By all accounts, South Africa will end its financial year with the government having collected more money than it spent over the last 12 months.

Ironically, this unexpected economic boost is likely to unleash criticism of the government, that is accused by some of its critics of not doing – and spending – enough to alleviate poverty in the country.

Government has budgeted for revenue of about R273 billion (30.3 billion U.S. dollars) – for the fiscal year ending, Feb 2003 – and expenditure of about just under R292 billion (32.4 billion U.S. dollars). This leaves it with an expected deficit of the region of R19 billion (2.1 billion U.S. dollars), for the fiscal year. However, many economists think government will collect up to R20 billion (2.2 billion U.S. dollars) more than it officially budgeted for, by the end of the fiscal year, on the back of better than expected tax revenue.

Over the past year, South African exports have increased substantially and the price of gold – one of the country’s main exports – has soared on international markets. This has meant that gold mines and private companies – among the country’s biggest taxpayers – have had a profitable year.

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has also been dramatically increasing the efficiency of its operations over the past years, and has regularly been collecting more tax than budgeted for by the National Treasury.

Economists also doubt government will spend all of the R292 billion (32.4 billion U.S. dollars) it set aside for the year, mainly because of spending capacity problems in most South African provinces, among other reasons. Provinces are responsible for spending money earmarked for social services, grants and pensions and health and education infrastructure. While provincial spending has improved this year, they still have not been able to get through all the money provided for them in the national budget, according to reports from the National Treasury.

Substantially better than expected revenue and slow government-spending makes it very likely the treasury will end the financial year with a surplus.

A fiscal surplus is likely to create a political outcry, among trade unions and South Africa’s social movements. They have long argued that government should be spending more on social and economic development programmes, because of the country’s high levels of unemployment (around 37 percent) and extreme poverty (around 50 percent) in some areas. They believe government should borrow more money for social spending and allow the national deficit to grow slightly.

Especially in regard to some of the more controversial development and poverty alleviation programmes – like a Basic Income Grant (BIG) – government has said it does not have the money or capacity to administer the grant. It has also insisted that unless it keeps tight control of state spending – money that could be used for development programmes, will simply be used to pay interest on loans used to fund deficits.

In a paper released in November 2002, the independent Budget Information Service (BIS) found that the National Treasury continuously underestimated revenue collection up between 1997/98 and 2002/03. The paper comments: ”The remaining question is why the National Treasury would underestimate revenue collection. While it is always risky to speculate about intentions, revenue collection is plainly surrounded by a number of contentious political issues that it may be desirable to avoid. These would include the size of the deficit and the affordability of new expenditure programmes, such as the BIG. By the time actual revenue collection has been confirmed, the financial year has ended, and it is too late to influence or change decisions around these issues.”

Shun Govender, the BIS manager, explains that there is a policy debate in South Africa about how government can best use its revenue to kick-start economic growth and social development and alleviate poverty.

While some economists generally believe poverty can best be alleviated by tax cuts, aimed at stimulating economic growth; trade unions and social movements want government to spend more on development programmes and social grants, aimed directly at the poor.

However, it now seems that government may have enough money to pursue both options.

In last year’s Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) – which sets out government’s spending plans for the next three years – South African finance minister, Trevor Manuel indicated that some of the treasury’s surplus would be used to finance tax cuts. By leaving a little more money in South Africans pockets, the finance minister hopes to get them to spend more to boost the country’s economy.

However, the MTBPS also contains plans to increase spending on poverty alleviation, social security and education and health programmes. Manuel is expected to present the South African budget for 2003, in the next two weeks.

Until the recent US economic downturn, pundits on both the left and right had claimed that job growth had picked up during the past decade. In a new book, one left-leaning journalist finds out the reality behind the service-sector boom by actually trying to work in it.

In ‘Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America’, published by Metropolitan Books, Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the myth of the Clinton-era “McJob” economy by working, for a month at a time, as a waitress, a cleaning woman, and a sales clerk at the Wal-Mart store chain. In an alternately hilarious and sobering book, she finds life on the other side of the class divide to be as challenging as ever.

Part of the humour of the book comes from Ehrenreich’s bitter awareness that, in the service sector, she has to spend a lot of time tending to the annoying needs of upper-class people like herself.

While working as a maid in Maine, she finds to her surprise that the owners of the houses she cleans sometimes will spy on their cleaning women, keeping video cameras or tape recorders in the house to catch them cursing or stealing. Ehrenreich also starts to resent some homeowners for the decorative pots or unread books they have that must be individually cleaned, as well as for the unsightly hairs they seem to shed everywhere.

Similarly, as a waitress at a fast-food restaurant in Florida, she grows impatient with families who take a long time to make complex orders, while she notes acerbically that customers at the Wal-Mart she works for in Minnesota get pleasure from leaving shirts on display in the sort of heap they would not tolerate in their homes.

Throughout these experiences, Ehrenreich notices how invisible she is as a service-sector worker – that is, unless her customers notice her failings. Between the low wages, the daily struggle to make ends meet – which often require her, like her new colleagues, to find a second job – and the grinding isolation of being seen only by her ability to serve, she comes to see the underside of the so-called economic boom.

Ehrenreich tries to hew to strict rules while doing her jobs – starting with only a small amount of cash, and finding her own apartments – but realises that, when the pressure of work leads to aches and pains, or when it is difficult to find affordable rent, the effort to make ends meet for just one month can be tough.

Yet through it all, she keeps her wit intact. At one point in Minnesota, she notices the increasing size of white Americans, who have “huge bulges in completely exotic locations, like the backs of the neck and the knees,” and realises that the expanded sizes of fast food they eat has resulted in “biggie-sized” people.

At other times, she is aware of an undercurrent of resistance among the mostly female workforce she has joined, from workers who know how to put abusive supervisors in their place to those who watch TV coverage of strikes and bounce up to yell, “Damn right!”

More often, however, beneath the humour is an undercurrent of anger about the plight of some of the women, who barely eat but talk dreamily of the meals they might have; or who wear themselves out with the rigours of their jobs; or who spend their nights in cars, or on the street.

There is considerable anger, too, directed at employers who force workers to take demeaning drug tests, which Ehrenreich argues persuasively is done simply to assert control over workers’ privacy rather than for any concerns about workplace efficiency.

Ultimately, as she reviews her life in the service sector, Ehrenreich comes to a basic point that many US economists have missed: “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow.” The moral? “You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.”

Of course, other economists have warned perceptively against the illusions of the 1990s US economy, even before the “boom” started to sour. But Ehrenreich brings back the human element by focusing on the lives of the people who were allegedly benefiting from the economic good times – and in so doing, creates a study of US labour that is both modern and, in its jaundiced look at class, timeless.

When President George W. Bush visited New York City Tuesday to pay tribute to the late Roman Catholic Archbishop, John Cardinal O’Connor, the local response was summed up by protesters’ placards, which read, “Not MY President.”

A local radio station laughed off Bush’s visit, warning him to leave because “this is Clinton country.” Indeed, the Republican President almost seemed to take note, making sure that Democratic Senator and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton accompanied him on the one-day visit.

The coverage of the Bush visit dripped with the sort of contempt reserved for visiting athletes of opposing sports teams. Respected columnist Pete Hamill wrote of Bush in the New York Daily News, “His face twitched, his mouth moved as if to say something that never emerged, his brain seemed to be saying, ‘Don’t sneer, don’t sneer’.”

Nor is this only a New York reaction, although 85 percent of the residents of New York City gave their votes to Bush’s Democratic challenger, former Vice President Al Gore, in last year’s elections. Recent polls – from CBS and the New York Times, but also from more Republican-friendly pollsters like John Zogby – show Bush’s popularity plummeting among the nation at large, with barely half of all respondents saying that the new president is doing a good job.

Significantly, a majority of respondents in the CBS-Times poll said they believed that Bush does not care about the issues that concern them the most. Nor did the US public think their president has a good grasp of foreign policy, normally a safe zone for presidents who have run into trouble domestically.

All presidents have brief honeymoons with the US public. President Bill Clinton, just half a year after he replaced Bush’s father at the helm of government, had been embarrassed by a standoff with Branch Davidian militants in Waco, Texas, and was running into trouble on his ultimately failed plans to revamp the health-care system.

But few presidents have faced as low poll numbers as the younger Bush has done this early, and – from the pundits to the comedians on late-night talk shows – he seems unable to counter the impression, evident during last year’s campaign, that he is a lightweight.

Some of the problem lies in the contentious nature of last year’s election, when Bush actually lost the popular vote to Gore by more than half a million votes cast but, thanks to a certified 537-vote margin of victory in the hotly disputed ballot in Florida, prevailed in the system of selecting electors to decide the presidency.

Many Americans, from legal scholars to those on the left, continue to dismiss the five-to-four decision in the Supreme Court that stopped the vote count in Florida, effectively handing victory to Bush – who, like the Supreme Court majority, is a Republican.

Others, including Hillary Clinton, have advocated scrapping the electoral college system as antiquated; indeed, the majority of Americans were puzzled at how the distribution of electoral votes favoured Bush even when he fell short by a significant margin in the popular vote. Bush thus earned the dubious distinction of being the first president since Benjamin Harrison was elected in 1888 to win the White House simply on the basis of electoral votes, while losing among voters overall.

So it’s easy enough to see why the president faces problems of credibility – particularly when combined with a stumbling speaking style and seeming lack of intellectual energy that prompted the left-leaning Nation magazine to refer to him as the “Presidunce.”

Yet Bush’s inability to win over the nay-sayers by earning respect at his job has seemed unusual in a country that warmed over time to Bill Clinton as a lovable rogue, and to Ronald Reagan as a grandfatherly figure – overlooking the harsh rhetoric and frequent betrayals those presidents took on at their jobs.

In part, his unpopularity simply reflects the weakness of his administration, where lobbyists prevail over good-government activists and over which companies like Halliburton (to which Vice President Dick Cheney belonged) and Alcoa (former corporate home of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill) hold sway.

In addition, the joy the US public has had in poking fun at Bush – from his mangled syntax to his perpetual half-sneering, half-blank expression – reflects popular contempt at the sort of privileged underachiever that the president represents. From his mediocre academic record at Yale University to his ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Bush has been described repeatedly as someone who rises to prominence on wealth and family connections, rather than the sort of can-do overachiever that Clinton and even Reagan typified.

As a result, it’s quite possible that, as the economy slides into a decline and the Democratic-majority Senate rebuffs his conservative policies, Bush is in for a long four years. In time, the cool reception he earned this week in New York might not seem so bad.

The past year has been marked by large international interventions in Kosovo and East Timor and progress on creating an International Criminal Court.

Yet for many officials and analysts, governance of the global environment remains essentially in the hands of one nation. The United States has continued to be seen, in US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s phrase, as the “indispensable nation.”

Yet shifts in key areas, from the widespread support for the Kosovo and East Timor missions to the trial of the former Chilean dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, point to a world in which governance is multi-polar and less dependent on Washington, some experts argue.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan underscored that point at the opening of the recent session of the United Nations General Assembly, when he contrasted the international inaction during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda with the use of force – without UN Security Council authorisation – this year in Yugoslavia.

Although Annan argued in favour of “humanitarian intervention” in times of major humanitarian crises, he also warned against setting “dangerous precedents” for future interventions.

“The core challenge to the Security Council and the United Nations as a whole in the next century (is) to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights – wherever they may take place – should not be allowed to stand,” he said.

He also points out that if nations use armed force “in the common interest,” as the UN Charter allows, they must address the questions: “What is the common interest? Who shall define it? Who shall defend it? Under whose authority? And with what means of intervention?”

Those are questions that have challenged world leaders, and even seemed to threaten some. Several governments – including Russia and China, both of which hold veto power in the Security Council – have already issued warnings against any concept of “humanitarian intervention” which could form the basis for one- sided action.

“We believe that the state has a role and a relevance,” Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said in response to Annan’s questions.

“The new postulates and theories about intervention need to be debated fully, and not selectively applied,” he said, noting the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombing of Yugoslavia this year.

“Intervention is going to be the flavour of the year, or next couple of years,” one senior UN official predicted. He contended that a debate on how much power the UN system or groups of concerned nations have to intervene in national crises will continue for at least the next two years.

In a significant way, even as that debate goes on, the dynamic of international governance is changing dramatically, as both supporters and critics of intervention contend.

NATO forces pounded Yugoslavia for 11 weeks this spring in the Kosovo conflict, despite the lack of UN Security Council authorisation.

In September, the Council quickly approved Australia’s bid to lead a force of more than 8,000 troops to respond to the burst of Indonesia-backed violence in East Timor.

Now, both Kosovo and East Timor are under temporary UN administration, with UN officials garnering sweeping powers to change laws, train civil servants and police, handle day-to-day administration – and, ultimately, prepare the way for self-rule.

In one particularly controversial step, the UN administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, effectively allowed Kosovars to use German Deutschmarks as their currency – even though UN resolutions still explicitly endorse Yugoslavia’s sovereignty.

In the past, the idea of sovereignty automatically meant such things as respect for national laws and national currencies. Yet with the Yugoslav dinar virtually defunct as legal tender in Kosovo, and Yugoslav laws rapidly falling out of favour, some previous notions of sovereignty and governance are crumbling.

