of road, two soldiers lay in a dirt trench, huddling with Kalashnikovs.

Farther down the highway, inside another hut bombed out years ago during fighting with the former Soviet Union, one soldier slept on a weathered carpet aside stacks of bread and empty tea glasses.

Outside, a dozen troops stood idle and joked as occasional automatic weapons-fire peeled from a hilltop across the road.

As the two sides fought sporadically, two American helicopter gunships cruised over the hills on a separate mission.

Later, four double-rotor Chinook choppers made the same run low through the valley. Several foreign soldiers aboard _ it was unclear where they were from _ waved as they flew over the front line.

Gani said he didn't have any other option.

"Of course we are afraid to drive on these roads when there's fighting, but we have to make a living. There's no other way."

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Law's Reach

2011-08-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Now serving 5 million people: With single courthouse

June 4, 2004

By TODD PITMAN

BUNIA, Congo (AP) _ Nights at the Uruguayan U.N. military camp. Days in a courthouse surrounded by barbed wire, with U.N. peacekeepers on guard outside. Death threats all the time.

This is life for the small team of judges and prosecutors dispatched here from Congo's distant capital to help restore the rule of law _ and central government authority _ to a tense region still ruled by the gun in the wake of a five-year war.

Their means: A single courthouse serving 5 million people in the vast northeastern district of Ituri.

"It's not enough, but it's a start," said chief prosecutor Chris Aberi, one of 12 judicial officials who constitute the government's sole presence in this small, wild-east town of dirt roads, crumbling buildings and rampant poverty.

Troubles in Ituri started brewing in 1998, when this stretch of dense forests and rock-strewn hills was nominally taken over by Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed rebels who seized much of the northeast.

The rebels' weak authority allowed long-standing ethnic feuds to boil over in a separate conflict in 1999 between rival Hema and Lendu ethnic militias that's seen 50,000 people killed since.

Congo's war officially ended in 2002, but the transitional government serving until planned 2005 elections is still struggling to regain control over the vast nation.

President Joseph Kabila's administration suffered back-to-back crises this week when renegade commanders seized the eastern city of Bukavu on Wednesday, setting off riots in the capital Thursday that saw at least two protesters killed by U.N. forces. The violent demonstrations resumed Friday despite the renegades' promise to pull out of Bukavu, south of Bunia.

In Ituri, violence has grown ever more brutal over the last several years, worsened by struggles to control the region's mineral wealth. In 2003, massacres and reported cannibalism drew world condemnation and a French-led intervention force.

The United Nations took over the peacekeeping mission in Ituri late last year. Increasing its strength to 4,800 troops, the United Nations has expanded operations to several towns outside Bunia and detaining dozens of militia leaders allegedly responsible for planning massacres and other killings.

But with no mandate to try them, the U.N. workers looked to Kinshasa _ and urged the government to establish a presence here to do the job itself.

In mid-January, Congo's government restaffed the Bunia courthouse for the first time since May 2003.

"When we got here, we found a widespread climate of impunity" had taken root, said chief judge Jean Ekabela, whose predecessor was detained last year by a local militia, the Union of Congolese Patriots _ a move that effectively closed the court.

"When anybody with a gun can do just about anything, justice doesn't mean much in the eyes of the people," told The Associated Press at his office inside the newly reopened courthouse, a single-story building surrounded by coils of concertina wire.

Outside, U.N. troops in white Humvees eyed passers-by from behind machine guns, inspecting those who entered. Blue-helmeted peacekeepers manned sandbag fortresses in the middle of traffic circles.

Some people said things were changing for the better, with the public beginning to respect the magistrates.

"People are starting to fear them," Issa Pirmohamed, a local businessman, said. "They've seen militia leaders arrested, and now they're starting to see them tried. It's a good sign."

But other Bunia residents have given the magistrates from Congo's distant west a cold welcome, deriding them as "Djadjambo," or foreigners, Ekabela said.

After work, they are all escorted home to several houses perched in the middle of a dusty, heavily guarded military camp for flak-jacketed Uruguayan peacekeepers. They rarely leave, Aberi said.

The court relies heavily on U.N. troops, who are holding about 70 militia detainees at several U.N. bases in Bunia, to do its enforcing.

The shortcomings of the 260-strong local police force, which has neither vehicles nor weapons, were apparent in April, when 36 prisoners escaped from a lightly guarded jail.

Despite the obstacles, judges have issued over a dozen verdicts in cases involving rape, murder, robbery and the illegal possession of arms.

The first trial of real significance _ that of a militia leader named Matthieu Ngundjolo _ got under way in April amid repeated protests by his supporters.

Though no violence has been reported, the head of U.N. operations in Ituri, Dominique McAdams, said such high-profile trials should be held elsewhere in Congo for security reasons.

By trying militia leaders locally, "you put everybody in jeopardy, the entire justice staff," McAdams said during an interview at U.N. headquarters. "You have to be realistic. Here, you don't have peace yet."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Shadow State

2011-08-10T13:08:00.000-07:00

In one Iraqi neighborhood, al-Qaida digs deep

May 3, 2007

By TODD PITMAN

BAQOUBA, Iraq (AP) _ Across the walls of the villas they seized in the name of their shadow government, black-masked al-Qaida militants spray-painted the words: "Property of the Islamic State of Iraq."

They manned checkpoints and buried an elaborate network of bombs in the streets. They issued austere edicts ordering women not to work. They filmed themselves attacking Americans and slaughtered those who did not believe in their cause.

For months, al-Qaida turned a part of one Baqouba neighborhood into an insurgent fiefdom that American and Iraqi forces were too undermanned to tackle _ a startling example of the terror group's ability to thrive openly in some places outside Baghdad even as U.S.-led forces struggle to regain control in the capital.

Watch an Apache gunship fire a helfire at insurgents in Baqouba in April, 2007.

U.S. forces took back the entire Tahrir neighborhood during a weeklong operation that wrapped up Sunday in Baqouba, a city 35 miles northeast of Baghdad that al-Qaida declared last year the capital of its self-styled Islamic caliphate.

Though the operation was a success _ it forced the guerrillas to either flee or melt into the population _ soldiers say the extremists are likely to pop up anywhere else that's short on American firepower.

Indeed, even as the Tahrir operation took place, insurgents stepped up attacks on a new police post in the adjacent Old Baqouba district _ which was also cleared recently _ pounding it daily and killing Baqouba's police chief in a suicide car bombing.

Insurgent teams, meanwhile, have tried to infiltrate back into Tahrir, U.S. Capt. Huber Parsons said Tuesday.

When U.S. forces began pouring into the embattled district last week, residents said it was the first time they'd seen significant numbers of coalition troops since last fall. U.S. troops set up a combat outpost in northern Tahrir several months ago.

But to the south, residents recounted watching helplessly as masked fighters came and went freely in past months, piling weapons into the back of vehicles and taking over the homes of Shiites who had either fled or been killed.

"We were terrorized," said one man. "We wondered, Where is the government? Why have they forgotten us? Why does nobody come here to help?"

Baqouba has been wracked by violence for years. But insecurity has skyrocketed since late last year, partly because Sunni militants fleeing Baghdad's security crackdown have sought refuge here.
An estimated 60,000 people have fled the city of 300,000, most of them Shiites driven out by Sunni hit squads. Meanwhile, vital government subsidized food and fuel shipments, which normally flow in from Baghdad, ceased arriving because of political corruption in the capital, said Col. David W. Sutherland, whose 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, is responsible for security in Diyala province.

"In an insurgency, if you don't have faith in the government or security forces ... you turn to those who will offer you a better way," Sutherland said. "The terrorists were able to drive a wedge between the government and the people. But we're reversing that."

The battle for Baqouba picked up in mid-March.

U.S. commanders rushed in Stryker infantry battalion which helped clear, and eventually calm, the southern district of Buhriz, once the city's most violent area. While American forces fought there and in Old Baqouba, they watched neighboring Tahrir spin out of control.

Parsons said video from an unmanned aerial drone last month showed suspected al-Qaida militants searching vehicles at a checkpoint. They held back from destroying it, choosing to "track them to see where they were going, where they lived," Parsons said.

Then, for eight days in early April, al-Qaida battled fellow insurgents from the nationalist 1920 Revolution Brigades, who residents said were trying to resist the terror group's bid for control. The nationalist fighters ran out of ammunition and fled.

With the district firmly in al-Qaida's hands, local leaders and sheiks called on American and Iraqi soldiers for help.

U.S. forces first sent road-clearing teams into southern Tahrir April 22. Insurgents fired mortars and popped out of windows with rocket launchers, destroying three de-mining robots. Tanks and infantry blasted surrounding buildings, killing more than a dozen attackers.

The next day, Parsons moved three of his platoons into central Tahrir on foot. All three came under fire. The day ended with a 30-minute firefight at dusk in which rounds ripped through palm groves. Apache helicopters shot Hellfire missiles at a house insurgents had fled to, lighting the sky in thunderous blasts.

Watch some of the firefight.

Fighting eased afterward. Soon, previously empty streets were teeming with crowds of people who shook soldiers' hands as they passed.

Residents recounted watching groups of masked men dig into roads with jackhammers in recent weeks, planting bombs and stringing copper wire to trigger them from houses and schools.

The militants mostly kept to themselves, but they distributed puritanical leaflets commanding women to cover themselves in black from head to toe, and stay home from work. They ordered tea shops shut and warned men not to smoke water-pipes.

"No one dared ask them why," said one father. Those who did drew unwanted scrutiny _ and a possible death sentence, he said.

Families told of Shiites who went shopping and never returned. One man said his brother had been kept and beaten in a makeshift prison with two dozen others.

At night, masked men stormed homes, robbing and carrying out extra-judicial killings. "Nobody knew whether they were al-Qaida or the police or just common criminals," said a baker named Ali. "It was total lawlessness."

Like other residents interviewed, Ali declined to give his full name in fear of reprisals from insurgents.

Insurgents blocked roads with concrete barriers taken from coalition forces. One checkpoint was so permanent that U.S. troops found a schedule naming those who manned it daily.

In some empty homes, guerrillas knocked small holes in the walls to use them as sniper positions. Below some, bullet casings littered the floor.

Half a dozen of houses containing weapon stashes, as well as one booby-trapped villa with a 155mm artillery shell rigged to blow behind its front door, were leveled. Many stashes were pointed out by residents.

One cache of rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs was found simply leaning against a wall in the back room of an abandoned home, along with handcuffs, ski masks, radio handsets and a video camera. A tape inside it showed a "Husky" American bomb disposal vehicle trying to de-mine a road in Baqouba.

Parsons eyes widened when he saw it: the driver and the vehicle work with his Stryker unit.
On the video, machine-gun fire erupted amid cries of "Allahu Akbar," God is Great, targeting the vehicle and a de-mining robot.

The footage cut abruptly to an unrelated, final scene: A closeup of a blood-splattered corpse whose blindfold had been pulled from his face. The man looked Iraqi and appeared to have been tortured.

Soldiers said they believed al-Qaida operatives had lived in Tahrir, using homes there as a kind of rear base. In the living room of one home residents said served as a medical aid station for wounded fighters were empty beds, neck braces and x-rays scattered across the floor.

Although insurgents claimed many houses in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq, they tried to erase their work with splotches of white paint two months ago _ realizing the proclamations might be too conspicuous. On some gates and walls, the paint was too thin to cover the black Arabic lettering.

The Islamic State is a coalition of eight insurgent groups. Late last month, it named a 10-member "Cabinet" complete with a "war minister," an apparent attempt to present the Sunni coalition as an alternative to the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Parsons assured each family that U.S. troops and police would stay behind to keep insurgents out after he left, and establish a new police station.

Al-Qaida "had months and months to run rampant because we didn't have the forces available to come in here until now," Parsons said. "They controlled this neighborhood, but they don't anymore."

Copyright 2007 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Ramadi Down

2010-11-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

Insurgents fight U.S., Iraqi forces to stalemate in Ramadi

May 22, 2006

By TODD PITMAN

RAMADI, Iraq (AP) _ Whole neighborhoods are lawless, too dangerous for police. Some roads are so bomb-laden that U.S. troops won't use them. Guerrillas attack U.S. troops nearly every time they venture out _ and hit their bases with gunfire, rockets or mortars when they don't.

Though not powerful enough to overrun U.S. positions, insurgents here in the heart of the Sunni Muslim triangle have fought undermanned U.S. and Iraqi forces to a virtual stalemate.

"It's out of control," says Army Sgt. 1st Class Britt Ruble, behind the sandbags of an observation post in the capital of Anbar province. "We don't have control of this ... we just don't have enough boots on the ground."
Reining in Ramadi, through arms or persuasion, could be the toughest challenge for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's new government. Al-Maliki has promised to use "maximum force" when needed. But three years of U.S. military presence, with nearly constant patrols and sweeps, hasn't done it.

Today Ramadi, a city of 400,000 along the main highway running to Jordan and Syria, 70 miles west of Baghdad, has battles fought in endless circles. Small teams of insurgents open fire and coalition troops respond with heavy blows, often airstrikes or rocket fire that's turned city blocks into rubble.

"We're holding it down to a manageable level until Iraqis forces can take over the fight," Marine Capt. Carlos Barela said of the daily violence battering the city.

How long before that happens is anybody's guess.

U.S. and Iraqi commanders say militants fled to Ramadi from Fallujah during a devastating U.S.-led assault there in 2004. Others have joined from elsewhere in Anbar, blending into a civilian population either sympathetic to their cause or too afraid to turn against them.

They've destroyed police stations and left the force in shambles. The criminal court system doesn't function because judges are afraid to work; tribal sheiks have fled or been assassinated.

While al-Maliki has vowed to crush the insurgency, a major military operation to clear Ramadi risks destroying any hope of reaching a political settlement with disaffected Sunnis.

U.S. commanders also say a Fallujah-style operation is not in the cards, at least not yet, and might not have the desired effect. "That would set us back two years," said Lt. Col. Stephen Neary, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.

However, the status quo with its bloodletting doesn't sit well with the troops.

"We just go out, lose people and come back," said Iraqi Col. Ali Hassan, whose men fight alongside the Americans. "The insurgents are moving freely everywhere. We need a big operation. We need control."

Some Americans also say ground needs to be taken and held. Most U.S. missions typically consist of going out, coming under fire and returning to base _ leaving behind a no-man's-land held by neither side that insurgents in black ski masks always pour back into.

"This just 'we ride out, hold it for an hour, get hit, ride back in and now we don't hold it anymore,' what's the point?" said Ruble of the Army's 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment. "I believe in the cause and I believe in doing good, but when were going out, getting hurt and ... not accomplishing anything, why are we going out there? If you're saying killing one insurgent is worth one of my guys getting hurt ... you're crazy. That's like killing one guy in the Chinese army. What have you done? not a thing."

The sheer scale of violence in Ramadi is astounding.

One recent coalition tally of "significant acts" _ roadside bombs, attacks, exchanges of fire _ indicated that out of 43 reported in Iraq on a single day, 27 occurred in Ramadi and its environs, according to a Marine officer who declined to be named because he's not authorized to speak to the media.

And that, he said, was "a quiet day" _ when nothing from Ramadi even made the news.

In Ramadi, machine-gun fire and explosions are heard every day and tracer fire or illumination flares are seen every night. Even after airstrikes have transformed already ruined buildings full of gunmen into huge balls of gray debris, Marines have marveled at surviving insurgents who've come out shooting.

Even though such assaults kill dozens at a time, guerrillas keep on coming _ and keep dying.

"They're crazy to be coming in the numbers that they do," Lance Cpl. Chris Skiff, 25, of Tupper Lake, N.Y.

Inside a palatial Saddam-era guesthouse near the Euphrates River _ now a fortified U.S. base where sand-filled barriers and camouflage netting surround even the portable toilets _ Marines stare in wonder at photos of U.S. troops deployed here less two years ago.

The pictures show their predecessors riding in open-topped vehicles, often with little armor. They show freshly painted buildings, since destroyed or splattered with gunfire. They show U.S. troops walking through a downtown marketplace, a casual outing unthinkable today.

Some of the pictures show bullet-strafed buildings and cars on fire, but it's a far cry from Ramadi, 2006. Case in point: Government Center, headquarters of the provincial governor.

Once, civilian traffic was allowed to pass in front of the near-pristine edifice. Today, only military vehicles are allowed near. The wrecked building is enclosed by blast walls, barbed wire and a sometime moat of sewage. From machine-gun nests, walls of sandbags and tents of camouflage on the roof Marines repel several attacks a day.

Marines say that the governor is unfazed and comes to work despite 29 assassination attempts.

"If you wanna get blown up or shot at or anything else, then this is the place," said Marine Staff Sgt. Jacob Smith, 28, from Martin, S.D., who helps clear roadside bombs that are sometimes replaced just after the minesweepers drive past.

In one Ramadi neighborhood, Master Sgt. Tom Coffey, 38, of Underhill, Vt., gestured to a paved road his forces would not drive on. "They hit us so many times with IEDs (roadside bombs), we ceded it to them," he said.

Though coalition forces answer with massive firepower, they rarely pursue attackers _ for fear of falling into an ambush and because they have few troops to spare. Though U.S. and Iraqi troops conduct frequent raids and hit targets, the insurgents fight back in their own way.

When U.S. and Iraqi troops question civilians, insurgents follow in their footsteps to visit and sometimes kill the suspected informants.

After U.S. troops use residential rooftop walls as observation posts, insurgents have been known to knock them down.

Ramadi is dangerous not only for combatants, but for civilians caught in the crossfire.

"It's getting worse. Safety is zero," Col. Hassan said.

After one neighborhood sweep devolved into an hour-long gunbattle, Iraqi Maj. Jabar Marouf al-Tamini returned to base and drew his finger across a satellite map of the area he'd just fled under fire: "It's fallen under the command of insurgents," he said, shaking his head. "They control it now."

U.S. commanders would argue otherwise, but acknowledge perhaps a bigger problem.

"They don't have to win. All they have to do is not lose," said Barela, 35, of Albuquerque, N.M., citing an adage about guerrilla war.

Copyright 2006 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Chasing Ghosts

2010-10-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

For Marines in southern Afghan town, often-invisible insurgents melt away after fighting

Oct. 18, 2010

By TODD PITMAN

MARJAH, Afghanistan (AP) _ The Marines have found bloody clothes and spent bullet casings and bombs meant to kill them. They've heard bullets flying overhead and seen muzzle flashes in tree lines.

In this southern Afghan town that coalition forces seized from Taliban fighters eight months ago _ and are still clearing _ you don't have to go far to find the insurgency. But finding insurgents is another story altogether.

"The only time we see them is when we're in contact" in a gunfight, said Cpl. Chuck Martin, 24, of Middletown, R.I.

And even catching a glimpse of them during gunbattles can be rare.

When U.S.-led coalition forces poured into Marjah in February, they ended years of Taliban control here. But the Taliban never left _ they simply went underground, blending in among civilians, taking advantage of the region's terrain of agricultural fields and irrigation trenches to stage daily ambushes of American patrols.

Today, U.S. troops are knee-deep in a classic guerrilla war, in what sometimes seems to be an endless turf battle against an often-invisible enemy that fights one minute, pretends to farm the next.

"I've seen the Taliban a couple of times, but it's only for brief seconds," said Lance Cpl. Benjamin Long, 21, of Trussville, Ala., who knew they were close on one recent patrol when machine gun rounds suddenly began kicking up dust near his feet.

"It's like fighting ghosts. They're in and they're out. They're quick. They've been doing this a long time ... (and) they're good at it."

When U.S. forces go out on patrol, children and farmers come out of their homes and watch them closely. Some are just curious. Others use cell phones to tell insurgents what the Americans are doing.

When gunbattles erupt, Marines must simultaneously take cover and figure out where the Taliban are so they can return fire. They first listen to the crack and pop of gunshots, then look for muzzle flashes _ although sometimes gunmen are hiding in foliage so thick they can't even see those.

Firefights often last around 15 or 20 minutes because the Taliban know how long it takes for troops to call in helicopter gunships or mortar barrages, Marines say. If air support doesn't arrive, the gunmen often start shooting again.

After one recent firefight, one Marine squad scooped up spent bullet cartridges from a compound insurgents had just fired from. It was the first time they'd found such a trace since arriving in July, said Sgt. Jeffrey Benson, 34, of Medina, Ohio.

"Usually they take everything after a firefight," Benson said. "They're real good at getting their dead and injured out."

During another 20-minute battle two days later, guerrillas ambushed Marines from the broken windows of a small, abandoned school compound. When Marines pushed up to it, they found more spent bullet casings _ but again, no dead or wounded.

Soon, they began taking fire again from two more locations; the insurgents had merely withdrawn and found somewhere else to shoot from.

"It's like a little cat-and-mouse game," Martin said. "We try and get them. They hide their weapons ... then they just come back to the same location, pick up the same rifle, shoot at us again."

During the second gunbattle, Marines radioed for a mortar bombardment to suppress their attackers. A wave of shells exploded along the outer wall of a compound, shaking the area and kicking up vast brown clouds of dust.

When Martin arrived afterward to assess the damage, he found the father of a family who claimed he'd seen no Taliban in the area at all _ a common refrain.

"It's one of the most frustrating things out here," Martin said. "We know there's Taliban in the area, and they're like, 'No, they're not.'"

"I pressed him about it because I saw the guy right outside his compound shooting at me with a rifle, but he still said no," Martin said. "I'm not sure if they think we're stupid, or if they're so afraid of the Taliban they won't talk."

U.S. forces across Afghanistan say the key to turning the tide in the nine-year war rests largely on civilians turning against the Taliban. In Marjah, though, that has yet to happen on any significant level, despite the steady presence for more than eight months of two Marine battalions and their Afghan counterparts.

"They always ask us, 'why do you need our help anyway? You're the ones with the guns ... you have the planes, you have the helicopters,'" Martin said. "They don't realize that just the information that they give us is the most helpful thing."

Some residents, having heard about President Barack Obama's pledge to begin withdrawing Americans from Afghanistan next summer, believe U.S. forces are not going to be in Marjah for long, Marines say. And whenever U.S. forces leave, they people who live here think they'll be left with an ineffective and undedicated force of Afghan police and soldiers _ and of course, the Taliban, who are already among them.

"They don't know who to trust," Long said.

Neither do the Marines.

On the eve of the Sept. 18 parliamentary elections, one U.S. base in Marjah hosted a delegation of 20 government poll organizers. Two of them were detained, though, after they were found to have smuggled in a pressure-plate bomb and a pair of grenades.

On election day, the base was attacked in a six-hour firefight that saw insurgents _ with clear knowledge of the base's interior _ angling their machine gun fire up and over the walls in an attempt to strike the vulnerable tents inside.

During a patrol one week later, Marines were astonished to find a crude drawing of what was clearly the exterior of the base, scrawled in white chalk on a wall in a man's home. Lines of fire were drawn at what appeared to be the post's guard towers.

"This looks a lot like an attack plan to me," said Lance Cpl. Patrick Cassidy, 23, of Stroudsburg, Pa. The Marines' base was only a couple dozen meters (yards) away, on the other side of a wide canal built with U.S. aid money half a century ago.

Bismullah Nazir Ali, the home's white-bearded owner, pleaded innocence. No Taliban had been there or in his fields, he said.

As he spoke, another gunbattle raged a few hundred meters away. Cobra attack helicopters were pounding targets with rockets that shook the area.

"Those are just flowers, children's drawings," Ali said, before being detained and carted away.

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Marjah Bleeding

2010-10-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

8 months after clearing operation, Marines in Marjah face full-blown insurgency

By TODD PITMAN

MARJAH, Afghanistan (AP) _ The young Marine had a simple question for the farmer with the white beard: Have you seen any Taliban today?

The answer came within seconds _ from insurgents hiding nearby who ended the conversation with bursts of automatic rifle fire that sent deadly rounds cracking overhead.

It was a telling coincidence _ and the start of yet another gunbattle in Marjah, the southern poppy-producing hub which U.S. forces wrested from Taliban control in February to restore government rule.

Eight months on, the Taliban are still here in force, waging a full-blown guerrilla insurgency that rages daily across a bomb-riddled landscape of agricultural fields and irrigation trenches.

As U.S. involvement in the war enters its 10th year, the failure to pacify this town raises questions about the effectiveness of America's overall strategy. Similarly crucial operations are now under way in neighboring Kandahar province, the Taliban's birthplace.

There are signs the situation in Marjah is beginning to improve, but "it's still a very tough fight," said Capt. Chuck Anklam, whose Marine company has lost three men since arriving in July. "We're in firefights all over, every day."
¶ "There's no area that's void of enemy. But there's no area void of Marines and (Afghan forces) either," said Anklam, 34, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "It's a constant presence both sides are trying to exert."

That day, militants in his zone of operations alone had attacked Marines in four separate locations by mid-afternoon.

The February assault on Marjah was the first major offensive since President Barack Obama ordered the 30,000-man troop surge to Afghanistan and the biggest joint NATO-Afghan operation since the war began in 2001.

Since then, Marjah has become a microcosm of the war itself _ and a metaphor for an insurgency that has spread nationwide.

On Oct. 7, 2001, the Bush administration launched a withering bombing campaign that forced the Taliban from power weeks later. But what looked like quick victory turned out to be the start of one of the longest wars in U.S. history.

Similarly, the end of Taliban control in Marjah has sown the seeds of an entrenched guerrilla war that has tied down at least two U.S. Marine battalions and hordes of Afghan police and army troops.

The result, so far at least: Residents say the town is more insecure than ever.

"There was peace here before you came," farmer Khari Badar told one Marine patrol that recently visited his home. "Today, there is only fighting."

Marines say the Taliban can no longer move freely through the town with fighters and weapons. But the militants are still doing so clandestinely _ so much so, that "we have areas where every time we go in, we know we're going to become engaged" in fighting, Anklam said.

On their way to Badar's home, Marines snatched cell phones from suspicious men believed to have been spotting for insurgents

"The presence is that consistent and that heavy of enemy," Anklam said. "But there's no area that we allow the Taliban to say they can claim ownership over."

Marjah always had a long way to go, even before the Taliban took it over. More than 50,000 people are still thought to live here, but it's more a vast patchwork of fields and dried mud homes than a town. There's no electricity, running water or paved roads.

The coalition has succeeded in setting up a nascent government in the town's district center. But the local officials' connection to the people they govern is thin. The most visible signs of authority today are sandbagged police checkpoints that frequently come under attack.

Taliban militants have sown fear into the heart of the population in a bid to undermine the U.S.-led effort, warning people to stay clear of American and Afghan government projects.

Markets have come back to life in some parts of town, including the biggest one in northern Marjah. But the only one in Anklam's 18-square-mile zone closed a few weeks ago after shopkeepers succumbed to Taliban threats.

