Newspaper article analysis

1. INTRODUCE THE ARTICLE

1. Name the title of the article.

2. If there is a byline, say who the author of the article is, what his/her qualifications are, where and when the article was published.

3. Name the topic of the article.

4. Name the message of the article, if there is one.

2. SUMMARIZE THE ARTICLE

3. ANALYZE AND INTERPRET THE ARTICLE

1. Article genre

• Is the article under analysis a (straight) news story, a (straight) feature story or a featurized news story? Why?

1. Article structure and unity:

   1. Headline:

      • What is the purpose of the headline?

      • Is the headline straightforward or teasing? Why?

      • Are there any grammatical/lexical/graphic peculiarities in the headline? If yes, how can you account for them?

   2. Lead:

• Is it a direct lead summarizing the story’s essential facts (who, what, when, where, why and how)?

• Or is it a delayed lead (an anecdote, a shocking or startling statement, a generalization, description, a quote, a question, a comparison, etc.) enticing the reader into the story by hinting at its contents?

1. Body of the article:

• Does the body of the article mainly contain details on the information given in the lead? Is it written in the “inverted pyramid” form?

• Or is it a sequence of plot events united by the main theme and the message/ a first-person narration about the author’s own experience?

• Is it written in the quote/transitional way?

• Does the story have a thread?

1. End:

• Does the story end with less important information (in comparison with the lead)?

• Or does it end with a conclusion wrapping up the story/

a strong quotation/ a surprising climax?

3. Comment on graphology and punctuation of the article. Are there any

peculiarities? If yes, what is the purpose of their use?

4. Comment on the language, vocabulary and style of the article. Are there any peculiarities? If yes, what is the purpose of their use?

5. Illustrations and captions and their function(s).

4. Conclusion

1. The author’s attitude and purpose in writing the article.

• Can you ‘hear’ the voice of the author? What is it used for?

2. Your ideas and attitudes.

Unit 1 Terrorism

Text 1.1 The War on Terror Is Not New

By Niall Ferguson

New York Times, September 20, 2001

Oxford, England – Viewed from England, what happened last Tuesday looked not like Pearl Harbor II, but like the London Blitz. That was one of many reasons for the outpouring of sympathy for America after the attacks on New York and Washington.

Without suicide bombers and without high-rise targets, this kind of death and devastation took Luftwaffe weeks to achieve in 1940-41. During those dark days, it was Edward R. Murrow, CBS’s bureau chief in London, who brought home to American radio listeners what London was enduring. Last week Britain felt the flames in New York, thanks to the still more vivid transmissions of satellite television.

Yet as the smoke clears, both literally and metaphorically, the mood in Europe is one of growing disquiet as well as sincere sympathy. A week ago it was impossible not to offer unconditional support to an America in agony. Today, however, there is a growing apprehension about what America’s allies may have committed themselves to when they invoked, for the first time, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, with its affirmation that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”.

To be sure, Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, has dutifully toed the American line: “Whatever the technical or legal issues about a declaration of war”, he said Monday, “the fact is we are at war with terrorism”. The British public seems ready for a fight: an opinion poll this week suggested that as many as two-thirds of the people here want military action.

And there is support for such action on the continent as well. Spain is solidly behind the United States and has already offered the use of its air bases. The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, called this week for a “grand international coalition to fight against this plague of terrorism”.

Yet it would be a grave mistake for President Bush and his advisers to take such words to mean unconditional support for whatever retaliatory measures they decide on.

To some extent, the anxiety comes from those in the usual anti-American quarters, who regard any blow to the United States – no matter how terrible – as just retribution for past misdeeds. There is also the familiar European hankering after an independent foreign policy, unconstrained by American military objectives. American talk of “war” clearly makes many European leaders squirm. The Norwegian government was conspicuously quick to say that despite the NATO declaration, it did not regard itself as at war. Likewise, Defense Minister Antonio Martino of Italy said, “The term ‘war’ is inappropriate”.

Even the big European players are becoming more circumspect in their remarks. In Washington Tuesday, President Jacques Chirac of France pointedly declined to use the word “war”. Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher of Germany has warned against a “disproportionate response” by the United States, echoing remarks by the French defense minister, Alain Richard. All this was inevitable. We have heard it many times before, most recently during the Kosovo war and before that during the Persian Gulf war. Yet even among Europeans who are usually regarded as pro-American hawks, there is mounting unease. It is grounded in the fear that the United States does not know what it is getting into. This is not a war like World War II. It is a continuation of a war against terrorism that Europeans have been waging for more than 30 years. In this war, Americans are novices.