That decay stems, at least in part, from globalisation. It has become difficult for nations to resist UN or regional interventions even as they enforce the recommendations of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund or donor nations to lower tariffs, cut subsidies and enact other market-friendly measures.

Yet although governments have – often unwillingly – accepted such economic liberalisation, the effort to push more unified political and legal governance have been resisted.

Even a nation like the United States, which played a major role in the Kosovo intervention and has led other efforts to enforce international norms – notably the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent embargo against Iraq – has chafed at signs of the growing internationalisation of governance.

A recent eexample of retreat from internationalism was the U.S. Senate rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The United States is also the one major nation resisting the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the court to try genocide and other crimes against humanity. US objections stemmed largely from worries that US military officials may eventually be prosecuted by such a body.

You know that the millennium is at hand when Paul McCartney, seemingly the most light-hearted of the Beatles, re-records some of his old songs as orchestral pieces for a new album titled ‘Working Classical.’

From McCartney’s classical excursions to new, often quite serious, millennium-themed pop songs, the next few months promise to bring a rare spectacle: rock stars attempting to become more weighty and grave in accordance with the end of the century.

McCartney has tackled the issue two different ways; besides ‘Working Classical’ he has come out with another album for EMI records – the rocking ‘Run Devil Run.’ This offers new versions of old rock standards like ‘Lonesome Town’ and ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man.’

Both albums are now selling in the United States and, of the two, ‘Working Classical’ – recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Loma Mar Qintet – is the more interesting effort.

It features some of the most frivolous tunes of McCartney’s solo career and tenure with the rock band ‘Wings’ and turns them into whimsical pieces of chamber music.

Most classical remakes of rock songs suffer from sounding a bit too much like goofy summertime pop hits – especially several tunes written for McCartney’s late wife, Linda, such as ‘The Lovely Linda,’ ‘My Love’ and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed.’

Still, hearing the electric guitars and keyboards of the original versions turned into cellos and violins has its own charm.

Even better, new compositions like ‘Junk’ and ‘A Leaf’ are genuinely beautiful, fragile works that update the semi-orchestral sound the Beatles used to good effect on ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’

On the whole, ‘Working Classical’ suggests that McCartney could have a future in classical music if he sticks to his gifts for attractive, ethereally light melodies.

His forte clearly is the sort of miniatures and chamber pieces on this album, rather than the overblown symphonic works – such as ‘The Liverpool Oratorio’ and ‘Standing Stone’ – which he has written in recent years.

On the other hand, ‘Run Devil Run’ – which McCartney told one magazine he had recorded so he could end the millennium with rock and roll – shows that 1950s rock sounds just as dated now as any classical music!

Although McCartney sings with flair and plays bass with abandon, his band – including Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour – plods through some relatively pleasant songs associated with Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and other rock icons.

Both McCartney’s records display an attitude of trying to grasp for some meaning – the enduring quality of rock and roll, the connection between popular and classical music – at the century’s end.

Other pop stars – notably Sting, formerly of the rock group, ‘Police’ – are even more explicitly millennial in their ambitions. Sting’s new album ‘Brand New Day’ (on A and M) opens with a sombre song about the last millennium, ‘A Thousand Years,’ and closes with a more upbeat tune, ‘Brand New Day.’

The latter is a fun, cock-eyed bit of optimism, looking forward to the Y2K computer virus as the day that all the machines will run down – and afford humans an opportunity to start anew.

With some joyous harmonica playing by Stevie Wonder and Sting in an uncharacteristically jaunty mood, ‘Brand New Day’ offers one of the most peculiar cases for celebrating the year 2000 that has been heard so far.

Nevertheless, one can assume that the next few months will bring even more pop stars to consider millennial topics. Already, rapper Will Smith has come out with a new song, ‘Will2K,’ in which – with typically good-natured arrogance – the rapper dubs the next thousand years after himself as the “Willennium.”

Even at the year’s beginning, British pop star Robbie Williams scored a hit with Millennium, which employs theme music from a James Bond film as it rhymes “we have stars against our fate” with “we’ve already fallen from grace.” And rapper Wyclef Jean and U2 singer Bono have collaborated on another millennium-themed song, which they played at last month’s NetAid concert.

So, is popular music set to take on weightier issues – or is the millennium just a fad for the next few months?

The best answer probably can be found with the Backstreet Boys, who titled their latest album ‘Millennium’ – presumably because it sounds like a sufficiently grandiose concept for an album title.

Three UN human rights officials said Monday that they had received substantial evidence of murder, torture, rape and other abuses in East Timor after they voted Aug 30 to be independent of Indonesia.

“I think what we are seeing is devastating,” said Asma Jahangir, UN special rapporteur on extra judicial and summary executions. his remarks at a news conference in the East Timorese capital, Dili, were made available here.

Jahangir cited reports that some 200 people out of a group of about 2,000 who had sought refuge at a church in Suai had been killed. She also noted eyewitness accounts of killings by Timorese who had survived the post-vote violence.

“We have had testimonies from eyewitnesses who have seen people being killed in front of them,” Jahangir said. “We have seen sites where people have been buried.”

She added that, in recent days, “two to three bodies have been identified per day” in the slow process of finding and registering those who were killed in the weeks after the ballot.

The three human rights rapporteurs – Jahangir, Nigel Rodley and Radhika Coomaraswamy – noted that they still have substantial work ahead to confirm reports and gather evidence on the violence.

The rapporteurs’ mission, they cautioned, was a first step and would be followed by the eventual dispatch of a commission of inquiry for East Timor. “Obviously, something catastrophic has happened,” said Rodley, the special rapporteur on torture.

UN officials have been at pains to stress the enormous scale of the devastation in East Timor – blamed on pro-Indonesia militias and on factions of the Indonesian military, which had occupied East Timor for 24 years.

The majority of houses and buildings in cities like Dili, Suai, Liquica and Maliana were destroyed, according to UN spokesman Fred Eckhard.

The evidence being gathered by the human rights officials on their current trip included widespread allegations of rapes, sexual slavery, torture and other crimes.

Coomaraswamy said that the officials had received “stories of an increase in domestic violence, trafficking, all these other issues relating to violence against women… To see the devastation is quite shocking.”

She added, however, that despite reports of cases of sexual slavery of East Timorese women in the Indonesian province of West Timor, the rapporteurs had not been allowed to enter refugee camps there to verify reports.

“We were told we could not go and that we would have no access to the camps in West Timor,” Coomaraswamy said. But she added that she has heard reports from women who have left West Timor of “widespread” sexual violence against East Timorese women there.

UN officials estimated that more than 200,000 East Timorese remained in West Timorese camps, often run by the pro-Indonesia militias, despite commitments by Indonesian officials to allow the refugees to return home.

Several thousand East Timorese returned from West Timor in recent days but Jahangir said that the new Indonesian government of President Abdurrahman Wahid had denied rapporteurs access to West Timor.

The three officials were scheduled to stay in East Timor until mid-November and, by Nov 25, they must file a report on atrocities committed after the Aug. 30 ballot on independence for the territory. In addition, a UN commission of inquiry is expected to gather its own evidence shortly.

The commission, however, has not yet begun its work, and Rodley warned that any delays in its deployment could result in the loss or deterioration of evidence.

In particular forensic specialists are urgently needed, he said.

UN peacekeepers had been asking “for weeks” for forensic specialists to be sent to East Timor “precisely because of their fears over the problem of degrading evidence.” So far, Rodley said, one specialist had arrived there to assess forensic needs.

One of the main challenges facing any investigation was determining how many East Timorese were affected by the violence, when many were still missing.

According to UN officials, some 500,000 of the state’s 890,000 East Timorese were dislocated by the violence, which erupted immediately after some 80 percent of voters opted for independence from Indonesian rule.

Even now, as many as 300,000 East Timorese are unaccounted for, although most were believed to be hiding in remote parts of the territory or displaced in West Timor or other Indonesian provinces.

With the flow of refugees coming from West Timor increasing slowly, some UN officials suggested that the number of East Timorese believed to have been killed during the referendum could turn out be be less than previously estimated.

More than 200,000 East Timorese were killed in the immediate aftermath of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of the former Portuguese colony. Estimates by human rights groups of the death toll following the August ballot have ranged from about 900 to 7,000.

Three UN human rights officials said Monday that they had received substantial evidence of murder, torture, rape and other abuses in East Timor after they voted Aug 30 to be independent of Indonesia.

“I think what we are seeing is devastating,” said Asma Jahangir, UN special rapporteur on extra judicial and summary executions. his remarks at a news conference in the East Timorese capital, Dili, were made available here.

Jahangir cited reports that some 200 people out of a group of about 2,000 who had sought refuge at a church in Suai had been killed. She also noted eyewitness accounts of killings by Timorese who had survived the post-vote violence.

“We have had testimonies from eyewitnesses who have seen people being killed in front of them,” Jahangir said. “We have seen sites where people have been buried.”

She added that, in recent days, “two to three bodies have been identified per day” in the slow process of finding and registering those who were killed in the weeks after the ballot.

The three human rights rapporteurs – Jahangir, Nigel Rodley and Radhika Coomaraswamy – noted that they still have substantial work ahead to confirm reports and gather evidence on the violence.

The rapporteurs’ mission, they cautioned, was a first step and would be followed by the eventual dispatch of a commission of inquiry for East Timor. “Obviously, something catastrophic has happened,” said Rodley, the special rapporteur on torture.

UN officials have been at pains to stress the enormous scale of the devastation in East Timor – blamed on pro-Indonesia militias and on factions of the Indonesian military, which had occupied East Timor for 24 years.

The majority of houses and buildings in cities like Dili, Suai, Liquica and Maliana were destroyed, according to UN spokesman Fred Eckhard.

The evidence being gathered by the human rights officials on their current trip included widespread allegations of rapes, sexual slavery, torture and other crimes.

Coomaraswamy said that the officials had received “stories of an increase in domestic violence, trafficking, all these other issues relating to violence against women… To see the devastation is quite shocking.”

She added, however, that despite reports of cases of sexual slavery of East Timorese women in the Indonesian province of West Timor, the rapporteurs had not been allowed to enter refugee camps there to verify reports.

“We were told we could not go and that we would have no access to the camps in West Timor,” Coomaraswamy said. But she added that she has heard reports from women who have left West Timor of “widespread” sexual violence against East Timorese women there.

UN officials estimated that more than 200,000 East Timorese remained in West Timorese camps, often run by the pro-Indonesia militias, despite commitments by Indonesian officials to allow the refugees to return home.

Several thousand East Timorese returned from West Timor in recent days but Jahangir said that the new Indonesian government of President Abdurrahman Wahid had denied rapporteurs access to West Timor.

The three officials were scheduled to stay in East Timor until mid-November and, by Nov 25, they must file a report on atrocities committed after the Aug. 30 ballot on independence for the territory. In addition, a UN commission of inquiry is expected to gather its own evidence shortly.

The commission, however, has not yet begun its work, and Rodley warned that any delays in its deployment could result in the loss or deterioration of evidence.

In particular forensic specialists are urgently needed, he said.

UN peacekeepers had been asking “for weeks” for forensic specialists to be sent to East Timor “precisely because of their fears over the problem of degrading evidence.” So far, Rodley said, one specialist had arrived there to assess forensic needs.

One of the main challenges facing any investigation was determining how many East Timorese were affected by the violence, when many were still missing.

According to UN officials, some 500,000 of the state’s 890,000 East Timorese were dislocated by the violence, which erupted immediately after some 80 percent of voters opted for independence from Indonesian rule.

Even now, as many as 300,000 East Timorese are unaccounted for, although most were believed to be hiding in remote parts of the territory or displaced in West Timor or other Indonesian provinces.

With the flow of refugees coming from West Timor increasing slowly, some UN officials suggested that the number of East Timorese believed to have been killed during the referendum could turn out be be less than previously estimated.

More than 200,000 East Timorese were killed in the immediate aftermath of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of the former Portuguese colony. Estimates by human rights groups of the death toll following the August ballot have ranged from about 900 to 7,000.

After languishing for more than a year, a UN investigation is resuming its prove into alleged massacres that occurred in 1996-1997 in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire.

The resumption of the long-stalled inquiry came even as the UN Security Council Friday approved a renewal of UN military observers in the DRC, but stopped short of authorising a request to deploy up to 500 military observers in the country.

Roberto Garreton, the UN human rights rapporteur entrusted with investigating the massacre allegations, said that the UN Commission on Human Rights has renewed his mandate.

In a new twist, DRC President Laurent Kabila – who two years ago first blocked and then ultimately banned Garreton from doing any work in the eastern Congo – pledged to support the new rights investigation.

As Garreton noted, Kabila’s change of heart came after he fell out with his old allies in the Rwandan and Ugandan governments – who aided his rise to power in 1997, but are now blamed by the DRC leader for conducting massacres of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees in what was then Zaire.

“Our problem was with (Zairean) President Mobutu, not with the Hutu refugees,” Kabila told Garreton during a recent meeting.

The year-long rivalry between Kabila on the one hand and Rwanda and Uganda on the other – which led to the eight-nation conflict in the DRC that has been halted by the current, fragile ceasefire – has helped to re-activate Garreton’s inquiry.

For Kabila, who relied on Rwanda and Uganda to overthrow Mobutu in 1997, the new investigation could help to improve his image.