Anklam has helped oversee the opening of three government schools. Attendance at one of them rose recently to a high of 18, then plummeted a few days later to zero because parents were either too terrified of the Taliban or the security situation to let their children attend. Other schools have fared better _ one in central Marjah has so many kids that officials have had to find tents to accommodate them all.

Coalition forces are also trying to win over the population by organizing the delivery of solar panels to businessmen, and refurbishing shops, wells and mosques, Anklam said. But residents are weary: One Marine simply trying to give away a lollipop to children at a checkpoint tried three times before finding one who would take it.

"It's hearts and minds versus fear and intimidation," said Marine Lance Cpl. Chuck Martin, 24, of Middletown, Rhode Island, referring to the Marines' attempt to gain the backing people terrified of Taliban threats. "And right now, fear and intimidation are winning."

Anklam said the Taliban enjoy "the tacit support of probably the vast majority of the population," but said they had known little other rule for years and were still too scared to stand up to them. He said several dismembered bodies, apparently of suspected coalition sympathizers, had been found over the last few months in the town's canals.

With Marine and Afghan forces present across the town, "people are starting to realize their government has a vested interest that's not going to disappear," Anklam said. The Taliban, by contrast, "have nothing to offer the people. When people are sick or injured, they come to us."

When the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines arrived two months ago, most people were too terrified of Taliban reprisals even to speak to U.S. troops during the day, Anklam said. Now, Marines routinely talk to shop owners and farmers in their homes.

"Most of them still won't tell us anything yet about the enemy's activity," he said. "But slowly, it's starting to happen."

Indeed, the white-bearded farmer whom Marines asked about the Taliban presence said he'd seen several fighters moving through the fields around his home during another gunfight _ an honest and rare response troops often don't get even when they visit a home from which insurgents were just shooting, Martin said.

The old man also did something else that that was novel for Martin's platoon: He waved the Americans and their Afghan counterparts inside his home when the shooting started.

While the family hid inside, Marines climbed onto his roof and took cover behind a crumbling wall, firing a barrage of bullets toward insurgents a few hundred yards (meters) away. One Marine corpsman stepped in for an Afghan soldier _ who was spraying bursts of fire aimlessly straight up into the sky _and began taking studied single shots instead.

Anklam has spread the Marines of Echo company as much as possible. The squads are now based at 13 small outposts _ twice as many as in July. As a result, Marines say that although firefights occur daily, violence has decreased overall.

Maj. Dallas Shah, the 2/9 Marines' 42-year-old operations commander from Fairfax, Virginia, confirmed that assessment, but said firefights were on the rise in another company's part of Marjah to the north.

"As you lock down one area," Shaw said, "you have to accept that they're going to move into another area."

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Hearts and Grenades

2010-10-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

Grenade attacks cause US troops to keep their distance from Afghan town they seek to secure

Sept. 10, 2010

By TODD PITMAN

SENJERAY, Afghanistan (AP) _ Pfc. Sean Provenzano saw it whiz by out of the corner of his eye: a dark object hurled from a rooftop as he patrolled the medieval maze of alleyways in this fort-like walled village at the center of America's Afghan surge.

It bounced off his M-4 Carbine's gun-sight and landed in the dirt a few yards away. At first he mistook it for a rock _ kids here often throw them at U.S. troops. But when it rose up and began spinning like a top, he realized it was something far more dangerous.

"GRENADE!!!" the 25-year-old screamed, diving to the ground as the explosion sprayed a deadly burst of shrapnel across the street.

Through a cloud of black smoke and brown dust, Provenzano heard a colleague calling his name. He was alive, unscathed, and incredibly, so was everyone else.
U.S. forces deployed to this village in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar province as part of President Barack Obama's troop surge say they came with the noblest intentions: to build up government and security forces, protect the population, make this a safer place. But after a relentless spate of grenade attacks _ tossed anonymously over walls and down from rooftops at soldiers patrolling the labyrinthine town _ they now keep their distance from the people they're trying to protect.

The change of heart _ nine years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that triggered the war _ underscores the profound challenges American forces face in securing this insurgent stronghold, where sympathy for the Taliban runs high and the radical Islamist movement was born in 1994. NATO commanders say a major operation will be launched this month here in Zhari district to clear guerrilla fighters who use the cover of grape vineyards and pomegranate orchards to stage attacks.

"When we first came here, we were giving candy away and water bottles. But as soon as we saw a little kid throw a grenade over the wall, that was it, we don't give 'em anything anymore," said Provenzano, of the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment.

"We make sure they keep their distance," he said of the population. "You keep 'em away from you as long as you can, because it's only a matter of time before someone gets hurt."

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the joint Afghan-U.S. outpost at Senjeray last week and said he was "encouraged" by signs of progress. But Zhari remains a battlefield where firefights erupt daily. The lush green fields fed by the Arghandab river, just south of the village, are virtual no-go zones controlled by Taliban fighters, and progress in building local governance is painfully slow.

On Wednesday, insurgents ambushed a convoy carrying district chief Kareem Jan, killing one of his guards and getting close enough to steal one of his vehicles. The midday attack on Highway 1 was the third attempt on his life since he assumed office in late May.

Grenade assaults against U.S. forces occur mostly when they move into walled Senjeray. They began in earnest in June, and "a significant amount" of troops have been wounded but none killed, said Capt. Nick Stout, a 27-year-old U.S. company commander from Lake Orion, Michigan.

Soldiers say the assaults are aimed at demoralizing or disrupting their operations. Stout said the Taliban or their sympathizers are "trying everything they can to keep us out."

"But you have to continue to get out there, you have to keep them at bay," Stout said. Because "if we don't go in, things could get a lot worse."

Some grenade throwers are "impressionable teenagers" influenced by Taliban propaganda, he said. The youngest is believed to have been 10 or 11 years old.

Troops have captured several, but most escape easily, jumping across rooftops, fleeing through ubiquitous doors, tunnels and passageways hidden inside the sprawling compounds. Others simply blend in with everyone else.

As Provenzano's squad headed into Senjeray on Tuesday accompanied by Afghan police, they scanned rooftops and spread out to lower the risk of multiple injuries in case of an attack.

As light faded from the warren of narrow streets lined with steep brown earthen walls, women and children carrying clay vases of water stepped out of wooden doorways and stared silently. Turbaned men with long beards sat on idling motorcycles, hands crossed, observing the troops as they passed.

Provenzano was at the rear of his squad when the pineapple grenade was thrown at him.

"By the time it skipped off my weapon, I had about three seconds to get as far away as possible," Provenzano said afterward. "If he had thrown it a second later, it would have blown me to pieces, guaranteed."

After the blast, the Toms River, New Jersey native stood up, knees shaking, and shook off the dust.

Immediately afterward, troops raided two compounds. They flung a flash-bang grenade over the wall of one but found no suspects.

In the second home _ where troops believed the attacker lay in wait on a rooftop _ a soldier burst through the metal front door, knocking it off its hinges. Inside, they found two middle-aged women crying hysterically, and a horde of screaming kids. An elderly man said through an interpreter he heard the blast but knew nothing more about it.

There were doors and passageways in the compound, some draped with rugs and silk veils.

Whoever threw the grenade was likely long gone.

"Pretty much every time, they say they didn't see anything and don't know who's doing it," said Staff Sgt. Brandon Griffis, 26, of Pendleton, Indiana.

"It's very, very frustrating, because we're here to help," he said. But "they don't want to be seen speaking to us, because these Taliban come into their homes and say they're going to kill their family if they say anything."

Griffis found a toy machine gun made of wood in the home, and smashed it against a wall.

"I told the kid (it belonged to), 'You can't be running around the streets with this. At night, this could be mistaken for a real weapon,'" Griffis said.

Stout said his company had become more aggressive in hunting down attackers as a result _ more patrols, more searches, more suspects detained.

Troops say the attacks only make them want to go into Senjeray more. But in the battle to win over hearts and minds, some are finding their own changing.

At the hilltop base, Provenzano said he finds himself angry at the townspeople and distrusting everyone in Senjeray. "I don't care about these people a bit."

Asked what his main goal here was, Provenzano was blunt: "to survive."

Griffis, the staff sergeant, said the anger was understandable _ and temporary.

Anybody who "just had a grenade thrown at them is probably going to be a little pissed off," Griffis said. "But when I hear soldiers say that, I always say, 'You gotta' look at the bigger picture, you gotta' look at what we're here to do.'"

Marjah: Life on the Front

2010-10-25T04:16:00.000-07:00

Photography, Audio and Production by AP West Africa Bureau Chief, Todd Pitman.

Pitman embedded with the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines in northern Marjah in late September, 2010. The material for this slideshow was gathered from interviews and patrols with the troops of Echo company. Video screen grabs courtesy of APTN/Adil Bradlow.

Lessons of Marjah

2010-09-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

As US makes gains in Kandahar, another Afghan district shows difficulty of holding ground

Oct. 27, 2010

By TODD PITMAN

MARJAH, Afghanistan (AP) _ With bandoliers of bullets wrapped over both shoulders, U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Seth Little knelt in a trench, his machine gun pointing toward a clutch of farmers in a field who stared silently back.

The 23-year-old from Bremen, Georgia, was scanning the horizon for Taliban gunmen who were maneuvering unseen somewhere across this rural battlefield, ordering civilians out of their homes in apparent preparation for a fight.

Eight months after U.S.-led forces launched the biggest operation of the war to clear insurgents from the southern poppy-growing district of Marjah, it wasn't supposed to be this way. Today, the world's most powerful military is still struggling to rout guerrillas staging complex hit-and-run attacks relentlessly, every day.

The ongoing conflict here comes as another massive American-led clearing operation is under way 100 miles to the east in neighboring Kandahar province. NATO commanders are touting recent successes there in seizing ground from Taliban militants who, as in Marjah, once roamed freely.

The Kandahar operation, launched last month along the Arghandab River Valley northwest of the provincial capital, has so far produced stunning results. NATO and embedded journalists say many Taliban have fled or gone underground in the face of withering air power. Gunbattles have markedly declined _ in some places they've ended altogether _ and the biggest threat is hidden, homemade bombs. Farmers have returned to plant once-abandoned fields, and new allied outposts are being set up to hold ground.

The gains, though, come at a time when Afghanistan's fighting season was winding down anyway with the arrival of cold weather, which erodes the vegetation insurgents rely on for cover to stage attacks.

Winter is traditionally the time when Taliban militants disappear into the mountains to rest and regroup before resuming the fight in the spring. The challenge for coalition forces will be to maintain their gains before then.

Previous operations hailed as successes in the same area in 2006 and 2007 saw Taliban fighters re-infiltrate in the months that followed _ mainly because there weren't enough coalition troops to stop them.

American commanders argue that this time, there will be.

The daily fighting in Marjah, however, offers a grimmer image of what the security landscape in Kandahar could look like next summer, when President Barack Obama has said he hopes to start a drawdown of U.S. forces. Extra troops do not automatically equate to success.

The February assault on the poppy-growing hub in Helmand province was supposed to be the first stage here of the counterinsurgency strategy, "clear, hold, build." But Capt. Chuck Anklam, who commands 2/9's Echo Company in a northern swathe of Marjah, said all three stages are now going on simultaneously _ and none of them is complete.

The initial clearing during the allied assault, he said, had only been "of the most stalwart enemy fighters who stayed to fight" when U.S. and Afghan forces poured in.

"Due to the nature of the insurgent activity and the way that the enemy fights _ disguising themselves as farmers during the day and having weapons caches hidden throughout ... we don't truly clear the area, we hold the area," the 34-year-old native of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. said.

And holding it all is not an option, either. Only two Marine battalions are stationed in Marjah, and Echo Company's area of operations alone is an 18-mile-square grid of rectangular farms intersected by irrigation canals, hedgerows and islands of trees _ all of which insurgents use to stage attacks.

"It's impossible for us to physically hold all that terrain," Anklam added. "I cannot put a Marine element everywhere."

Instead, he has maximized the American presence here by spreading forces out as much as possible, basing them at 13 small outposts occupied by only a squad or two of Marines each, and a similar amount of Afghan soldiers. The strategy mimics the 2007 "surge" in Iraq, which saw American troops leave large bases en masse and set up small outposts in the center of populated areas.

The goal is to cover and stabilize as much ground as possible ahead of Obama's year-end review of the conflict in December. With the 30,000-man surge here bringing the American troop total to about 100,000, Obama is hoping to reverse the tide of the increasingly unpopular war, which entered its 10th year this month.

Even if gains are made in the Taliban's southern heartland, though, the insurgency is steadily spreading elsewhere in Afghanistan, making pockets of the once-safe north precarious. Attacks are also reportedly on the rise in the east, where U.S. forces abandoned some outposts last year because they were too hard to defend.

Marines in Marjah are spread thin not only on bases, but on patrol, when they typically split squads up into two or three even smaller teams. The strategy, they say, has proven effective, allowing troops to cover more ground and reduce the number of attacks _ almost all of which are initiated by Taliban fighters.

The insurgency in Marjah is crude, but effective: Militants use wires or kite string to set off homemade bombs fashioned mostly from ammonium nitrate, commonly used here as fertilizer.

Squad leaders say the Taliban typically operate in teams of four to six gunmen and launch attacks from multiple locations simultaneously _ as they did twice when The Associated Press accompanied them on several patrols.

"When we spread out, they have a hard time determining where all the Marines are, and where we're going to pop out," said Sgt. Jeffrey Benson, 34, of Medina, Ohio. "They might have eyes on four or five of us at one time, but they don't know where the other four or five are ... and I think that's why they've had a hard time ambushing us."

NATO officials argue the strategy in Marjah is working, albeit slower than they'd hoped. A fledgling local government has been installed in the district center, and the first police station opened in September. In some parts, children have begun attending school and markets have opened; in others, they've closed and parents don't dare send their children to class.

Success, however, ultimately rests not on winning outright _ few American commanders speak of that anymore _ but on the ability of Afghan forces to take over the fight after the U.S. military inevitably leaves.

In a telling sign of the challenges ahead, one American captain in Kandahar's Zhari district pulled his troops from a frequently attacked school and left Afghan security forces in charge of defending it. But after attacks continued, he had to station American troops there again in mid-September, tying up combat power he desperately wanted to use elsewhere.

In Marjah, Afghans and Americans are partnered at every outpost and on every patrol. But U.S. Marines typically call the shots and lead movements with Afghan soldiers trailing behind, some insulted for wasting ammunition or ignoring orders to avoid bomb-laden footpaths.

One Marine training Afghan security forces complained he had to wrest them from bed in the morning. "I told them, wake up, this is YOUR country," he said.

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

The Manyanga

2010-08-10T18:08:00.000-07:00

Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at once, space exists so that everything doesn’t happen to you. - anonymous

A Story by Todd Pitman

Don’t ever walk through Nairobi at night. That’s what they tell you. You might get shot. You might get mugged. You might get accosted, accused, bamboozled, beguiled, harassed, harangued, tricked, cheated, robbed, raped, pestered, pulverized, pick-pocketed, victimized, beaten-up, cut-up, or worse.

Hey, that’s what they tell you. So we didn’t.

The other night, me and a friend went down to the local pub to grab a few beers. Afterwards, we’re trying to get back home, which is only three or four blocks - a 10 minute walk. Problem is, it’s dark. If it’s dark, you don’t walk. No, not in Nairobi. You can’t walk. Cats are looking for you: thieves, beggars, crazies, rapists, murderers, gangsters, gravediggers. Watching, waiting, hiding - searching for you. You work? Hey, they work too. That's what they tell you.

In Nairobi, public transportation is colored by the Manyanga: a brightly painted, oversized, customized cross between a van and a bus with a driver and a tout and a radio playing music with the base up so loud your esophagus will shake. They have names like "Shaq", "Somtin’ 4 da Honeez", and "Internet." Some are rusted out. Some have parts missing. Some are crooked and bent so far sideways they look like they’re in italics.

It’s late, but the buses are still running; we see them going the other way to prove it. My friend, he wants to walk. He’s new here. He doesn’t know; he hasn’t heard. I try to explain the situation to him, and we debate the options, of which there are three: walk, bus, taxi.

As we stood debating, fate arrived: this pulsating, neon-blue Manyanga pulls up on the curb where we are standing with a tremendously, unbelievably over-stuffed chunk of humanity on board. I have never, ever seen so many people on or in one of these in my life. There are arms and heads and elbows sticking out of every spare space, crevice and opening. The faces of the people inside are crushed - literally crushed - against the window glass with such pressure that they are squeezed into an intricate collection of dazed caricatures. There are people in it, on it, under it, around it, hanging off the side of it. I think I even saw feet sticking out somewhere. It reminds me of one of those concentration camp pictures: a mass of cadavers thrown carelessly on top of one another in a pile, the arms and legs extending outward unnaturally.

You know me, though. You know how I feel about traveling in these things. I can’t. I won’t. I don’t.

But I did.

I spoke involuntarily: "Hey, let’s just hop on."

I rationalized as we boarded the steps. "It’s only three stops."

I defended my choice as the tout patted me on the back: "We’ll be at this door the whole time. It’ll just be a couple minutes."

The tout nodded. My friend shook his head. "Hey," I said, "it’s safer than walking."

As soon as we get on, I can feel the overwhelming, claustrophobic crush of bodies and skin and breath and sweat. The air on board, what little there is of it, is stale and humid. I pause momentarily, trying to decide which route to take inside. There is nowhere to go.

Noticing my hesitation, the tout juts an open palm into my back. Now he is barking orders in Kiswahili: "songa, songa" - "squeeze, squeeze." Then I feel it: a slow, massive crush propels me backwards down the aisle. I’m getting pushed, crammed, jammed, shoved and stuffed backwards. That I or any of my fellow occupants can move at all is difficult for me to believe. Hell, I can’t even breathe. We’re packed in so tightly I can feel the veins popping in my neck. A sharp chill of panic sweeps through me, and I make a push forward towards the exit - the only way out - but I can’t move. Astonishingly, through the window, I can see still more passengers getting on. It’s all in slow motion now. I am drowning. I feel weak. I struggle to maintain. Then the mammoth blue tin can in which we are crammed begins to move.

The Manyanga is lurching up the street now, indelicately circumventing the potholes torn in the tarmac below us. First left, then right. With each turn the total weight of every person packed on board is displaced against me, crushing me, momentarily cutting off my circulation.

Then I think its our stop. I motion (with eyes only) to my friend that this is it - we need to get the fuck off. He’s in a much better position to do this than me (crammed frontwards, on one leg, at an angle - but with a fortunate proximity to the door). I reach up a weak hand to the greasy, sweat-covered bar above me and pull forward with all my might. There is no room to move, no empty space anywhere, but the dense mass of bodies somehow contorts itself and gives way. I am squeezed gradually through it towards the exit.

My first glimpse through the doorway of the wide-open expanse of space outside makes me intensely anxious to disembark this hideous bus. I try to get off, but the tout wants money first. I’m astounded. I can barely move, much less reach in my pocket to extract proper change. I tell him as much, but he says "No" again and forcibly blocks my way. In the confusion, my friend, who is already off and free, pays the fare. I am released.

I step down into the crisp, fresh, night air and feel the wet grass curl under my feet. I take a deep breath.

Then I reach in my pocket to grab that 500 shilling note I had just stuffed there, moments before, in the relative safety of the curb. I look up as the neon-blue behemoth is barrelling away, music blaring, exhaust smoke trailing, arms dangling. I stand there muttering, cursing, looking at the blur of crushed caricatures receding in the darkness.

Don’t ever walk through Nairobi at night. That’s what they tell you.

And then I realize we have only gone one stop.

Copyright 1997 Todd Pitman. All rights reserved.

Note: The origin of the picture at the top of this story is unknown. I found it in a box of my old African photos, but I don't remember taking it. I checked with several friends who were with me when I first traveled to Africa _ to Kenya _ in 1993. None of them could identify it.

Strasser Down

2010-08-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

Broke and unemployed, former Sierra Leone dictator living back home with his mother

July 24, 2002

By TODD PITMAN

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) _ Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.

It's even tougher when you're a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.

Valentine Strasser became the world's youngest head of state when he seized power in 1992 at the age of 25. But the limelight didn't last _ four years later, he was ousted in another coup.

"I'm basically living off my mother now. She's been very supportive," the 35-year-old said at a neighborhood bar on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital.

"It's been tough. I'm unemployed, but I'm coping."

It was well before noon and the former president was doing what he often does on weekdays: Joking around with friends, playing checkers and sipping diligently on a plastic cup of palm wine _ a cheap and highly potent alcoholic brew.

In contrast to the days when he commanded an army and courted the favor of foreign presidents, Strasser today seems to have reverted simply to being just another neighborhood kid.

Gone are the crisp military fatigues, new suits and wraparound sunglasses. In their place: A baseball hat worn backward, a Bob Marley T-shirt, dark green shorts and a pair of 'Air' Nike sneakers.

Asked how he spends his time now that he doesn't have to rule the nation, Strasser took a drag of his cigarette and thought for a moment.

"I've been drinking palm wine," he said. "You shouldn't say that. But this is a democracy now. So go ahead."

Things were very different a decade ago when Strasser, then a captain known for winning disco contests, headed up a group of twentysomething officers demanding unpaid salaries.

The protests snowballed into a popular coup that ousted dictator Maj. Gen. Joseph Momoh in April 1992.

Strasser was hailed as a savior by many. Even today, Freetown residents say he changed things for the better, drastically cutting inflation, cleaning up the capital and putting the long defunct national TV station back on air.

He and his junta _ known as "the boys" because most were only in their 20s _ scored points by waging war, if unsuccessfully, on the nation's hated rebels.

But Strasser was no angel. The young ruler was widely criticized when his government executed two dozen alleged coup plotters without trial on a Freetown beach.

Strasser promised to hand over power in democratic elections in 1996. But he was beaten to the punch by his No. 2 man, Brig. Julius Maada Bio, who overthrew him in a bloodless coup in January that year.

Strasser was forced into exile and soon ended up in Britain, where the United Nations arranged a special scholarship for him to study law at Warwick University in Coventry.

University spokesman Peter Dunn said the former dictator spent 18 months at the school before dropping out, saying in a letter that he'd run out of money.

Media reports at the time said Strasser slipped away to London and changed his name to Reginald to avoid the press and potential enemies. In 2000, his student visa expired and he was deported.

Soon after, he made his way back to Sierra Leone, which is only now emerging peacefully from a decade of civil war in which rebels abducted children into their ranks and killed, raped and maimed tens of thousands of civilians.

Unlike many of the world's former heads of state, however, Strasser was not treated to a generous government stipend or given a plush mansion or bodyguards.

A house he built for himself on the edge of town was burned down by aggrieved soldiers in 1999, so he moved into his mother's two-story house across the street.

The government says Strasser is not entitled to benefits because he took power by force. Strasser concedes the point but says he should be treated better.

Last year, the government called on citizens not to throw stones at the former head of state, who without a car, was wandering around Freetown on foot.

But Strasser is still immensely popular among some, and may be able to capitalize on it. In five years, he'll be eligible to run for president _ something he says he's considering.

Charismatic, muscle-bound and six-foot-two, he's the dominant figure at the bar he often frequents, which stands tenuously together with bamboo poles and plastic sheeting somehow obtained from the U.N. World Food Program.

Whatever the future holds, Strasser will always have his high-profile past to relish.

"Oh it was good. I was the youngest ... head of state in the whole wide world," he said with a guffaw, looking around the bar for support.

Then he leaned forward with a wide smile and slapped a high-five on the hand of someone sitting across from him.

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Note: The photos above were taken from the Internet. The first is an AP file photo of Strasser. When photographer Christine Nesbitt and I tried to interview him for this story, he refused to have his picture taken.

Crime Stories

2010-08-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

In Nigeria, robbers let their victims know they're coming

July 12, 2001

By TODD PITMAN

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) _ Bolanle Ijikelly wasn't too surprised when armed robbers broke through the wall of her apartment with a sledgehammer one night last month and started carting away her valuables.

The week before, they'd sent her entire apartment block a note to let everyone know they'd be stopping by.

In Lagos, thieves are so sure of getting away with crimes they hand-deliver notices alerting intended targets they're coming _ so even the poorest victims will have some cash on hand to steal.

The rationale is simple: Those with no money and nothing worth stealing are often beaten _ or shot.

In a city where police were cleared last month to shoot suspected criminals on sight, everyone's got a crime story to tell.

The anonymous message penned on a sheet of paper and pasted to the wall of Ijikelly's rundown apartment block was blunt:

"We are coming to Block 31 to rob each flat and no flat will be exempted."

Many tenants fled. Others stayed home during the day but slept elsewhere after dark.
Some, like Ijikelly, were so resigned to their fate they chose to stay and wait.

"I knew they were coming, so I prepared an envelope with 650 naira ($5) in it to give them," the 47-year-old teacher said.

Ijikelly and her five children woke to the sound of gunfire, got dressed and soon met eight armed men who crawled through the hole they knocked in her wall.

Two hours, 13 ransacked apartments _ and no arrests _ later, officers finally chased off the robbers.

That the police came at all was remarkable. In Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital, only 12,000 officers are deployed to protect a population of 13 million.

Few residents expect much help. The poorly paid police force is best known not for foiling crimes, but for extorting bribes from drivers at checkpoints around town.

Left on their own, many residents barricade neighborhood streets with gates and lock themselves up inside houses with barred windows.

Few have telephones at home to call for help.

When the sun goes down, many parts of the city are plunged into darkness because electricity is so scarce.

Moving around at night can be eerie _ and dangerous.

"I try to get home as early as possible. Nowhere is really safe," said Akin Ajose-Adeogun, a 42-year-old civil servant.

"We usually hear gunshots every night somewhere in the distance. It's like we're under siege."
Robbers frequently operate in groups of 50 or more, hitting not just single houses but entire streets.

Sometimes they stuff nails into shoes or oranges and toss them onto bridges to blow out the tires of passing cars. Bands of thieves then converge on the car and rob the occupants.
Shootouts with police are common.

Gruesome crime stories make headlines in local newspapers every day and robbers have become infamous for acts of brutality.

Actress Patience Oseni, 37, said a gang of thieves who lost one of their men during a robbery last month in the Bariga neighborhood returned a few days later _ and gunned down two dozen residents in revenge.

Lawyer Femi Odutola said one group even attacked a police station this month in another act of revenge, killing two officers.

But the violence goes both ways.

Oseni said she saw police kill five suspected robbers as she was going to church one Sunday in June.

"They didn't ask too many questions. They just took them out on the street in front of the station and blew their heads off," Oseni said. "It's jungle justice."

Some civilians, tired of all the crime, have shown little sympathy for thieves.

Odutola saw one man caught July 5 trying to steal a car from the parking lot of the Lagos High Court.

A mob threw an old tire around his neck, doused him with gasoline and set him on fire.
"These things happen often," Odutola said, holding a photo he took of the scene showing a charred corpse.

"But the fact that they burnt him to death right in front of the High Court shows how little faith people have in the criminal justice system."