Since 1968, there have been 500 hijackings around the world and more than 4,000 recorded terrorist bombings. Although Americans abroad were often the targets, virtually none of these attacks occurred within the United States. In Europe, it was different.

The Irish Republican Army has never come close to killing so many people at a stroke as happened in the World Trade Center attack; nor has the Basque separatist group E.T.A.; nor did the German Maoist Red Army Faction in its bloody heyday. But we in Europe have been living for decades with the daily possibility of lethal explosions, and we know that you cannot rely on stealth bombers to defeat the stealthy bombers on the ground.

If making war on terrorists were simple, the forces of the I.R.A. and E.T.A. would have been smoked out and hunted down long ago. But terrorist organizations are not nation-states that can be vanquished in conventional war.

The fear of indiscriminate retaliation by the United States is particularly acute in countries like France, Holland, Britain and Germany, which all have substantial Muslim populations. Only a tiny minority may respond to calls for a jihad, but that is reason enough for Europeans to feel nervous about American talk of a “crusade”.

Europeans have another concern about American policy. To many, last week’s attacks have made a mockery of the Bush administration’s missile defense plans. How, they argue, can any form of Star Wars protect us when a gang of fanatics armed with nothing more than knives can kill thousands of people in minutes? The biggest menace we face today – and all civilized societies face it together – is not intercontinental ballistic missiles but terrorism, which requires a subtler means of defense.

In truth, this may not be a case of either/or. What is undeniable, however, is that some countries in Europe have been at war with terrorists for decades and they have learned some hard lessons in the process. The biggest lesson is that there are no quick victories. The foe does not line up his tanks for you to flatten, his ships for you to sink. His troops live among you. While it is possible to attack foreign bases of operation, a direct hit does not guarantee an end to future terrorism. The smartest weapon in this fight will be the spy who is capable of mingling among Arabs and Afghans undetected. Can America find such people today?

George W. Bush may well grow impatient with Europeans’ urging him to be cautious. But their hesitations must not be dismissed as faintheartedness. Americans must steel themselves for a long, inglorious kind of war that governments in Europe already know only too well. Niall Ferguson, professor of political and financial history at Oxford, is author of “The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World”.

Text 1.2 Washington Cites Shortage of Linguistics for Key Security Jobs

Diana Jean Schemo

The New York Times, April 16 2001

As a band of trained terrorists plotted to blow up the World Trade Center, clues to the devastation ahead lay under the nose of law enforcement officials.

The F.B.I. held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on bomb making that had been seized from Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian serving time in federal prison for passport fraud. There were phone calls the prison had taped, in which Mr. Ajaj guardedly told another terrorist how to build the bomb.

There was one problem: they were in Arabic. Nobody who understood Arabic listened to them until after the explosion at the Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, which killed six people and injured more than a thousand.

The tale is but one illustration of what intelligence and law enforcement officials describe as an increasingly dire lack of foreign language expertise that is undermining national security.

In the post-Soviet world, where threats are more diffuse and scattered over the map, military, diplomatic and intelligence officials are warning of critical shortages in their ability to understand the languages of other nations, and so unravel their secrets.

The reasons are many. With English increasingly becoming the world’s lingua franca, the study of foreign languages has suffered. Taxpayer pressure on school districts to cut budgets and focus on the basics of reading and math has shortchanged language courses, and districts that are interested in teaching foreign languages report a shortage of qualified teachers.

At the same time, the need for language proficiency has grown as security threats have fragmented and the ability to eavesdrop has expanded.

While the cold war’s end has brought waves of immigrants with knowledge of obscure languages to the United States, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been reluctant to hire great numbers of them, citing a weakness in English and, frequently, difficulties in gaining security clearances for them.

According to testimony last September before a Senate subcommittee, roughly half of the State Department’s diplomatic postings are filled by people lacking necessary foreign language skills.

The F.B.I. must translate a million pages and untold hours of intercepted conversations a year and faces a mounting backlog that undermines its ability to prevent some crimes and investigate others.

Intelligence agencies say they are frequently caught short in times of crisis, lacking a sufficient pool of agents and analysts with needed languages, from Arabic to Korean and – most recently – Macedonian.

Thousands of scientific and technical papers also go untranslated, depriving analysts and policy makers of vital information about the state of foreign research in a range of areas, the Senate heard.