The alleged massacres targetted Rwandan Hutus who had been linked to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda – and, many observers believed, were done at the behest of Rwandan forces who were upset at the presence of Hutu extremists so close to the Zaire-Rwanda border.

The inquiry, in turn, could help Kabila to sully the image of his former backers in Rwanda, as well as that of the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), which is backed by Rwanda and has won control of much of the eastern DRC.

In the past Kabila – who has also been accused of repressive measures in the DRC – tried to prevent Garreton from even entering the Congo. He accused the Chilean diplomat of being biased against his coalition of anti-Mobutu groups, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL).

Last year, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan tried to sidestep any controversy over Garreton by sending a separate mission, headed by Atsu-Kofi Amega, to investigate the massacres.

However, that mission was unable to perform its work, after the DRC government failed to provide access to several sites in eastern and central Congo. Now, however, Garreton said that he was willing to accept Kabila’s offer of cooperation.

A larger problem remained: much of the eastern DRC, where rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda have maintained resistance to Kabila’s regime, is treacherous, and security for investigators is questionable.

The UN Security Council, which last week discussed the possibility of sending a larger peacekeeping force to the DRC, acknowledged those risks Friday by passing a narrow resolution that only renewed the existing, small body of military observers.

The Council resolution would allow the current level of observers to continue their work until Jan. 15, 2000.

The United Nations currently deploys about 40 observers in the DRC, but has not received sufficient security guarantees from the Kabila government to field a larger force, Annan noted in a report.

Annan and other top officials, however, have intended to place a larger mission, the UN Observer Mission in the DRC (MONUC), within the coming months.

MONUC would be expected to field several hundred military observers and a large number of humanitarian and political officers. Eventually, the United Nations intends to lead to a full- fledged peacekeeping operation, officials here said.

Still, there are problems in winning acceptance for such a force in the DRC, where some officials in the Kabila government have been wary of UN involvement.

Some DRC officials have accused the world body of trying to destabilise Kabila, and of having helped oust the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960. (Lumumba was murdered by Katangese rebels in 1961, one year after a UN peacekeeping mission was deployed in the Congo after Belgian colonial forces departed.)

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard acknowledged “suspicions in the Congo dating back to 1960” had complicated discussions on the security and freedom of movement of UN officers. Currently, Eckhard said, the DRC government still placed restrictions on the UN observers’ movements through the country.

Yet Annan, in his report this week, affirmed the need for deeper UN involvement regardless of the difficulties. “The suffering in the DRC has persisted for far too long for us to miss the chance offered by the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement,” he said, referring to the pact that led to the halt in fighting.

Garreton added that the tense situation in the DRC – which has involved 18 different armed groups, as well as eight outside nations – clearly required outside assistance to bolster the ceasefire. “It could blow up at any minute,” he warned.

The growth of Colombia’s cocaine traffic fuelled by increased demands from Europe and problems with coca production in Peruhas intensified the conflict between the government, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries, according to political analysts.

In particular some officials, who have tried to mediate an end to 40-years of onflict in Colombia, believe the fighting may worsen in the next few months as drug profits allow all sides to buy weapons while some groups try to derail the fragile peace process.

Rafael Pardo, former Colombian defense minister and president of the Milenia Foundation, a Bogota-based research group, says that one of the factors leading to the increased drug profits has been the growth of a fungus in neighbouring Peru which can destroy one of the parents of the coca crop.

As a result, drug cartels have shifted more production to Colombia’s coca plantations, so that there are currently an estimated 100,000 hectares of coca leaf being harvested in the country.

The parties which benefit the most from such production are the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which controls and taxes much of the cocaine-producing southwest of the country, and rightist paramilitaries who are strong in the north, Pardo argues.

“In the last four years, the FARC has really grown stronger,” says Pardo, who was defense minister under then-President Cesar Gaviria between 1991 and 1994, and has also served as a peace negotiator dealing with rebel groups.

The Colombian government – and US officials, who intend to provide Colombia with some two billion dollars in military aid in the next three years to combat drug trafficking – contend that the FARC has recently acquired surface-to-air missiles, new anti- encryption technology and aircraft.

Meanwhile, “the paramilitaries have really grown,” seizing control of the main cocaine-producing zones in the north, among other northern areas, says Francisco Santos, managing editor of ‘El Tiempo’ and a founding member of Pais Libre, an anti- kidnapping group.

Santos contends that drug cartels have helped all sides in the conflict to buy arms – but are actually more interested in ensuring that no party gains control of Colombia.

“Drug traffickers, which finance all the actors of the war, leftists and rightists, like the chaos,” he argues. As a result, he says, they are interested in “helping either side in generating chaos…and possibly sabotaging peace negotiations.”

The peace talks in Colombia, pushed by the year-old government of President Andres Pastrana, have only begun to move forward seriously in the past few weeks, Santos says.

The government and the FARC resumed talks on Oct. 24 to discuss a 12-point agenda to resolve the war. Meanwhile, the government has also held several rounds of talks, mediated in part in Havana, with the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN), to pave the way for formal negotiations before the end of the year, Pardo says.

Yet the drug factor can complicate the peace process immensely, analysts fear. For one thing, Colombia’s drug trade – which accounts for an estimated 80 percent of world cocaine production – has drawn the attention of the United States.

Pardo argues that increased US attention may not be good because “the United States doesn’t have any clear policy toward Latin America or Colombia” – rather, he says, it is chiefly concerned about drug trafficking.

With a US election year looming, he adds, “I don’t expect to see any clear position from the United States.”

While US President Bill Clinton’s administration has been eager to show a tough stance against drugs, Pastrana has won support for his effort to receive some seven billion dollars over the next several years to curtail Colombia’s drug production.

About 1.5 billion dollars of that money, Pardo says, is earmarked for military expenditures – placing the military, rather than Colombia’s police, in a greater role to combat domestic drug production and trafficking.

Pastrana’s plea for help, however, has been heard in Washington. “There won’t be peace in Colombia as long as greedy narcotrafficking businesses and the black market of weapons continue supplying illegal groups in my country,” the Colombian president said during a September visit to the United States.

“We must especially fight contraband smuggling of industrial products to Colombia, which is a way of laundering drug money and asphyxiating Colombian industries,” Pastrana told the UN General Assembly during his visit. “And we must also halt the flow of precursor chemicals indispensable for the production of narcotics.”

Pastrana’s efforts have been supported by the White House, which committed nearly 290 million dollars in aid for the current fiscal year, and promised during the Colombian president’s trip to provide two billion dollars more for the next several years.

Already, the United States deploys some 200 trainers who are supposed to improve the military’s anti-drug tactics.

That support has worried human rights groups, who accuse the Colombian military and rightist paramilitaries of significant violations.

Human Rights Watch, in its 1999 World Report, says that the Colombian military continues to be linked to atrocities against civilians and shows “little apparent will to investigate or punish those responsible.”

On Wednesday this week, Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch-Americas, wrote Pastrana to complain that two officers of the army’s Ninth Brigade who were implicated in the 1994 murder of Senator Manuel Cepeda remain on the payroll.

“How is it possible that these individuals not only remain on active duty, but also continue to work in the military intelligence?” Vivanco wrote.

The United Nations stepped up plans this week for a transitional authority in East Timor and officials expected new administrators would take charge of the Pacific island state by late January.

UN Under Secretary-General Sergio Vieira de Mello is scheduled to take up his duties as East Timor’s first UN administrator by mid-November, and already has held talks on setting up the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).

Alexander Downer, Australia’s foreign minister, met UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other top officials here Tuesday to reassure them of Canberra’s continued role in the UN peacekeeping force.

Downer said that the Australian-led International Force, or Interfet, would hand over authority to UNTAET by late January or mid-February of next year.

“We will be looking to provide around 1,700 troops” for UNTAET, which will comprise some 9,000 troops and more than 1,600 police officers in all, Downer said.

He noted that Australia’s contribution would be a decrease from its troop level in the Interfet operation, in which it has provided more than 5,000 of the more than 8,500 troops deployed.

Some of the slack would be taken up by Asian nations, including Malaysia, which announced plans to send some 1,700 soldiers for UNTAET.

Yet the replacement of Australians by Asians concerned some East Timorese officials, including Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta, who threatened “civil disobedience” if Malaysia were to take charge of UNTAET.

Ramos Horta has worried about statements like those made by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammed, who accused the Australian Interfet troops of being “belligerent.’

Mahathir previously had doubted the need for the Aug. 30 vote in East Timor, in which voters overwhelmingly opted for independence from Indonesia.

“We don’t need them,” Ramos Horta said last month of the possibility of Malaysian peace keepers.

UN officials, mindful of regional politics, however were equally worried that Australia’s dominant role in East Timor peacekeeping, in the long term, would upset nearby Asian states.

Officials reportedly were considering Malaysian command of UNTAET although Australia still would have a substantial presence in the force.

Downer said that Annan would decide who should command the peace keepers, adding that Canberra never intended to be such a powerful force on the ground in East Timor. “We were the only country that was really able to make a significant and early contribution,” he explained about Australia’s role in Interfet.

Still, UN officials wanted to ensure that the peacekeeping presence in East Timor remained strong, even if Australia cut back on the number of its troops.

Before Interfet was deployed in late September, Indonesian troops and pro-Indonesia militias destroyed much of East Timor, displacing more than half of the state’s 890,000 people.

Vieira de Mello has urged governments to provide nearly 200 million dollars for humanitarian aid in East Timor and also to press for the return of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese who are living in camps in the Indonesian province of West Timor.

He argued that access was still restricted to some camps in West Timor by militias – most of whom had slipped into West Timor since the September violence.

“There has been a trickle” of East Timorese refugees returning from the West in recent weeks, Vieira de Mello said last week. But so far, he noted, there has been no major shift among the more than 200,000 East Timorese who are estimated to be living in West Timor.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has tried to strike a more aggressive stance in securing access to the refugees.

This week, UNHCR workers carried out several surprise visits to refugee camps in the West Timorese cities of Kupang and Atambua,and picked up 5,000 refugees who wanted to return home to East Timor. The operations had been risky, with militias harassing and throwing stones at UNHCR staff, the agency said.

Despite such problems, UN officials remained generally upbeat about East Timor. The last Indonesian troops left East Timor over the weekend, finally ending the 24-year struggle between Jakarta and East Timor’s pro-independence movement.

The withdrawal has greatly strengthened the political wing of that movement, the National Council of Timorese Resistance, and its armed wing, the National Liberation Force or FALINTIL.

Pro-independence leader Xanana Gusmao is widely expected to lead the country to independence within the next two to three years.

Vieira de Mello also praised FALINTIL, which he said had cooperated with Interfet troops and shown restraint.

As a result, when the United Nations helps set up a police force for East Timor, it would consider FALINTIL officers for membership – but “as individuals, not as units,” he cautioned.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was resisting pressure from the United States and Britain to oust his humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, UN officials said Tuesday.

News of the push to remove von Sponeck appeared earlier in the London Financial Times. Von Sponeck, a German diplomat, had become too critical of sanctions against Iraq for London and Washington’s liking, according to the newspaper.

Annan, however, had asked Von Sponeck to stay on in his post for another year, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said Tuesday.

“There were similar complaints about his predecessor, and the secretary-general feels there would be similar complaints about his successor,” Eckhard said. “It comes with the territory.”

Von Sponeck’s predecessor, Irish diplomat Denis Halliday, left one year ago after US and British officials complained about his increasing opposition to the effects of the nine-year-old sanctions regime. He then became a leading critic of UN sanctions.

Although von Sponeck was believed to have a less combative stance than Halliday, he also has come under fire for suggesting that sanctions had hurt the Iraqi people.

“The humanitarian coordinator has to be concerned about the people he’s there to serve,” Eckhard said. “It becomes a very fine line for any humanitarian coordinator to walk.”

Last week during a scheduled trip to UN headquarters, von Sponeck said that even a special “oil-for-food” programme – that currently allowed Iraq to export one billion dollars of oil each month to pay for humanitarian goods – had suffered because of holds placed on Iraqi imports by Washington and London.

In recent months the two countries had stalled 572 Iraqi import applications worth some 700 million dollars, according to the United Nations.

Even without the holds, the oil-for-food programme would not be able to restore Iraqis to their living standards prior to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Persian Gulf War and UN sanctions, von Sponeck said.

Even if the sanctions exemptions were to allow Baghdad to sell one billion dollars of oil each month, he said, that still would provide only some 550 dollars for each of Iraq’s more than 23 million people.

In a country where the per capita income before 1990 had been more than 3,000 dollars, that represented only a fraction, he said.

Von Sponeck’s assertions struck Washington and London as more critical of sanctions than of the Iraqi government, which they blamed for the deterioration of Iraqi living standards.

British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock placed the blame on Baghdad, saying that of 82 holds Britain has placed on Iraqi applications, 62 were because the Iraqi government had not provided sufficient information on its import requests. (Eighteen holds were placed on items that could have “dual uses” that included military applications, while two were for items that Britain deemed to fall under an illegal oil programme.)

US Ambassador Peter Burleigh said Iraq’s humanitarian appeals needed to be examined carefully because that government intended to “maintain, and even rebuild, its weapons of mass destruction.”