Since January, 183 robbers, 41 civilians and 14 police officers have been killed in Lagos, according to police statistics reported by the independent Guardian newspaper. Figures for the previous year put the death toll at more than 700.

Some residents would like to leave the city altogether. But not everybody's got a choice.

"If I could get out of here, I would," Ijikelly said. "But I can't move. I can't afford it."

Copyright 2001 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Palm Beach Hotel, II

2010-08-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

Rebels, war and unpaid bar tabs: Congo hotel survives in Africa's heart

July 11, 2004

By TODD PITMAN

KISANGANI, Congo (AP) _ It's counted diamond dealers, foreign soldiers and an ill-fated president among the guests. It's been occupied by rebels who left behind astronomical bar tabs. It's been splattered with bullets, littered with corpses, battered, broken, bruised and rebuilt.

In the city immortalized by Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the Palm Beach Hotel has seen it all, and survived _ much like the country itself.

"It's been difficult really, but we managed. In Congo, we always manage," says Gaspar Mande, the soft-spoken chief receptionist.

The brainchild of a general once close to the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the Palm Beach opened in 1995 _ just in time for an anti-Mobutu rebellion that swept the country a year later.

Perched on the banks of the Congo River, the whitewashed, two-story hotel easily dominated its lowbrow, bedbug-ridden competitors, offering 19 air-conditioned rooms and villas equipped with satellite TV.

Though modest by world standards, the Palm Beach had much to offer. For the mosquitos, there was bug spray. For power outages, generators. And for water shortages, water tanks ensured a 24-hour supply.

When rebels led by Laurent Kabila captured Kisangani in 1997, it didn't take them long to check in. But not as paying guests. Heavily armed soldiers camped out six to a room, pillaging telephones, TVs, VCRs, alarm clocks and refrigerators.

Rebel commanders sent the hotel's staff home amid the chaos, but invited them back weeks later after realizing their troops were occupying a potentially lucrative source of income.

"They needed money, so they kicked the soldiers out," says one employee, Jeff Basilieki.

Congo has recently seen another surge in violence, with rebels battling government troops in the eastern city of Bukavu and gunfire rattling the capital, Kinshasa, twice since March. Kisangani, a northeastern city that was known as Stanleyville during Belgian colonial rule, has been spared so far.

Through the years, guests at the Palm Beach have included Lebanese diamond dealers, foreign journalists and Kabila, who went on to become president and was assassinated in Kinshasa in 2001.

The former leader slept in Villa 21, whose two rooms and salon now go for $180 a night.
"Kabila was just like the rest of them _ he didn't pay," Basilieki says.

In 1998, a second rebellion _ this time against Kabila _ brought another wave of penniless rebels.

Dozens slept in the courtyard with grenades and automatic weapons piled beside them. Some stood guard at the restaurant in wraparound sunglasses, holding rocket launchers like spears at the entrance to a tribal court.

Many a rebel had his hand wrapped around a cold beer.

According to Mande, a rebel group backed by the government of Rwanda left unpaid bills of $251,750, while their allies in a Ugandan-supported faction departed $55,000 in debt.
Asked how much of that was for alcohol, Mande says: "About half, at least."

In 1999, the Palm Beach became a military base for Ugandan troops, whose tented camps and machine-gun nests _ erected in the hotel gardens _ made them a target for Rwandan forces with whom they'd fallen out in a dispute over mineral wealth.

In the first of two battles, 11 Ugandan soldiers were killed on the hotel grounds.
"They piled the bodies in the toilet," Basilieki says. "They wanted to put them in the storage freezer, but it was destroyed."

During another battle in 2000, rockets and mortar shells burst all around, shattering every window in the hotel and slicing palm trees with shrapnel. Gunfire smacked into concrete walls, and one twisted shell landed in front of the reception desk.

Through it all, staff dutifully kept the restaurant open, serving meals and drinks to journalists until supplies ran out. During artillery barrages, the employees slept in the hallways and ran ducking to the river to fetch water.

Somehow, everybody survived.

The fighting was bad for business. But it brought a welcome bedfellow _ the United Nations.
Hundreds of well-paid U.N. staff checked in as peacekeeping operations expanded, bringing new life _ and money _ to a suddenly fully booked Palm Beach.

The profits helped repair blown-out air conditioners and windows, and pay for two billiard tables.

Prostitutes crowded the bar. There was dancing until dawn.
"Those pool tables used to be going around the clock," says Robert Powell, a U.N. logistics officer who works in the city. "It was great. There was nowhere else to go."

The good times faded, though, after many U.N. staffers shifted west to the strife-torn town of Bunia.

But life has been slowly improving since a 2002 peace deal that unified the nation _ once split into rival rebel zones and occupied by foreign armies.

Today, a small shop inside the hotel sells cell phone cards, offering links to the outside world unheard of a couple years ago.

Water and electricity supplies are still uneven, but Mande has big dreams for upgrading the hotel. In the garden out back, he envisions customers dining at a planned cafe, taking in pleasant river views.

"There's been a big change," he says. "These days, everybody pays."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Spiritual Combat

2010-08-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

On faraway battlefield, chaplains lead spiritual fight

August 22, 2004

By TODD PITMAN

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) _ The Marines screamed for a medic and tried to stanch the blood. But in the end, there was nothing they could do.

In a surreal battlefield of tombstones, in a Muslim cemetery thousands of miles from home, a young Marine lay unconscious after a mortar barrage, five minutes from death.

Lt. Cmdr. Paul Shaughnessy, a Navy chaplain, pressed a thumb across the motionless corporal's blood-drenched forehead, made the sign of the cross and summoned the strength to perform last rites on a man he barely knew.

"I absolve you of all your sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit," Shaughnessy said while kneeling beside Cpl. Roberto Abad, a 22-year-old from Los Angeles, just before he died Aug. 6. "May God, who gave you life, bring you everlasting life."

As American troops cope with life _ and death _ on a faraway battlefield, military chaplains cope with them, offering prayers, comfort and spiritual advice to keep the American military machine running.

Since Aug. 5, U.S. troops have fought intense skirmishes with Iraqi militants loyal to firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf's vast cemetery, believed to be the largest in the Muslim world.

Through a maze of tan-colored, Arabic-inscribed tombs, U.S. troops have scrambled onto mausoleums to open fire, taken refuge in underground crypts and, with bombs falling and bullets flying, wondered whether they might die here.

"Many of them had a great deal of reservation about going into a cemetery," said Capt. Warren Haggray, 48-year-old Baptist Army chaplain living in Fort Hood, Texas.

"One of the things that I teach my soldiers from the Bible is that there's a time for war and there's a time for peace, and there are times that you just have to get out there and fight."

Shaughnessy, a 54-year-old Roman Catholic priest from Worcester, Mass., had just finished a prayer service for a lance corporal, shot fatally in the neck by a sniper, when he joined a supply convoy to spend the night with Marines in the cemetery.

Crouched behind tombstones for cover, the Marines came under mortar attack at dusk.
One round exploded about 50 yards from Shaughnessy, who, after hearing calls for help, found two severely wounded Marines bleeding profusely.

Believing they would die, he performed last rites on both of them.

One was wounded in the thigh and survived, Shaughnessy learned later.

The second, pinned between two tombstones, did not.

Lacking a stretcher, the Marines put rifles under the corporal's legs and back to move him out of the cemetery.

"The young Marines who carried him, they were switching off," Shaughnessy said. "One, he was his buddy, he had blood all over him. He was pretty affected by it. He came back to his position, and I said, 'You gotta take deep breaths.' They lost a fellow Marine, and they knew they had to continue, but in their eyes, you could see the sadness."

At such times, chaplains, who accompany military units unarmed, can help simply by being present.

"A lot of them wanted blessings during that time. You just didn't know through the night what was gonna happen," Shaughnessy said. "The first time you have an RPG or a mortar explode next to you it's pretty sobering. The reality of death is more than just an abstraction. It matures them pretty fast."

Few troops appear to have reservations about taking what they see as "enemy" life, though.
Chaplains help grease the wheels of any soldier's troubled conscience by arguing that killing combatants is justified.

"I teach them from the scripture, and in the scripture I can see many times where men were told ... to go out and defeat the enemy," Haggray said. "This is real stuff. You're out there and you gotta eliminate that guy, because if you don't, he's gonna eliminate you."

Shaughnessy agreed.

"The Marine Corps is an assault-based entity. You have to have them ready to do some pretty nasty things. The danger is turning that off, that's always the problem," he said. "We want them to perform their duties in a moral and just way. I try to convey to them in the most cogent way I can that you don't use excessive force, you don't take innocent life."

One Marine deployed near the cemetery, following orders from his superiors, sprayed gunfire on a vehicle that failed to stop at a checkpoint after a series of warning shots, Shaughnessy said.

When the bullet-ridden car rolled to a halt, the Marine found two men and one woman, apparently civilians, dead or on the verge of death, inside.

"It bothered him immensely," Shaughnessy said. "I told him the intention is important. You had warned them that they were in a combatant zone, your intent was not to take any civilian life, and morally, that's significant."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Palm Beach Hotel, I

2010-08-08T17:58:00.000-07:00

FEATURE-Rebels run up huge bills in Congo hotel
09:03 p.m Nov 24, 1998 Eastern

By Todd Pitman

KISANGANI, Congo, Nov 25 (Reuters) - When rebels swept through this city in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo three months ago, it didn't take them long to find the nicest hotel in town.

As retreating government troops fled by boat down the mighty Congo river, the rebels -- a mixture of Rwandan, Ugandan and Congolese soldiers fighting to oust President Laurent Kabila -- checked into comfortable rooms at the riverside Palm Beach Hotel.

Three months later, hotel staff say the rebels have run up a tab of nearly $70,000.

``They come, they eat, they drink, but they don't pay,'' said 43-year-old Charlette Bongumba, who has run the hotel -- a family business -- for the last four months.

``Before we used to make money. We had tourists, businessmen, diamond dealers. But now when you talk about the bill, they (the rebels) just laugh,'' Bongumba said.

Kisangani, a city of diamond shops and fading colonial villas perched in the middle of some of the densest jungle on earth, has been the military headquarters of the rebellion since it fell from government hands on August 23.

Dozens of gun-toting rebels, some with machine-guns and small rockets or grenades strapped to their chests, relaxed at the reception hall this week or lounged around hotel grounds chatting, sleeping and listening to radios.

Just behind the hotel on the banks of the broad, dark Congo river, rebel troops joked with local residents and haggled to buy cigarettes -- sold individually at small wooden kiosks.

Other rebel soldiers stood guard at the hotel's front gate or reclined behind the restaurant reception desk with rifles while officials held talks over fried bananas and beer.

DEJA VU FOR THE STAFF

While the rebel occupation may not be good for profits, it is not the first time hotel staff have witnessed such scenes.

Two years ago, another rebellion led by then guerrilla leader Laurent Kabila swept across the country, capturing Kisangani from government soldiers in March 1997.

Kabila moved into the Palm Beach Hotel and rebels then -- as now -- ran up massive, unpaid bills.

``Kabila stayed here in this room, but he didn't pay either,'' said Omar, a grey-haired sweeper in blue flip-flops pushing a broom through a modestly furnished two-bedroom villa equipped with air-conditioning and cable television.

Kabila's troops went on to oust one of Africa's longest ruling dictators, the late Mobutu Sese Seko, and many of them then became government soldiers.

They finally left this hotel in April 1998 but by then they had looted almost everything they could find, including television sets, refrigerators, mattresses and forks.

That tab -- in excess of $100,000 -- was never paid despite repeated appeals to Kabila's government in the capital Kinshasa.

Hotel staff say this time around, the Congolese troops have more unpaid bills than the Ugandan or Rwandan soldiers, mainly because many of them haven't been paid in months themselves.

With supplies from Kinshasa cut off by the war, military cargo flights from the Ugandan capital Kampala have brought in basics like soap, sugar and salt to keep the place running.

Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Democracy's Long Road

2010-07-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

July 17, 2009

By Todd Pitman

LEMDEN, Mauritania (AP) _ At the end of a long road that disappears in a scrub-brush desert where camels trek across orange ribbons of sand, the first freely elected president in Mauritania's history believes he is watching a democratic revolution unfold.

And so, too, does the man who overthrew him.

This Islamic republic straddling the southern edge of the Sahara votes Saturday in a presidential election that will restore civilian rule for the second time in two years.

The vote epitomizes a half-century-old struggle still being waged across Africa against the ever-strong reign of autocratic strongmen. At stake is whether Mauritania can really turn its back on an era of military rule and become a democratic example on a continent where democracy is still struggling, while at the same time taking a hard line against an encroaching al-Qaida presence spreading south from Algeria.

"The military has always believed it has the right to intervene in government," said 72-year-old former president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, who was toppled in August by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz _ a former general who resigned from the military and the junta he led to run in Saturday's poll.

"We're trying to put an end to that. And we're seeing more resistance than ever before," Abdallahi said during an interview at his home in Lemden, the tiny, native village where he has lived since being released from house arrest in November.

Abdallahi's fall made clear the military wields real power, no matter who is president. That reality is casting a long shadow over Saturday's vote, and raises a fundamental concern for whoever wins: what assurance is there that Mauritania's next leader will be able to govern freely without fear he, too, will be toppled if the military isn't content?

"That's the million dollar question," Abdallahi said, sitting barefoot on an ornamental Arabic-style couch in a traditional gold-trimmed flowing white robe.

Last year's coup _ Mauritania's fifth since independence in 1960 _ was met with typical condemnation abroad: the African Union suspended the country from its continental body, and international donors froze aid pledges worth a staggering $2 billion.

But atypical for this desert nation of 3.5 million people: the coup met strong opposition at home. Abdallahi joined a political coalition that forced the junta to dissolve in June in exchange for Abdallahi giving up his claim to the presidency.

As part of the deal, a government of national unity was formed to oversee the ballot, which had previously been set to go ahead without the opposition. Their absence would have given Aziz certain victory, but deprived his win of any legitimacy _ and with it, the prospect of restarting vital aid.

The impending vote amounts to "a choice between despotism and democracy," said journalist Mohamed Fall Ould Oumeir, who works for the independent Tribune newspaper. "People will have to say whether they want a strongman or a true civilian ruler."

In Mauritania _ where many believe strong, forceful personalities govern better than laws _ it could go either way.

Though many African nations have successfully evolved from dictatorships, others are "backsliding," in the words of President Barack Obama. In the last year alone, the continent has seen coups in Guinea and Madagascar, the assassination of Guinea-Bissau's president, and Niger's leader fighting to stay in power past his legal two-term mandate.

Hundreds of international observers will monitor Mauritania's election, and most expect it to be free and fair. Though nine candidates are contesting, only four are considered serious contenders. None is likely to win the 50 percent majority needed to avoid a runoff, and the vote is almost certain to go to a second round Aug. 1.

The most prominent candidate is Aziz, who was vital to engineering the 2005 coup, a transformational and widely praised turning point that ended two decades of harsh dictatorship and opened the way for unprecedented freedoms. As a result, Aziz sees himself as protecting the nation's nascent democracy.

Also running is Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who led the 2005 junta, and Ahmed Ould Daddah, a popular civilian opposition leader who was runner-up in 2007.

All three are so-called white Moors _ Arabs who make up 30 percent of the population but who overwhelmingly dominate the government, the military and business sectors. Black Moors, who are darker-skinned and consider themselves Arab, account for around 40 percent, while black Africans, some of whom speak languages common with southern neighbor Senegal, account for the rest.

Parliament speaker Messaoud Ould Boulkheir _ a black Moor whose parents were slaves _ is also on the ballot. Backed by Abdallahi, he is also thought to have a chance at winning _ another sign Mauritania is changing.

"There has been an awakening within our society," said Cheikh Saad Bouh Kamara, a sociology professor and former human rights leader. "People are fighting for democracy and their rights like never before. People are becoming aware, speaking out. Women's groups, the media, unions, politicians. This is a major change."

Still, many are skeptical.

"They all promise to bring jobs and electricity and feed the poor," said cafe worker Pape Daouda Ba, who will not vote. "But when they are in the chair, they are there for themselves and their people, not for Mauritania."

The post-coup isolation imposed by Western powers has forced Mauritania to look for support from the Arab world. One casualty in doing so: Mauritania severed ties with Israel in the wake of the war in Gaza this year. Mauritania had been only one of three Arab League nations maintaining diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, a stance taken in the 1990s to woo the West.

Washington, for its part, has walked a tightrope: it never recognized the junta, but it needs to keep the country from sliding toward extremism. The U.S. sees Mauritania as a bulwark against growing al-Qaida activity in North Africa, which has spread south of Algeria in recent years. In June, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the shooting death of an American professor in the capital, Nouakchott, the first attack of its kind here.

Abdallahi was criticized for reaching out to Islamists, and many here do not view him as a democratic hero. Aziz says he toppled Abdallahi because he had become an autocrat and was turning the country backward _ cracking down on the media, and assigning senior posts to Islamists and officials linked to the old dictatorial regime. Abdallahi says he was exercising his democratic rights and being inclusive.

The next president will face the profound challenge of developing a nation that ranks 137 out of 177 on the U.N.'s Human Development Index, which measures general well-being. In Abdallahi's village, water only comes from wells and electricity comes only from solar panels and generators.

"Mauritania is still a feudal society with slaves and masters. We're still in the middle ages," said Abdallahi, a gentle, bespectacled economics expert. "But this country is in the midst of an extraordinary revolution ... democracy is taking hold."

Copyright 2009 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Nyiragongo's Shadow

2010-07-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Congo volcano symbol of death and rebirth

April 25, 2010

By Todd Pitman

MOUNT NYIRAGONGO, Congo (AP) - I was startled to see it perched at the lip of the volcano's rocky summit: a small cross marking the spot where one visitor tragically slipped from the crater's edge and plummeted to her death.

Below, the mesmerizing lava lake that drew her here several years ago - an awe-inspiring vision of hell - still gushes bright orange fountains of magma like a bleeding wound in the earth.

Looming ominously over the Eastern Congo city of Goma, Mount Nyiragongo is the ultimate symbol of death in a town it has repeatedly overrun.

But for all the danger, it's also a symbol of rebirth and resilience, not just for residents who've defiantly built homes atop its hardened volcanic flows, but for a nation still struggling to emerge from years of conflict.

In March, the volcano itself became one milestone on that long path: with help from the military, park rangers cleared Rwandan militias from its slopes and reopened the summit for the first time in a year and a half.

Authorities are hoping volcano tourism will provide vital new revenue, and help project a positive new image for a region renowned for violence.

Last month, 69 visitors - mainly Goma-based foreign aid workers - paid $200 each to climb the summit, according to park spokeswoman Samantha Newport.

Blessed with stunning natural diversity, Virunga National Park became the first wildlife park in Africa when it was established in 1925.

It boasts a second active volcano called Nyamuragira, a third of the world's last mountain gorillas, hippos at Lake Edward, elephant herds trundling across golden meadows, even glacial mountain peaks.

As a journalist covering Africa, I have traveled here often over the last decade - usually to cover what the media is criticized for covering too much: bad news.

Eastern Congo, to be sure, has seen its share.

Over the past 15 years alone, it's survived apocalyptic catastrophes - hunger, disease, poverty, plane crashes, fighting, foreign occupation. I once looked out from my hotel balcony in Goma at dawn to see insurgents swarming a hilltop downtown, setting army tents ablaze as machine-gun and rocket fire rang out.

The park has similarly suffered - 95 percent of its hippos, for example, have been wiped out.

Trekking to Nyiragongo's summit never seemed prudent, or even possible.

The volcano's lush slopes have become ideal hideouts for poachers and brutal armed groups, like the Rwandan militias who fled here with millions of refugees after Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Today, they are still terrorizing civilians, and chopping forests to profit from a lucrative and illegal multimillion dollar charcoal trade.

When I heard tourists were actually climbing the summit a few years ago, I was shocked - and wanted to go. But by 2008, the park had closed anew, this time because a Congolese rebel group had battled its way to Goma's outskirts.

Now, clinging to the crater's frigid, 11,384-foot-high rim one recent moonlit night after an arduous, five-hour hike over solidified lava flows, it was my turn to gaze into the abyss.

I was speechless.

"It's a miracle," said our park ranger-guide, gazing into the smoky cone below. "A God-given miracle."
I had to agree.

Sprawling across the floor of the volcano's steaming cone, the lava lake resembles a colossal pie crust, its blackened surface riddled with fiery red zigzagging fissures where magma is blazing through. Its power is evident in the nonstop roar accompanying it, a soundtrack akin to the perpetual rumble of a gargantuan waterfall.

The lake surface is in constant motion, shifting slowly, splitting, sinking, consuming itself, spewing lava in prodigious gurgling fountains - a real-life Hades that's hard to turn away from.

Not far from where I lay hugging the rim, in high wind, the cross planted for the Chinese tourist who died in 2007 was eerily silhouetted against the crater's rugged walls, which flickered faintly red from the boiling lake below.

There are no guard rails at the summit. The cross is a warning not to get too close.

The tourist reportedly climbed onto a small outcropping just under the rim to take a picture despite park guards urging her not to. She lost her balance and plummeted onto another ledge 200 yards below.
Her body was retrieved by U.N. peacekeepers.

"One slip," I thought, backing safely away from the edge before gaining the courage to stand up.

It's hard to be here and not ponder, for a moment, your own mortality.

Nyiragongo straddles a giant fault line where the earth's crust is literally breaking apart. When eruptions occur, the lava lake typically drains, sending magma pouring through a network of fissures, some of which run underneath Goma.

The provincial capital of 600,000, to state the obvious, is doomed.
Which is why it's hard, at least for a visitor, to understand why people live near active volcanoes at all.

Especially this one.

Nyiragongo's lava is notoriously fluid: it can move at speeds up to 60 miles (95 kilometers) per hour downhill, with little warning.

And yet Goma, just nine miles to the south, is growing.

The last eruption in 2002 sent fiery ribbons streaming though downtown, killing nearly 150 people and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee.

Residents not only rebuilt in the aftermath, but dramatically expanded - new shops, new homes, a hotel called Lavastone, a disco called Magma. Some have brazenly built houses atop the last hardened flows - the land is cheaper - using the lava rocks themselves as walls, fences and foundations.

Gregoire Bizige, a 46-year-old father of eight, waited years for one 2-meter flow to stop steaming. When it finally did, he cleared the rock away and swiftly pitched a house upon it.

The devastation, ironically, also gave him precious work in a world where unemployment is rampant. Bizige and his family make a living breaking the lava field apart, selling the stones to passing construction crews.

It's enough, he said, to feed his kids and send them to school. But not enough to move his family away.

"We thank God every day for today," Bizige told me, trying to explain the city's muted acceptance of the volcano it must live with. "Because tomorrow, we know it will erupt again."

Guinea's Choice

2010-07-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

June 27, 2010

Guinea holds first free elections since independence

By Todd Pitman

CONAKRY, Guinea (AP) _ They've voted before _ but never freely, and never fairly.

On Sunday, junta-ruled Guinea cast ballots for a new president in the first democratic election this West African nation has ever known. The poll caps an odyssey of repression and dictatorship spanning a half century that climaxed with a year of military rule so terrifying, people carved hiding places in their attics to avoid their own rampaging army.
It also breathes life into the hope _ however tenuous _ that a new generation of leaders may finally bring substantive change to a corruption-riddled country whose 10 million inhabitants rank among Africa's poorest despite sitting atop billions of dollars of mineral wealth.

"We have voted and we are FREE!" one man with tears in his eyes screamed at a red-bereted presidential guard outside the villa housing Gen. Sekouba Konate _ the junta chief who steered Guinea toward elections after his predecessor was shot in the head and nearly killed in December.

"The military is now in their place and we are in ours. We are real citizens! We are free! Do you understand?" the man said, wagging his index finger indignantly in the elite guard's face and proudly waving a voter registration card.

Sitting calmly on a motorcycle, the soldier replied quietly and nodded.

Just a few months ago _ during the yearlong reign of exiled coup leader Capt. Moussa "Dadis" Camara _ such a scene would have been hard to imagine. Had it occurred at all, a civilian so brazen would have likely have been brutally beaten and possibly executed.

Ruled as a one-party state for decades after independence from France in 1958, Guinea suffered its first coup in 1984 and spent 32 years under late strongman Lansana Conte. When he passed away in December 2008, Camara stepped into take his place _ and turned out to be little better.

Last September, Guinea hit rock bottom when the military sealed off a Conakry stadium where thousands of protesters had rallied to insist Camara step down. In broad daylight, security forces burst through the gates and machine-gunned unarmed crowds, slaughtering more than 150 people, leaving bodies strewn across the field and draped over walls. They also wounded more than 1,000 and gang-raped women, some with rifle butts and bayonets.

The tragedy marked a new low in Guinea's history, but it also set the stage for unprecedented change. A United Nations investigation into the killings fueled tensions within the junta over who would take the blame, prompting an assasination attempt against Camara Dec. 3 by his presidential guard chief, who has since disappeared.

Guinea has come a long way since.

After a peace deal neutralized Camara in Burkina Faso in January, Konate appointed a civilian prime minister and a transitional governing council comprised of junta opponents. He marginalized Camara loyalists and imposed discipline on an army that had become accustomed to looting at will, breaking into private homes at night and hijacking even diplomatic vehicles.

Many of those who participated in the September protests are now helping run the country, or on the verge of doing so. Menacing soldiers have largely disappeared from the streets. And the U.S. is funding foreign security experts to retrain a new presidential guard _ Human Rights Watch says the majority of troops who carried out the stadium massacre were members of the last one.

On Saturday, Konate summoned presidential hopefuls to the empty palace they hope to occupy and warned they must help avert violence and prevent the nation from backsliding into its dark past.

"We can no longer continue to live like we are in a jungle, as if we are in a state without authority," he said. "Too many Guineans have perished and suffered."

"Starting from now, it's up to you to make it happen," he said. The choice, he added, is between "peace, freedom and democracy, or chaos and instability."

Fixing Guinea will not be easy. With one of the largest reserves of bauxite in the world, as well as gold, diamonds and iron ore, the country should be rich. But it has been horribly governed _ so much so that some neighborhoods in the squalid capital have been without water and electricity not for weeks or months, but years.

Heaps of stinking garbage fill cramped streets whose shantytown sidewalks are used to eat, wash and bathe. Guinea ranks 170 out of 182 nations on the U.N.'s Human Development Index, which measures general well-being. Transparency International puts it at 174 of 180 nations in terms of perceived corruption.

Conte, the late dictator, organized ballots in 1993, 1998 and 2003 _ but they were all scams, a fact now acknowledged even by the military elite that secured them.

"In those elections, we all knew what the outcome would be before the vote," said Thierno Balde, who runs a local think tank that advocates democracy. "This time, nobody knows who will win. That's a very new thing for us."