Robert O. Slater is director of the National Security Education Program run by the Defense Department, which offers grants to promote the study of foreign languages and cultures. Mr. Slater said that in the last decade, the linguistic shortfalls had gone from an episodic to a chronic problem. “It’s now affecting the ability of federal agencies to address their missions”, he said.

According to government figures, American colleges and universities graduated only nine students who majored in Arabic last year. Only about 140 students graduated with degrees in Chinese, and only a handful in Korean.

These days, only 8.2 percent of American college and university students enroll in foreign language course – nearly all in Spanish, French and German, said Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the Modern Language Association.

There is no single solution.

A number of government agencies, including the Defense Department, are using computers to take a first pass at reducing the load of material for translation.

The Justice Department is exploring the use of a pool of translations with security clearance who could work for a number of agencies. The State Department increased language training for junior officers nine fold between 1997and 1999.

The Defense and State Departments run the largest factories for training foreign language speakers in the country. Ray Clifford, provost of the Defense Language Training Institute, notes that the languages the military considers critical are not those generally taught in universities, so the military for the most part does its own training.

“The largest number of enrollments in the school system is Spanish”, Dr. Clifford said. “Our №1 enrollment is in Arabic”. The military has more students learning Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Russian than it does Spanish, he said.

Compared with the nine students majoring in Arabic last year in colleges, his institute graduated 409. It graduated 120 students in Farsi. Dr. Clifford said he could not even find figures on Farsi among colleges and universities.

For the first time, the military is planning to set quotas for the recruitment of so-called heritage speakers – the children of immigrants.

Advances in technology have multiplied the ability to eavesdrop and, consequently, the material requiring translation, Mr. Crump said.

Margaret R. Gulotta, the F.B.I.’s section chief for language services, said court-sanctioned wiretaps have to be translated as conversations take place. The expertise needed is high, with suspects frequently using coded language.

And in investigating the bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bureau came across a tape recording in an esoteric language. Eventually, the bureau was able to identify the language, but found nobody with the required security clearance who could translate it.

Text 1.3 Timeline: Russia terror attacks

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

(CNN) – Armed attackers on Wednesday seized a school in a town in southern Russia in the latest in a series of terrorist attacks in Russia that have killed hundreds of people. Here is a timeline of the most significant recent strikes:

August 31, 2004 – A female suicide bomber kills nine people and herself, and wounds 51 others when she detonates a bomb outside a subway station in northeastern Moscow.

August 24, 2004 – Two Russian passenger planes are blown up almost simultaneously, killing89. Federal Security Service focusing on whether acts of terrorism brought down the jets after traces of explosives found in wreckage of planes.

June 22, 2004 – Rebels seize an interior ministry building in Ingushetia, near Chechnya, killing at least 92 people, including the acting head of the Ingush Interior.

February 6, 2004 – A rush-hour blast kills at least 30 people and injures 70 on a metro train in Moscow.

December 9, 2003 – A suicide bomber in central Moscow kills at least five people.

December 5, 2003 – An explosion on a commuter train in the Stavropol region north of Chechnya kills at least 36 people and injures more than 150.

September 3, 2003 – Six people are killed in an explosion on board a commuter train near the Northern Caucasus spa town of Pyatigorsk, but police say it is not the work of Chechen rebels.

August 1, 2003 – A suicide bomber kills at least 50 people at a military hospital in the town of Mozdok in North Ossetia bordering Chechnya.

July 5, 2003 – Two women suicide bomber kill 15 other people when they blow themselves apart at an open-air rock festival at Moscow’s Tushino airfield. 60 are injured.

June 5, 2003 – A woman bomber ambushes a bus carrying Russian air force pilots near Chechnya, blowing it up and killing herself and 18 other people.

May 14, 2003 – At least 16 people are killed in a suicide bomb attack during a religious festival in the town of lliskhan-Yurt, east of Grozny. 145 are wounded.

May 12, 2003 – Two suicide bombers drive a truck full of explosives into a government administration and security complex in Znamenskoye, in northern Chechnya. Fifty-nine people are killed, and scores hurt.

December 27, 2002 – Chechen suicide bombers ram vehicles into the local government headquarters in Grozny, bringing down the roof and floors of the four-story building. Chechen officials say about 80 people killed.

October 23, 2002 – About 50 Chechen rebels seize a Moscow theatre and take about 800 hostages. After a three-day siege Russian forces storm the building using gas, killing most of the rebels and 115 hostages.