According to UN Security Council resolutions, sanctions will not be lifted until Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated and that effort has been verified by UN monitors. With UN monitors kept out of Iraq since US and British planes attacked Iraq last December, such verification is months, if not years, away.

The Security Council had wanted the oil-for-food deal to fill the gap by allowing Baghdad, under strict UN monitoring, to provide food, medicine and even some rebuilding of infrastructure to take place despite sanctions.

Von Sponeck and Annan warned last month, more than 10 percent of the aid Iraq has tried to import has been held up – mostly by the two nations that strongly support continued sanctions.

The US and British complaints against von Sponeck followed sustained criticism of another special UN envoy to Baghdad, Indian diplomat Prakash Shah, whom both governments also believed was too critical of the sanctions regime.

Shah returned to New Delhi after the expulsion of the weapons monitors reduced his duties in Baghdad.

Yet the United States has also been criticised by other nations in the Security Council for supporting sanctions while at the same time openly encouraging Iraqi dissidents who seek to overthrow President Saddam Hussein.

On Monday, several dissidents groups including in the Iraqi National Congress concluded a four-day meeting in New York to iron out differences and pledge a united front against Hussein.

Senior US officials, including Under-Secretary of State Thomas Pickering and David Scheffer, ambassador-at-large for war crimes, met the dissident delegates to encourage them to build greater unity.

Delegates present at the talks said later, however, that many issues remained outstanding and that several groups – including some Shi’a Muslims and Kurdish dissidents – did not even participate.

Before David O. Russell’s Gulf War movie ‘Three Kings’ opened here last month, the young writer-director already had fended off criticism from parties as diverse as US Muslim anti-discrimination groups and Texas Governor George W. Bush.

Muslim groups worried that the movie, a fictionalised account of four US soldiers in the 1991 Gulf War attempting to retrieve a stash of treasure near the Iraqi city of Karbala, would indulge in “Arab-bashing.”

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) noted that a draft of the film’s script had included offensive references to “rag-heads,” among other slurs.

Bush, the leading Republican contender for next year’s presidential elections, had a more direct worry: he was concerned that the movie would make the Gulf War policy of his father, former President George Bush, look bad.

Russell obviously decided that the film would be its own best defence, and gave special preview screenings to CAIR and to Governor Bush. One can imagine that the Muslim activists went away satisfied, and that the governor did not.

For all the heroics by the US soldiers in their ill-fated pursuit of stolen Kuwaiti gold, ‘Three Kings’ is one of the more subversive American movies to come out in recent years, with a surprisingly balanced view of Iraqis and a jaundiced look at the Gulf War.

Coming from no less a US corporation than Disney, the movie caused a genuine surprise – and an unwelcome one at that – for supporters of former President George Bush.

As the movie’s hero, Cpt. Archie Gates (played by George Clooney, better known for playing ‘Batman’), explains to his three colleagues, the chaos that surrounds them after the Gulf War is the result of the Bush administration’s policy to encourage revolt against Saddam Hussein.

“The United States promised to support the rebels, and they didn’t,” he says. “Now they’re being slaughtered.”

For the US soldiers – who experienced little fighting in the “war” itself – the main surprise is that Hussein’s forces and Iraqi rebels are more concerned with fighting each other than to notice the presence of the Americans.

When the rebels encounter Gates’ squad – Staff Sgt. Chief Elgin (played by rapper Ice Cube), Troy Barlow (the former rapper Mark Wahlberg) and Conrad Vig (director Spike Jonze) – their first request is for food. Later, Iraqi women rush to retrieve milk from a truck which the pro-Saddam troops have shot up.

Russell shows the peculiar dislocation the US soldiers feel after they wander out of their camp to hunt for the rumoured treasure with an off-kilter, exciting series of camera techniques.

The film is saturated so that the desert looks unusually pale; the chaos of the atmosphere around the soldiers includes everything from a convoy of luxury cars and booby-trapped toy footballs to an exploding cow and a flood of milk; and even bullets are followed on their course inside a human body.

The visual effects correspond to the loopy insanity of the script, written by Russell from a story by John Ridley. Iraqi troops actually help the US soldiers carry out gold from a bunker – but only to get the Americans to leave so that the Iraqis can get back to crushing any revolt.

The Iraqis themselves seem awash in US commodities: one soldier tries to bribe his way out of trouble with a stolen food processor, while others idly watch the Rodney King beating on videotape and wonder why Michael Jackson tries to look white.

Meanwhile, an obnoxious US television reporter – played by Nora Dunn – scours the scenery for worthwhile stories, only being moved to emotion by the sight of oil-drenched birds.

For all the stylish touches, the film eventually settles down into a familiar mode, as Gates and his crew opt to help Iraqi rebels desperate to flee into Iran for safety from the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard.

Clooney, in an appealingly cynical turn, succeeds both at undercutting the John Wayne archtype – at one point he mockingly notes that the US troops are so effective because “we have the cool flashlights” – while playing a modern-day John Wayne role.

Ice Cube, a rapper normally typecast as a tough street kid, brings some deadpan humour to his role as an airport baggage- handler-turned-soldier, as he plays a character who ultimately even joins in Muslim prayer (presumably soothing anyone offended by the comments about “rag-heads”).

Jonze is funny as a redneck Southern soldier, while Wahlberg convincingly depicts someone utterly confused by the shifting political landscape around him.

The film’s ability to shift sympathies at short notice is most apparent, however, in the small role played by Said Taghnaoui of an Iraqi torturer, who is equally capable of dispensing electric shocks to Barlow and of mourning his infant child, who was killed in the US bombing.

Ultimately, Russell’s film points to the fact that war produces victims on all sides, and makes villains out of all officials – from the smug Iraqi officer, who waits for the Americans to depart so that he can crush the anti-Saddam rebels to his US counterparts, who won’t lift a finger to protect the Iraqi fighters.

The film contains many ironies – not least of which is the fact that the plot hinges on the protagonists making an escape across the border to Iran.

Who would have thought the day would come when a US film depicts Iran’s holy city of Qom as the promised land? Just for that bizarre concept, ‘Three Kings’ may be one of the strangest action films to come along in quite a while.

It is also possibly the best US war film since such similarly messy masterpieces as Robert Altman’s ‘MASH’ and Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now.’

The UN Security Council Monday committed the United Nations to be the interim administrators of East Timor and voted unanimously to send more than 10,000 peacekeeping troops to the Pacific island state.

The 15-nation Council gave the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) a mandate to maintain law and order in the formerly Indonesian-occupied state, as well as to set up an effective administration, social services and political and development infrastructure.

To achieve those goals, UNTAET was authorised to deploy up to 8,950 soldiers, 200 military observers and 1,640 civilian police officers in East Timor.

The troops, one of the largest UN peacekeeping forces in several years, also were authorised under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter to use “all necessary measures,” including military means, to perform their tasks.

The mission would be headed by a special transitional administrator, who will “have the power to enact new laws and regulations and to amend, suspend or repeal existing ones,” according to the Council resolution.

The Council set an intitial 15-month term for UNTAET, lasting until Jan. 31, 2001. The mission was expected to be deployed within the next two to three months, UN officials said, with UN Under-Secretary-General Sergio Vieira de Mello as its first administrator.

Until that time, security in East Timor would remain the responsibility of the 16-nation International Force (Interfet) led by Australia, involving more than 7,000 troops, which has been operative for the past month.

Several Interfet contributors, including Australia and New Zealand, emphasised Monday that they would continue to provide troops to UNTAET even after Interfet has handed its mission over to the UN force.

“Australia looks forward to the time when the multinational force in East Timor will hand over its duties to the military component of UNTAET,” said Australian Ambassador Penny Wensley.

Michael Powles, New Zealand’s ambassador, said that there were compelling “symbolic and practical” reasons to replace Interfet with the UN force as quickly as possible.

Australia has been under particular pressure from Asian nations to cut back its forces, which number more than 4,500, in East Timor, as some Indonesian officials – particularly those from the recently-defeated government of Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie – accused the Australians of using excessive force.

Indonesian Ambassador Makmur Widodo urged UNTAET to act impartially in East Timor and cautioned that “self-righteous attitudes have proved…to be of no relevance in rectifying the situation but rather could exacerbate the situation.”

Widodo dismissed what he called “unverified and often exaggerated reports of human rights violations,” in which pro- Indonesia militias and their Indonesian military allies were accused of widespread atrocities following the Aug. 30 self- determination ballot.

“Allegations of mass killings have not been supported with even a shred of credible evidence,” he claimed.

Yet Interfet troops have uncovered evidence of killings of supporters of East Timor’s independence, which largely were blamed on the militias.

UN officials estimated that, in the aftermath of the overwhelming vote for independence on Aug. 30, some 500,000 of the more than 850,000 East Timorese were forced to flee their homes, and hundreds of thousands still living in camps in the Indonesian province of West Timor.

The scale of atrocities, and the muted response to the violence by many Asian states, prompted concern among East Timorese leaders over any Asian role in UNTAET.

Jose Ramos Horta, a Timorese Nobel laureate and pro- independence activist, warned recently that if Asian nations were not more forceful in their stance with Jakarta, “we don’t want them.”

Bernard Miyet, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, said that the United Nations, however, was trying to get support for UNTAET from as many Asian countries as possible.

In particular, many key members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Malaysia, South Korea and the Philippines, were expected to contribute troops.

“We will establish the mission as quickly as we can,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday. UN officials were negotiating with countries to obtain the necessary resources for the deployment of the mission, Annan added.

The approval of the East Timor mission came just three days after the Security Council unanimously approved the creation of a 6,000-soldier peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone. The two new missions more than doubled the number of UN troops and police deployed worldwide, Miyet noted.

In recent years, UN peacekeeping missions had shrunk in size, from more than 70,000 troops deployed in the mid-1990s to about 14,000 earlier this year.

But the Sierra Leone and East Timor missions, Miyet argued, showed that the Security Council was more willing to support UN peacekeeping. “The pendulum is bouncing back,” he said.

The World Bank joined three UN agencies Thursday in pursuing priority activities designed to reduce maternal mortality worldwide.

The coalition called for increased efforts to reduce the estimated 600,000 deaths of pregnant or child-bearing women that currently were occurring each year – 98 percent in the developing world.

In a joint statement, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Population Fund (UNFPA), World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Bank urged governments to treat maternal mortality as a human rights issue, to improve the availability and quality of maternal health services and to ensure access to family planning.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, WHO director-general, deemed their action important, both as a summary of what the organisations had learned about reducing health risks to mothers and as a sign of partnership among the agencies to reduce maternal mortality.

“We need societies to commit themselves firmly to making pregnancy and birth safe for all women,” Brundtland said.

The joint statement noted that some 80 percent of all maternal deaths resulted directly from complications during pregnancy, delivery or the first six weeks after birth.

Hemorrhaging was blamed for about one-quarter of all deaths but infections, high blood pressure, obstructed labour and unsafe abortions also were major direct causes of maternal mortality, according to the statement.

“There is no magic bullet that will ensure that women can go safely through pregnancy and childbirth,” Brundtland said. However, she added, there were many medical, social, cultural and economic changes that could help prevent the risks for pregnant women.

Many of those steps, added UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy, were straightforward and cost-effective – such as focusing on nutrition before birth, and even before pregnancy, and providing women with education and training in skills.

“I think we’ve learned a lot over the past 10 years,” she said.

The agencies urged that health professionals – whether doctors and health centres or trained midwives – be made accessible to all mothers.

Currently, according to the joint statement, only 53 percent of deliveries in developing countries are attended by a health professional, and only 40 percent occur in hospitals or health centres.

Although training more health service providers was part of the solution other areas – like the improvement of transportation systems – needed to be pursued to ensure access, Bellamy said.

Just as important, argued Nafis Sadik, UNFPA executive director, was the prevention of unplanned pregnancies – which accounted for about half of all pregnancies.

Some of the changes therefore needed to be cultural, she said, including preventing girls from being married at too early an age, or from being pressured to produce boys. Another would be to reduce the dangers of unsafe abortions by ensuring that, in countries where abortion is legal, health providers are adequately trained.

World Bank Vice President Eduardo Doryan said that the steps needed to prevent the overwhelming majority of maternal deaths and half of all infant deaths could be funded at an annual cost of “only about three dollars per person.”

The agencies contended that the measures being proposed to reduce maternal mortality would also have a tremendous impact on lowering infent deaths.

According to the joint statement, nearly two-thirds of the eight million infant deaths occurring every year resulted from poor maternal health and hygiene, or because of the lack of essential medical care during and after birth.

“More than three million infants die in the first week after birth from factors relating to pregnancy and labour” and, each year, another three million pregnancies end in stillbirths, Bellamy said.

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) marked its 30th year of operations Wednesday with a plea for donor nations to boost their contributions to the agency.

UNFPA officials said there was a shortfall this year of some 72 million dollars in commitments to country programmes.

“It is still ironic and tragic that, as we move into what should be a new era of harmony and cooperation, a shortage of funds is tying our hands,” said UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik.

UNFPA’s 1999 income was estimated to be 248 million dollars, 29 million dollars less than last year and 42 million dollars less than in 1997, Sadik said. Income had dropped by 14 percent over the past two years, she added.

“This reduction has led to a stop-and-go process that impedes progress, prevents economies of scale and disrupts the efficient management of programmes and resources,” Sadik said. “We have had to postpone training for midwives, put off buying new obstetric equipment, and delay the purchase of contraceptives.”