Konate has won praise for barring himself, all members of the junta, and the transitional government, from running in the latest poll.

Among the top contenders are two ex-premiers, Cellou Dalein Diallo and Sidya Toure, and a longtime government opponent, Alpha Conde.

If no candidate wins a simple majority, a runoff between the top two finishers is due July 18.

Analysts say violence could break out if any of the losers fail to accept the results or contest them peacefully. Though campaigning was mostly smooth, a spate of clashes among party rivals Thursday left at least four dead and dozens injured north of Conakry.

Thousands of local and foreign observers are monitoring the vote. The U.S. Embassy said it had "gone extraordinarily well" given the short time it had been arranged in. The European Union called the ballot "encouraging" so far and praised the military for staying out of it. Because some polling stations opened late and lines were long with apparently record turnout, the electoral commission late Sunday extended voting for several hours.

Among the millions who traveled by bicycle, foot and wheelchair to vote was Ouma Kankou Diallo, a 39-year-old teacher.

"A lot of people said this would never happen," she said after slipping her ballot into a clear plastic urn at a seaside primary school within sight of the military barracks where Camara was shot. "But it has happened and we will forever be grateful. For us, this is a kind of dream."

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

The Forest People

2010-07-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

July 3, 2010

Deep in Congo's Ituri Rainforest, growing bushmeat trade threatens a traditional way of life

Audio Slideshow: Net-Hunters of the Ituri Rainforest

By Todd Pitman

THE ITURI FOREST, Congo (AP) – They emerge from the stillness of the rainforest like a lost tribe of prehistoric warriors forgotten by time — a barefoot band of Mbuti Pygmies wielding iron-tipped spears.

The men come first, cloaked head to toe in coiled hunting nets shaved from the liana vine.

Then the women, lugging hand-woven baskets filled with the same bloodstained antelope their ancestors survived on for thousands of years.

And waiting anxiously in the middle of their smoke-filled hunting camp: a horde of village traders who've come to buy as much bushmeat as the Mbuti can bring.

Time has long stood still in the innermost reaches of northeast Congo's Ituri Forest — a remote and crepuscular world without electricity or cell phones that's so isolated, the Pygmies living here have never heard of Barack Obama or the Internet or the war in Afghanistan.

But the future is coming, on a tidal wave of demand for game meat that's pushing an army of tall Bantu traders ever deeper into Africa's primordial vine-slung jungles.

It's a demand so voracious, experts warn it could drive some of Africa's last hunter-gatherers to eradicate the very wildlife that sustains them, and with it, their own forest-dwelling existence.

Over the last few decades, that existence has been vanishing at astonishing rates across the continent, as forests are ripped apart amid soaring population growth and legions of Pygmies are forced into settled lives on the outskirts of society.

One place — Congo's Okapi Wildlife Reserve — was supposed to be a bulwark against the onslaught, a place where commercial hunting is banned.

But an Associated Press team that hiked two days to join one Pygmy band found the thriving bushmeat trade penetrating even into the protected zone.

Here — where water is still scooped from glassy streams and drunk pure from curled leaf cups, where Pygmies still scamper up treetops to savor the golden delight of raw honeycomb — lies a frontline where this continent's future is slowly erasing its ancient past, one antelope at a time.

___

From the window of a plane, Central Africa is an infinite ocean of treetops that unfolds as far as the eye can see, from the steamy jungles of Gabon on the continent's western coast to the rolling hills of Rwanda in the east.

This is the world's second-largest rainforest, home to Africa's estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Pygmies, according to Survival International, an organization which monitors their plight.

Every year, it grows smaller.

According to the United Nations, Africa is losing 10 million acres (4 million hectares) of trees annually — an area the size of Switzerland — because of uncontrolled logging, mining and mass waves of migrants desperate for land.

The fundamental problem: Congo's population — 70 million people and counting — is about three times what it was three decades ago.

By 2020, it could reach 120 million. And it needs to eat.
Bushmeat — animals like monkeys and especially antelope — has been a staple of the African diet for millennia.

But it has never been consumed as much as now: at least 1 million metric tons (1.1 million tons) each year in the Congo basin alone, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Other estimates put the figure at five times that.

The result: the forests still standing are growing emptier by the day.

Some have suffered 90 percent drops in wildlife, stripped so bare, hunters have been reduced to eating their own hunting dogs, says John Hart, an American conservationist who first lived among the Mbuti in the 1970s.

The shortage of game elsewhere is part of what makes the Okapi Reserve so valuable — and so attractive to traders looking for bushmeat.

Carved out of a pristine swath of the Ituri Forest in 1992, it is unique among most wildlife parks in Africa because the people living inside it — 20,000 Pygmies and Bantus — were not kicked out and were allowed to keep hunting non-endangered species for subsistence.

Only the Pygmies do so with masterful efficiency, however, giving them a near monopoly on selling off the reserve's dwindling fauna.

___

Zaire Njikali, an elderly Pygmy clan leader, is kneeling bare-chested in silence, staring into the kaleidoscopic wall of forest beyond.

To his rear, 15 men have carefully laid a waist-high net in a mile-long (kilometer-long) arc through the shrubbery.

To his front, a surreal wall of sound is approaching: a polyphonic deluge of multiplying tubular intonations that sound a bit like water dripping from a faucet.

Thenoise is coming from the female hunters in his clan, who are driving animals toward the net, where they'll get tangled, tackled and speared.

Nets are cast like this almost every hour for a working day. And on a good one, Njikali's clan will return to camp with as many as 15 antelope, or more.

There, traders buy the meat, preserving it on smoking racks until they can ship it out of the forest where it's consumed as a delicacy.

The exchange between Bantus and Pygmies is nothing new — Pygmies have always been dependent on cultivated farm foods and split their time between camps both in the forest or near villages outside it — but the trade has changed in fundamental ways over time.

When Njikali was a boy, Bantu traders never stayed overnight in his clan's camps. Their numbers have risen steadily over time, though, and today they are a permanent presence. Besides the 20 Pygmy couples and a smattering of children, the AP counted 14 traders — nearly a quarter of Njikali's camp.

Decades ago, the Mbuti typically sold about half the meat they captured; now they sell nearly every carcass, saving only the prized entrails and heads for themselves.

The hunt, in essence, has devolved into an all-out commercial endeavor, staged not for subsistence, but to feed growing regional markets.

And the impact is clear.

Surveys conducted within the Okapi for the Wildlife Conservation Society between 1995 and 2006 showed major drops in all populations of antelope, the most commonly hunted bushmeat animal.

The number of blue duikers dropped 26 percent; larger red duikers 42 percent; the even larger yellow-backed duikers 59 percent.

Those percentages have almost certainly grown since Chinese road crews refurbished the dirt highway that slices through the reserve a couple of years ago.

Traffic jumped from a couple of trucks per month to more than 1,000, leading to "a huge increase in the illegal bushmeat trade," says Conrad Aveling, a British environmental consultant who has worked sporadically in Congo for decades.

The problem, says Aveling: "the forest just doesn't produce enough to meet the demand."

And by depleting their most precious resource for short-term gain, he says, the Pygmies "are sawing off the branch on which they're sitting."

Longtime Congo expert Terese Hart put it this way: "They're overexploiting the forest in a way that's making their own way of living impossible."

But Pygmies welcome traders with open arms, because their presence enables the Pygmies to stay longer in the forest without having to return to the village for necessities — rice, cassava flour, plantains, salt.

Traders also sell items that slowly erode culture and tradition: manioc wine, trinkets, Chinese watches, flowery kanga wraps, cassette radios blaring Congolese music, and used clothes, which long ago replaced bark loincloths and animal skins.

A trader, meanwhile, can buy a blue duiker for five dollars and sell it outside the reserve for 15, or less by simply holding it up by the road for sale. With the profit, a father can send his kids to school, feed his family.

Combating the trade isn't easy. The 5,400 square mile (14,000 square kilometer) reserve has just 90 rangers and guards — many of whose relatives are trading bushmeat themselves. People in the region have few economic options, apart from manual labor in sun-blasted fields, says game warden James Mapilanga.

Reserve authorities are trying to educate people nevertheless, Mapilanga says, to tell the them: "'Your ancestors hunted game. You should be able to hunt game forever. But if wildlife is over-hunted, it's going to disappear.'"

___

The word Pygmy is derived from the Greek word Pygmaios, meaning literally, the distance from the elbow to the knuckle.

In some countries it is considered pejorative; but there is no other term that adequately describes the disparate groups scattered in pockets across equatorial Africa whose adult males are among the shortest on earth — on average 4 feet 11 inches (150 centimeters) tall.

Their first known mention in recorded history was cast in a tombstone letter around 2300 B.C. by an Egyptian explorer who claimed he'd discovered a race of "dancing dwarfs."

Aristotle speculated they were intermediaries between apes and humans.

In 1904, one Pygmy was infamously put on display at the World's Fair in St. Louis, then later at the Bronx Zoo.

And during Congo's 1998-2002 war, armed rebels-turned-cannibals hunted Pygmies "as though they were game animals," according to one victims' representative.

Today, they often suffer discrimination from Bantus, who typically see their shorter brethren as primitive, ignorant and inferior.

Over the last generation, their lives have changed dramatically.

Travel the dirt highway east from the Okapi, and the abundant verdure quickly fades away.

One stretch, John Hart says, used to be a Pygmy heartland.

But today, with no forest, no animals, "the Pygmies have been marginalized in little slums on the edge of towns, working as day laborers."

Every day, more Pygmies attend Bantu-dominated primary schools in villages outside the forest, more are born in hospitals instead of huts.

And more work on plantations — harvesting crops, clearing land, willingly cutting down their own forests for cash.

___

After weeks of hunting in the same spot, the game has notably thinned, and Njikali's clan moves on.

They assemble their belongings in backpacks made of sticks and vines and set fire to the traders' meat-smoking racks so, Njikali says, "sorcerers don't use them to roast human flesh."

On a two-hour trek, they drop to their knees to gather berries and yank wild mushrooms from the forest floor.

On arrival, the women construct tropical igloos, weaving fantastically sized waterproof leaves — which double as cups, plates, lunch-bags and umbrellas — through skeleton domes of arched sticks.

The men head out for an afternoon hunt, netting fish from a stream, returning with four blue duikers tied and slung from their shoulders like purses.

By dusk, amid wafts of marijuana smoke — the Pygmies are frequent tokers — the band boasts food, shelter, and tiny campfires outside every hut. (The Mbuti do not use matches; instead, they keep small log embers burning eternally, like Olympic Torch flames).

By morning, their children are swinging on a newly built jungle playground of dangling vines — until one elder abruptly pulls the plug.

The long-awaited honey season is approaching, he warns, and all the noise is disturbing the bees.

___

The sun has set, and Njikali is standing on the orange ribbon of tree-lined road that cuts through the Okapi.

Somewhere at the other end of the rural highway, millions of Africans are scuttling to day jobs in suits, tapping out e-mails on smartphones, shuttling up and down elevators in the bowels of electrified skyscrapers.

Here, though, there is only silence and stillness and the mind-numbing chorus of the cicadas.

The genteel clan leader does not want to talk about the change sweeping the continent, or the dangers of over-hunting. "The forest will always be there," he says. "For the forest to disappear, for the animals to disappear, the world would have to end first."

Njikali had promised the rest of his hunting band he would rejoin them deep in the forest days ago. But as the last rays of light leak through the trees, he announces he's not going back tomorrow, either.

The night is young, and Njikali is sporting a pair of rumpled brown moccasins on his no longer bare feet, faded jeans on his hips, a dark blue wind-breaker on his back (teen size, 14).

He opens a brown women's faux-leather purse that's slung over his shoulder and pulls out a small, empty bottle of cheap alcohol — a gesture intended to highlight his need for another.

Wooden cane in hand, he walks away — smile heavy with drink — down the road toward one of his clan's permanent camps near the village.

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Balancing Arms

2010-02-26T13:18:00.000-08:00

Feb. 23, 2010

By Todd Pitman

NIAMEY, Niger (AP) - It's politics, upside down.

The elected president of a uranium-rich nation morphs into a despot and refuses to relinquish power, prompting the army to stage a popular coup with guns blazing in the name of democracy.

Most governments check executive excesses through sister branches - the legislature, the judiciary. In Niger, the military has assumed the bizarre yet vital role of safeguarding democratic institutions by force - most recently by blowing a hole through the front gate of the presidential palace last week and taking hostage an entire government.

The soldiers who overthrew Mamadou Tandja are vowing to restore civilian rule, a claim that's often proved hollow among Africa's myriad juntas. The difference in Niger, though, is profound: Most people here actually believe them.

"For democracy activists like us, it's difficult to applaud a coup d'etat," said Marou Amadou, a leading human rights worker who was jailed for a month and beaten by security forces during Tandja's regime. "But this had to happen and we are overjoyed. There was no other way."

Though officially condemned by governments worldwide, Tandja's ouster has been widely praised at home: by unions, human rights groups, civil society leaders, local media. The trust is so great, in fact, that the director of one widely respected independent Niamey newspaper was working protocol for the junta this week.

On Tuesday, the junta named one-time Information Minister Mahamadou Dandah as civilian prime minister to lead the West African nation's transitional government until elections are held.

Tandja ascended to power a decade ago through the ballot box and won elections again five years later. But in the twilight of his final term, he transformed his Islamic nation into a dictatorship, abolishing parliament and the nation's highest court and imposing rule by decree.

In a final blow last August, he forced through a controversial referendum that cast aside a constitutionally protected ban on term limits. A new constitution, which critics say was illegal, granted him three more years in power and the chance to run for president as many times as he wanted.

Tandja initially succeeded because, Amadou said, "he knew most our people fall into one of three categories. They are either illiterate, corrupt or afraid."

The nation of 15 million on the Sahara's southern edge has the dubious honor of being last among 182 nations on the U.N.'s Human Development Index, which ranks general well-being. It is regularly battered by drought and food shortages, and its lawless northern deserts have been the scene of repeated insurgencies, and more recently, kidnappings linked to al-Qaida terrorists.

After the referendum, a regional West African economic bloc suspended Niger from its ranks. The United States cut non-humanitarian aid. Europe also froze vital support to a country whose budget is 40 percent dependent on donors.

Amid the isolation, the putschists had little to lose. And, critics say, much to gain: Oil deposits have recently been discovered and there are plans to build the world's biggest uranium mine.

"They present themselves as saviors of democracy, but are they?" asked Ali Sabo, a top member of Tandja's ousted political party. "Who's to say they won't loot our country as other military regimes have done?"
The coup, he said, simply proves the army "is still a powerful political force that can intervene at any moment with arms."

One reason the educated public has placed so much trust in the military is because it has a track record. Several of the top putschists engineered a similar coup in 1999, and went on to oversee free elections the same year that set the stage for a decade of democratic peace.

On Sunday, a top junta leader, Col. Djibrilla Hima Hamidou, vowed that this time, the coup leaders will "do the same thing."

If they do, it could show the armed forces in Niger at least, have evolved from an era in Africa when a military takeover inevitably meant the dawn of dictatorship.

"Our soldiers know the era of military regimes is over," said Mohamed Bazoum, a spokesman for Niger's main opposition party. "There is always the risk they will try to stay in power, but we think the risk is minimal. We have faith in them to do the right thing."

Transparency International's Aissata Bagnan Fall said the junta appeared comprised of a new generation of soldiers better educated than their predecessors, some of whom could not read or write.

Today, most officers have university degrees and many been trained abroad. They've studied human rights. Some, like coup leader Maj. Salou Djibou, have taken part in peacekeeping missions in Congo and Ivory Coast, giving them a firsthand look at how conflict can tear nations apart.

"They have laptops and access to the Internet," Fall said. "They are aware of how they are perceived and that affects how they act."

Still, Fall said the junta should be treated with great caution, because "you can only truly know a man when he is given money and power, and you see what he does with it."

In West Africa alone, there are plenty of worrying examples.

A military junta in Mauritania organized a widely praised ballot in 2007, but a year later overthrew the man who won. Another junta in Guinea also promised swift elections after seizing power in 2008. Its chief went on to terrorize the nation and brought it to the brink of civil war before he was shot in the head and exiled.

There have been modest success stories. After Guinea-Bissau's president was murdered last year by troops in his home, the military stood aside and let the democratic succession take its course. And despite the recent turmoil in Guinea, the army general who inherited control has vowed elections and appointed an opposition leader prime minister for the first time in the country's history.

Fall said one risk in Niger was time: "the longer the military stays in control, the harder it will be for them leave. The lure of power is great, which is "why we want the transition period to be as short as possible," she said.

The junta has set no timetable for elections but says there will eventually be a referendum on a new constitution adopted by national consensus.

Some residents go so far as saying they don't even want a return to civilian rule.

"We've tried Western-style democracy, and it didn't work," said Amadou Madi, a 27-year-old electrician. "Elections brought us dictatorship and corruption. What we need is a strong military to lay down the law."

Niger: Once-taboo topic of hunger spoken again

2010-02-26T13:09:00.000-08:00

February 26, 2010

By Todd Pitman

NIAMEY, Niger (AP) - They are simple words humanitarian workers in Africa use often but dared not speak in this impoverished nation: hunger, starvation.

And definitely not famine.

For years, President Mamadou Tandja denied there was any food crisis in Niger, even when images were broadcast of skeletal children too weak to brush away flies. Now that the military has ousted Tandja, aid agencies are speaking out, with good reason: The country is facing its worst food shortage in years.
"A window has finally opened and we need to take advantage of it," said Anne Boher, Niger spokeswoman for the U.N. Children's Fund.

With food supplies rapidly dwindling, humanitarian agencies must prepare and mobilize funds, she said. "And to do that, we need to talk about what's really happening. It's urgent that we act now."

Nearly half of Niger's 15 million people are facing food shortages this year because poor rainfall has thinned harvests, according to a leaked government report that said nearly 3 million of those people are expected to face "extreme" shortfalls.

The U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which monitors food security, also predicts there will be "a serious food security emergency" in Niger this year. The number of malnourished children being admitted to feeding centers was 60 percent greater in January than the previous year, the group said. UNICEF is mobilizing help to at least 200,000 severely malnourished children alone.

Five years ago, Niger faced a similar crisis after crops were devastated first by locusts, then by drought, leaving a third of the country facing starvation. Foreign governments and aid groups rushed in food, although the U.N. said the crisis did not reach famine proportions.

Media coverage of the episode enraged Tandja, who lashed out at humanitarian agencies and opposition parties for allegedly fabricating "false propaganda" for political and economic gain. Several aid groups were expelled.

Since then, humanitarian workers here have tiptoed around discussions with government officials on the sensitive topics of food and nutrition, even when they concerned children.

"We weren't able to say there wasn't enough food," Boher told The Associated Press. "You couldn't talk about a 'food crisis' because there wasn't supposed to be one. The word 'malnutrition'" was difficult to speak, but possible. Some ministers said it, but they took risks to do so."

Just days before the Feb. 18 coup, another U.N. employee recounted a regional governor recoiling in anger when asked about malnutrition. "He said, 'We have a good relationship' - between the government and the humanitarian community - 'why are you trying to spoil it?'" the employee said. She spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Food has always been a deeply political topic in Niger, one of Africa's poorest nations. Perched on the southern edge of the Sahara, it has suffered cyclical drought for centuries, a phenomenon exacerbated by exploding population growth. Millions of people are chronically malnourished.

Niger's first post-independence coup came amid another food crisis in 1974, and "the soldiers who took power justified it by saying the president at the time could not feed the population," said journalist Abdoulaye Tiemogo, who runs the weekly independent, Le Canard Dechaine, French for "Wild Duck."

"That's why they're still afraid of words like 'famine,'" said Tiemogo, who spent three months in prison and seven in exile for publishing articles critical of Tandja.

During the 2005 crisis, Tandja's government felt humiliated, Boher said. "They thought people were trying to make it look like it was their fault that children were dying."

And "if you are unable to feed the population, as president, you are going to be at risk," Boher said. "Malnutrition has political implications. This is why Tandja wanted to deny there was a problem."

A government report in December on the country's latest food crisis may have only come to light because Tiemogo obtained a leaked copy. When his paper ran the story, the government suspended his press card and told him they had begun legal proceedings to shut his weekly down.

The failure to publish accurate statistics can have "dramatic consequences," Tiemogo said. "If you don't know what's really going on, you can't react to it, and it's the population that suffers. People die."

The International Federation of the Red Cross says many households have already exhausted food stocks, and within a few weeks will be unable to provide for themselves.

"We must act without delay to prevent a deterioration of the food situation, and pre-empt what will otherwise be disastrous consequences," said Angelika Kessler, a food expert for the IFRC in Dakar, Senegal.

One unanswered question is whether Niger's new junta will be as sensitive to the issue as Tandja's regime has been.

So far, the soldiers in charge are overwhelmed with the burden of governing and convincing diplomats - none of which are calling for Tandja's return - that the coup was a good thing.

The impending food emergency has yet to be addressed.

A Junta's Democracy

2010-02-21T15:29:00.001-08:00

Aug. 9, 2008

Mauritania junta's promise of democracy in doubt

By Todd Pitman

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania (AP) _ The small clique of army generals who masterminded Mauritania's latest coup say all the right things: they want to end authoritarianism, they want elections, they want real democracy.

Problem is, that's exactly what they said after their last putsch three years ago, when they ended a 21-year dictatorship and set the stage for the first free ballot in the Islamic nation's history.

The 2007 vote transferred power to a civilian president, culminating an extraordinary era of optimism in Africa's newest oil producer. But today, the man who won is under house arrest and the new junta's familiar promises are ringing hollow.

Facing international condemnation, the generals' biggest challenge this time may simply be getting the world and a skeptical public to believe them.

That will be vital to assuring foreign investors and securing aid programs. The U.S. had already cut aid programs and the European Union has threatened to.

The U.S. sees Mauritania as a bulwark against the encroachment southward of al-Qaida-linked militants in North Africa. It had sent dozens of troops to train Mauritania's military in its far northern deserts, but it suspended those programs in response to the coup.

The coup raises questions not just about the veracity of the junta's claim they acted to protect the democratic institutions they established in 2005. Another uncertainty is whether the country's next elected leader will have any real autonomy or power if a new ballot is held.

"They talk of democracy, but they just want their hands on the power," 30-year-old Oumar Sow said of the army's top brass. He spoke Friday after attending a demonstration broken up by baton-wielding riot police who chased dozens of protesters holding the image of ousted President Sidi Cheikh Ould Abdallahi off a street in the capital Nouakchott.

If Wednesday's bloodless coup made anything crystal clear, it was this: the army is in control, democracy or no.

That's par for the course in Mauritania, a country of just 3 million people on the southern edge of the Sahara desert that bridges the Arab world with sub-Saharan Africa. The coup was the country's fifth since independence in 1960, and many more have failed.

Most Mauritanians seemed unfazed by the takeover.

Though their president and prime minister have not been heard of since being detained by soldiers last week, laid-back shoppers nipped in and out of grocery stores Saturday as usual. They devoured shish-kebabs at sun-blasted sidewalk cafes. And battered old Mercedes plied through traffic-snarled sandswept streets _ some passing a jeep mounted with an anti-aircraft gun standing guard outside the junta-controlled state radio station.

As one party held a rally Friday calling for Abdallahi to be reinstated, rivals drove by with newly printed posters showing junta leader Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz in military garb, honking horns in a bid to drown the rally out. It looked startlingly like a scene from the electoral campaign.

There has been no curfew, no big clamp down, no massive military presence in the streets. Indeed, driving around Nouakchott, its hard to tell there was even a coup at all.

But the fact there was does not bode well for a country _ or a continent _ trying to escape the vestiges of military dictatorships that stretch back decades. Some of the worst were in Nigeria, where juntas stayed in power for years, ruling police states low on human rights and high on theft of state treasuries.

Led by Aziz, Mauritania's junta seems altogether different, and well aware that military rule cannot last long. One of their first statements promised democratic elections "as soon as possible." A lawmaker supporting them suggested the transition might last a mere six months.

The putschists actually have a good track record. When Aziz engineered the last coup in 2005, his junta promised elections in 24 months and held them in 19 to widespread praise. It fostered a free press and guaranteed unprecedented personal freedoms.

Since then, critics say Abdallahi had become increasingly dictatorial and ignored the officers who backed his electoral win.

Exercising his constitutional right, Abdallahi shuffled his Cabinet several times, but in June parliament passed a vote of no confidence. Lawmakers demanded an investigation into allegations of corruption and misappropriation of public funds by his wife, and Abdallahi threatened to dissolve the legislature if the inquiry went forward.

Increasingly isolated, he tried to build alliances with Islamist politicians and those who had served in the regime of former dictator Maaouya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya, who was overthrown in 2005's wildly popular coup.

When Abdallahi named Taya loyalists to the Cabinet last month, 49 legislators quit the president's own party in protest.

Abdallahi's actions were all constitutionally sound, and supporters credit him with helping bring home thousands of refugees from Senegal who fled decades before. Under his rule, parliament passed laws imposing harsh jail terms for the scourge of slavery.

His error was that he thought Mauritania's fragile new laws were actually strong enough to protect him.

The trigger came Wednesday when he fired the country's top four military officers _ including Aziz, who had given him the backing he needed to win the election. Though legal, it was a fatal miscalculation.

An hour later, Abdallahi was toppled.

But why didn't his critics, particularly those in the military, wait for the next round of elections in 2012? The goal of the junta's own democratic set up was ostensibly that power could only change hands at the ballot box.

"The wait-factor is a luxury we don't have," said Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, a Foreign Ministry official who is a member of Aziz's extended family.

"It's regrettable this had to happen," said Mohamedou, who directed a Harvard University program on conflict research until returning home this year. "But we couldn't let dictatorship return under the guise of democracy."

At stake are potentially lucrative offshore oil reserves discovered in 2006 and extensive iron ore deposits under the sand.

Also, Mauritania is only one of three Arab League countries to recognize Israel, though that policy is almost certain to remain unchanged.

The country was wracked by a series of attacks this year and last blamed on Islamic militants. The slaughter of four French tourists on Christmas Eve prompted organizers of the famous Dakar Rally to call off the cross-continental road-race this year _ a severe economic blow.

Sow, the protester, said the coup set a dangerous precedent.

"We didn't really like Abdallahi, but he was democratically elected," he said. "What's the point of having a constitution if he can be forced out like that?"
___

Associated Press West Africa Bureau Chief Todd Pitman has covered the region for more than a decade.

West Africa's Last Giraffes

2009-12-24T02:12:00.000-08:00

Hovering on extinction's edge, West Africa's last giraffes make a surprising comeback

Nov. 7, 2009

By Todd Pitman

KOURE, Niger (AP) _ A crisp African dawn is breaking overhead, and Zibo Mounkaila is on the back of a pickup truck bounding across a sparse landscape of rocky orange soil.