August 8, 2000 – A bomb in a busy Moscow underpass kills eight people.

July 2-3, 2000 – Chechen guerrillas launch five suicide bomb attacks on bases of Russian forces within 24 hours. In the deadliest, at least 54 people are killed at a police base near Grozny.

June 7, 2000 – In the first attack of its kind in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, two Russian special police are killed in a suicide car-bombing near the regional capital Grozny.

September 1999 – Bombs destroy apartment blocks in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgoonsk, killing 200. The government blames Chechen rebels, who in turn accuse Russia’s secret services. Then – Prime Minister Vladimir Putin responds by sending troops into Chechnya for the first time since 1997.

August 31, 1999 – A bomb explodes in an underground shopping center near the Kremlin, injuring 20 people.

January 1996 – 350 Chechen militants seized a hospital in Kizlyar, eastern Chechnya, and took more than 3,000 people hostage. In military operation to free them, 65 civilians and soldiers were killed.

June 1995 – Chechen rebels seize hundreds of hostages in a hospital in southern Russian town of Budennovsk. More than 100 die as Russian commandos launch botched raid. Rebels allowed to leave for Chechnya after five days in return for freeing captives.

Text 1.4 Germany accused of paying large ransom for release of hostages

• Two men freed following 99 days in captivity in Iraq

• Critics say payments encourage kidnapping

Luke Harding in Berlin

The Guardian Thursday May 4, 2006

Two German hostages kidnapped in Iraq arrived home yesterday as Iraq’s ambassador to Germany claimed a “load of money” had been paid to secure their release.

Alaa al-Hashimi, said the German government had handed over a “large amount” to the kidnappers of René Bräunlich and Thomas Nitzschke, who were freed on Tuesday after 99 days of captivity. “Regarding the payment of ransom, I don’t know. But I assume it was a large amount of money”, the ambassador told Germany’s ARD public television station. The Iraqi government had no part in the release, he said.

The claim is likely to provoke fresh debate over whether western governments should pay for the release of hostages or refuse to negotiate with kidnappers – the official policy of Britain and the US. Italy and France are believed to have paid million-dollar sums for the release of kidnapped nationals.

Two British hostages, Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley, were executed by their captors.

Mr. Bräunlich, 32, and Mr. Nitzschke, 28, arrived at Tegel airport in Berlin yesterday looking pale and exhausted but apparently unharmed. “We are very happy to be alive. It was something we didn’t take for granted”, said Mr. Bräunlich. He thanked the German government for getting him out, adding: “We are happy to be here again. We had a difficult time.”

The engineers, from Leipzig in east Germany, were seized on January 24 outside their workplace, an Iraqi-owned detergent factory in the industrial town of Baiji, 110 miles north of Baghdad. German officials swiftly established that their captors were not holding them for political reasons. Instead they wanted to make money, diplomats said.

Asked yesterday whether Germany had paid a ransom, the foreign minister, Franz-Walter Steinmeier, said: “We will of course say nothing about the concrete details regarding their release”. He thanked the US, Britain, France and “other partners in the region” for helping to get the men out after three months in “inhuman conditions”.

Although the release is a success for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who last night held talks with the US president, George Bush, in Washington, there are questions about the wisdom of paying large ransoms to Iraqi gangs.

Yesterday, Rolfeckhard Giermann, who spent five years in Baghdad as east Germany’s trade attaché, said it was a signal to potential kidnappers “that you can earn good money with German hostages”. He told the Sächsische Zeitung newspaper: “This simply strengthens Iraq’s kidnapping industry”.

When the men were taken hostage, there was speculation that Germans were being targeted because Berlin, unlike Washington or London, had a habit of paying ransoms. Their kidnapping came a month after Susanne Osthoff, a German woman working in Iraq, was freed from captivity. German diplomats admitted the government paid $5 m (£2.7) for her release.

High-profile examples include a case in 2003 when at least $5 m (£3.4) was paid to secure the release of 14 tourists kidnapped in the Sahara desert.

The release is good news for Mr. Steinmeier, who has emerged as a skilled crisis manager since he became foreign minister in November.

More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Most foreign hostages have been released. But 55 foreign hostages have been reported executed by their Iraqi captors – 41 in 2004, 13 last year, and one so far this year.