Sadik said that the 79-million-dollar shortfall for this year could deprive more than one million people of modern contraceptive methods, and could lead to 1.4 million additional unwanted pregnancies.

She blamed currency fluctuations – which have lowered the value of contributions from European donors – and the financial problems in Japan, the agency’s largest donor, for some of the shortfall.

Yet the United States has been responsible for a large portion of the problem, with conservatives in the US Congress repeatedly objecting to what they have alleged was UNFPA support for draconian population programmes in China.

Because of pressure from some Republicans in Congress, the 25- million-dollar US contribution to UNFPA was cut by five million dollars last year – an amount which corresponded to the proportion spent on the China programme.

US President Bill Clinton has pushed Congress to re-fund UNFPA, and has won supported from Democrats and moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives. The appropriations for UNFPA have passed the relevant committees in both the House and Senate, and have been approved by the House as a whole.

“This looks hopeful to us,” Sadik said of the progress of the UNFPA funding measure.

On Tuesday, US Delegate Sim Farar told the second committee of the UN General Assembly that the United States had not done all that it could to meet population commitments.

“Overseas development assistance continued its decline of the past few years, and political pressures have made it difficult to mobilise all the resources” needed to implement population goals agreed to five years ago at a population summit in Cairo, Farar acknowledged.

“Nevertheless, the Clinton administration continues to seek ways to increase funding for Cairo priorities,” Farar added. “We are quite hopeful that we will restore the US contribution to UNFPA this year, and remain strongly committed to the work, goals and principles of UNFPA.”

Still, UNFPA officials said, the population debate could remain a political football in the US Congress.

Already, an unrelated effort by Republicans to cut US funding for non-governmental groups that advocated changes in abortion laws worldwide, threatened to sink a bill to repay some 900 million dollars in arrears to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, officials noted privately, some Republican politicians – including Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey – continue to view UNFPA, and the China programme in particular, as pro-abortion, despite evidence to the contrary.

Sadik said she has tried to ensure that the China programme does not include population targets, including Beijing’s previous effort to restrict couples to having only one child. “I’m pleased with the way the one-child policy was suspended,” Sadik said.

The UN Security Council must end the delay on humanitarian goods entering Iraq to end the suffering there, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday.

Annan again criticised the number of ‘holds’ on the delivery of food, medicine and other goods that Iraq imports and pays for with oil revenue under the UN-approved special exemption from the nine- year-old sanctions regime against Baghdad.

Most of the delays have been instigated by the United States and Britain, the two countries who most strongly favour continued sanctions against Iraq, Annan said.

“In some instances, goods which have been shipped as part of the (humanitarian) package have to sit and wait because part of (the package) has either been withheld or is not in,” Annan told reporters Tuesday.

“I want to see the United Nations run a smooth humanitarian operation in Iraq, with a capacity to deliver all that the Council has approved,” he added.

Yet Benon Sevan, executive director of the UN Office of the Iraq Programme, warned the Council in a letter this week that the number of holds placed on Iraqi imports actually has increased in recent months.

Since mid-August, Sevan reported, the number of holds on Iraqi applications rose from 475 – on goods worth a total of some 500 million dollars – to 572, on goods worth about 700 million dollars.

There was a particularly high level of holds on requests dealing with oil, telecommunications, electricity, water, sanitation and spare parts requests, he said.

In the telecommunications sector, Sevan reported, 100 percent of requested imports have been subjected to holds by the Council. In addition, the time taken by the Council to review holds had increased to an average of 34 days.

The delays had been significant, said Hans van Sponeck, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. In some cases they prevented goods from being distributed effectively – such as medicines that were delivered but not the necessary syringes.

“It is a complex picture that has worsened in recent months,” he said.

US officials have placed much of the blame on the Iraqi government, which it contended was not doing enough to relieve humanitarian suffering with the money it has obtained by the UN “oil-for-food” exemption.

(Iraq, under the current phase of the programme, can sell some six billion dollars of oil in a six-month period to pay for food, medicine and infrastructure repair.)

US State Department spokesman James Rubin alleged this week that Iraq even had exported basic foodstuffs in recent months, contradicting Baghdad’s claims that the holds had hurt food distribution.

Van Sponeck, however, doubted the US allegations, arguing that his programme employed 170 monitors to ensure that Iraq’s humanitarian imports were distributed properly. “I challenge anybody to prove us wrong when I say that items go where they belong,” he said.

UN officials stressed that both sides shared some blame for the problems of delays – the United States and its backers for increasingly placing holds on Iraqi applications, and Iraq for not providing enough information about some of its import requests.

Rather than trying to blame either side, van Sponeck said, the United Nations needed both to work to expedite the process of humanitarian distribution. For Iraq, he said, that would mean providing more technical information about its import requests. Lack of such information had been the most common reason for the holds, accounting for almost half of the applications placed on hold, Sevan said.

US and British officials have declared some Iraqi requests were unnecessary – such as a recent one for musical doorbells – while others might have “dual use,” in which they could potentially be used for military programmes.

“We try to argue that those parties that are wishing to have an item, and those who are ready to supply it, must be as accurate in their submissions as possible,” van Sponeck said.

The dispute over holds came at a time when the Security Council was deadlocked on the larger question of the sanctions regime.

Of the Council’s five veto-holding permanent members, the United States and Britain supported import sanctions, while Russia, France and China want to see all sanctions lifted in exchange for the resumption of now-stalled UN weapons monitoring efforts.

UN efforts to break the deadlock in the Council, so far, had failed to bridge the gap.

Iraq has stated it would refuse any weapons monitoring efforts until the sanctions regime, put in place after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, was lifted.

The US presidential campaign may be more than one year away but organised labour already has thrown its weight behind Vice President Al Gore – a candidate with strong pro- business and free-trade leanings.

The leadership of the main US labour coalition, the American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL- CIO), provoked some second-guessing when it endorsed Gore earlier this month for next year’s Democratic Party nomination.

From the right came a barrage of accusations that the AFL-CIO had acted too quickly in endorsing a Democratic candidate, 13 months before the election in November 2000. Even leftists, who praised the rise of John Sweeney to the AFL-CIO presidency four years ago, raised their eyebrows at the Gore endorsement.

Paul Buhle – a historian whose recent book, ‘Taking Care of Business’ studied the evolution of the AFL-CIO – noted that, despite Sweeney’s progressive politics, the Gore endorsement fitted the middle-of-the-road policies of past labour leaders.

“The AFL-CIO once again is pouring all its money and all its resources into electing a centrist Democrat,” Buhle said.

Leftist journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in their journal ‘Counterpunch,’ also attacked the union leaders for swinging too quickly behind free-trade Democratic policies that they contended had hindered workers’ rights.

By contrast Gore, who was facing a stiff challenge for the Democratic nomination from former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, pledged his solidarity with the labour movement at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles.

“With the AFL-CIO by my side, we’re going to win this nomination next summer, and we’re going to win this election in the year 2000,” Gore said.

Clearly, Sweeney had increased the political clout of the AFL- CIO since he replaced Lane Kirkland as the organisation’s head in 1995, in what Buhle called a “palace coup.”

Republicans were furious last year when labour leaders sank millions of dollars into supporting Democratic candidates in legislative elections. According to election-day surveys, some 22 percent of voters last year belonged to union households, and nearly two-thirds of them voted for Democrats.

The close ties to the centre-left Democrats have yielded some gains for labour in recent years, including several pushes to increase the minimum wage.

Yet some labour leaders wondered why the AFL-CIO was so eager to give an early endorsement to Gore, who has backed such free- trade pacts as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT).

Teamsters President James Hoffa – whose father, Jimmy Hoffa, repeatedly feuded with Democratic President John F. Kennedy – refused to allow his union to join in the AFL-CIO endorsement of Gore. Another key union, the United Auto Workers, also withheld its endorsement.

The continued controversy over the Gore support showed how much change actually had occurred in the AFL-CIO since Sweeney – along with progressive labour leaders like Rich Trumka of the United Mine Workers – rose to the top of the organisation.

Cockburn and St. Clair wrote that “there’s no doubt when Sweeney took over four years ago, the new regime put heart into people forlorn by years of inertia and defeat in the Kirkland years.”

“There have been so many good changes near the top that one is very reluctant to say that nothing has changed,” Buhle argued.

He pointed to the increased amount of US labour solidarity with workers in the developing world, including campaigns to support workers’ rights in Central America.

Such labour internationalism, he argued, was a welcome change from previous decades, when US labour groups allegedly cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in containing labour radicalism worldwide.

Yet Buhle noted that, at the same time, the modern AFL-CIO still paid for activities that did not advance international labour goals – including funding for radio broadcasts supporting Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who has been criticised by union leaders in his own country.

Buhle praised recent efforts to organise workers across international borders – such as efforts to unite with Mexican workers – as a “real step forward.” But he noted that one of the most effective unions working at cross-border organising has been the United Electrical Workers, which is not an AFL-CIO member.

Meanwhile, according to Cockburn and St. Clair, Sweeney’s efforts to increase union organising efforts in the United Sates have been “patchy at best.”

One of the most significant defeats was the failure by the United Farm Workers to win the right to organise Watsonville, California, strawberry workers – even though the AFL-CIO gave 12 million dollars to that campaign.

This summer, the Watsonville workers chose to be represented by a non-AFL-CIO union.

Yet labour leaders remained confident they would again demonstrate their clout once the election season began in earnest ins. Steve Rosenthal, the AFL-CIO’s political director, said that the unions would begin to mobilise their membership to help Gore secure votes next year.

The UN Security Council Monday committed the United Nations to be the interim administrators of East Timor and voted unanimously to send more than 10,000 peacekeeping troops to the Pacific island state.

The 15-nation Council gave the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) a mandate to maintain law and order in the formerly Indonesian-occupied state, as well as to set up an effective administration, social services and political and development infrastructure.

To achieve those goals, UNTAET was authorised to deploy up to 8,950 soldiers, 200 military observers and 1,640 civilian police officers in East Timor.

The troops, one of the largest UN peacekeeping forces in several years, also were authorised under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter to use “all necessary measures,” including military means, to perform their tasks.

The mission would be headed by a special transitional administrator, who will “have the power to enact new laws and regulations and to amend, suspend or repeal existing ones,” according to the Council resolution.

The Council set an intitial 15-month term for UNTAET, lasting until Jan. 31, 2001. The mission was expected to be deployed within the next two to three months, UN officials said, with UN Under-Secretary-General Sergio Vieira de Mello as its first administrator.

Until that time, security in East Timor would remain the responsibility of the 16-nation International Force (Interfet) led by Australia, involving more than 7,000 troops, which has been operative for the past month.

Several Interfet contributors, including Australia and New Zealand, emphasised Monday that they would continue to provide troops to UNTAET even after Interfet has handed its mission over to the UN force.

“Australia looks forward to the time when the multinational force in East Timor will hand over its duties to the military component of UNTAET,” said Australian Ambassador Penny Wensley.

Michael Powles, New Zealand’s ambassador, said that there were compelling “symbolic and practical” reasons to replace Interfet with the UN force as quickly as possible.

Australia has been under particular pressure from Asian nations to cut back its forces, which number more than 4,500, in East Timor, as some Indonesian officials – particularly those from the recently-defeated government of Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie – accused the Australians of using excessive force.

Indonesian Ambassador Makmur Widodo urged UNTAET to act impartially in East Timor and cautioned that “self-righteous attitudes have proved…to be of no relevance in rectifying the situation but rather could exacerbate the situation.”

Widodo dismissed what he called “unverified and often exaggerated reports of human rights violations,” in which pro- Indonesia militias and their Indonesian military allies were accused of widespread atrocities following the Aug. 30 self- determination ballot.

“Allegations of mass killings have not been supported with even a shred of credible evidence,” he claimed.

Yet Interfet troops have uncovered evidence of killings of supporters of East Timor’s independence, which largely were blamed on the militias.

UN officials estimated that, in the aftermath of the overwhelming vote for independence on Aug. 30, some 500,000 of the more than 850,000 East Timorese were forced to flee their homes, and hundreds of thousands still living in camps in the Indonesian province of West Timor.

The scale of atrocities, and the muted response to the violence by many Asian states, prompted concern among East Timorese leaders over any Asian role in UNTAET.

Jose Ramos Horta, a Timorese Nobel laureate and pro- independence activist, warned recently that if Asian nations were not more forceful in their stance with Jakarta, “we don’t want them.”

Bernard Miyet, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, said that the United Nations, however, was trying to get support for UNTAET from as many Asian countries as possible.

In particular, many key members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Malaysia, South Korea and the Philippines, were expected to contribute troops.

“We will establish the mission as quickly as we can,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday. UN officials were negotiating with countries to obtain the necessary resources for the deployment of the mission, Annan added.

The approval of the East Timor mission came just three days after the Security Council unanimously approved the creation of a 6,000-soldier peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone. The two new missions more than doubled the number of UN troops and police deployed worldwide, Miyet noted.

In recent years, UN peacekeeping missions had shrunk in size, from more than 70,000 troops deployed in the mid-1990s to about 14,000 earlier this year.