The tallest animals on earth are here, the guide says, somewhere amid the scant green bush on one side, and the thatched dome villages on the other.

They're here, but by all accounts, they shouldn't be.

A hundred years ago, West Africa's last giraffes numbered in the thousands and their habitat stretched from Senegal's Atlantic Ocean coast to Chad, in the heart of the continent. By the dawn of the 21st century, their world had shrunk to a tiny zone southeast of the capital, Niamey, stretching barely 150 miles (240 kilometers) long.

The numbers of the Western subspecies dwindled so low that in 1996, they numbered a mere 50.

Instead of disappearing as many feared, though, the giraffes have bounced miraculously back from the brink of extinction, swelling to more than 200 today.

It's an unlikely boon experts credit to a combination of concerned conservationists, a government keen for revenue, and a rare harmony with villagers who have accepted their presence _ for now.

___

There are nine subspecies of giraffes in Africa, each distinguished by geographic location and the color, pattern and shape of their spotted coats.

The animals in Niger are known as Giraffa camelopardalis peralta, the most endangered subspecies in Africa. They have large orange-brown spots that fade into pale white legs.

Ten years ago, an estimated 140,000 giraffes inhabited Africa, according to Julian Fennessy, a Nairobi, Kenya-based conservation expert. Today, giraffes number less than 100,000, devastated by poaching, war, advancing deserts and exploding human populations that have destroyed and fragmented their habitats. Around half the giraffes live outside game parks in the wild, where they are more difficult to monitor and protect, Fennessy said.

Giraffe hunting is prohibited in many countries. And some, like Kenya, have taken giraffe meat off the menu of tourist restaurants that once served them up on huge skewers. Even so, Fennessy said the plight of giraffes has largely been overlooked in conservation circles.

"We're trying to increase awareness, educate people, help governments put conservation practices in place," said Fennessy, who founded the Giraffe Conservation Foundation to draw attention to the animals' plight. "If we don't, giraffe numbers are going to continue to drop."

___

The first time the trucks came for them in Koure was more than a decade ago, during the reign of an army colonel who seized power in a 1996 coup.

Col. Ibrahim Bare Mainassara was adamant they would make a good gift for the president of neighboring Burkina Faso and he ordered several captured, said Omer Kodjo Dovi of the Niamey-based Association to Safeguard the Giraffes of Niger.

But "the giraffes went into a panic," Dovi said. "They couldn't outrun the trucks."

The animals weigh up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) and can run at speeds up to 35 miles per hour (55 kilometers per hour). But if they fall, they can have difficulty getting up and die.

Dovi said five were captured. Three died on the spot; two were believed shipped to Burkina Faso. Nobody knows if they ever made it.

By 1998, Niger's government _ pressed by conservation groups _ began to realize the herds were about to disappear forever.

Authorities drafted new laws banning hunting and poaching. Killing a giraffe became punishable by five-year jail terms and fines amounting to hundreds of times the yearly income of farmers.

The changes had a startling effect: by 2004, the herds had nearly doubled in size.

The government "realized they had an invaluable biological and tourism resource: the last population left in West Africa," said Jean-Patrick Suraud, a French scientist with the Association to Safeguard the Giraffes of Niger.

In 2004, though, the trucks came again _ this time on a mission for President Mamadou Tandja, who ordered a pair captured for the dictator of neighboring Togo.

Four vehicles barreled down the two-lane highway toward the giraffe zone. Inside them were Togolese soldiers, government forestry rangers and three local guides, according to the independent local newspaper Le Republicain, which reported the incident and published photographs.

"They did it like cowboys," said Suraud, who began working in Niger in 2005. "These are big animals, fragile. They can easily die of stress."

The giraffes were tied up, blindfolded, tranquilized and hauled onto the back of open-back trucks bound for the Togo border.

They died en route.

___

In Africa, giraffe skin is used for drums, watertight bowls, even shoes. Their bones are employed as grinders and some believe they can help bring rain. Mounkaila, the guide, said some villagers believe the hair on giraffe coats can induce fertility.

The villagers living around Koure, though, think giraffes are mostly useless, Suraud said. They aren't domesticated, and they can't be hunted for food. So the Association to Safeguard the Giraffes of Niger tries to teach people it's in their interest to keep them around.

"We tell them, 'if you are pro-giraffe, we can support you, give you loans,'" Suraud said. "But there is a quid pro quo. 'We also want you to stop chopping down their bushes and plant trees.'"

With 10 staff and help from private European zoos and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, the Giraffe Association has built wells, planted trees and educated guides like Mounkaila who make a living escorting visitors through "the giraffe zone" _ the fenceless region the animals trek through.

Niger's herds bring in a modest amount of tourist money for the government, too, paid in small sums through $10 fees distributed partly to the local district.

The Giraffe Association has focused especially on loans.

One of the beneficiaries, a 55-year-old Adiza Yamba, bought a small lamb for $50. The mother of eight fed it, then sold it for twice the price after it grew, paying back the money and pocketing the profit _ a huge amount in one of the world's poorest countries.

"We don't mind them," Yamba said, echoing the stated view of most farmers. "Sometimes they try to eat the beans or mangos from our fields, but they never bother us."

Truer sentiments, perhaps, were evident last year when a pair of giraffes was killed by a truck as they crossed the highway: villagers swiftly moved in and divvied up huge chunks of red meat from the roadkill.

___

Since 1996, Niger's giraffe population has expanded by 12 percent per year _ three times their average growth rate on the rest of the continent, Suraud said.

One reason: they face no natural predators. Poachers around Koure long ago wiped out the region's lions and leopards _ which can claim 50 to 70 percent of young giraffes before they reach their first year.

The giraffes had also stumbled upon a peaceful region with enough food to sustain them, and a population that mostly left them alone. Today, they crisscross the land in harmony with turbaned nomads in worn flip-flops shepherding camels and sheep.

Drawn to freshly growing vegetation that sprouts during the rainy season, the giraffes can be seen in herds of 10 or 15, wrapping 18-inch black tongues (45-centimeter black tongues) around thorny acacia trees and combretum bush.

They graze within eyesight of farmers living in thatched dome huts, sometimes crossing through their bean and millet fields.

They are so used to humans, tourists can walk virtually right up to them.

"It's quite special in Niger how habituated they've become," Fennessy said. "You don't normally find giraffes living so close to villagers."

__

As the herds grow, some question how much the land can support.

The animals have been exploring new zones close to the border with Mali. In 2007, two crossed into Nigeria, and never returned.

"When they go away from this zone, it's a big risk, they can be hunted easily," said Suraud. "The population may be growing, but they're still very threatened."

The biggest hazard: habitat loss.

On a recent day, Salifou Mamoudou, an Environment Ministry official, spotted a turbaned man raking away vegetation from a dirt field. He told the man he was breaking the law; the man said he was only plowing a family plot _ legally.

Mamoudou shrugged, and moved on.

Villagers relentlessly cut down dead wood to sell, he said. And, in an effort to make way for crops, they cut down vegetation the giraffes feed on. That's technically illegal, but there is almost no authority around to stop them.

"If we let them, they'll cut trees all the way up to the road," Mamadou said, waving a hand toward the highway, several miles (kilometers) away. "If there is no habitat, there will be no giraffes."

___

In the early morning dusk, a family of five giraffes is feeding on bubbles of vegetation freshened by recent rain.

It is a peaceful, primordial scene.

Mounkaila, the guide, takes a drag off a cigarette and walks casually toward them. He is just a few yards (meters) away, dwarfed by animals nearly three times his height.

Mounkaila rattles off some facts, not bothering to keep his voice down. The gentle creatures eye him, but don't seem to mind. A step closer, and they will slowly walk away.

They can grow up 20 feet tall (six meters tall), he says. They can eat 65 to 85 pounds (30 to 40 kilograms) per day, live an average of 25 years, and are able to go without water for weeks, needing less than camels.

Amid a clutch of treetops in the opposite direction, the heads of another pair poke out.

Mounkaila sweeps his shriveled hand across the landscape, toward a red and white cell phone tower rising not far away above the greenery.

"It wasn't always like this," the 50-year-old says, digging his flip flops into the orange soil. "When I was a boy, the giraffes were far more numerous, but they were harder to see."

There used to be enough vegetation to conceal them, he said, but the bush and forests are disappearing. And with nowhere to hide, the animals are forced to come out in search of food.

"They're easier to spot," Mounkaila said. "But that's good for us, not them."

___

On the Net:
Giraffe Conservation Foundation: http://www.giraffeconservation.org

Copyright 2009 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Slow Motion Coup

2009-12-24T02:09:00.000-08:00

Aug. 3, 2009

By Todd Pitman

NIAMEY, Niger (AP) _ His opponents call it the "slow-motion coup."

Despite promising to step down in December at the end of his two-term limit, the leader of this uranium-rich desert nation is waging a fierce political battle to stay in power, and critics say he has morphed from democrat to dictator to do it.

Over a span of several months, 71-year-old President Mamadou Tandja has imposed rule by decree, cracked down on opponents and the press, and dismantled parliament and the constitutional court, which oppose his plan and together represented the last real checks on his rule.

On Tuesday, a controversial referendum could remove the last obstacle in Tandja's way _ the constitution _ replacing it with a new one that does away with term-limits and simultaneously gives him greatly boosted powers and an unprecedented three-year extension of his rule.

"He took the oath of office swearing on the Quran to protect our nation's democratic institutions," opposition leader Mahamadou Issoufou said. "But instead, he is destroying them."

Issoufou compared the moves to Niger's three coups since independence from France half a century ago. The only difference: "This time, it's happening in slow-motion."

The ease with which Niger's democratic institutions have been swept aside marks a setback for a continent struggling to shake off strongman rulers. The region has already been hit by coups in Guinea, Mauritania and Madagascar in the last year.

If the referendum succeeds, it may sow more instability in a country where a simmering northern rebellion launched over access to uranium wealth only eased this year because the insurgency split into three rival factions _ one of which has threatened violence if Tuesday's vote goes ahead. In the same region, al-Qaida has kidnapped several foreigners, including the U.N.'s special envoy to the country, and plans are afoot to build Africa's largest uranium mine.

Niger's capacity to produce uranium became well known when the U.S. accused Saddam Hussein of having tried to purchase yellowcake for Iraq's nuclear weapons program in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. The accusation turned out to be false.

Opponents say Tandja is clinging to power so his family, clan and entourage can benefit from an influx of wealth from large-scale projects that are under way. Tandja denies it and says he is only obeying the will of his people, who he feels want him to finish projects to develop one of the poorest nations in the world.

"The people see the future and they are asking their president to continue to serve, so he completes this work," Tandja told The Associated Press in an interview Friday at his residence, a complex of low-rise sand-brown buildings surrounded by palm trees. "But the constitution does not permit me to stay ... that's why the people demand a new one. We need to find a way."

A handful of African leaders have failed in attempts to extend their rule but more have succeeded. Similar referendums succeeded in Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, Namibia, Tunisia and Uganda.

"It's an existential problem for many African heads of state," said Mahamane Ousmane, who led parliament until Tandja dissolved it in May because lawmakers opposed the referendum. "They can't imagine a normal life outside the palace. They say, 'Will I be in exile? Will I be in prison? What will I do?'"

Ousmane defeated Tandja in a 1993 poll and served as president until he was toppled in a 1996 coup. Today he lives in a modest home on a dirt road in the sleepy capital.

Battered by periodic drought, food shortages and desertification, Niger has the world's highest birthrate, stepping up pressure on scarce resources. In Niamey, camels wander past bland brown downtown buildings. Many residents are so poor they can't afford tables to eat on, dining instead with bowls on potholed, dirt-caked streets.

International donors _ who fund more than half the budget _ view the referendum as illegal and may freeze aid if it proceeds. The European Union suspended $9.3 million (euro6.5 million) in support and could cut $643 million (euro450 million) more pledged through 2013.

Tandja, however, told The AP he was "afraid of nothing."

"I count on myself, my people, my country," he said. "We can't live on aid eternally. If you want to give it, give it, but there can be no blackmail."

Any influence foreign donors may have has been undermined by several huge new projects that have buoyed Tandja and are unlikely to grind to a halt. Among them: a US$5 billion (euro3.5 billion) deal with China to build an oil refinery and extract new crude from the desert, a US$1.7 billion (euro1.2 billion) accord with French nuclear giant Areva to build the world's second biggest uranium mine and a hydroelectric dam financed with US$50 million (euro35 million) from the Islamic Development Bank.

"In the short term, it means he doesn't need to listen to anyone," said Alex Vines, an Africa specialist at the London-based think-tank Chatham House. "More resources make staying in power more attractive. But to manage them, you need strong institutions, and what's happening in Niger is the erosion of core institutions."

Tandja claims his actions are legal, but opponents say he could only rule by decree if Niger was under threat and parliament was in place to safeguard against abuse. Tandja dissolved the constitutional court _ the only body that could judge such disputes _ after it ruled the referendum illegal. He then replaced it with another court whose members he appointed.

The proposed new constitution would give him authority to name one third of a new 60-seat senate and the power to jail journalists who are deemed security threats without warning.

In a country where the U.N. says 70 percent of adults are illiterate, many voters don't know what's at stake.

A roadside florist, Hama Alhassane, hasn't seen the draft constitution and doesn't know how it differs from the current one. But "whatever Tandja wants, I will do," the 23-year-old said. "Because he is the state and we must do what the state demands."

State media only carry pro-referendum messages. A private TV station that broadcast a statement critical of Tandja was temporarily shut down.

Thousands of opposition supporters have protested, but only twice, and lawyers and trade unions launched brief, ineffective strikes. Opposition leaders are calling for a boycott but that may make it even more likely the referendum will pass.

Tandja vowed to respect the outcome, telling The AP: "If they say no, I will go."

Copyright 2009 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Life on the Front

2009-10-25T10:44:00.000-07:00

16 firefights, 8 enemy deaths, 46 base shootings: One Marine unit describes life at war

Oct. 25, 2010

By TODD PITMAN

MARJAH, Afghanistan (AP) _ In the first two months of a seven-month tour, U.S. Marine Cpl. Chuck Martin has been in 16 firefights.

He's done laundry twice, mailed five letters and received two. He's spent 378 hours on post and 256 hours on patrol. He's crossed 140 miles (230 kilometers) of thorny bomb-laced farmland and waist-high trenches of water on foot.

Along the way, he's ripped eight pairs of pants, ruined two pairs of boots, and downed 1,350 half-liter bottles of water. His platoon has killed at least eight militants in battle and nine farm animals in crossfire. The rugged outposts he's lived in have been shot at 46 times.

"Tiring would be the best word to describe it," the lanky 24-year-old native of Middletown, R.I., said, summarizing his time in the insurgent-plagued southern Afghan district of Marjah so far. "There's no downtime. It's a constant gruel."

Martin's list, stored on spreadsheet on his laptop, offers a snapshot of American military life in this rural battlezone, where a new generation of young troops are growing up thousands of miles from home.

Since arriving in mid-July, troops from the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines' Echo Company have spread out across 13 small, spartan outposts in northern Marjah, a vast patch of fields and ancient hardened mud homes without running water or electricity that one company commander likened to "200 B.C."

At one outpost called Inchon, a droning generator provides power for laptops loaded with movies and iPods, and just two lights _ one for the Americans, the other for their Afghan counterparts. Troops have knitted together several shaky chairs from the metal fencing of discarded Hesco barriers.

At many bases, Marines sleep outside on cots inside hot-dog shaped mosquito nets. There are no toilets _ just "wag" bags, no showers _ just pouches you can fill up with water warmed by the afternoon sun. Fleas are such a problem, many Marines have taken to wearing flea collars made for cats or dogs around their wrists and belts.

"It's definitely a culture shock," Lance Cpl. Benjamin Long, 21, of Trussville, Ala. said of life for incoming troops. "Some people come here and they think we're living like cavemen."

For Sgt. Jeffrey Benson of Medina, Ohio, the hardest part is being away from his wife and two-year-old son.

"Every time I call home, I feel like I'm missing something, missing another milestone," said Benson, 34-year-old squad leader.

On the front, Benson said, his biggest fear is of making a decision that will lead to one of his Marines getting hurt. He said he worries about varying routes and patrol patterns to avoid insurgent attacks.

"I'm constantly double-checking things," he said. "Marines want to get into gunfights. But it's the small details _ running into an ambush or running over an IED (bomb) _ that I worry about most."

The dangers of Marjah became apparent shortly after the Marines touched down. On one early patrol, six of them were wounded when guerrillas sprayed machine gunfire down a canal they were moving through.

The first time Benson led troops outside the wire, a Taliban fighter set off a fragmentation charge that blew up an Afghan soldier and wounded his radio operator. A few minutes earlier, he had been squatting on a knee in the same spot as his squad passed by.

There have been many more close calls, including one Marine who walked into a trip wire across a canal that didn't go off. Another survived a burst of gunfire where a bullet pierced his radio and then the Camelbak hydration pack strapped to his back, before finally stopping at his armored plate.

Lance Cpl. Patrick Cassidy remembers bullet rounds kicking up dust just six inches from his head during a morning firefight _ after he had already hit the ground to take cover at the start of an ambush.

"Some days it sucks, but I can't complain," said the 23-year-old native of Stroudsburg, Penn., after lugging around a mortar tube for hours on a patrol that thankfully turned out quiet. "I signed up for it. I knew what I was getting into."

At one patrol base, a dinnertime conversation turned to this: is it better to be blown up or shot?

The two American Marine battalions deployed in Marjah since this summer have lost 21 men so far, according to a Facebook page that tracks casualties.

Lance Cpl. Damon George, 21, of Northville, Mich., remembers two of them in particular. As he walked away seconds after a military memorial service for a fallen friend, he was told by his commanding officer that another comrade had been killed.

Despite the danger, George, a driver, said it was crucial to ferry supplies to the troops. "Even if it's Pop Tarts or Rip-its ... or mail ... It's a morale factor."

Lance Cpl. Matthew Gallant, 21, of Cape Cod, Mass., was in a convoy that hit two roadside bombs in 24 hours, one of which was the biggest blast his unit has seen. That explosion broke his ankle, ripped the driver's leg apart, and severely wounded his truck's gunner, who was hurled into the road.

"It's not fun," Gallant said of driving on Marjah's roads. "It's waiting to get blown up again for the most part."

Marjah has no paved roads and 90 percent of U.S. military operations are on foot.

Troops routinely patrol weighed down with 80 or 90 pounds of gear _ armored jackets, rifles _ traversing a harsh terrain of water-filled trenches. The canal system was built by American aid money half a century ago; today both insurgents and coalition forces use them as cover to avoid or stage attacks.

"All the guys out here have lost weight," Martin said, speaking of the pace doing three patrols a day, then back-to-back six-hour post shifts the next. It "really beats you up."

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

A War Story

2009-08-18T14:50:00.001-07:00

One Lebanese father mourns loss of family with sole surviving daughter

August 29, 2006

By TODD PITMAN

MARWAHEEN, Lebanon (AP) _ Last month, Khamel Ali Abdallah kissed his wife and six children goodbye, then put them on a bus to his native village in south Lebanon for summer vacation. He was supposed to join them a week later, but war between Hezbollah and Israel broke out.

He would see only one of them again.

The day after Abdallah's family arrived in Marwaheen, a small hilltop village a stone's throw from the Israeli border, Israel unleashed a barrage of artillery and airstrikes that reached Lebanon's glittering Mediterranean capital of Beirut and beyond.

The assault tore giant craters into roads across the country, making it too dangerous for Abdallah to leave Beirut. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of charred cars still line the roads of war-wrecked towns, more than two weeks after a U.N. cease-fire ended the fighting, provoked by Hezbollah's July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers.

Abdallah, 36, who holds jobs as a security guard and a coffee server at a communications company, called his wife in Marwaheen three times a day for the first three days of the war.

"She kept telling me 'Beirut is dangerous, it's being bombed, be careful,'" Abdallah said. "I told her 'I'll be fine, take care of yourself.'"

On the fourth day of fighting, he called at 7:30 a.m. "She told me 'We are fine,'" Abdallah said, and he felt reassured.

He called back an hour later. This time there was no answer.

Abdallah managed to reach a brother in nearby Sidon on the phone, who told him he'd heard the family had fled Marwaheen after Israeli forces ordered residents via loudspeakers to evacuate within two hours.

The panicked family had rushed to the local U.N. headquarters and begged U.N. peacekeepers to protect them. The peacekeepers turned them away, and the group decided the only way out was to risk Lebanon's deadly roads.

"There was a fire burning inside me. I couldn't think. I could only worry," Abdallah said of the uncertain hours that followed.

Glued to the television in his Beirut apartment, he saw a report about a convoy carrying civilians trying to flee Marwaheen that had been hit by an Israeli airstrike. More than a dozen were said to be dead.

A sick feeling came over him.

Desperate for news, he called his brother in Sidon. His brother told him he had something important to tell him, but he could not do it on the phone.

Abdallah knew what it was and wept.

Twenty-three people in the two-vehicle convoy were killed in the assault, carried out by an Israeli gunboat and an attack helicopter that strafed the survivors.

Only four people survived. One was Abdallah's 6-year-old daughter, Lara, who miraculously crawled out of the burning wreckage without a scratch, but covered in blood and screaming.

Her aunt, Zeinab, said Lara was in her mother's lap when the vehicle was struck and her mother's body had shielded her. Zeinab survived only because she had stepped away from the vehicle, which had overheated or broken down, and was sitting by the road.

His wife and five other children _ a 2-year-old daughter and sons aged 8, 12, 13 and 14 _ were killed.

"God protected her, this little girl," Abdallah said, cradling her in his lap. "I thank God. She is all I have left."

Across south Lebanon, the yellow flags of Hezbollah fly over the rubble of destroyed houses. Hung across roads in Hezbollah strongholds, yellow banners proclaim "Our Blood has Won" in Arabic, French and English. The Islamic militia says it won an asymmetrical war simply by surviving.
But there are no Hezbollah banners in Marwaheen. Here black flags fly from rooftops.

"Nobody won this war," Abdallah said, wearing black trousers and a black shirt.

He leaned down, put his cheek to Lara's and ran his hand through her hair. She hopped down and ran giddily from room to room, too young to understand she'll never see her mother and five brothers again.

On a wind-swept hilltop cemetery overlooking a deep valley, the 23 slain were buried Thursday in coffins under a patch of dark red earth. Simple cinder blocks topped with pictures kept in place by loose stones mark their locations until proper grave stones can be brought in.

"The Lebanese people, the civilians, we are the losers," Abdallah said softly. "We have lost everything."

Copyright 2006 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Like Art, Like Life

2009-08-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

This photo was of a painting I saw hanging above the bed in my hotel room in Goma, Congo in 1999. - Photo by Todd Pitman

Hutu rebels who slew tourists wreak havoc in Congo
01:01 p.m Mar 04, 1999 EasternBy Todd Pitman

RUTSHURU, Congo, March 4 (Reuters) - A colourful painting hanging in a popular but modest roadside restaurant in the small town of Rutshuru gives an accurate portrait of life in eastern Congo, a stronghold of Rwandan Hutu rebels.

It shows soldiers running across a stream from a burning car in pursuit of militiamen clad in leaves, one of whom is about to be gunned down against a rural backdrop of green terraced hills.
Residents of the lush volcanic highlands on the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo say they live in constant fear of attacks, ambushes, looting and killing sprees by the notorious ``Interahamwe'' militia of extremist Hutus.

That same militia brutally murdered eight foreign tourists this week after abducting them and 23 others while they were on holiday tracking rare mountain gorillas just across the border in southwestern Uganda.

The Interahamwe militiamen led the massacre of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda's 1994 genocide and, after being forced into exile, have set up bases in the dense jungle of eastern Congo.

``We're living in a war zone,'' said a traffic policeman sporting a yellow motorcycle helmet as he flagged down passing vehicles in Rutshuru on Thursday.

``The Interahamwe are all around us. They come every day to steal, to loot, to rob,'' he said.

Residents say the Hutus have taken advantage of lax security in the area since a rebellion began last August to oust President Laurent Kabila in the region's second war since 1996.

Rwandan soldiers have also descended on the area, backing the Congolese rebels against Kabila and launching a major offensive against the Interahamwe four months ago.

Authorities and residents say the Interahamwe hide in the hills among civilians but also roam freely under the dense canopy of forests inside the Virunga National Park.

Local authorities said at least 14 vehicles were ambushed and burned and as many as 30 people killed on three different roads radiating out of Rutshuru over the last two weeks alone.

``They're animals. All they do is burn houses and cars and loot people's goats and cattle,'' said an immigration officer working on the Congo-Uganda border.

The violence has forced tens of thousands of civilians from their fields and into the houses of relatives in safer areas.

``The Interahamwe are still there in every forest, every bush, every mountain, so we can't go back to our fields to cultivate the crops,'' said Jules Ruyango, 35, a displaced peasant who moved in with relatives in Rutshuru after Rwandan soldiers clashed with militiamen near his rural home last month.

Authorities are now training civilians to patrol villages with soldiers every night in ``popular self-defence forces.''

On a field north of Rutshuru, around 100 bare-chested boys armed with sticks chanted songs under the searing sun as the region's governor looked on.

Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Rebels fighting Rebels

2009-08-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

Attackers wreak havoc on rebel-held Congo town.

On September 14, 1998, I was woken up by the sound of gunfire. Looking out on the balcony of my hotel overlooking Lake Kivu, I could see people running across the top of a hilltop with several fires burning on it. The hilltop was home to the city's state radio station, and Mai Mai militiamen had just overrun it. The fighting went on through the early afternoon, until Congolese rebels and Rwandan troops pushed them back.

By Todd Pitman

GOMA, Congo, Sept 15 (Reuters) - The attackers came before dawn in the hundreds, singing war songs in the streets and firing cannons into the town.

As residents ducked for cover and fires burned on a hill overlooking the town, sustained bursts of machinegun and mortar fire echoed across this lakeside town in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Monday.

Listen to the attack.

Tutsi-led rebels fighting to topple President Laurent Kabila launched a rebellion in Goma on August 2, quickly taking control of a vast area on Congo's eastern borders with Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.

But on Monday, a coalition of Rwandan Hutu extremists and traditional Mai Mai warriors from eastern Congo launched a six-hour offensive on Goma in which dozens were killed or wounded, rebel officials and witnesses said.

Rebel captain Dieudonne Bolakofo said Hutu militias - including the Interahamwe and the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) - launched a coordinated attack "simultaneously on the airport, the radio station, a military camp and the port".

The fighting, which caught residents by surprise, cleared normally bustling streets of civilians. Shops and kiosks shut down.

Witnesses, pinned down in hotels by the shooting, reported heavy weapons fire coming from the direction of Lake Kivu. Three motorboats mounted with machineguns cruised up and down the lake.

Listen to more of the attack.

Speaking over Goma's Voice of the People radio, rebel military chief Jean-Pierre Ondekane called on residents to remain calm, stay in their houses, and not give shelter to "the enemy".