Text 1.5 Hotel blast kills 25 as Pakistan crisis deepens

• Suicide bomber leaves warning of more attacks

• Musharraf’s rule under threat amid internal strife

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

The Guardian, May 16, 2007

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded hotel restaurant in Peshawar yesterday, killing 25 people and leaving a posthumous warning of more attacks to come attached to his leg.

The attack came in the course of the bloodiest period of internal strife Pakistan has endured since President Pervez Musharraf came to power in 1999 and represents the latest sign that the military leader’s hold on the country is shakier than ever.

The bomber walked into the restaurant in the Marhaba hotel at lunchtime, when the dining room and the narrow streets outside were at their most crowded.

“One side of the hotel was totally demolished”, said Jamshed Baghwan, a reporter in the Peshawar bureau of Pakistan’s Daily Express newspaper, who was on the scene 15 minutes after the blast. “There was blood everywhere, like rainwater. I saw 16 bodies.I think one was the son of the owner, about eight or nine years old. There were people taking the wounded in their arms to the hospital that is across the road. The wounded were everywhere”.

The authorities said about 50 people were injured. Amid the carnage, according to Peshawar police, the bomber’s legs were recovered. Scrawled on brown packaging tape wrapped around one was a note in Pashtu proclaiming: “Those who spy for America will face this same fate. “Sources in Peshawar said the hotel owners had come from Afghanistan and were seen as outsiders. In the febrile atmosphere of Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic militancy, they had been denounced as spies.

One theory is that the attack was intended as revenge for the death of Mullah Dadullah, a Taliban leader killed over the weekend by Afghan and Nato forces in Afghanistan. He was reportedly tracked down with the help of informants.

The bombing follows the worst political violence in Pakistan for two decades over the weekend, when 41 people were killed in street gun battles in Karachi between pro-government and opposition parties. The next day, Karachi and other major cities were brought to a near halt by a protest strike over the role of pro-government MQM party in the killings.

The opposition Pakistan People’s party also protested yesterday at the killing on Monday of a supreme court official, Syed Hamad Raza, who was to have been a witness in a legal dispute between the government and Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Chaundhry, whom General Musharaff is trying to remove from office.

“Raza’s murder is a strong message to the judiciary, “Sherry Rehman, the party spokeswoman, said. “Pakistan is being ruled by a bunch of butchers”.

The fight over Justice Chaundry’s future has crystallized opposition to the Musharraff government. Yesterday’s bomb attack is not thought to be connected. Rather it represents a different threat, the increasing power of Islamic militancy, or “Talibanisation”, coming from Afghanistan and the tribal regions along the border.

“The days of Musharraff ruling the roost unquestioned are over”, said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador who is now director of Boston University’s center for international relations. “I see a very rocky period ahead and at the end of that rocky period, one Musharraf’s critical supporters – the US and the army – is going to say: Sir, this can’t endure”.

Text 1.6 Triple blasts rock Egypt resort

BBC News 25 April 2006, 05:21 GMT 06:21 UK

At least 23 people – including three foreigners – have been killed and 62 wounded in three blasts in the Egyptian resort town of Dahab, officials say.

The explosions occurred in a bustling area popular with tourists during the early evening when many people would have been out in cafes and restaurants.

Eyewitnesses spoke of seeing debris and body parts in the streets.

Southern Sinai peninsula resorts have been hit before. About 60 people were killed in Sharm el-Shaikh last July.

Most of the dead were Egyptians, who had been enjoying a Spring holiday in Dahab when the attacks occurred. A German boy was among three foreigners killed.

Some officials were quoted as saying the attacks were the work of suicide bombers, but others said it was too early to say. There has been no immediate claim of responsibility.

The attacks received swift international condemnation.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called the explosions a “wicked terrorist act”, and US president George W Bush described it as “heinous”.

The Hamas-led Palestinian government said it “strongly condemns this criminal act which flouts our religion, shakes Palestinian national security and works against Arab interests”.

Israel’s ambassador in Cairo urged Israelis in Sinai to leave immediately, and a stream of Israeli cars were reportedly heading to the Israeli border at Taba by late evening.

‘Like War’

The three explosions happened in quick succession at about 1900 (1700GMT) in what is a small, low-key resort popular with Western backpackers, budget Israeli tourists and scuba-divers.

Several restaurants, shops and a supermarket were destroyed in the main tourist street close to the seafront during one of the busiest times of the day.

A German doctor, who was holidaying in the town at the time, said a 10-year-old boy died in his arms as he went to the aid of the wounded.