But the Sierra Leone and East Timor missions, Miyet argued, showed that the Security Council was more willing to support UN peacekeeping. “The pendulum is bouncing back,” he said.

The UN Security Council, after the green light from Indonesia, is set to approve Monday an ambitious reconstruction mission for battered East Timor.

Indonesia renounced all claims to the territory last week, clearing the way for the Council’s 15 member states – including China, which previously opposed what it deemed to be interference in a country’s internal affairs – to support the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).

A draft resolution, expected to be approved unanimously, would authorise UNTAET to take charge of the country’s administration, including its justice system and the development of a new constitution.

The resolution also would pave the way for the dispatch of some 10,000 troops, including more than 1,600 civilian police officers. The mission is expected to maintain order in East Timor until an elected government is chosen, a process which some officials here have predicted could take two to three years.

The UNTAET mission’s first civilian administrator is expected to be UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Sergio Vieira de Mello, who recently ended a posting as temporary administrator of the UN mission in Kosovo.

Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian, has been criticized by some diplomats here because his country has been a longtime supporter of East Timor and a critic of Indonesia’s 24-year occupation.

UN officials, however, have stressed Vieira de Mello would be an impartial administrator for the six-month period he is expected to serve.

Recent event also have underscored the fact that Indonesia – despite last month’s violence following the Aug. 30 ballot in which East Timorese voters opted for independence – is prepared to let go of East Timor.

On Wednesday, Indonesia’s legislature, the People’s Consultative Assembly, voted to reliquish its claims to the territory which it annexed in 1976 but which was never accepted by the United Nations.

That decision prompted the departure of thousands of Indonesian troops which had remained in East Timor even as roughly 7,000 Australian-led soldiers of the International Force in East Timor (Interfet) moved in to take charge.

With security restored in the East Timorese capital, Dili, Interfet brought back the country’s resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, last week.

Gusmao, who had spent seven years in Indonesian jails and house arrest until his release last month, was greeted by hundreds of Timorese when he delivered a brief speech on Friday to declare that East Timor was on the road to independence.

“It has been a very difficult struggle, that has lasted too long,” Gusmao said. But, he added, East Timorese had shown the world that they were willing to fight for independence.

Although Timorese in general have been supportive of the impending UN transitional administration, Timorese officials have worried about the immense challenges that lay ahead.

“Basically, we have to worry about rebuilding East Timor,” Jose Luis Guterres, foreign affairs secretary for the pro- independence National Council of Timorese Resistance, said this week. “The whole country is destroyed.”

According to UN officials, much of East Timor was burned and looted during last month’s violence, blamed on pro-Indonesia militias and their Indonesian military allies, while hundreds of thousands of people remain missing.

Although thousands of East Timorese have started to return from the neighbouring Indonesian province of West Timor in recent days, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated this week that some 250,000 people may still be in West Timor or other parts of Indonesia.

The East Timor Action Network (ETAN), a US-based rights group, urged Indonesia’s government, under newly-selected President Abdurrahman Wahid, to allow the East Timorese now living in camps in West Timor to return.

“The refugee camps must come under international control,” said ETAN spokesman John Miller. “The militia and members of the Indonesian military now terrorising the refugees must be removed from the camps and prosecuted, so that humanitarian aid workers can safely assist the East Timorese.”

More than 2,000 East Timorese returned from West Timor on Thursday, UN officials here said, apparently after pro-Indonesia militais left a major camp in the West Timorese city of Kupang.

But the flow of refugees has been halting in recent days, with big movements often followed by days of restricted movement across the border into East Timor, the officials added.

The UN Security Council unanimously approved Friday the creation of a new peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone, which is intended to deploy some 6,000 soldiers to the West African nation within one month.

The Council’s approval of the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), which will assist in demobilising government and rebel troops and monitor a cease-fire in effect since July, marked the first major UN commitment to peacekeeping in Africa since UN troops withdrew from Rwanda and Somalia four years ago.

The Council resolution effectively established UNAMSIL – for an initial period of six months – to cooperate with the West African peacekeeping force, called ECOMOG.

It was authorised to use force under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, in order to protect civilians from violence.

Ibrahim Kamara, Sierra Leone’s UN ambassador, called the UN force an “insurance policy” against the prospect of further violence. Friday’s vote, demonstrated that nations would not “turn a blind eye if and when civilians are under the threat of physical violence,” he added.

ECOMOG, the military force of the Economic Community of West African States, has reduced the level of its troops in Sierra Leone in recent months. Nigeria, the dominant force in ECOMOG, elected a civilian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who was committed to reducing Nigeria’s military presence in the region.

As a result, several thousand of the 12,000 ECOMOG troops who were deployed in Sierra Leone in August already had returned to Nigeria or are scheduled to depart.

UNAMSIL would help ensure that the Nigerians’ departure does not hurt Sierra Leone’s fledgling peace process, and that some ECOMOG troops stay on in the country, diplomats said.

The vote to create UNAMSIL demonstrated that the Security Council was “ready and willing to stand with (the Sierra Leoneans) as they rebuild their shattered country and their shattered lives,” said US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.

Holbrooke noted that, earlier this week, there was another skirmish between rebel factions, a sign that the peace process remains fragile. “The momentum of the peace process could easily be lost without prompt, robust action by the international community,” he warned.

Such concerns prompted the United States to back the Sierra Leone force, despite some misgivings by the Pentagon against approving such a large force in an African country where some violence has sputtered on even after the cease-fire.

Yet US officials, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, tried to raise the visibility of Sierra Leone’s problems in order to bolster US support for the UN mission.

This week, in a visit to Sierra Leone, Albright urged the government and rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) to abide by the Jul. 7 peace agreement signed in Lome, Togo.

Albright met RUF leader Foday Sankoh, who is to participate in a power-sharing agreement as part of the July accord, at a closed meeting and refused to appear with him in public as she did with President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah.

Sankoh and his rebel group were accused of orchestrating mass killings and the mutilation of thousands of Sierra Leoneans during the country’s brutal nine-year civil war.

The Lome accord has been criticised by human rights groups for offering amnesty to the RUF and other rebel factions.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose organisation signed on to the peace agreement, attached a proviso to the UN acceptance of the pact: that the world body would not accept the amnesty provisions in the case of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

To show its concern about human rights, the Security Council urged in its resolution that the Sierra Leonean parties should set up commissions for reconciliation and human rights as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, most diplomats here are also hoping that the amnesty and power-sharing deals spell an end to the civil war, in which roughly half a million people were forced to flee the country and thousands others were killed or maimed.

“We remain committed to the pursuit of accountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law, wherever they occur,” Holbrooke said. “At the same time, we recognise the need to allow the peace agreement to bear fruit.”

The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, one of the most traumatic events of the 20th century, saw one million peopled killed while millions more were forced to flee their homes.

Yet, until now, it has been all but invisible on the cinema screens of South Asia.

India’s mammoth film industry, in particular, has stayed away from trying to depict the turbulent flight of Hindus from Muslim- dominated Pakistan and of Muslims from Hindu-majority India – except for an adaptation in the 1960s of Khushwant Singh’s grim novel, ‘Train to Pakistan.’

Like the World War-II holocaust, partition is a subject that touches so many raw nerves even today – from Muslim-Hindu violence to the legacy of British colonialism – that it has been regarded as unfilmable.

But now, Indian director Deepa Mehta whose last film was the equally controversial ‘Fire’ – a story whose look at lesbianism sparked rioting in parts of India three years ago – has met the challenge with her new film, ‘Earth.’

‘Earth’ – now being shown in the United States – has become a surprise success in India where, under the title ‘1947,’ it has enthralled audiences who have clearly longed for a chance to remember what Partition was like.

Mehta’s film is part of a trilogy that grapple with large questions about Indian identity: ‘Fire,’ which touched on issues of sexuality and feminism; ‘Earth,’ which deals with nationalism and ethnic divisions; and the forthcoming ‘Water,’ which is intended to explore Indian religions.

The director’s new film is an adaptation of Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa’s wistful book ‘Cracking India,’ a look back at Partition from the eyes of a young Parsi girl, crippled from using her legs without a brace, who lives in Lahore – a Punjabi city now in Pakistan.

Sidhwa’s alternately funny and sad novel used a simple, but effective, device to examine the madness of the Hindu-Muslim violence unleashed by Partition: its protagonist, Lenny, is young enough to examine the killings without any partisan prejudices, and without understanding or excusing Partition’s horrors.

Of course, that could have made for a simplistic, overly sentimental film, and there are times when the movie’s Lenny (played by child actress Kitu Gidwani) too obviously pulls at the audience’s heartstrings.

When she asks her mother after breaking a dish, “Can you break a country?”, the symbolism is too heavy-handed to be effective.

Yet Mehta is for the most part an insightful, subtle director, who makes a film that shows the real tragedy that happened when, as India and Pakistan neared independence in August 1947, communal madness destroyed the fabric of social relations that had previously bound Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Parsi together.

That social fabric – perhaps a little romanticised, but nevertheless real – is shown in the friendship of a cluster of young men, who are Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, who gather in Lahore’s parks to entertain Lenny and her beautiful Ayyah (Nandita Das), or nanny.

Among the circle of shy suitors who all seem enchanted by the Ayyah are Dil Nawaz, a Muslim ice-cream seller (played by Indian heart-throb Aamir Khan in a shrewd example of casting against type); Hassan, a Muslim masseur (Rahul Khanna); and several bantering Sikhs and Hindus.

The friends are clearly not dogmatic: Dil Nawaz, for example, enjoys conning people in his disguise as a holy man, in which he mocks organised religion by pretending to receive calls on a direct phone line from God.

Yet as Partition becomes inevitable, the religious tensions that led Pakistani founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah to demand the creation of a separate Muslim state – called Pakistan, or ‘land of the pure’ – from India tear at Lenny’s world.

Lenny’s Parsi family believe themselves to be immune from problems, since Parsis (the followers of Zoroaster, descended from Persians) are neither Hindu nor Muslim, but try to adapt to both cultures. “Think of Switzerland,” Lenny’s deluded father says, wistfully imagining himself to be part of a different, European world.

When Lenny’s mother explains to her about how the Parsis’ small presence has led to their policy of neutrality, the young girl concludes wryly: “So we are not bum-lickers – we are invisible.”

Mehta, however, shows how no-one can be invisible or immune when political and religious violence are on the rise.

Dil Nawaz shifts from being a friendly Muslim to a staunch opponent of Hindus after his sisters are killed on a train coming from India. Hassan, on the other hand, tries to shelter people from violence, including a Sikh friend distressed at the prospect of having to leave Lahore.

All the characters, in fact, are on a collision course: that of history, in which large forces wipe out personal friendships in an instant.

The love that Dil Nawaz and Hassan both have for the Hindu Ayyah itself becomes twisted by the violence, in ways that ultimately destroy all three.

Indeed, ‘Earth’ is at its strongest in shifting the audience’s expectations of its characters’ actions. Aamir Khan – normally a noble, if dull, hero in Indian films – demonstrates how likable people can become caught up in evil, and Nandita Das offers a heartbreaking portrayal of someone unable to understand the violence around her.

The film is in many ways a tour de force, showing many sides of Lahore – from the kite-flying Muslim celebration of Besant to the annihilation of the city’s Hindu population in the 1947 violence – that has not been depicted before.

For United States audiences, the film has been a small hit, opening in cinemas in New York, Washington and other cities.

But the success of ‘1947’ in India, where the message of communal insanity and personal betrayal remains relevant today, is an even stronger indication that Mehta and Sidhwa have delivered a message whose time has come.

The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, one of the most traumatic events of the 20th century, saw one million peopled killed while millions more were forced to flee their homes.

Yet, until now, it has been all but invisible on the cinema screens of South Asia.

India’s mammoth film industry, in particular, has stayed away from trying to depict the turbulent flight of Hindus from Muslim- dominated Pakistan and of Muslims from Hindu-majority India – except for an adaptation in the 1960s of Khushwant Singh’s grim novel, ‘Train to Pakistan.’

Like the World War-II holocaust, partition is a subject that touches so many raw nerves even today – from Muslim-Hindu violence to the legacy of British colonialism – that it has been regarded as unfilmable.

But now, Indian director Deepa Mehta whose last film was the equally controversial ‘Fire’ – a story whose look at lesbianism sparked rioting in parts of India three years ago – has met the challenge with her new film, ‘Earth.’

‘Earth’ – now being shown in the United States – has become a surprise success in India where, under the title ‘1947,’ it has enthralled audiences who have clearly longed for a chance to remember what Partition was like.

Mehta’s film is part of a trilogy that grapple with large questions about Indian identity: ‘Fire,’ which touched on issues of sexuality and feminism; ‘Earth,’ which deals with nationalism and ethnic divisions; and the forthcoming ‘Water,’ which is intended to explore Indian religions.

The director’s new film is an adaptation of Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa’s wistful book ‘Cracking India,’ a look back at Partition from the eyes of a young Parsi girl, crippled from using her legs without a brace, who lives in Lahore – a Punjabi city now in Pakistan.

Sidhwa’s alternately funny and sad novel used a simple, but effective, device to examine the madness of the Hindu-Muslim violence unleashed by Partition: its protagonist, Lenny, is young enough to examine the killings without any partisan prejudices, and without understanding or excusing Partition’s horrors.