Asked how many were killed in the fighting, Ondekane said: "We don't know, but there are bodies everywhere."

Dozens of children gathered to look at the corpses of two young men lying in pools of blood in the town.

Residents and rebel soldiers said the two - one with a military jacket and red bandanna tied around his head, the second in civilians clothes - had been among those who had launched the attack.

Lying in a bed at Goma Hospital, 25-year-old Mokela Lisakopasa said up to 30 civilians were killed in his neighbourhood alone.

"The Mai Mai and Interahamwe attacked at 5 a.m. There were more than 500 of them. We all hid in our houses, but I was hit by a bullet in my arm," he said.

Residents say the Mai Mai - who believe magic water can protect them from bullets - have clashed with rebels in the hills around Goma at least three times since the rebellion began.

Medical sources at the hospital said at least three people were killed and 14 were wounded in Monday's fighting. One of the dead and six of the wounded were rebel soldiers and the rest were civilians, they said.

Armed rebel troops combing Goma's suburbs for Mai Mai fighters told journalists three rebel battalions - about 2,400 men - had engaged several hundred Hutu militia fighters armed with cannon and Kalashnikov rifles in the morning battle.

Ondekane said his forces had captured about 200 Interahamwe and ex-FAR soldiers and showed journalists 14 captives. All were dressed in civilian clothes and some, with dried blood caked on their faces, appeared to have been beaten.

"It's Kabila who armed them (the attackers). Kabila is not only the enemy of the Congolese, but also the enemy of the neighbouring countries," Ondekane said.

Interahamwe and ex-FAR soldiers were jointly responsible for Rwanda's 1994 genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

One of the prisoners identified himself as Corporal Vincent Habimana, a 32-year-old Hutu and a former Rwandan army infantryman.

Habimana said he was part of the group of ex-FAR and Interahamwe militia who launched Monday's attack with small arms and 60mm mortar.

"Our objective was to take Goma and then Gisenyi," he said, referring to the twon across the border in Rwanda. "There were almost 900 of us. The others fled and took the road (east) toward Virunga and the volcanoes," Habimana said.

By Monday afternoon frightened residents began to come out of their houses to assess the damage.

In one part of the town built on volcanic rock, 26-year-old Zainda Ciza pointed to a foot-wide (30 cm-wide) hole in the wooden side of his house which he said was hit by a rocket.
"We were hiding on the floor and it came in here and exploded," he said.

The explosion sent shrapnel flying in all directions, ripping 12 holes through a tin roof, but miraculously wounding nobody.

By dusk, a helicopter patrolled the skies over Goma while tanks and armoured personnel carriers filled with rebel troops patrolled empty streets.

(C) Reuters Limited 1998.

Worlds Away

2009-08-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

War seems world's away from Burundi capital

Children play on the shores of the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika with Bujumbura in the background in 1999. In these days, Hutu rebels moved through the hills behind the capital while Tutus army forces controlled the city. - Photo by Todd Pitman.

June 30, 1998

By Todd Pitman

BUJUMBURA, June 30 (Reuters) - Sporadic bursts of gunfire often crackle over the emerald hills and valleys surrounding Burundi's capital but for most residents the smouldering civil war is worlds away.

At a restaurant by the shores of Lake Tanganyika, wealthy Burundians and expatriate aid workers sip cold beer, chat on mobile phones and keep watch for the occasional hippo grunting in the water.

Out on the lake, sailboats and jet skis whiz through the waves against a backdrop of magnificent 3,000-metre (10,000-foot) mountains to the west in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Bujumbura's lakeside restaurants, gigantic fan-palms, squash courts and playing children contrast sharply with rural life in the hills just east of the city, where officials say dozens of people have died in recent clashes between the army and Hutu rebels.

Listen to Burundi's former coup leader, Pierre Buyoya, talk _ and laugh _ about crying rebels.

20 seconds.

"People in Bujumbura are living in another world," said Louis-Marie Nindorera, executive director of Ligue Iteka, a local human rights group.

"They don't realise there is a war and they don't know how people outside the city are suffering."

IMAGES OF WAR

Diplomats and aid workers credit Burundi's military ruler, Pierre Buyoya, with restoring security in the capital since he came to power in an army coup in July 1996.

But Hutu insurgents bent on overthrowing the Tutsi-led government remain a permanent fixture in the fertile hills and valleys that crisscross the tiny central African nation.

"Of course Bujumbura is a great city to live in but you go over those hills and it's hell on earth," a foreign aid worker said.

Democracy ran aground in Burundi in October 1993 when Tutsi troops murdered the country's first freely elected president - a Hutu - sparking a wave of massacres and a civil war in which more than 150,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed.

Ethnic Tutsis, who make up about 14 percent of Burundi's six million people, say Hutus launched a genocide against them following the assassination. Hutus accuse the army of brutal reprisals.

The government, 12 political parties and three rebel groups signed an agreement in Arusha, Tanzania, earlier this month promising a truce and a second round of negotiations - both to begin on July 20.

Despite the pledge that "all armed parties to the conflict declare a suspension of hostilities", the future of the peace process remains far from assured.

A senior army official said after the talks that troops would continue their patrols and operations to hunt for rebels.

In Isale commune, a half-hour drive east through steep, winding roads, some 20,000 peasants displaced by the fighting huddle under plastic sheeting in and around schools, churches, abandoned buildings and military posts.

A recent broadcast on state television showed about 20 civilians in Isale who had their ears cut off by the rebels.

THE ILLUSION OF NORMALITY

But the macabre images of war are easily replaced - for those who can afford it - by private companies offering the latest American and European movies on digital satellite television from South Africa.

At Bujumbura's vibrant central market, the ethnic divisions seem forgotten.

Under a vast steel canopy, Hutu and Tutsi traders work side by side, hawking stereos, colourful wraps called "kangas", tropical fruit and American vegetable oil marked "Not to be Sold or Exchanged".

But by nightfall, most Hutus return on foot to their homes in the hills and the city's ubiquitous road blocks, manned by armed - and occasionally drunk - gendarmes, begin to spring up.

At the Archipel nightclub, a DJ pumps out modern Zairean and western music while dozens of well-off and smartly dressed Tutsi youths dance and drink Primus beer until a government-imposed midnight curfew.

"People come out here to relax and ease the tension," said the club's manager, Michel Rugema.

"They just need a place to enjoy themselves and forget about the troubles for a few hours."

LIFE GOES ON

Fighting between the army and Hutu rebels flared recently just a few kilometres (miles) northeast of the capital in hills off National Route 1, a major highway running out of town.
Small cars and trucks zoomed by a line of soldiers and several hundred displaced peasants squatting sullenly by the roadside.

As a steady exchange of gunfire rattled away on the hill behind them, a tractor operator, oblivious to the fighting, emptied gravel from a rock quarry into a truck.

"It's just business," said one woman observing the scene. "You know this war has become normal for us. People have to make a living. What else can you do?"

After five years of civil war and bloodshed, many Burundians harbour a mixture of hope and resignation over what sort of peace the politicians and the rebels will be able to achieve.

"Many people here live as if it (the war) was all a bad dream," said Charles Ntezahorigwa, one of Bujumbura's leading coffee exporters. "They just ignore it and think one day they'll wake up and it will all be over."

(C) Reuters Limited 1998.

Dreaming of Exile

2009-08-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

For many of Afghanistan's returning refugees, exile abroad was better

October 21, 2002

By TODD PITMAN

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) _ It wasn't exactly what Abdul Fatah had in mind when he packed up his life as a refugee in Pakistan two months ago and came home on the heels of a mammoth influx of foreign aid meant to help resurrect this war-battered nation.

Now he lives in a hole in the wall _ of a bombed-out building in Afghanistan's bombed-out capital _ and dreams of living in exile again.

The U.N. refugee agency says more than 1.75 million Afghans have returned from neighboring countries since March. But increasingly, a small number are going back the other way, or trying to, disillusioned with out-of-reach rents, a lack of jobs and a soaring cost of living.

"I expected to find work here, but there's nothing. I can barely feed my family," the 46-year-old Fatah said. "We were better off in Pakistan. I want to go back."

The problem for most, though, is they simply can't afford to.

The U.N. refugee agency first spotted families heading back to Pakistan in late August, said UNHCR spokeswoman Maki Shinohara. The numbers picked up in mid-September, and now about 1,200 people are heading back across the border every week.

The reasons for leaving vary, Shinohara said. For some, it's a seasonal migration that happens every year _ Peshawar, across the border in Pakistan, stays warm in contrast to Afghanistan's icy winters. For others, it's a lack of work, a lack of schools or a lack of affordable accommodation. For a few, it's a realization that Afghanistan isn't as secure as they thought.

Fatah was a refugee in Peshawar when he decided it was safe enough to return to Afghanistan.

Selling off a cart he once used to hawk vegetables, Fatah gathered his six children _ his wife had died _ and packed into a truck paid for by UNHCR.

At the end of the road, Fatah got a bag of wheat, a piece of plastic sheeting and $60 from the U.N. refugee agency. Then he was on his own.

"We looked for a place to live, but we couldn't afford to pay any rent anywhere. We saw some others (former refugees) living here and said, 'Can we be next to you?'"

Fatah's new home, in a three-story former shoe factory, looks like it was hit by an earthquake. But it has an important advantage: the rent is free.

It's not hard to see why.

A top corner of the bullet-spattered building has collapsed onto the floor below it, forming an arch of rubble that precariously shelters a family squatting there.

Fatah's own house on the bottom floor is a tiny concrete enclosure that serves as living room, dining room and bedroom _ depending on the time of day. The entrance, covered with a blanket, seems to have been knocked through the wall with a sledgehammer.

Breakfast for Fatah's entire family one morning comprises leftovers from the night before: four potatoes in sauce, a small chicken leg _ and the hope some bread would be coming.

In January, international donors pledged $4.5 billion to help rebuild Afghanistan over the next five years. But President Hamid Karzai said last week only $890 million had arrived, and almost all of that had gone to the United Nations and private aid agencies.

The divide between Fatah's life and the foreigners who came to help people like him is phenomenally vast.

U.N. employees cruise the streets of Kabul in four-wheel drive vehicles, earning 100 times more in daily allowances that top off their salaries than the single dollar Fatah can make in a day _ if he's lucky to find work on a construction site.

What is clear is that little of the aid has trickled down to the devastated warrens of Kabul, where an estimated 500,000 returnees have settled.

"Lots of aid organizations have come here and written our names down, but they haven't come back," said Sher Aqa, another inhabitant of the wasted shoe-factory.

Shinohara said aid agencies were stockpiling food and supplies as temperatures start to drop. Fatah has strung towels and blankets across empty windows on one side of his house to keep out the cold night air.

Fatah said he would stick it out in Kabul a few more weeks. Aqa was more blunt.

"I would go back to Pakistan today if I could. But I can't afford it," the 24-year-old carpenter said. "Who wants to be in Kabul with no job and no heat. Winter is coming."

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Ice Cream at 4 a.m

2009-08-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

Night in Abidjan: Ivory Coast security forces are scourge of roads

October 31, 2003

By TODD PITMAN

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) _ It's 4 a.m. on the streets of this once-lively West African city and a grim-faced soldier is manning a makeshift roadblock made from old tires and a pair of 7-foot-high beer bottles, wooden advertisements confiscated from a nearby bar.

AK-47 in one hand, ice cream bar in the other, he stops each car that passes, and lets each go at a price. Every driver knows the routine _ they've all just paid to pass through another roadblock on the other side of the intersection.

Four years of coups, rebellions and violence have shattered Ivory Coast's reputation as a peaceful, economic powerhouse of West Africa, and allowed the country's security forces to grow increasingly lawless, corrupt and feared _ under a government reluctant to rein in the military and police that help keep it in power.

"They're spoiling the country," said taxi driver Adama Kunde, gesturing toward a phalanx of police inspecting two dozen cars pulled over one recent night on Charles de Gaulle bridge.

"They're supposed to be enforcing the law, but they're criminals," Kunde said. "It's a big racket and we're tired of it."

Pressured by former colonial ruler France, President Laurent Gbagbo's government did fire the national police chief last week after the killing of French radio journalist Jean Helene. Witnesses said Helene was shot in the back of the head by a policeman as he waited for interviews outside police headquarters.

Gbagbo, however, has done nothing to end widespread extortion at citywide checkpoints, regarded by many as the most visible _ and for drivers, unavoidable _ proof that security forces have grown out of control.

Since 1999, security officers have raped numerous women and fatally shot 16 cab drivers, prompting repeated strikes, local news media and residents say.
Police armed with assault rifles interrogate drivers and passengers harshly and relentlessly, usually forcing them to pay 500-1,000 francs (about $1-$2) whether they've done anything wrong or not.

Kunde was penalized after officers said his spare tire didn't have enough air.

"They always find something wrong. Even if all your papers are in order, they'll tell you something is missing," said Ibrahim Connate, 45, another cab driver. "You always have to pay."

Sometimes drunk and rarely smiling, military police are known to fire into the air to force cars to stop and can start shoving when payment is slow. Drivers who refuse to pay bribes are kept by the roadside for hours or threatened with arrest.

Toussaint Alain, a spokesman for Gbagbo, calls the checkpoints "a minor problem."
"The security forces are there to reassure the population. People should not be afraid of them," he said.

Roadblocks have plagued Abidjan's streets since 1999, when the nation's first-ever coup plunged Ivory Coast into turmoil and led to uprisings, revolutions and coup attempts.

Civil war broke out with a failed coup against Gbagbo in September 2002. The conflict was officially declared over in July, but tensions are still high. Rebels control the north of the country and many fear new violence.

"Don't you know we're in a state of war?" one police officer said at a roadblock near the airport, irritated after being asked by a taxi passenger _ told to remove his luggage _ why he was being harassed.

Most checkpoints are built from tires and overturned tables, sometimes broken car doors. Police wave vehicles off the road with flashlights and whistles, while a soldier often waits farther along with an AK-47 at the ready _ to ensure every car stops.

Muslims and citizens of neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso _ frequently accused of supporting rebels _ are favorite targets of police, who've razed thousands of their homes and shops.

Foreigners who can't show "proper" passport entry stamps _ sometimes too faded to read because they weren't stamped hard enough _ are accused of slipping into the country illegally.

At least 10,000 French, 100,000 Malians, 300,000 Burkinabes and countless others have fled Ivory Coast.

For businessmen struggling to survive a humbled economy, the roadblocks are cutting ever deeper into dwindling profits, particularly at night. The head of the Ivory Coast's Chamber of Commerce, Jean-Louis Billon, described their effect as "disastrous."

"People are afraid to go out," said Ibrahim Dialo, the 30-year-old manager of Las Palmas, a restaurant-nightclub that averaged over 200 customers a day before 1999. Today, it's lucky to see 10.

"Security forces are supposed to be protecting people, making things safe. But they're frightening everybody and scaring off our customers," Dialo said.

Most security forces patrolling Abidjan defended Gbagbo during last year's coup attempt, and helped him come to power in a popular revolution in 2000.

"It's not easy for authorities to punish them. They know if they start rounding those people up ... they'll probably take up arms and revolt," said Tanoh Kouame, a court stenographer. "And nobody wants that."

Copyright 2003 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

By Coup, By Ballot

2009-07-27T03:29:00.000-07:00

July 19, 2009

By Todd Pitman

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania (AP) _ Nearly a year after seizing power in a military putsch that ousted Mauritania's first freely elected leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz won the presidency Sunday in a landslide vote his opponents decried as a fraudulent "electoral coup."

The poll was officially held to restore civilian rule, but critics say little is likely to change in this moderate Islamic republic on the western edge of the sand-swept Sahara: Power will remain in the hands of the 52-year-old retired general who spent his life in the military and resigned only to legitimize his grasp on it by running for president.

"We've gone backward to an era of dictatorship," said Boubacar Ould Messaoud, who heads an organization that fights a tradition of slavery that continues here despite being banned.

"Aziz is no democrat," Messaoud said. "He is a soldier, and like all soldiers, he should stay in his barracks. There will be no difference between this regime and the junta" he ruled.

Aziz, however, styles himself as a defender of democracy who staged a coup only to prevent the country from reverting to a past epoch of repressive rule _ which he helped end with an earlier putsch, in 2005.

The final result announced late Sunday by Interior Minister Mohamed Ould Rzeizim gave Aziz 52 percent of the vote, enabling him to avoid a runoff.

The count must be validated by the constitutional court before it becomes final.

Parliament speaker Messaoud Ould Boulkheir came in second with 16 percent, while veteran opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah was third with 13 percent, Rzeizim said.

The main opposition candidates rejected the final outcome even before it was announced, saying the count had been "prefabricated." In a statement, they accused Aziz of carrying out "an electoral coup d'etat."

"We refuse to recognize these results and call on the international community to create a commission to investigate to expose this manipulation," Boulkheir told reporters.

In a victory speech, Aziz said his staff and supporters had "committed no fraud." He said the vote could not have been rigged because results from each polling station had to be approved and signed by rival parties before being forwarded to the electoral commission headquarters.

Several hundred international observers are monitoring the vote. But key delegations from the African Union and French speaking countries have released their findings.

Lawyer Bouhoube Yni of the nation's independent electoral commission _ whose 15 members represent the rival political parties _ said no serious complaints or proof of fraud had been received so far.

Messaoud spokeswoman Amal Mint Abdallahi said the opposition was preparing to formally submit its complaints. Among them: allegations Aziz's camp handed out ballots pre-marked in his favor and paid voters to cast them; the voters then returned with empty ballots taken from polling stations to prove they had done so, she said.

Abdallahi also alleged Aziz's camp fabricated false identity cards and illegally inflated voter lists.

After nightfall, Aziz supporters sent red and white fireworks bursting into the air above Nouakchott in celebration. They crisscrossed the sandy streets, honking horns relentlessly, chanting his name. Others hung out the windows of dilapidated Mercedes Benzes and pickup trucks waving posters of the unsmiling former general.

In his speech, Aziz vowed to eradicate terrorism and ensure his army is equipped to do so. He also said the government must also fight poverty in equal measures, "because the cause of terrorism is poverty."

On the eve of the vote, police exchanged gunfire with two alleged members of an al-Qaida-linked terror cell that had claimed responsibility for gunning down an American teacher here last month. The pair was detained, and one was found wearing an explosive belt.

The U.S. has expressed concern over the steady spread south from Algeria in recent years of al-Qaida's North Africa branch. While Washington never recognized Aziz's junta, it is keen to maintain Mauritania as a bulwark against the terror group and prevent the moderate Muslim nation from sliding toward extremism.

Saturday's election represents a chance for the desert nation straddling the Arab and African worlds to resurrect billions of dollars in pledged international aid, which was cut after Aziz ousted President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi last August. Restarting that aid will be no easy task: Aziz will first have to convince skeptical donors that democracy has really been restored.

Mauritania has suffered five coups since independence from France in 1960, and has been led by military rulers for most of the past three decades.

Born Dec. 20, 1956, Aziz joined the armed forces at the age of 21. Since 1998, he served as head of the presidential guard, a post that allowed him an influential, behind-the-scenes role in the top echelons of power and politics for a decade.

Together with a small clique of the country's senior military brass, he helped foment a popular putsch in 2005 that ended the two-decade dictatorship of Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya and paved the way for unprecedented freedoms.

But when the same military group led by Aziz staged another coup last year, many viewed it as a setback to the nation's democratic gains.

Aziz says he acted to protect the country's nascent democracy; Abdallahi, the president, had begun appointing members of the old regime to senior government posts and was trying to censor the press.

Aziz's junta quickly found itself isolated for breaking the constitutional order, and met unexpected political resistance at home.

Elections offered a way out.

From the beginning, though, Aziz had a huge advantage over his opponents _ who only joined the race a few weeks ago after his junta was replaced by an interim government of national unity that was charged with overseeing the weekend ballot.

Unlike his opponents, Aziz was also able to take advantage of the machinery of state to carry out public works projects like paving roads. He cast himself as "president of the poor," dropping the prices of electricity, water, sugar and gas by as much as a third.

Copyright 2009 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Slavery's Legacy

2009-07-27T03:20:00.000-07:00

July 10, 2009

By Todd Pitman

CAPE COAST, Ghana _ From the rampart of a whitewashed fort once used to ship countless slaves from Africa to the Americas, Cheryl Hardin gazed through watery eyes at the route forcibly taken across the sea by her ancestors centuries before.

"It never gets any easier," the 48-year-old pediatrician said, wiping away tears on her fourth trip to Ghana's Cape Coast Castle in two decades. "It feels the same as when I first visited _ painful, incomprehensible."

On Saturday, Barack Obama and his family will follow in the footsteps of countless African-Americans who have tried to reconnect with their past on these shores. Though Obama was not descended from slaves _ his father was Kenyan _ he will carry the legacy of the African-American experience with him as America's first black president.

For many, the trip will be steeped in symbolism.

"The world's least powerful people were shipped off from here as slaves," Hardin said Tuesday, looking past a row of cannons pointing toward the Atlantic Ocean. "Now Obama, an African-American, the most powerful person in the world, is going to be standing here. For us it will be a full-circle experience."

Built in the 1600s, Cape Coast Castle served as Britain's West Africa headquarters for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which saw European powers and African chiefs export millions in shackles to Europe and the Americas.

The slave trade ended here in 1833, and visitors can now trek through the fort's dungeons, dark rooms once crammed with more than 1,000 men and women at a time who slept in their own excrement. The dank air inside still stings the eyes.

Visiting for the first time, Hardin's 47-year-old sister Wanda Milian said the dungeons felt "like burial tombs."

"It felt suffocating. It felt still," said Milian, who like her sister lives in Houston, Texas. "I don't know what I expected. I didn't expect to experience the sense of loss, the sense of hopelessness and desolation."

Those who rebelled were packed into similar rooms with hardly enough air to breath, left to die without food or water. Their faint scratch marks are still visible on walls.

Down by the shore is the fort's so-called "Door of No Return," the last glimpse of Africa the slaves would ever see before they were loaded into canoes that took them to ships that crossed the ocean.

Today, the door opens onto a different world: a gentle shore where boys freely kick a white soccer ball through the surf, where gray-bearded men sit in beached canoes fixing lime-green fishing nets, where women sell maize meal from plates on their heads.

Behind them is Africa's poverty: smoke from cooking fires rises from a maze of thin wooden shacks, their rusted corrugated aluminum roofs held down by rocks. Children bathe naked in a tiny dirt courtyard.

"I just can't wrap my mind around this," said Milian, who works at a Methodist church. "If it weren't for all this" _ for slavery _ "I wouldn't be standing here today. I wouldn't be who I am. I wouldn't have the opportunities I do. I wouldn't practice the religion I do."

Milian also grappled with the irony that fort housed a church while the trade went on, and that African chiefs and merchants made it all possible, brutally capturing millions and marching them from the continent's interior to be sold in exchange for guns, iron and rum.

"It's mixed up," Milian said. "It's not an easy puzzle to put together."

Though slavery in the U.S. ended after the Civil War in 1865, its legacy has lived on. The U.S. Senate on June 18 unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and racial segregation.

"This is part of our history," said Hardin, who first visited Ghana in the late 1980s and later married a Ghanaian engineer she met in the U.S.

Her 15-year-old son was along for the first time. "I want him to understand what his liberty really means, who he really is," Hardin said.

But racism, both sisters agreed, would not end with Obama's visit.

"Let's not be naive. When your skin is darker, you are still going to be treated differently," Hardin said. But Obama's trip "will be a turning point, not just for America but for the world."

Milian said Obama's journey would also bear a message to those who organized the trade.

"It will say they failed, it all failed," she said. "The human mind is capable of horrible things, but the fact that we're standing here, the fact Obama will be standing here, proves we are also capable of great resilience."

Copyright 2009 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Out of Africa

2009-06-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

By Todd Pitman

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) _ He moves across the sand-specked basketball court swathed in the glossy dark blue jersey of his old Japanese pro team, a keepsake from a career that propelled him around the world.

Now back home in Africa, playing among friends, Ndongo Ndiaye is in no hurry to impress anymore. But when a crosscourt pass comes his way, time stands still for a moment.

The 7-foot-1 Senegalese hoop star snatches the ball from the air with remarkable swiftness, slamming it home in one deft motion _ just like the old days.

Not long ago, Ndiaye lived the life of a professional international athlete, scoring kudos, cash and respect on courts from the U.S. to Lebanon to Japan.

Plucked from teenage obscurity by an American scout, he turned basketball into a 14-year trek across the globe, experiencing things along the way that people in his tiny West African village never had, from hot showers to the finest sashimi and sake.

Earlier this year, Ndiaye moved back to Dakar to start a new career in business, imbued with a fresh perspective on the world. But the nation he left is unchanged. It's still full of kids just like he was once: naive and inexperienced, desperate to escape the continent's crushing poverty and unemployment.

They are there in the basketball academy in Senegal's interior that he visits, the promising high school students hoping for professional careers in the West. They are there, sometimes, on his doorstep, the young kids who cannot afford school, who may never play the game well.

"Basketball helped me to have an education, see new things, travel, make a little bit of money," Ndiaye said in an interview. "And the best thing I can do with that is come back here and help."

As the number of African players in the United States begins to climb, The Associated Press counted more than 170 of them in U.S. colleges last season.

With many more pursuing the great American hoop dream, Ndiaye's story offers a glimpse of what it takes to break out _ a combination of talent, work, timing and flexibility.

"The potential in this country is unbelievable as far as basketball," Ndiaye said of his native Senegal. "But most kids here are never given a chance."
___

When Ndiaye was growing up in Sadio, a village some 130 miles east of Dakar, everyone he knew seemed to have the same goal. "Get out of this country and start a new life," he recalled.

The aim: find a job, make enough money to come back, support family and friends.

He had never heard of basketball before. In Sadio, there were no courts or even TV.

The first time he picked up a basketball was when he went to high school in Dakar at the age of 16.

Already a head taller than his peers, Ndiaye stood out. Boys teased him. Girls wouldn't have anything to do with him. The alienation proved advantageous: with little else to do, he was soon playing _ and improving _ every day.

He joined the high school team, and in his senior year, an American recruiter from the University of Maine showed up.

The man looked at Ndiaye and said, "Holy God, you're 7-foot-tall!" Ndiaye recounted. "Why don't you try out?"

The recruiter left, and two weeks later called _ offering a one-year scholarship to a U.S. prep school where Ndiaye could learn English and try his chances at college.

The prospect was daunting. America, from the movies he'd seen, appeared to be a violent frontierland.

"I thought I'd be armed, live with black gangster-rappers or white cowboys," Ndiaye said.

Before leaving, his father handed him a good luck charm, a small pouch made of goatskin to be wrapped around the waist on a thin string. It contained a prayer written in Arabic _ "to protect me against guns," Ndiaye shrugged with a smile.