“It was like war”, Michael Hartlich told the AFP news agency, still shocked and upset several hours after the blasts. “I’d never seen anything like it before, a child, a baby, blood everywhere, the smell of burnt skin, of burnt hair”.

The BBC’s Mark Perrow in Dahab saw people sitting dazed near to where the explosions took place as police set up cordons.

The roads in and out of Dahab were being controlled by checkpoints and a virtual curfew existed overnight in the town, our correspondent says.

The emergency services were quickly on the scene, and many volunteers rushed to the town’s small hospital to give blood.

The worst of the injured were driven 80 kilometers (50 miles) for treatment at Sharm el-Sheikh or flown on to the capital, Cairo.

Among the 62 wounded there were three Danes, three Britons, two Italians, two Germans, two French people, a South Korean, a Lebanese, a Palestinian, an American, an Israeli and Australian.

Text 1.7 Gunmen kill top Mexican policeman

BBC News 9 May 2008 22:57 UK

Gunmen in Mexico have killed another top Mexican police official – just one day after the head of the national anti-narcotics effort was shot dead.

Esteban Robles headed the anti-kidnapping unit of the Mexico City police department. He was shot several times outside his home on Friday.

Mr. Robles was flown to a nearby hospital, but died shortly afterwards.

The news came as Mexico’s president was attending a memorial service honoring three other senior police officers.

President Felipe Calderon said these latest attacks would not deter his efforts to continue his government’s campaign against the drugs trafficking cartels operating in the country.

“We have to come together to confront this evil, we Mexicans have to definitively and categorically say ‘That’s enough!’,” he said.

“We can’t accept this situation, we have to take back our streets”, he added.

Mr. Robles was the fourth top policemen to have been killed in Mexico City in the past 10 days.

He was ambushed by four gunmen in a truck and shot as he was driving out of his house in Mexico Сity, officials said.

Retaliatory attacks

Edgar Millan Gomez, the official who died on Thursday, was in charge of co-coordinating national police operations against drugs traffickers.

He was shot nine times outside his home and died in hospital. Police are investigating whether the attack was drug-related.

The White House has again called on the United States Congress to pass legislation that would allow more than $1bn of aid to be used in the fight against Mexico’s drug cartels.

Mexico has seen a surge in drug-related killings recently. Last year. 2,500 people were killed; so far this year, 1,100 people have been killed.

Mr. Calderon has sent nearly 30,000 soldiers and federal police to fight Mexico’s powerful drug cartels since he took office in 2006.

The drugs cartels have fought back by attacking security forces. They are also fighting each other to control lucrative trafficking routes.

Text 1.8 Colombian rebels release 4 hostages

San Jose Del Guaviare, Colombia

International Herald Tribune February 28, 2008

Colombian rebels Wednesday handed four hostages over to the International Red Cross and the Venezuelan interior minister, ending more than six years of captivity.

The four Colombian politicians were freed in a clearing in the southern jungles of Colombia around midday. Two Venezuelan helicopters with doctors aboard were flying them directly to Colombia.

“It’s a very important day for the Colombian people and for these for freed people”, Barbara Hintermann, the Red Cross Director for Colombia, said in Bogotá in announcing the handover.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, into whose custody the four were released, spoke with them by phone after they were freed, said Jesse Chacón, a senior aide to the president.

“They are safe and sound”, Chacón said.

The handover raised hopes for a broader deal to free dozens more hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian politician who also holds French citizenship, and three American defense contractors whose plight has drawn worldwide attention to the captives.

Hintermann said the helicopters would fly to the Venezuelan border town of Santo Domingo. The freed hostages would then fly on to Caracas to be reunited with their families.

“It appears that they are in good enough health to travel to Caracas”, Hintermann said.

The revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, announced Jan.31 that it planned to free three of the hostages – Gloria Polanco and Orlando Beltrán, both former representatives; and former Senator Luis Eladio Pérez – and said they were in poor health. Former Senator Jorge Gechem was later added to the group.

Polanco is said to have suffered health problems including thyroid trouble, while Gechem has heart, back and ulcer problems.

The FARC freed the four in the same region where it freed two other politicians – Clara Rojas and Consuelo González – on Jan.10.

Venezuelan state radio called the operation “Camino a La Paz” or “Path to Peace”.

“Such a kidnapping surely tears out one’s insides”, Daniel Polanco, the youngest of Gloria Polanco’s three sons, told Caracol Radio, a Colombian network, in Caracas, where he waited for her. He was 11 years old when his mother was kidnapped.