Of course, that could have made for a simplistic, overly sentimental film, and there are times when the movie’s Lenny (played by child actress Kitu Gidwani) too obviously pulls at the audience’s heartstrings.

When she asks her mother after breaking a dish, “Can you break a country?”, the symbolism is too heavy-handed to be effective.

Yet Mehta is for the most part an insightful, subtle director, who makes a film that shows the real tragedy that happened when, as India and Pakistan neared independence in August 1947, communal madness destroyed the fabric of social relations that had previously bound Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Parsi together.

That social fabric – perhaps a little romanticised, but nevertheless real – is shown in the friendship of a cluster of young men, who are Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, who gather in Lahore’s parks to entertain Lenny and her beautiful Ayyah (Nandita Das), or nanny.

Among the circle of shy suitors who all seem enchanted by the Ayyah are Dil Nawaz, a Muslim ice-cream seller (played by Indian heart-throb Aamir Khan in a shrewd example of casting against type); Hassan, a Muslim masseur (Rahul Khanna); and several bantering Sikhs and Hindus.

The friends are clearly not dogmatic: Dil Nawaz, for example, enjoys conning people in his disguise as a holy man, in which he mocks organised religion by pretending to receive calls on a direct phone line from God.

Yet as Partition becomes inevitable, the religious tensions that led Pakistani founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah to demand the creation of a separate Muslim state – called Pakistan, or ‘land of the pure’ – from India tear at Lenny’s world.

Lenny’s Parsi family believe themselves to be immune from problems, since Parsis (the followers of Zoroaster, descended from Persians) are neither Hindu nor Muslim, but try to adapt to both cultures. “Think of Switzerland,” Lenny’s deluded father says, wistfully imagining himself to be part of a different, European world.

When Lenny’s mother explains to her about how the Parsis’ small presence has led to their policy of neutrality, the young girl concludes wryly: “So we are not bum-lickers – we are invisible.”

Mehta, however, shows how no-one can be invisible or immune when political and religious violence are on the rise.

Dil Nawaz shifts from being a friendly Muslim to a staunch opponent of Hindus after his sisters are killed on a train coming from India. Hassan, on the other hand, tries to shelter people from violence, including a Sikh friend distressed at the prospect of having to leave Lahore.

All the characters, in fact, are on a collision course: that of history, in which large forces wipe out personal friendships in an instant.

The love that Dil Nawaz and Hassan both have for the Hindu Ayyah itself becomes twisted by the violence, in ways that ultimately destroy all three.

Indeed, ‘Earth’ is at its strongest in shifting the audience’s expectations of its characters’ actions. Aamir Khan – normally a noble, if dull, hero in Indian films – demonstrates how likable people can become caught up in evil, and Nandita Das offers a heartbreaking portrayal of someone unable to understand the violence around her.

The film is in many ways a tour de force, showing many sides of Lahore – from the kite-flying Muslim celebration of Besant to the annihilation of the city’s Hindu population in the 1947 violence – that has not been depicted before.

For United States audiences, the film has been a small hit, opening in cinemas in New York, Washington and other cities.

But the success of ‘1947’ in India, where the message of communal insanity and personal betrayal remains relevant today, is an even stronger indication that Mehta and Sidhwa have delivered a message whose time has come.

The UN Security Council Friday threatened to ban airline flights to or from Afghanistan and impose further sanctions unless the ruling Taliban movement produced Saudi financier Osama bin Laden for trial on terrorism charges.

The Taliban, a radical Islamic group which has ruled most of Afghanistan since 1996 – but is not recognised as its government by the United Nations – has one month to comply with the Council’s demands to turn bin Laden over for trial.

If this was not done by Nov. 14, the Council ruled, the Taliban would face the freezing of its overseas funds and all nations would be ordered to deny permission for travel on all Taliban owned or operated aircraft.

In practise, the flight ban would halt the activities of the Taliban-run Ariana airlines, currently flying internationally only to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

To underscore its concern, the Council voted unanimously in favour of the resolution. The Muslim nations of Bahrain and Malaysia voted with China, a staunch opponent of sanctions, in agrreing to the embargo against Afghanistan.

Both Bahrain and Malaysia, however, noted that the Council had one month to review whether to impose sanctions, and if so, how to implement them to affect only the Taliban leadership rather than the Afghan people as a whole.

US Ambassador Nancy Soderberg said as the vote passed that the Council had sent a strong message to terrorists: “You cannot run, you cannot hide – you will be brought to justice.”

The United States has charged bin Laden, head of the Islamic ‘al-Qaeda’ organisation, with planning the Aug. 7, 1998, bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which more than 200 people were killed.

Several of bin Laden’s associates have been indicted for involvement in the bombing, with trial proceedings scheduled to begin in New York by September 2000.

Bin Laden, regarded by the Taliban as a “guest” living in Afghanistan, helped organise resistance to the 1979-90 Soviet occupation of the country. He lives under armed guard in an undisclosed location.

Laili Helms, a spokeswoman for the Taliban in New York, told IPS that the Islamist movement did not understand why bin Laden is regarded as a threat, given that the Taliban monitors his actions and has restricted his involvement with the outside world.

That argument, which has been made repeatedly by the Taliban ever since the United States responded to the Aug. 7 attack by bombing targets in Afghanistan two weeks later, has not convinced the US government.

“Our information confirms that bin Laden’s organisation, working with other terrorist groups, continues actively to plan attacks on Americans and others,” Soderberg said. “We also have reliable evidence that bin Laden’s network seeks to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons.”

Yet Helms argued that bin Laden and his associates have not been proven to commit any crime. “We haven’t received any evidence of his involvement” in last year’s embassy attacks, she said.

Still, Helms said, the Taliban – which is only recognised by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as Afghanistan’s government – is willing to negotiate with US officials on bin Laden’s fate.

One option, she said, was to hand bin Laden, a Saudi national, over to Saudi judges for a trial – but she added that Washington has so far rejected that option.

Nevertheless, the US State Department was considering plans to talk with Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the Taliban’s New York representative, possibly by next week, Helms added.

Mujahid recently downplayed the effect of any sanctions, arguing last month that the United States had not provided any significant level of commerce with Afghanistan in recent years. US President Bill Clinton cut off US trade with Afghanistan on Jul. 5, citing the Taliban’s harbouring of bin Laden.

Many UN diplomats also doubted how much effect the sanctions would have on the Taliban, a group which has some close ties with Pakistan but is isolated from all its other neighbours, including India, Iran and Tajikistan.

One Asian diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, argued, “Countries simply don’t have much leverage in Afghanistan, and I don’t think this (resolution) will change that reality.”

Much of Afghanistan’s money from outside comes from already- illegal exports of opium and heroin, according to UN estimates. This year, the United Nations reported, Afghanistan produced some 4,600 metric tonnes of raw opium – the largest amount ever recorded for one nation.

Another worry, voiced privately by some diplomats, is that sanctions on Afghanistan may further aggravate the crisis in Pakistan following Tuesday’s military coup, led by army chief Gan. Pervez Musharraf.

Pakistan and, ironically, the US Central Intelligence Agency were alleged to have helped form the Taliban and Pakistani military officials retained ties with the Islamist movement.

Consequently, some officials here have warned, sanctions on the aliban could further isolate Pakistan at a time when the military there has seized sweeping powers.

International troops and UN officials, striving to restore order to East Timor, faced the disturbing problem Friday of where were the hundreds of thousands of Timorese, missing since last month.

Prior to the Aug. 30 vote in which the East Timorese overwhelmingly opted for independence from Indonesia, the population of the territory was estimated to be as high as 890,000.

When pro-Indonesia militias – supported by the Indonesian military – responded to the pro-independence vote with burning, looting and massacres, the East Timorese fled in their thousands.

Now that Australian-led troops are in control of the territory, many East Timorese have returned from hiding places in the forests and mountains and the 200,000, who were expelled to the Indonesian province of West Timor, slowly are being returned.

Even so, say UN officials, thousands of East Timorese – perhaps as many as 300,000 – remain missing.

Whether they are still in hiding, or whether many were killed during last month’s violence, is now the subject of controversy at the United nations.

On the one hand, the disappearance of so many Timorese has sparked concern here that Indonesian forces may have massacred them.

Some human rights groups have mentioned reports that, besides the approximately 230,000 East Timorese who were forced into West Timor last month, thousands more may have been shipped to other islands in Indonesia, or even killed and dumped into the Pacific Ocean.

One South American diplomat told the UN Security Council last week about reports of the “harassment, even killing, of 6000 Timorese in Java and other Indonesian islands.”

A former UN official in East Timor cited reports that Indonesian boats which had ferried East Timorese to West Timor’s capital, Kupang, returned in less time than it would take to travel to Kupang and back.

Such reports have led to accusations by Timorese leaders like Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta, who said of the Indonesians, “They threw people off helicopters into the ocean.”

On the other hand, only a few bodies have been uncovered by the International Force in East Timor (Interfet), leading Indonesia to deny angrily that there was “any shred of evidence” of massacres.

In a statement this week, the Indonesian Foreign Ministry argued that there had been no evidence to support claims either of mass killings on land or of bodies dumped offshore.

Indonesia’s supporters have argued that there is no truth in the “myths” of wide-scale massacres.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammed said several reports of killings – such as the rumoured murder of the father of East Timor’s independence leader, Xanana Gusmao – later proved to be false.

“Indonesia has been vilified,” Mahathir contended.

Yet UN officials argued privately that the September violence clearly was organised by Indonesian officials. One UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that officials from both the Indonesian military and the civilian government had been witnessed coordinating militia activity during the worst phase of the violence.

That wave of violence clearly included killings, as Interfet has shown as it has discovered bodies in several suspected massacre sites – although not as many bodies as previously believed.

And even the 4,000 East Timorese who worked as local staffers for the UN Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) have not been fully accounted for, admitted Ian Martin, head of UNAMET.

“It is going to be a long time before we are able to know the fate of all of those people, as distinct from the core staff who worked at the headquarters in Dili and at the (UN) regional offices on a longer-term basis,” Martin said Thursday.

“We are extremely anxious to do that (find out where they are), and obviously we have the kind of records to enable us to do that, but it is going to be part of the general process of discovering who have come back from the hills, who comes back from Kupang or Atambua (in West Timor),” he added.

UN officials have organised flights for hundreds of East Timorese who want to return home from West Timor, but more than 200,000 remain in camps there – many of which are under the control of the militias, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees.

World leaders responded Wednesday to the coup against Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammed Nawaz Sharif’s government by criticising the nation’s armed forces and calling for a return to civilian rule.

A statement from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the Pakistani military leadership to restore both civilian rule and “the constitutional process” seized by the army 24 hours previously.

“Although the intentions of those who perpetrated it are still unclear, the Secretary-General does not believe that coups are the way to solve a country’s problems,” said UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva.

Away from UN headquaters, the coup, led Gen. Parvez Musharraf after his dismissal as army chief, also sparked widespread criticism.

The Finnish president of the European Union (EU) said in a statement that the EU could “in no circumstances approve extra- constitutional and non-democratic means in any country” and therefore urged the Pakistani military to “respect democracy and the parliamentary process.”

Chief Emeka Anyaoku, secretary-general of the Commonwealth – which currently includes Pakistan as a member state – said that the takeover would isolate Pakistan because it “flies in the face” of democratic norms.

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright echoed that argument, saying that there could be no “business as usual” between the US and Pakistani governments until civilian rule is restored.

Yet many governments muted their objections, often avoiding any mention of the fate of Sharif’s elected government to focus on hopes for some new form of civilian rule.

According to diplomatic sources here, Musharraf and other top military leaders have already begun talks on forming a possible “caretaker cabinet” of civilian politicians that could rule Pakistan until fresh elections.

The discussions involved President Rafiq Tarar who, like Musharraf, was appointed to his post last year by Sharif, and top politicians from Sharif’s ruling political party, the Muslim League, the sources said.

Sharif remained under detention Wednesday at his residence in Islamabad, and several other top officials – including Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz and Information Minister Mushahid Hussein – also were under arrest, said reports from the Pakistani capital.

Some diplomats speculated that Sharif’s ouster by Musharraf would largely follow the same pattern as several previous dismissals of prime ministers in recent years.

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, now opposition leader, and Nawaz Sharif had both been dismissed previously under the now- defunct Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed Pakistani presidents to dissolve corrupt or mismanaged governments.

The Muslim League-dominated parliament scrapped that provision last year but the military still intended to do the same thing that happened during previous dismissals – to place a caretaker cabinet in charge for several months and hold fresh elections, sources said.

Sharif, whose popularity slid sharply this year following Pakistan’s economic woes and his agreement in July with US President Bill Clinton to put an end to a separatist insurgency in the Kargil peaks of the disputed region of Kashmir, would not be expected to fare well in a new round of elections.

Ironically, Sharif owed his nearly three-year stint as prime minister to the dismissal of his rival, Bhutto, who was dismissed by President Farooq Leghari in 1997 in what was widely seen as a military-backed effort.

Both Sharif and Bhutto have now been dismissed twice, and neither has served a full term since democratic elections resumed in 1988 at the end of the 11-year dictatorship of Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq.

In recent years, the military stayed clear of direct involvement in political matters, particularly out of wariness that it would be internationally isolated if it planned any future takeovers.