In the fall of 1995, Ndiaye boarded a plane for the first time in his life. Soon, he was gazing down at the world from above the clouds.

___

Instead of Wild West gunbattles and gangland drive-by's, the Senegalese teen discovered quiet American suburbia and lived in a dorm on the campus of Suffield Academy, a private Connecticut prep school founded in 1833.

He fell in love with it, and America.

It was everything Senegal was not. The cars were big. The houses were big. The roads were trash-free and paved. And unlike Senegal's dry and dusty climate, greenery was omnipresent _ in neatly trimmed lawns, in lush swaths of treetops.

His coach took him shopping for clothes _ the school dress code required blue blazers and khaki pants _ and tied his tie each morning because Ndiaye didn't know how.

He took his first shower with hot-running water. And then, in the campus dining hall, he spied something bizarre: a drink dispenser filled with cold milk.

"They told me you don't have to drink it all, if you need more, it's still gonna be there," he said. "But I was hungry. My mind was hungry. It was all so overwhelming."

Ndiaye gulped down five glasses at each meal one day. By nightfall, he was in bed with stomach pains so bad, he never tasted milk again.

Ndiaye felt no racism. But people sometimes stared or joked at his height. When they did, he turned their comments into a conversation-starter, winning instant friends with a capacious smile and a warm personality.

He deciphered the world by looking and listening. He barely spoke English, and history class sounded more like gibberish. After a few months, though, he began to understand, and excel.

He won a basketball scholarship to Providence, which recruited him to play center. Wanting more time on the court, he transferred to Delaware in his sophomore year.

By the time he graduated in 2000 with a degree in business administration, he was good enough to take a shot at the NBA.

He signed for a two-week training camp with the San Antonio Spurs. It paid $25,000, and put him "right up there in heaven," he said.

The NBA dream, however, quickly crashed. Ndiaye was cut and for a time, crushed. But he settled for the next-best thing: the minor-league American Basketball Association. He helped the Detroit Dogs to victory in the nascent league's first-ever championship, and realized second-best wasn't so bad.

"I was doing something I loved, and getting paid for it," he said.

The ABA didn't pay enough, though, so Ndiaye sought more lucrative salaries with professional teams outside of the U.S., "living out of a suitcase" in countries as far-flung as Japan, Lebanon, France, Syria, Tunisia, Angola and Saudi Arabia. The pay was much less than NBA standards but still allowed for a comfortable living.

"Basketball was the same everywhere, but every country was a new experience," he said. "You play a few hours a day and the rest of the time you learn about a new culture, a new religion, how to live with other people. That's where I really grew up as a person."

And most important, perhaps, Ndiaye felt he had become a man.

He could take care of himself, so he bought himself clothes, shoes, a gold necklace.

He could take care of others, so he sent money home.

In 2001, he built an eight-bedroom house for his mother and family. A year later, he got married to a Senegalese woman he met through a friend and started a family.

___

Pro sports is a young man's game, and after one last pro stint in Saudi Arabia, Ndiaye finally moved home in February to settle down.

His countrymen, he noticed, regarded him differently than before.

"When you come back with money in your pocket, people expect that now you can help them out," he said. "You have a certain status in your family. You have respect. People love you more."

These days, Ndiaye sits in the living room of his small Dakar apartment on a brown leather couch. There is a large flat-screen TV, a Persian rug, gold-colored curtains, and in his hand, a small, sweet cup of coffee.

A poster on the wall shows him staring fiercely ahead with the Japanese team Fukuoka Rizing, who he played with in 2007-08. He had enjoyed a special status there _ as the league's tallest player.

At home, Ndiaye exudes an American-style, can-do spirit of entrepreneurialism.

He keeps an apartment in Delaware. And the apartment he owns in Dakar is part of a complex he is building to rent out.

He fiddles with his cell phone and pulls up the number of Senegal's most popular traditional wrestler, a muscle-bound man named Tyson, and says he wants to promote him stateside.

He recounts Senegal's woes _ corruption, trash, lack of development _ and expounds on improving agricultural production.

He's gotten involved in politics and goes to opposition party meetings, something he never thought he'd do.

"We are not a poor continent. But we live very poorly because of the way we behave and handle things," he said. "I want to see what I can do to help, and I think the best way is to change people's mentality."

He marvels at the American concept of personal responsibility, the unity of Japanese society, and wonders why there is so much trash in Dakar's streets.

Basketball "opened my eyes and allowed me to see things from a different perspective," Ndiaye said. "I've seen how other people live, how other governments function, and I always say, why not us?"
___

A few years ago, Ndiaye spotted the legs and head of a young mechanic sticking out from under a car in the Senegalese town of Thies.

"Do you play basketball?" Ndiaye asked.

The teen said he didn't know anything about the game.

"Well, you should," Ndiaye shot back.

The mechanic was Mouhamed Sene. Now aged 23 and 6-foot-11, Sene is a center for the New York Knicks.

Ndiaye takes no credit. He simply introduced Sene to fellow countryman Amadou Gallo Fall, a chief scout for the Dallas Mavericks who created a basketball academy in Thies that Sene attended called SEEDS, short for Sports for Education and Economic Development in Senegal.

Founded in 2003, SEEDS did not exist when Ndiaye was growing up. If it had, he believes, he might have made the NBA himself.

Ndiaye tries to visit the academy each week or two, helping mentor the couple dozen kids there being groomed for a chance at pro careers. The teenagers sometimes meet NBA coaches and players. A pictorial flier recounts each student's physical assets and wingspan for recruiters.

A decade ago, only a handful of foreign scouts visited Senegal each year, Ndiaye said. Today, they come by the dozens.

"If you qualify, you are definitely going somewhere, because the connections are there, the routes are done," Ndiaye said. "Coaches are calling me all the time, asking, 'Do you know any interesting kids?' Back when we were growing up, it was not that way."

Ahead of a recent practice match on the waxed wood floor of SEEDS' only indoor court _ which looks like an American high school gym _ two dozen lanky teens gathered in a circle and listened to Ndiaye talk about the importance of body language on the court.

"Be confident," he told them. "Show you have the desire to win."

Asked what they want to do in life, the students answers are prudent: Accountant. Businessman. Scouting agent. Doctor.

Ndiaye says they all dream of the NBA, but "the reality is, their chances of making it are small," he said. "Those who succeed are those who do more than others, who try more than others, everyday."

Still, most have a good shot at winning scholarships to American universities or playing in European clubs. And even if they don't, the art of basketball can teach a lot more than court skills.

Ndiaye spoke of a 16-year-old who comes to his home on Sundays, a boy abandoned by his father, whose mother has diabetes and can't walk. The boy is a good point guard, but not good enough for SEEDS. Ndiaye buys him shoes, makes sure he's got food and what he needs for school.

"We want every kid to learn they don't have to be a failure. They can be successful at whatever they do in life," Ndiaye said. "Basketball can teach you that."

Copyright 2009 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Gorillas' Rebel Refuge

2009-03-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

Amid war, endangered Congo mountain gorillas survive in rebel-held fores

Nov. 26, 2008

VIRUNGA NATIONAL PARK, Congo (AP) _ Deep in the rebel-held forests of Congo's mighty Mikeno volcano, a world away from this Central African nation's latest fighting, a wild 440-pound mountain gorilla serenely rips a meal of bamboo stalks from the moist dark earth.

His pregnant "wife" dangles from a moss-strewn treetop. Nearby, another gentle ape waddles on all-fours among luminescent green foliage, a 3-month-old baby riding precariously on her back's velvety black fur coat.

The primordial scenes are a rare window into the lives of some of the world's last mountain gorillas. They unfold in a habitat on the edge of a war zone that until now has been overseen by renegade rangers who stayed behind when rebels seized control of these jungle foothills in late 2007.

Now, a breakthrough deal between the insurgents and President Joseph Kabila's administration has paved the way for staff who fled fighting and the rebel occupation to return to the gorilla sector of Virunga National Park for the first time in 15 months.

On Tuesday, a team of Associated Press journalists visited the gorillas in the rebel-controlled zone. The same day, in another part of the park, rangers and scientists from the Congolese Wildlife Authority entered the apes' habitat for the first time since fleeing last year. They found one gorilla family _ kicking off a monthlong census that will give the world its first comprehensive glimpse at the status and health of the highly endangered animals since it fell to rebels.

"We are extremely pleased that all sides in this conflict accept the importance of protecting Virunga's gorilla sector," said Emmanuel de Merode, the park's Belgian director and the man who pushed the breakthrough deal. "The survey will give us an accurate assessment of Congo's mountain gorillas and how they have been affected by the war."

Congo has grabbed world headlines in recent weeks because of fighting that exploded in August between government forces and Laurent Nkunda's rebels, unleashing a humanitarian catastrophe that forced more than 250,000 people from their homes.

Ironically, the latest clashes may have been a good thing for the gorillas. Previously, the frontline had run right through the middle of the apes' habitat. But in October, rebels pushed the frontline dozens of miles away, essentially making the area safer for the animals.

Over the last year, government forces had repeatedly set up mortars and multiple rocket launchers on a main road _ now controlled by rebels _ that cut through the park, firing them toward rebel positions in the hills. An Associated Press reporter who visited the area at the time saw plumes of smoke rising from Mikeno's forested slopes, not far from where the apes live.

"They were firing bombs into the park, destroying the forest and the gorillas' natural habitat," said Pierre-Canisius Kanamahalagi, who was identified as being in charge of park affairs for the rebels.

Only about 700 mountain gorillas are left in the world, an estimated 190 of them in Congo around the Mikeno volcano.

Over the past year, conservationists and park authorities have expressed fear for the animals' safety, saying nobody knew their fate. But the rangers who stayed behind tell a different story.

"It's a myth that nobody knew what was happening to them," said Benjamin Nsana, a 40-year-old park guide in the rebel zone who has worked with the gorillas for 15 years. "We were here all along. We've been sending rangers out every single day" to track seven gorilla families that had grown accustomed to human contact.

Nsana said no gorillas had died over the last year _ from poaching, disease, crossfire or anything else. The area was safe, he said, because rebels patrolled the park's outskirts so thoroughly. In fact, he said, six babies have been born.

Kanamahalagi and the dozens of rangers who remained behind say they did so because they were genuinely concerned about the apes' fate and have been misidentified as rebels or "rebel rangers" by park staff who fled. Kanamahalagi asked simply: "If we hadn't stayed, who would have?"

Politics, though, undoubtedly played a role. Most of the "renegade" rangers are sympathetic to the rebels and many are Tutsis like Nkunda, the rebel leader. Many of the more than 120 who fled did so either because they feared insecurity or because they opposed the rebels.

Still, de Merode lauded the rangers who stayed and both groups say they welcome the prospect of working with each other again.

Kanamahalagi said they need help. The rangers working in insurgent territory have done their jobs with little compensation beyond $10 monthly allowances from a conservation group and sacks of corn or bean rations from rebel authorities, Nsana said, adding that all their GPS devices were broken. The foot and toes of one tracker were visible through a ripped, dirt-clad boot.

In the months before insurgents first seized the area in 2007, 10 mountain gorillas were killed by unidentified attackers believed to be involved in an illegal multimillion dollar charcoal trade. Five were shot to death in a single massacre and one was eaten and hurled into a pit latrine. It was the apes' bloodiest year since late American researcher Dian Fossey began working in Congo in the mid-1960s.

"It's imperative that these rangers get back into the park," said Samantha Newport, park spokeswoman said. "There is war, poaching, snares, disease. It's imperative that people have a clue what is going on, that the gorillas are properly looked after."

Unable to enter the gorilla sector, park authorities have decried what they described as unauthorized tourist visits offered by rangers in the rebel zone, worrying they were not following standard rules and might endanger the animals.

Nsana said there had not been many tourists in the rebel zone _ only 45 this year, most from Uganda.

De Merode, the Belgian park chief, secured the deal after meeting last week with top officials in the capital of Kinshasa, as well as Nkunda. The deal marks an unusual crossroads because the government-run Congolese Wildlife Conservation Society, which is supposed to manage the park, will essentially be a government entity operating within a rebel-controlled zone.

De Merode said he has continually stressed the Conservation Authority's neutrality and the park's status as a U.N. World Heritage Site.

"Our agenda is simply to manage the park and protect the animals inside it," said de Merode, who became head of the park in August, just as the latest fighting exploded.

High up in the forested foothills of Mikeno, a family of eight gorillas Tuesday showed no sign of hostility toward the visiting humans, whose species has nearly wiped them out, or the three rangers carrying weapons.

"You see it's safe for them here," Nsana whispered. "No fighting. No problem."

Copyright 2008 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Failed State

2009-03-07T03:49:00.000-08:00

No crime scene: Apathy over Guinea-Bissau president's death shows just how failed this failed state is

March 5, 2009

By TODD PITMAN

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau (AP) _ The blood-soaked dining room where Guinea-Bissau's president was brutally murdered is littered with broken glass, bullet casings and a rusted machete.

No crime scene tape cordons off the area, no police stand guard outside. No one has been arrested, and hardly anyone in this sleepy tropical capital seems to care.

The apathy surrounding the slaying of President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira in his own home _ as well as the bombing attack that killed his main rival hours earlier _ symbolizes just how far this drug-wracked state has fallen.

"What are we supposed to do, cry? Demand justice?" asked journalist Zique Choaib, 41. "The powerful people at the top have been fighting each other for decades. They'll keep fighting. It's really nothing new."

Less than 24 hours after the brutal slayings Monday, market stalls were open, people were back in the streets and the city's dilapidated fleet of blue-and-white Mercedes taxis was again cruising the potholed roads, Caribbean rhythms pulsing from their radios.

The reaction was nearly identical after the last military coup in 2003: no surprise, mild speculation, then within a day, a return to normalcy so complete it seemed as if nothing had happened.

Since winning a violent struggle for independence from Portugal in 1974, this nation of 1.5 million has been on a losing streak _ cursed by coups, coup attempts and war. Today it is ranked third-worst of 177 nations on the U.N. Human Development Index, which measures general well-being. One of the world's poorest countries, life expectancy is a mere 45.

Vieira is blamed for much of the slide. He seized power in 1980 and ruled for 19 years until being ousted at the end of the country's civil war. He returned from exile to win 2005 elections that observers deemed free and fair.

But life only seemed to get worse.

Then, multistory villas began springing up on the edge of town, signaling the arrival of suspected Latin American drug traffickers who moved in to take advantage of the country's weak government, corrupt security forces and strategic position south of European drug markets.

U.N. officials now say Guinea-Bissau has become a leading transit point for Europe-bound cocaine. Last month, the State Department warned that the "degeneration of Guinea-Bissau into a narco-state is a real possibility."

The nation's economy is minuscule, driven largely by cashew, fish and peanut exports, so even a small influx of drug money can have a major impact.

The U.N. estimates the cocaine transiting through Guinea-Bissau is worth more than a billion dollars a year, dwarfing the meager national budget.

Top military officials have been accused of taking a cut to allow drug planes to land and to turn a blind eye to drug activity. The Judicial Police responsible for investigating the narcotics trade are unarmed, equipped with typewriters and the targets of anonymous death threats.

The International Crisis Group summed up the dire state of affairs in its latest report, titled "Guinea-Bissau: In Need of a State."

Vieira governed from his own modest home _ a four-bedroom, single-story bungalow on a crumbling downtown street frequented by mud-covered pigs. The rocket-blasted presidential palace has been uninhabitable since its roof was blown apart in fighting a decade ago. Today, it lies neglected _ much like this extraordinarily undeveloped nation.

Asked about Vieira's fate, student Abenaque Camara asked: "Why should we care?"

"We're more concerned with finding something to eat," said the 20-year-old, who still hasn't finished high school because of repeated teacher strikes. "Look at us: No jobs, no food, no electricity. There's only darkness."

The capital, Bissau, is a place where young men watch the world go by from dilapidated sofas dumped on the side of the road and where gas is more likely to be hawked in plastic water bottles than at gas stations.

Yellow clumps of grass sprout from the top of the city's main courthouse, where a concrete sculpture darkened by mildew features scales of justice that look like thousand-year-old artifacts. The rusted skeletons of abandoned cars are everywhere.

Amid the languid despair, there was one upside to the latest tragedy: The military did not seize power, and the head of parliament was swiftly sworn in as interim president.

Military spokesman Zamora Induta, who is leading one of two investigations into the slayings, said whoever killed the armed forces chief, Batiste Tagme na Waie, was in the military headquarters at the time. An inside-job, but nobody has been detained.

Zamora keeps the key piece of evidence in a black plastic bag beside his desk: the pieces of an electrical device that may have been used to detonate the bomb.

Few believe justice will be meted out, though, and the sense of impunity sets a dangerous precedent. On a continent trying to put violence behind it, coups in neighboring Guinea in December and Mauritania in August have already dampened hopes for change.

Luis vaz Martins, of the independent National Human Rights League, said he believed Vieira and people surrounding the armed forces chief were deeply involved in the drug trade. One plane that landed in Bissau from Venezuela last year, intended for Vieira's associates, was seized instead by military rivals and disappeared, he said.

There is little to indicate the killings were drug-related hits. Even so, Martins said the influx of cocaine money has given people another reason to fight, exacerbating deep ethnic tensions that have already fueled years of conflict.

A nephew of Vieira who refused to be identified because he was afraid for his safety, also dismissed theories the slayings were drug related or a settling of scores between the two longtime enemies, whose rivalry dates back to the independence era.

"It's about power. They just wanted him out of the way," he said. "But he was democratically elected. You can't just kill a president like a dog."

Forsyth in Bissau: Fact Trumps Fiction

2009-03-05T16:12:00.000-08:00

The blood is real:Triller master stumbles into Africa mayhem

March 5, 2009

By TODD PITMAN

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau (AP) _ It could have been a scene right out of one of his own thrillers. And when his next novel is published, it may very well be.

British author Frederick ("The Day of the Jackal") Forsyth jetted into coup-prone, cocaine-plagued Guinea-Bissau this week to research his latest novel, and found real life trumping fiction.

Hours before he touched down in the West African nation, a bomb hidden under a staircase blew apart the armed forces chief. Hours later the president was gunned down, and according to Forsyth, hacked to pieces.

The double assassination of President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira and his military rival, Gen. Batiste Tagme na Waie, shocked Guinea-Bissau and clouded this sweaty equatorial capital in the kind of mystery and intrigue often detailed in Forsyth's own fiction about assassins, spies and coups.

Forsyth's presence here inevitably raised the association with his hit novel, "The Dogs of War," about mercenaries trying to stage a coup in a mineral-rich, African backwater.

"I didn't come for a coup d'etat or regime change, but that's what I ran into," Forsyth said over coffee at his hotel, where The Associated Press found him.

He said he couldn't sleep and was in his hotel bed reading when he heard a boom before dawn Monday and thought, "that wasn't a car door slamming."

The explosion was blocks away at Vieira's modest downtown villa _ the beginning of the president's end.

Forsyth went out that day and saw army troops patrolling the streets. They left him alone.

That night, he had dinner with the Dutch pathologist who autopsied Vieira and had spent the morning "trying to put the president back together again."

According to Forsyth's sources, the 71-year-old ruler survived an initial rocket attack, got up, was shot four times, then was "slung into the back of a pickup truck ... and cut to pieces with machetes" by soldiers bent on avenging their own chief's death.

Forsyth said he came here for "the flavor, the odor, of a pretty washed up, impoverished, failed West African mangrove swamp."

"I thought, what is the most disastrous part of West Africa, and by a mile, it's Guinea-Bissau," he said. "If you drive around you'll see why: one wrecked building after another, one mountain of garbage after another. A navy with no ships, an air force with no airplanes. No infrastructure, no electricity. Everything is purchasable."

Forsyth was a Royal Air Force pilot in the late 1950s, then spent 12 years as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency and the BBC.

His first attempt at fiction, "The Day of the Jackal," was about a plot to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle of France. Published in 1971, it was an international best-seller.

In 1974 came "The Dogs of War," set in the fictional nation of "Zangoro," which he said was modeled after the oil-rich Central African dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea, some 1,700 miles southeast of Guinea-Bissau.

Forsyth's next novel, which he expects to publish next year, will be set in Guinea-Bissau.

He said he has stopped inventing fictional places "because the world is so weird and so scary, you might as well use the real ones."

Forsyth was long rumored to have financed a 1973 attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. But he dismissed the claims as "imaginary fantasies" spurred by people who saw him interviewing mercenaries for "The Dogs of War" around the same time.

Dressed in khaki pants and a loose white shirt, the sprightly, 70-year-old author said he always works the same way: story idea, then research, travel and interviews with people who have experienced the things he wants to write about.

He spent much of his three days in Bissau talking with expatriates, who he said can speak more freely than government officials and see the nation's history "from an outsider's point of view."

At 10 pages a day, he figures it will take him October and November to write the novel.

It will be another "international thriller involving the usual mix of forces of law and order, criminality, special forces, U.S. Green Berets, a coup d'etat, and a lot of money," Forsyth said. "But there will be surprises. It's not going to be what you just read about in the news."

Asked if he misses the life of a foreign correspondent, Forsyth said: "Investigative journalism is like a drug. When you write, it's very hard to walk way."

"If push comes to shove I could still cover a story. But in Guinea-Bissau, there is no need to exaggerate," he said. "This place is for real."

Nobody Sleeps at Home

2009-01-10T18:01:00.000-08:00

In eastern Burundi, nobody sleeps at home

A man walks nervously past army soldiers in eastern Burundi. While many were afraid of rebels, many more were afraid of the army. Photo by Todd Pitman.

January 28, 2000

By Todd Pitman

KAYERO, Burundi, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Michel Nyandwi has a house in the mountain village of Kayero, set high up on a craggy ridge in eastern Burundi.

But when night falls, he - like thousands of others here - doesn't sleep in it.

Residents say roaming bands of Hutu rebels, who are waging a brutal civil war against

Burundi's mostly Tutsi army, launch raids in the district every night, combing velvety green hills that glow blue in the moonlight for food, money and medicines.

Most people in Kayero, around 95 kms (60 miles) southeast of the capital Bujumbura, stay close to their homes during the day but abandon them at night for fear of the raids.

Hundreds of houses have been burned to the ground in the area over the last few months.

"When night falls I sleep away from my house, out in the banana fields with my family," Nyandwi told Reuters.

On Tuesday, rebels woke Nyandwi from his slumber just after midnight, stealing goats and 11,540 Burundi francs ($20), a hefty sum in a nation were most people earn under $150 a year.

Other attacks have been much more brutal.

Aloys Nyawenda, a 45-year-old businessman living in a displaced camp, said rebels killed one man in Kayero last week because he had no money to give.

They then went to Nyawenda's house, plundered it and set it on fire, leaving behind charred windows, a fallen roof and a floor covered with broken bottles and shattered plates.

"They broke the windows with rifles, destroyed the doors and began to take all my things," Nyawenda said.

"Then they got matches from the kitchen, set the house on fire and left," he said, adding that rebels also took two of his workers hostage, forcing them to carry his belongings away in bags on their heads.

ROADS CLOSED AT NIGHT

At dusk, the army closes most major roads that twist through the region's hills and valleys to deter ambushes, but insecurity persists.

On Tuesday afternoon, residents said army and rebel troops fought a brief gun battle in Kayero but no one was killed.

Military officials say some zones in the eastern provinces of Rutana and Ruyigi, where rebels are most active, have been completely emptied of their inhabitants after recent fighting.

The general state of insecurity and clashes between the army and rebels in a no-go zone farther to the north in Giharo have forced thousands of civilians to seek nightly refuge at schools, parishes and administrative centres.

Thousands of others have fled this month across the border into neighbouring Tanzania, where more than 300,000 Burundian refugees already live in camps.

Army reprisals and mopping-up operations after rebel attacks give civilians, most of them Hutus, another reason to flee.

Last week in the neighbouring commune of Musongati, 54 people, a mixture of rebels and civilians, were killed during an army operation in pursuit of a rebel unit.

Jean-Pierre Mpfayokurera, a government administrator in the nearby town of Mpinga, said the military was also organising civilian units to help them patrol the areas at night.

But the rebel raids have not stopped.

"The assailants still come every day," Mpfayokurera said. "People are afraid. Nobody can live at home."

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.

Amputee Soldier

2008-10-25T10:40:00.000-07:00

Wounded in Iraq, double-amputee returns to front lines in Afghanistan

Sept 25, 2010

By TODD PITMAN

ASHOQEH, Afghanistan (AP) _ When a bomb exploded under Dan Luckett's Army Humvee in Iraq two years ago _ blowing off one of his legs and part of his foot _ the first thing he thought was: "That's it. You're done. No more Army for you."

But two years later, the 27-year-old Norcross, Georgia, native is back on duty _ a double-amputee fighting on the front lines of America's Afghan surge in one of the most dangerous parts of this volatile country.

Luckett's remarkable recovery can be attributed in part to dogged self-determination. But technological advances have been crucial: Artificial limbs today are so effective, some war-wounded like Luckett are not only able to do intensive sports like snow skiing, they can return to active duty as fully operational soldiers. The Pentagon says 41 American amputee veterans are now serving in combat zones worldwide.

Luckett was a young platoon leader on his first tour in Iraq when an explosively formed penetrator _ a bomb that hurls an armor-piercing lump of molten copper _ ripped through his vehicle on a Baghdad street on Mother's Day 2008.

His Humvee cabin instantly filled with heavy gray smoke and the smell of burning diesel and molten metal. Luckett felt an excruciating pain and a "liquid" _ his blood _ pouring out of his legs. He looked down and saw a shocking sight: his own left foot sheared off above the ankle and his right boot a bloody mangle of flesh and dust.

Still conscious, he took deep breaths and made a deliberate effort to calm down.

A voice rang out over the radio _ his squad leader checking in.

"1-6, is everybody all right?" the soldier asked, referring to Luckett's call-sign.

"Negative," Luckett responded. "My feet are gone."

He was evacuated by helicopter to a Baghdad emergency room, flown to Germany, and six days after the blast, he was back in the U.S.

As his plane touched down at Andrew's Air Force Base, he made a determined decision. He was going to rejoin the 101st Airborne Division any way he could.

For the first month at Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Luckett was bound to a wheelchair. He hated the dependence that came with it. He hated the way people changed their voice when they spoke to him _ soft and sympathetic.

He wondered: how long is THIS going to last? Will I be dependent on others for the rest of my life?

At night, he dreamed of walking on two legs.

When he woke, only the stump of his left leg was there, painfully tender and swollen.

His family wanted to know, is this going to be the same Dan?

He assured them he was.

Luckett was fortunate in one sense. His wounds had been caused not by shrapnel, but the projectile itself, which made a relatively clean cut. That meant no complications _ no joint or nerve damage or bone fractures.

His right foot was sheered across his metatarsals, the five long bones before the toes. Doctors fitted it with a removable carbon fiber plate that runs under the foot and fills the space where toes should be with hardened foam.