His two older brothers were seized with his mother and released in 2004 after a ransom was paid and their father was murdered, allegedly by the FARC. Polanco said they had bought their mother flowers, balloons, two or three changes of clothes and cosmetics “so she can be pretty the first days”.

Aboard the helicopters were the Venezuelan interior minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, and Senator Piedad Córdoba of Colombia, a close Chávez collaborator, as well as four Red Cross representatives and a team of doctors.

The FARC had called its planned release of the hostages a gesture of recognition for the mediation efforts of Chávez, who last month called on the international community to recognize the rebels as belligerents.

The rebels have proposed to trade some 40 other high-value captives – including Betancourt and the three Americans – for hundreds of imprisoned guerrillas. But they have been unable to agree with the hard-line Colombian government of president Alvaro Uribe on conditions to begin a dialogue.

“This release is very positive, but the larger hostage-for-prisoner exchange process is a stuck as ever”, said Adam Isakson, a Colombia analyst with the center for International Policy, a research institute in Washington.

Text 1.9 Tigers sink ship on polling day

BBC News 10 May 2008 07:55 UK

Tamil Tiger rebels have sunk a naval cargo ship in eastern Sri Lanka, hours before voting got under way in important local elections.

The navy said a 65-metre (213-ft) ship was hit by an underwater blast caused by a suicide diver, though no other casualties were reported.

Rebels said the ship had been loaded with munitions destined for Sri Lankan troops operating in the north.

Saturday’s local polls are the first in the region in 20 years.

They follow a government offensive last summer.

Troops drove the Tamil Tigers from their bases in the region, which they had controlled for 13 years.

Thousands of extra troops and police have been deployed to ensure security for the elections in the east coast towns of Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Ampara.

On Friday, at least 11 people died in a bomb attack on a café in Ampara, which was blamed on the Tigers. There was no immediate comment from the rebels.

‘Sea Tiger’ attack

A Sri Lankan navy spokesman, Commander DKP Dassanayake, said the cargo vessel Invisible “sank due to an underwater explosion” at around 0215 local time (2045 GMT Friday).

“We suspect the blast was carried out by a suicide diver”, he said.

He gave no details of the ship’s cargo.

A rebel statement quoted by AFP news agency said “Sea Tiger underwater naval commandos” had attacked the ship just before dawn.

The army blamed the Tigers for the attack on the café in Ampara, in which 36 people were also wounded.

Fighting is continuing in the north where the rebels have their main stronghold.

About 70,000 people have been killed since the civil war began in 1983. The rebels want an independent state for minority Tamils in the north and east.

The BBC’s Roland Buerk in Colombo says Saturday’s vote will lay the foundation for limited devolution that the government says is the answer to Tamil complaints of domination by Sinhalese-led central governments.

Text 1.10 ‘The suicide bomber is the smartest of smart

bombs’

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor

The Guardian, July 14, 2005

In the West Bank and Gaza, portraits of dead suicide bombers and graffiti extolling their deeds are plastered all over walls. Videos of their last interviews are on sale on street stalls. Their funerals are occasions for mass mourning.

That celebrity factor helps in the recruitment of suicide bombers, young men and women brought up in the occupied territories.

Anne Marie Oliver, an American academic who has spent years studying the phenomenon in the West Bank and Gaza, believes the “star” factor and the acquiring of glory could also have motivated the Yorkshire bombers. They will not have posters up in Britain or mass mourning, but they will attain glory on internet sites across the Muslim world, according to Ms Oliver, who has co-written with Paul Steinberg the newly published The Road to Martyrs’ Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide bomber.

“It does not matter whether it is Britain or Syria or the West Bank, they are highly romantic figures,” she said.

The fact that they carried with them credit cards and other personal ID suggests they wanted to be known.

The British media has, in the main, demonized the Yorkshire bombers in much the same way as the IRA was in 1980s and 1990s. The adjectives come readily: fanatics, mad, evil.

Ms Oliver does not believe suicide bombing is a brave act, but, she says, “I steer away from the rubric of evil. You have to develop a concept of the suicide bomber without either of these extremes”.

Suicide bombings, which have their origins in medieval times, can be traced through Japan’s kamikaze pilots to the Iranians during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The modern version was developed by Hizbollah and its predecessor during the Lebanese civil war, with attacks on the US and then Israelis, and was refined by the Palestinians in 1994−96 and in the second intifada, beginning in 2000.

The number of suicide bombings has increased in the past five years, a combination of the Palestinian attacks and those in Iraq, where the numbers now outstrip those in Israel.

Ms Oliver said: ”The motives are diverse: religion, nationalism, grievance, fame, glory and money, and last of all and most important of all, they have to have an entire system that supports their actions (sympathetic groups round the world).”

She said the Yorkshire bombers would not necessarily have needed outside help from Al-Qaida and could have gained all the knowledge, including practical advice, they needed from the internet.

Boaz Ganor, head of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, disagreed, saying that suicide bombers needed experienced handlers to provide explosives and choose targets.

His view is that all suicide attacks worldwide are organized by movements. “If one wants to understand the phenomenon, do not understand the motivation of the perpetrator but the motivation of the organization,” he said.

For organizations, whether Hamas or Al-Qaida, the motivation was the same: the suicide bomber is the most effective weapon available. “The suicide bomber is the smartest of smart bombs. He can look around and decide when he can maximize the terror, maximize the casualties,” Dr Ganor said.

Even if he is caught, he or she can detonate the explosives, killing those trying to intervene.

The figures bear out Dr Ganor’s assessment. According to Israel, it has faced 160 suicide bombers in the last five years: they account for only 0.6% of the attacks but half the Israeli casualties. − 514.

The movements lock the recruits in, in part through the recording of the final videos for release after the bombing.

Among Palestinians, a further factor, one that does not apply in Yorkshire, is poverty. The suicide bomber knows his family will be cared for after his death by various Arab charities and will often be better off than before. The family will also enjoy greater prestige.

Most of the bombers tend to be young, well-educated, and from lower middle-class backgrounds rather than those fighting for daily survival. An Israeli government study found that 23% of suicide bombers between 2000 and this year had been university graduates. Their families, like those in Yorkshire, were often unaware of their intentions.

Dr Ganor said that religion was the predominant motive. “He believes he is carrying out God’s will. They do not call it a suicide but shuada, martyrdom. They believe they do not die: they just transfer from life to heaven, a one-way ticket. And they believe there will be 72 virgins that serve them.”

But religion is not the sole explanation. The Tamil Tigers were just as eager for self-sacrifice but were not motivated by religion. It was a matter of revenge, a way for the powerless to fight back, to create fear.

There is a desire among jihadists for revenge over what is seen as the brutal treatment of fellow Muslims: Russia’s suppression of Chechnya, the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West bank, and the US and British role in Iraq.

Toby Dodge, one of Britain’s leading academics specializing on Iraq said that Iraq has had a bigger impact on British Muslims than Chechnya or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“How Iraq is different is that Americans and British are killing Muslims. If you are a radical imam trying to mobilize a set of poorly integrated Yorkshire youths of Pakistani origin, it is much more potent message to say the Americans and British are killing Muslims,” Dr Dodge said.

Ms Oliver said that one of the most important motivating factors was what she described as ‘an element of ecstatic camaraderie, which is central to the group”.

She believed the Yorkshire bombers shared the happiness of camaraderie. “The people we studied, a Hamas cell, described their time before their death as the happiest day of their life. What I have read of the London bombings, police officers described the three guys on CCTV as looking as if they were going on holiday,” she said.

Text 1.11 Man guilty over nail bombs plot

BBC News 24 June 2008 13:15 UK

A Nazi sympathizer who kept nail bombs under his bed has been convicted of three terrorism offences.

Martyn Gilleard, 31, of Goole, east Yorkshire, was a paid-up member of the National Front, the White Nationalist Party and the British People’s Party.

Police officers discovered four home-made nail bombs, as well as bullets and bladed weapons in his flat.

Prosecutors said Gilleard had written that he had wanted to “save” Britain from “multi-racial peril”.

Gilleard was convicted of preparing for terrorist acts and possessing articles and collecting information for terrorist purposes.

During the trial, he admitted having a collection of Nazi memorabilia, saying Nazism appealed to him because of the way the Nazis had “rebuilt” Germany.

Officers had found “potentially lethal bladed weapons”, 34 bullets for a 2.2 calibre firearm and printouts from the internet about committing acts of terrorism, the court heard.

These included instructions on how to make a bomb and how to kill someone with poison.

Explaining why he made the bombs, Gilleard said: “I’d had a couple of cans. I was just sat around bored.”

“An idea popped up and I thought,’Why not?’ I thought, ‘I’ve got pretty much what I need,’ and I threw them together.”