His left leg was a far bigger challenge.

In early July, Luckett strapped into a harness, leaned on a set of parallel bars, and tried out his first prosthetic leg.

It felt awkward, but he was able to balance and walk.

The next day, Luckett tried the leg on crutches _ and tried to walk out the door.

"They were like, 'You gotta' give the leg back,'" Luckett said of his therapists. After a brief argument, they grudgingly gave in. "They said, 'If you're gonna be that hard-headed about it, do it smart, don't wear it all the time.'"

By February 2009, he had progressed so far, he could run a mile in eight minutes.

He rejoined his unit at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and told his battalion commander he wanted to return to duty "only if I could be an asset, not a liability," he recalled.

Months later, he passed a physical fitness test to attain the Expert Infantryman's Badge. It required running 12 miles (19 kilometers) in under three hours with a 35-pound (16-kilogram) backpack. It was a crucial moment, Luckett said, "because I knew if I can get this badge, then there's nothing they can say that I'm not capable of doing."

The Army agreed, and promoted him to captain.

In May, he deployed to Afghanistan.

On his first patrol, wearing 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of gear and body armor, Luckett slipped and fell down. But when he looked around, everybody else was falling, too.

The region around his outpost at Ashoqeh, just west of the provincial capital of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, is surrounded by irrigation trenches and 4-foot (1.2-meter) high mud walls that grapes grow over. Troops must traverse the treacherous terrain to avoid bombs on footpaths.

Capt. Brant Auge, Luckett's 30-year-old company commander, said Luckett was as capable as every soldier in his company, and treated no different.

"He's a soldier who just happens to be missing a leg," said Auge, who is from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. "He tries to play it down as much as possible, he doesn't like to bring a lot of attention to it."

On one of those early patrols, Luckett took to a knee and his pants leg rode up a little bit, revealing the prosthetic limb to a shocked group of Afghan soldiers nearby, Auge said. One gave him the nickname, the "One-legged Warrior of Ashoqeh."

Beside his cramped bunk-bed, the 185-pound (84-kilogram), 5-foot-11 (1.80-meter) Luckett keeps prosthetic legs for different tasks, each with a carbon fiber socket that attaches to his thigh.

One is fitted with a tennis shoe for running, another a boot. One, made of aluminum so it won't rust, has a waterproof black Croc for showering. The most important leg though, he saves for patrols. It is made with a high-tech axle that allows him to move smoothly over uneven terrain. His squad leader painted its toenails purple.

Luckett's prothesis is often a source of good humor _ most often generated by Luckett himself.

Some joke of his advantage of having little to lose if he steps on a mine. "That's always a big one," he said, "but the reality is, you don't want to step on an IED (bomb) because you enjoy living and you want stay living. The fear is no different than any other soldier."

Before heading to Afghanistan, Auge said Luckett had an as yet untried "master plan" to upset the insurgents.

Troops would have Luckett step on a mine and blow his fake leg off. He'd then look up at the trigger man while whipping a replacement leg over his shoulder and slipping it on.

"Then he would flip them off," Auge said, "and keep on walking."

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

The Boardwalk

2008-10-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Kandahar boardwalk at heart of Afghan battlezone is a world away from war

Sept. 6, 2010

By TODD PITMAN

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) _ It was a broiling fall evening in this southern Afghan battlezone, and U.S. Army Sgt. Charles Reed wanted to celebrate his birthday in style _ at T.G.I. Friday's on the boardwalk.

So the military intelligence soldier ducked inside the Western diner with a dozen friends, climbed atop a chair, and began a slow, solo groove as smiling Asian waiters in baseball caps clapped a carefully practiced birthday cheer.

Two nonalcoholic Dutch beers and a $30 steak and shrimp dinner later, Reed stepped out of the air-conditioned cool of the wood-floored eatery _ whose walls are plastered with guitars, surfboards and Elvis posters _ and back into reality: the sweltering desert heat of a giant NATO military base ensconced in a rocky Afghan moonscape crawling with insurgents.

"It was kind of unreal," the Steamboat Springs, Colorado native said, describing his recent 34th birthday fete at Kandahar Airfield, better known as KAF. "At least for a few minutes, you could pretend you were somewhere else. It was like going back home."

The only difference, perhaps: most of the people ordering cheeseburgers and milkshakes were decked out in combat fatigues, and heavily armed.

T.G.I. Friday's is the apex of war-zone escapism on KAF's famed boardwalk, a Wild West-like quadrangle boasting three dozen glass-door shops and coffee bars that form a surreal counterpoint to the daily fighting going on just outside the base's walls.

Coalition forces arriving here this year as part of the U.S. surge to curb the mushrooming insurgency have been shocked to discover such elaborate dining and entertainment options.

Flashing neon signs beckon customers to the red and white tablecloths inside Mamma Mia's Pizzeria. The Green Bean cafe ("Honor First, Coffee Second") offers frozen iced latte and cinnamon buns. There is a barber shop, an AT&T call center, multiple Wifi networks, and a cyber cafe in which soldiers can video-chat with family and friends back home.

Around half a square mile (1 square kilometer) long, the covered walkway surrounds a dirt pitch hosting the occasional rock concert. Troops from NATO nations gather nightly in shorts and tennis shoes to watch basketball, flag-football and volleyball games. There is even a Canadian-dominated field hockey rink. And one night last week, an acoustic guitar jam.

There are ATM bank machines, too, and plenty to shop for: Cuban cigars, condoms, suits. The German military store sells a "Terror Chess" set pitting American forces against Taliban guerrillas on a map of Afghanistan (the American queen is the Statue of Liberty, while George W. Bush and a newly added Barack Obama are kings; their counterparts: a woman clad in a blue burqa and Osama bin Laden).

U.S. Capt. Braden Coleman, a 30-year-old pilot from North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, remembered sitting down on the boardwalk shortly after being deployed here in May.

"I couldn't believe I was in Kandahar eating a double-dipped chocolate ice cream at sunset on a Saturday afternoon," said Coleman, who was downing a strawberry smoothie from the French bakery behind him, where an Eiffel Tower climbs a wall above picnic tables with fake potted plants.

"It was a surreal experience," he said, as a jet fighter roared across the sky, letting loose a stream of defensive white flares. "I remember thinking, 'We're in the heart of the war-zone. The bad guys are 10 miles away. And here we are eating soft-serve ice cream.'"

Since a small American Marine contingent first landed here in late November 2001, KAF has expanded into a small city housing 30,000 multinational troops and support contractors. The population consumes nearly 37,000 gallons (140,000 liters) of water and 50,000 meals daily at seven free dining facilities known as D-FACs, according to U.S. Maj. Steven A. Williams, a senior acquisition officer.

Though far from the front lines, KAF residents endure frequent rocket attacks which rarely cause casualties but force everyone _ including patrons of T.G.I. Friday's _ to hit the ground whenever the alarm sounds.

In May, militants tried to storm the base's northern perimeter in a coordinated assault. One rocket hit about 50 yards (meters) outside a boardwalk coffee shop.

For the most part though, base life is monotonous. The walkway offers a welcome diversion, a place to kick back and relax. It's "a good morale booster," Williams said. The troops "see it as a slice of home."

The fast food outlets became controversial under former commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who questioned the utility of using vital supply lines transiting ambush-prone highways for nonessentials that could make troops too fat to fight. A Thai massage parlor was closed down (yes, a Thai massage parlor), and this spring, the U.S. military shut three American takeaways: Burger King, Pizza Hut and Subway.

T.G.I.'s, which opened in January and features the company's huge bright red and white sign outside and a dry bar with dangling wine glasses inside, appears to have escaped the austerity measures because the franchise is not American-owned.

McChrystal's replacement, Gen. David Petraeus, has hinted he may be kinder to the fast-food cause, saying through a spokesman in June that "all options are on the table."

Last month, a foreign-owned Kentucky Fried Chicken opened. And a new sign advertises a Coney Island specialty: "Nathan's Famous" hot-dogs, "Coming Soon."

Copyright 2010 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

The Hospital

2008-08-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

08Jun2000 CONGO: War-wounded crowd Congo hospital in chaotic scenes. 19:30 GMT

By Todd Pitman

KISANGANI, Congo, June 8 (Reuters) - Women and children, some screaming and crying, sprint barefoot up the steps of the hospital as gunbattles erupt and a black plume of smoke rises from a fresh mortar impact just 100 (yards) meters away.

Inside the university hospital's crumbling pink halls, fresh pools of blood stain floors littered with abandoned syringes.

Dozens of civilians - the wounded and their families - sit huddled against the walls, crouching anxiously on dirty foam mattresses as shells explode outside on Thursday afternoon.

Among them are children, some with fragments in their heads, backs and stomachs. Some rooms are filled with wounded soldiers, their automatic rifles stacked in corners.

In an operating theatre, a surgeon and four assistants work with un-sterilized surgical knives to amputate one man's left leg after it was torn apart by shrapnel earlier on Thursday. Doctors cut through it like a piece of raw meat.

The Congolese city of Kisangani is clearly not a city to get wounded in.

Ugandan and Rwandan troops - former allies in a chaotic war that has torn apart the Democratic Republic of the Congo since August 1998 - have fought intense, almost ceaseless artillery duels from opposite sides of Kisangani since Monday morning.

It is the third time the rival armies' struggle for control of this diamond-rich city has exploded into violence and once again it is civilians who are suffering most.

The fading, cream-coloured concrete building of the university hospital serves as a respite not only for the sick but also as shelter for hundreds of people fleeing the fighting.

The battles have sent thousands of mortar bombs thundering down across the city centre, tearing apart corrugated iron-roof houses and sending shrapnel flying in all directions.

TERRIBLE WOUNDS, NO SUPPLIES

With the city's airports closed, its roads cut off and no running water or electricity, the hospital has already run out of most medical supplies.

"We have nothing here. We are in urgent need of everything," said Dieudonne Mata, one of the city's few surgeons.

Mata, wearing a blue surgical mask, spoke with one gloved hand inside a conscious man's stomach, trying to retrieve a shell fragment.

"We've been working 24 hours a day since Monday. We have few medicines, no proper anaesthetics. We need surgical supplies, fuel to run the generator," he said.

One man died earlier in the day for lack of blood after having a bullet extracted from his gut without anaesthesia.

Kisangani's other main hospital was reportedly hit by shelling on Thursday but it was virtually impossible to reach.

Eric Kambale, a 23-year-old student with a bullet still lodged in his upper right thigh, crouches on a mattress in the university hospital hallway waiting for treatment.

"This morning I went out to get water - we haven't had any food or water for four days - and I got hit," Kambale said.

"Somebody has to do something. Who gave these foreigners the right to fight in our country? We want them to leave. But nobody is doing anything."

Mobs of people, visibly angry at foreigners for destroying their city, surrounded journalists and threatened some of them.

Doctors said they have received over 60 injured patients since Monday and five have died but most civilians, pinned down in their houses, are unable to come in for treatment.

Witnesses said dead bodies in some parts of town have been covered with blankets where they were killed, the living around them unable to bury them because of the incessant clashes.

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.

A Lot to Pray For

2008-08-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

Burundi rebels inspire fear in lakeside village

An army soldier looks down from a ridge just south of Bujumbura in 1999. In the background, Lake Tanganyika and the mountains of eastern Congo. Photo by Todd Pitman.

February 12, 1998

By Todd Pitman

MINAGO, Burundi, Feb 12 (Reuters) - When Father Athanase Nibizi bolted the doors shut and crouched down in his church in southern Burundi one night this week, he had a lot to pray for.

Just minutes before, hundreds of Hutu rebels armed with rifles, machetes, hoes, hammers, clubs and knives had descended from hills surrounding the sleepy, lakeside town of Minago, 50 km (30 miles) south of the capital Bujumbura.

As gunfire rattled through his tiny village, Nibizi, a Hutu, said he could hear the attackers outside singing in Kirundi, the country's native tongue: "We will shoot you! We will burn you! We will defeat you!"

"I locked the doors and stayed there all night," the 40-year-old priest told Reuters on Wednesday.

When he finally came out the next morning, Nibizi found the corpses of two dozen civilians -- men, women and children -- scattered through the village.

Most of the dead had been hacked to death as the attackers went from house to house, singing, shooting and looting whatever they could find, including chickens, goats and beer.

"I saw a young child...hacked in the neck, head and hand. Many others were killed in the same way," said 55-year-old Zacharie Kamwenubusa.

"After killing the people, they looted everything. Everybody tried to hide," Kamwenubusa said.

Hutu rebels stepped up their campaign against Burundi's Tutsi-dominated army and government last month, with a New Year's Day offensive on Bujumbura airport and its environs in which at least 284 people were killed.

The fighting has continued in hills around the capital almost every day, with rebels targeting both ethnic groups.

Fighting in Burundi has claimed at least 150,000 lives, mostly civilians, since Tutsi troops murdered the country's first elected Hutu president in an attempted coup in 1993.

A few hundred metres behind Minago's church, Father Nibizi walked between 16 freshly dug graves covered with dirt, sand, red flowers and stick crosses.

He said eight other bodies were buried nearby.

At the town clinic, soldiers waved away a reporter asking about casualties, but a senior army officer said 46 civilians had been wounded during the three-hour raid.

Most casualties had been evacuated to hospitals in Bujumbura and Rumonge, farther south along Lake Tanganyika.

Down the street a military commander sat sipping warm beer with a few troops under a makeshift hut.

He said his soldiers had chased away the rebels and killed several. When asked how many, he said when the rebels had retreated they carried their dead and wounded with them.

Asked about security in the region following the attack, the commander, speaking French and declining to be quoted by name, described the area as "calm". But as he spoke, the sound of automatic gunfire echoed over green hills in the distance.

The noise was enough for the soldiers to put down their beers, pick up their guns and step out of the hut to listen.
The commander ordered his troops on alert.

Five minutes later and a few hundred metres down the road, young Germaine Nteziyorirwa sat on a stump in front of a row of houses clutching her wounds.

Nteziyorirwa described how, on Tuesday night, a group of men broke down her door, beat her to the ground and slashed her with machetes five times on her head, neck, arm and hands.

"They thought I was dead," she said weakly. "That's how I survived."

As she finished the sentence, a loud explosion followed by a quick burst of nearby gunfire sent her and hundreds of others ducking and sprinting across the road.

As a car moved abruptly through the only street out of town, hundreds of peasants could be seen running out of the dense overgrowth and the tumble-down houses at the base of the hills.

(c) Reuters Limited 1998.

Scenes from a Coup

2008-08-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

Lingerie-clad dancers and Starbucks: After the Thai coup: A surreal day

September 20, 2006

By TODD PITMAN

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) _ Word of a military coup and tanks on the streets spread quickly inside the heaving bars of one of Bangkok's most infamous red-light districts.

But instead of closing up and running home, the lingerie-clad dancers kept dancing and the drinkers kept drinking as long as they could.

Anywhere else, the overthrow of a prime minister and the imposition of martial law might have sent shivers through a fearful population. But in Thailand's glittering capital, the news of Thailand's first coup in 15 years was greeted with a little bit of caution, a lot of calm smiles and some surreal scenes.

"Just relax, listen to the music and buy me a drink." That's what Num, a 29-year-old woman who works at a bar -- and would only give her first name -- had to say when asked what she thought about the coup early Wednesday.

"Nobody is worried," Num said as a group of beer-swigging Ukrainian pilots watched a dozen high-heeled women gyrating on a table under blue and red lights. "At least, not yet."

Throughout Wednesday, that seemed to be the dominant sentiment across much of Bangkok, where many residents woke up to learn the military had ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a 57-year-old billionaire whose popularity has dwindled amid allegations of corruption and abuse of power.

With the revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej still in power and the army keeping a tight lid on security, few seemed to mind the sudden change.

"A coup wasn't the right thing to do, but it was the best thing to do," said Sisoi Snidvongs, a 27-year-old advertising worker who was surfing the Web for news on her laptop at Starbucks. "They should have done it a long time ago."

Many Thais were reassured when the coup leaders pledged loyalty to the country's popular monarch and apologized for "any inconvenience" they had caused, Snidvongs said.

"It's a funny coup," she said. Pointing out the window at families strolling by, she added: "It doesn't feel much like martial law."

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Most of Bangkok was so normal that a first-time visitor to the city would have had a tough time figuring out a coup had just taken place.

Though government offices and schools were closed, most stores, even the city's major shopping malls, stayed open. Shoppers browsed for clothes and artwork at curbside kiosks and vendors hawked grilled squid and chicken, as always. Traffic flowed normally, too -- the usual sea of rickshaw drivers, public buses and purple and orange taxis.

The main giveaway that something was amiss were the tanks, Humvees and armored troop carriers deployed around key government installations. They first appeared late Tuesday, and they became instant tourist attractions to Thais and foreigners alike, who posed beside them for photos.

Children climbed on top of tanks and made the "V" for victory sign with their fingers as they sat beside silent, smiling soldiers. Others, curious about tank treads and turrets, ran their hands across them. Some Thais handed out purple and yellow flowers, which troops promptly stuck in their pockets or on top of their vehicles.

"It's a bit surreal," said 35-year-old Keith Graham, a tourist from Northern Ireland, who was snapping pictures beside one tank near parliament. "It's not every day you get to see a coup."

THE CALM AFTER THE COUP

Indeed, a coup was the last thing most vacationers would have expected to happen in Thailand, a tranquil tourist destination that boasts pristine turquoise-water beaches, exotic wildlife and foot massages that last an hour. Thais are also known for their warm hospitality and ubiquitous smiles.

"You see the soldiers are smiling. People are giving them flowers," said Nuttachai, a 45-year-old businessman who brought his wife and 9-year-old son out to see tanks that blocked off roads to the Royal Palace, the army headquarters and Thaksin's office.

"People outside Thailand will look at this coup and think badly of us," Nuttachai said. "They will be afraid, but there is no reason to be."
___
Todd Pitman, the AP's bureau chief in Dakar, Senegal, was vacationing in Asia at the time of the coup in Thailand.

Copyright 2006 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

King's Kabul

2008-08-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

Afghan king returns to devastated capital after decades-long exile

April 20, 2002

By TODD PITMAN

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) _ An old man named Amanudin leans on his shovel and squints up at the hilltop fort where one Afghan warlord ruthlessly shelled this city for years. He then points in the opposite direction to a place from where a rival warlord did the same.

What's left is an apocalyptic wasteland of rubble and devastation, of bullet-pocked clay-brick houses so decimated they make this part of Kabul look like an archaeological dig.

This is the city Afghanistan's former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, returned home to Thursday after 29 years in exile.

On Friday, the 87-year-old former monarch visited the tomb of his father and gaped at the rocket holes in the roof and the columns destroyed by gunfire. He held his hands out in prayer over his father's tomb, but said not a word.

The capital was a very different place when Zaher Shah left it in 1973. It was peaceful back then, largely untouched by war.

"The king may not recognize it anymore," Amanudin says.

"All these buildings used to be six or seven stories high," he says, pointing low across a jagged horizon of blown-out houses in Kabul's Jadah-i-Maiwand neighborhood. "It used to be very beautiful. This was one of the busiest, most popular parts of Kabul."

Zaher Shah was vacationing in Italy when his cousin, Mohammad Daoud, overthrew him in a palace coup three decades ago.

To avoid bloodshed, the king abdicated and began a long life of exile in Rome, where he watched from afar as Afghanistan descended into chaos.

Daoud was assassinated in 1978 and a communist government took over. The Soviets sent in troops to prop it up, and ended up battling for ten years against Afghan resistance fighters before pulling out. Rival warlords then turned their guns on one another, vying for power in a 1992-96 civil war that leveled much of the capital.

By 1996, the Taliban had taken control of most of the country. But the fanatical Islamic regime was ousted late last year after an intense U.S. bombing campaign backed by northern alliance troops.

Jadah-i-Maiwand, in southeastern Kabul, is the most devastated part of the city, with 90 percent of its buildings destroyed in the civil war.

Today, single walls rise precariously from mounds of dirt and rubbish where entire houses and offices once stood. Three-story buildings are collapsed on themselves, the girders that once held them together twisting out into the air.

One staircase stands by itself, leading up to a floor that no longer exists. A rusted tank, burned out long ago, is parked on a roadside. Only a handful of people still live in the neighborhood.

"We hated all the warlords. They wasted everything," says Amanudin, whose shop was looted by troops loyal to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of the commanders who made Kabul his battleground. The store was later destroyed by a stray missile.

Today, some 1,200 laborers, paid $2 a day by the United Nations, are trying to clear away the rubble and debris for the first time _ to pave the way for reconstruction.

Work crews are spread all over, tearing down fragile walls with pickaxes. A group of 10 men nearby is trying to pull down what remains of a lone three-story brick wall with a rope.

Amanudin digs his shovel into the dirt, slowly clearing away a broken pile of bricks.

The plan is to reuse whatever material they can, rebuilding a new Kabul from the rubble of the old.

Shops have emerged again on the edges of Maiwand street, but ruined buildings still teeter next to them _ a far cry from the Jadah-i-Maiwand that Amanudin remembers bustling with stores selling jewelry and carpets. Gone are the late afternoon strolls down tree-lined streets; drinks with friends in tea houses.

Green jeeps and armored cars mounted with heavy guns belonging to the 4,500-man international peacekeeping force cruise by on patrol, in curious juxtaposition with the horse-drawn carriages and donkey-carts they pass.

They share the roads with rickshaws and huge trucks overflowing with refugees just returned from Pakistan _ more than a few on word that the former king is back.

Many residents credit Zaher Shah with keeping Afghanistan at peace during his 40-year rule, and hope now that he has returned he will be a unifying force.

"During the king's reign, there was peace. We want that old life back," Amanudin says.

Zaher Shah will convene a grand council, or loya jirga, in June that will select a new government, but his role is largely symbolic _ there are no plans to restore the monarchy.

Interim Information Minister Sayed Makhdoom Raheen, said the former monarch had mixed feeling about his return.

"He was very happy to see Afghanistan after all this time," Raheen said. "But of course anybody who comes to a destroyed city like Kabul will feel sad."

Copyright 2002 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Cemetary Battlefield

2008-08-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

One of largest Muslim cemeteries in world becomes battlefield for U.S. troops

August 11, 2004

By TODD PITMAN

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) _ Unexploded rockets stick out of tombstones. Booby-trapped artillery shells lie buried on narrow lanes lined with crypts. Guerrilla fighters hide in a vast sea of pockmarked graves filled with underground tunnels, letting loose with rocket-propelled grenades and mortar fire.

One of the largest cemeteries in the Muslim world has become an eerie battleground for U.S. troops who have fought Shiite guerrillas for nearly a week in Najaf. For dozens of Iraqis and a handful of Americans, it's also become a graveyard.

"It's bad luck, but we gotta do what we gotta do," Staff Sgt. Jose Resto said Wednesday while walking behind a Bradley fighting vehicle in the Valley of Peace cemetery, cradling an M-4 carbine as explosions echoed in the distance.

Hundreds of thousands _ perhaps millions _ are buried in the graveyard, which covers nearly 5 square miles sprawling out from the outskirts of the Imam Ali shrine, one of the holiest in Shia Islam.

Fierce fighting erupted in Najaf on Aug. 5 between U.S. troops and militants loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. U.S. commanders accused al-Sadr's militiamen of launching attacks from the cemetery and swept though it, killing hundreds, according to the military.

Al-Sadr's forces put the death toll only in the dozens. Five U.S. troops have also been killed, along with about 20 Iraqi officers.

As fighting raged in Najaf for a seventh day Wednesday, the U.S. military said it was holding joint exercises with Iraqi national guardsmen in preparation for a major assault to crush the uprising, and al-Sadr told his followers to fight on even if he is killed.

Early Wednesday, a convoy of 18 Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles carrying 97 men from the 1st Cavalry Division _ whose soldiers write their blood types on their helmets in case they are wounded _ rolled up to a low wall on a deserted street outside the cemetery.

Almost immediately, they started fighting al-Sadr's men.

The soldiers climbed to the top of a blown-out single-story tomb and shot briefly at insurgent positions in buildings on the cemetery's far side, with Bradleys adding fire from their automatic cannon.

"Target destroyed," a voice crackled over the radios.

"Never in my life would I have expected we'd be fighting in a graveyard," said the company commander, Capt. Patrick McFall, 30. "Every day I think about the families whose loved ones are buried here."

Dirt paths crisscross the cemetery, which is filled with heavy tombs, some made of concrete, others of brick. Some have rounded brown clay domes with Arabic inscriptions. The more elaborate tombs feature green and blue domes, locked doors, even stairs that lead to underground rooms. Framed black and white photographs of the dead hang inside caged, turquoise crypts.

The graveyard is so congested many tombs sit side by side, some inches apart, some leaning into each other.

For guerrilla fighters, it's a perfect place to hide.

"You can hear 'em, but you can't see 'em," McFall said. "They're hiding down in the catacombs.

All you hear is 'phsssst'," he said, mimicking the sound of a passing bullet.

As parts of McFall's company pushed slowly south, it crossed narrow, sandy lanes strewn with rocks and bullet casings. Some were so narrow, tombstones scratched the sides of the Bradleys.

Soldiers found a roadside bomb: an artillery shell in the road and wires leading away from it.

They blew it up.

Later, al-Sadr militiamen started firing mortars, sending up gray plumes of smoke across the skyline. One round slammed into a tomb 10 yards from McFall, shaking his armored Humvee.

No one was injured.

On Tuesday, U.S. helicopter gunships had pummeled a multistory hotel 400 yards from the cemetery with rockets, missiles and 30 mm cannons. The military said about 20 people were killed inside the building.

By Wednesday, more militants were in the scorched building, firing at the Americans.

"We keep pushing south and they just keep coming," McFall said. "I think they got a reproduction facility down there. I think they're cloning."

A Bradley in front of McFall began pounding the charred building with a 25 mm cannon, sending up sparks and blasting away chunks of concrete. The hotel's roof soon caught fire _ soldiers said from either fuel or weapons caches _ darkening the sky with smoke.

Resto, the sergeant, said that when his Bradley unit swept through tombs this week, they found some tunnels and collapsed them with fragmentation grenades.

"We don't risk American lives," he said. "When we see there are tunnels, we throw down grenades."

On Wednesday, he searched one crypt with a blue door. It was empty when he examined it on Tuesday, but now he found empty cans, water basins and RPG boosters. "Somebody crept back in there overnight," he said.

Later, Resto and several other U.S. soldiers sat against the light green wall of a mausoleum, eating military rations and discussing the wisdom of war and whether George W. Bush or John Kerry would make a better president.

Two rocket-propelled grenades whooshed overhead, exploding nearby.
None of the soldiers flinched.

"We've been out here a few days," said Pvt. Henry Salice, 24. "This is an eerie place. ... You get used to it."

Copyright 2004 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.