According to several sources in the Pakistani government, however, that wariness subsided over the past year as the army grew to doubt its previously close relationship with the US government.

Those doubts – and coup rumours – first arose after the May 1998 nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan, after which both countries were hit with US sanctions. They were strengthened after Sharif’s Jul. 4 agreement with Clinton to withdraw the insurgent troops which had seized the peaks of Kargil on India’s side of the Line of Control, the de facto border in Kashmir.

Recent developments have done little to assure the Pakistani military that its close relationship with the United States – which lasted throughout Zia’s 11-year regime and the 1979-90 Soviet incursion in Afghanistan – has endured.

This week, the US and Russian governments were prepared to push a resolution in the UN Security Council that would cut air links to Afghanistan and freeze the overseas assets of the country’s ruling Taliban.

Although the sanctions were deemed likely to pass – a move which would isolate the Taliban, which was organised at least in part by Pakistan’s military – no vote had been scheduled by Wednesday. Some diplomats here said they were concerned about the coup when considering the timing of a sanctions vote.

Similarly, one European diplomat said on condition of anonymity, worries had grown since the coup that efforts to prod Pakistan and India to sign the nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would be hurt.

Clinton, the diplomat said, had planned to visit both countries this winter and to urge the two nations to sign and ratify the CTBT.

But the coup and the failure by the US Senate to ratify the CTBT have damaged any chances that the proposed trip could succeed, he added.

The UN system welcomed the birth Tuesday of the six billionth person living on Earth – a baby boy born in the war-shattered city of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Fatima Nevic gave birth to her eight-pound son two minutes after midnight. Later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan awarded a gift of 50,000 dollars to the maternity ward at Sarajevo’s Kosevo Hospital noting that the birth was a sign that Bosnia-Hercegovina was recovering from its ruinous 1992-95 war.

“The birth today of the six billionth person on the planet – a beautiful baby boy – in a city returning to life, to a people rebuilding their homes, in a region restoring a culture of co- existence after a decade of war – should light a path of tolerance and understanding for all peoples,” Annan said.

Douglas Coffman, a UN spokesman, emphasised that the United Nations had no way of determining precisely the identity of the six billionth person, but had simply chosen the first child born after midnight in Sarajevo, where Annan already had scheduled a visit.

Still, the birth of the boy to Fatima and Jasminko Nevic afforded Annan the opportunity to bring up the fact that the world population had topped six billion without appearing to blame the developing world – where 95 percent of the population increase occurred, according to UN estimates.

“The challenge to feed and clothe and house this great mass of humanity over the next decades will be immense,” Annan argued. “The means are available. The question is whether we have the will.”

The secretary-general said that, of the 4.8 billion people currently living in the developing world, nearly three-fifths lack basic sanitation, almost a third lack access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing and a fifth still require access to modern health services.

At the United Nations, where a population clock had been marking the incremental increase in world population every minute, the number 6,000,000,000 appeared on the clock before a cheering, yet concerned, audience.

Nafis Sadik, the executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said that world population was increasing by 78 million people a year – equal to the combined populations of France, Greece and Sweden.

According to UN statistics, world population has doubled since 1960, when it hit three billion. Before that point, it had taken 154 years from 1804, when a population of one billion worldwide had been recorded, until another two billion people were added.

Now the world population could reach seven billion, or even as much as 11 billion, by the year 2050 – depending on which population policies are adopted worldwide, UNFPA said.

Under the most likely scenario, the world population fifty years from now would be 8.9 billion.

Currently, some 350 million around the world lacked access to “safe and effective” family planning methods, according to Sadik. In order to meet such needs, UNFPA estimated that countries must spend some 17 billion dollars a year.

The agency warned that population assistance from governments had fallen from a peak level of 9.5 billion dollars in 1995. Population aid from the industrialised nations was only 2.46 percent of all their official development assistance (ODA) funds in 1996, even as ODA levels themselves fell sharply.

Meanwhile, developing nations have risen to the challenge, with nations from the South – particularly China, India and Indonesia – funding roughly four-fifths of all population activities.

However, Sadik remained optimistic that developed nations would respond to the call for funding population activities.

“We are on track to achieve the goals” set at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo, she said recently. “We should not be hampered by lack of resources…I think we still have the opportunity to get the (needed) resources.”

At a special session of the UN General Assembly this summer, governments rededicated themselves to the task of finding the resources to stabilise world population growth, and industrialised nations especially pledged to do more to fund population activities.

Currently, according to the UNFPA, 94 percent of all population assistance funding comes from ten countries, with the United States and the Netherlands accounting for 55 percent of such expenditures. The remainder of the funding from industrialised states comes from Britain, Germany, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada and Australia.

The imposition of broad-based sanctions may have lost favour with most UN members as a means of putting pressure on nations but sanctions targeted at selected ‘rogue’ leaders remain popular.

Take the case of the recent push by the UN Security Council to impose a ban on flights by Afghanistan’s official airline Ariana and to freeze the central Asian nation’s overseas assets.

These moves are intended to put the squeeze on the ultra Islamic Taliban movement that controls most of Afganistan and showed that, despite concerns over the embargo on Iraq and now-suspended sanctions against Libya, the United Nations can still use sanctions as a tool in its arsenal.

The Security council will vote during the coming week whether to take action against Afghanistan.

The move has the strong support of both the United States – which wants the Taliban to hand over Saudi financier and suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden – and Russia, a Taliban foe which, nevertheless, usuially is opposed to sanctions.

Remarkably, even China, the Council’s most staunch sanctions opponent, has indicated it will not veto the effort to punish the Taliban. One Chinese official said Beijing only wants to ensure that any measures taken is narrowly targeted so that the broad population of Afghanistan will not be hurt.

In a year which has seen the Council suspend sanctions on Libya and consider an end to the nine-year embargo against Iraq, the effort to craft a precisely-targeted sanctions regime against the Taliban shows a shift in the way sanctions are pursued.

To put it simply, broad-based embargoes – such as the one which UN officials claim has led to widespread malnutrition and disease in Iraq – are “out.”

Sanctions that focus on the economic and political power of rogue leaders are still “in.”

This strategy has helped to keep sanctions on the table, even while such sanctions critics as Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov declares that “Punishment of entire nations – especially for an indefinite time and indiscriminately – is inadmissible.”

The shift on sanctions has also become evident through the action of De Beers, the South African diamond mining and marketing giant, in suspending the purchase of all diamonds from Angola.

The decision follows an effort by the Security Council – particularly by Canada, which chairs the Council’s sanctions committee on Angola – to prod diamond marketers to crack down on any prohibited commerce with the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

As with the measures against the Taliban, the crackdown on Angolan diamonds is intended to strike at UNITA’s source of wealth: its control over most Angolan diamond-producing zones.

Canadian officials estimate that the rebels have netted between 3-4 billion dollars in diamond sales during the past eight years, enough to fund its lengthy, brutal war against the Angolan government.

Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s foreign minister, praises De Beers – believed to control about two-thirds of all global diamond transactions – for taking the lead in bolstering sanctions against UNITA.

“It is time to tackle the new war economy, where a direct relationship exists between certain illicit businesses, corrupt officials, mercenaries and warlords,” says Axworthy. “In Angola, that relationship perpetuates misery, conflict and the victimisation of innocent people.”

As British Foreign Minister Robin Cook notes, the “illegal trade in diamonds…pays for the small arms and, all too often the mercenaries, which sustain conflicts.”

Ironically, the De Beers example demonstrates how difficult it can be in enforcing carefully-targeted sanctions.

The only way it can be sure of not purchasing UNITA diamonds on the Angolan market is to stop buying entirely in Angola. Some legitimate Angolan sellers, trying to market diamonds from government-held zones, therefore will be excluded along with UNITA middlemen.

Nevertheless, the Angola case, like that of Afghanistan, at least marks an attempt by the Security Council to set clear rules for how to impose limited sanctions.

The new rules still must be spelled out but there are clearly some common elements to the sort of sanctions regimes governments will now accept.

First, they must be applied as a last resort, and normally imposed against groups that clearly are international pariahs.

Both UNITA and the Taliban have fallen out of favour with almost all nations. Significantly, the Angolan rebels and de facto Afghan government are fighting in former Cold War hot spots, yet are opposed by both the United States and Russia.

Second, sanctions must be crafted to hurt elites – closing their overseas offices, freezing their bank accounts – but that do not restrict commerce in general.

UNITA has already been hit with a UN-imposed freeze on its assets, while the Taliban is facing similar measures proposed by the United States and Russia. The United States has unsuccessfully tried to push the same measures – including a similar ban on flights – against the government of Sudan.

Yet the only sure means to end what UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan last year called “sanctions fatigue” is to prove that sanctions eventually will be lifted.

Most Council members are pushing for the suspension of Libyan sanctions to become an outright lifting of all bans against the Tripoli government.

Russia, China and France, meanwhile, are sticking to their position that the Iraqi embargo must end soon while the Council, as a whole, has moved toward the acceptance – or at least the principle – of lifting sanctions on Iraqi exports, if not on imports.

If these trends continue, sanctions supporters hope to see fewer cases of sanctions leading to economic collapse, as in Yugoslavia or Iraq, and more in which government and rebel leaders face greater financial difficulties.

The Security Council may face a different dilemma: whether the new targeted sanctions can be monitored as effectively as the blunt, all-embracing ones of the past – or whether UNITA and the Taliban, among others, will simply shrug off the new measures.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Tuesday urged the 15-nation Security Council to accept an ambitious plan for the United Nations temporarily to administer East Timor.

The proposed mission, the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET), would last for two to three years and involve nearly 9,000 troops being deployed in the territory along with 200 military observers, Ann said.

He insisted that quick approval of the force was necessary at a time when an estimated 500,000 of East Timor’s 850,000 people had been displaced by violence from pro-Indonesia militias and some Indonesian security forces.

“The civil administration is no longer functioning,” Annan wrote in his report to the Security Council. “The judiciary and court systems have ceased to exist; electrical services, such as water and electricity, are in real danger of collapse.”

The violence which followed the Aug. 30 self-determination ballot in East Timor was so severe that hardly any buildings were left undamaged in the capital, Dili, while the towns of Ainaro and Cassa were “completely destroyed.” Wide areas of other town, like Atsabe and Maliana, had been destroyed by fire, according to the report.

Before UNTAET was deployed, the United Nations must deploy 460 police officers, as well as legal experts and civil affairs officers, throughout the country to handle urgent security and administrative concerns, Annan said.

By the end of this month, some 8,000 troops led by Australia were expected to be deployed in East Timor, as part of the multinational Intervention Force for East Timor, or Interfet.

Indonesia, which invaded East Timor in 1975, has reduced its troop presence to a token force of some 1,200 soldiers.

Approval of the UN’s [peace-keeping plans was unlikely to occur until the end of this month, since the United Nations was forced to wait for the Indonesian legislature to accept the results of the vote in which 78.5 percent of East Timorese voters opted for independence from Indonesia.

Also the US Senate had 15 days to consult before Washington could support any UN peacekeeping operations – a delay which could push back a Council vote until late October.

However, Bernard Miyet, UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, said Tuesday that Annan had urged the Council to approve UNTAET as soon as possible, so that the UN troops could replace Interfet quickly without any security vacuum in East Timor.

“We are already preparing the transition,” he said. “We want a seamless transition…in which there is no gap between the end of Interfet and the beginning of UN administration.”

Miyet estimated that it would take between two and four months to deploy UNTAET, but said he was confident that countries would be willing to lend troops. Some soldiers and equipment, he added, could be donated by Australia and other Interfet forces.

In the meantime, he added, some 180 UN police are ready for deployment in the East Timorese capital, Dili, and nearby in Darwin, Australia.

Many Asian countries have offered to participate in the UN force and Australia – which currently had some 4,500 troops in East Timor – was expected to decrease its own participation as Asian troops arrived, observers opined.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer confirmed last week that Canberra was prepared to scale back its contribution once the UN peacekeeping force was established.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad argued that a more Asian force was preferable, although he cautioned that Malaysia and other cash-strapped nations could not afford a long-term deployment.

The UN force would be paid for by a standard assessment among member states, in which the United States pays for 31 percent of peacekeeping costs and European countries account for a heavy share of the funding. But Miyet noted that the United Nations alsowas relying on a trust fund to help rebuild East Timor’s shattered infrastructure.

Japan has contributed 100 million dollars to the trust fund, while Portugal – East Timor’s former colonial power – gave five million dollars.

Miyet argued that the new operation may be more costly and logistically challenging that other recent missions, such as the UN administration in Kosovo, because of the amount of destruction that was wreaked in recent weeks.

“Right now, we have a situation in which everything has been burned, looted – all our capacity has been destroyed,” Miyet said.

Yet the United Nations also has some advantages in the upcoming mission, including the support of the Timorese and the pro- independence movement, the National Council for Timorese Resistance.

The mission would be one of the most massive undertaken by the United Nations.

Annan wrote that the world body would establish an “effective administration”, help develop a constitution for East Timor and organise elections and build institutions for the territory’s independence. The entire process was expected to last two to three years.

It would include providing advisors on civil administration, legal and judicial affairs, policing and other key functions.

Miyet added that the amount of future work would depend on how many trained professionals remained in East Timor – a territory which for the past 23 years has relied on civil structures provided by Indonesia.

Even now, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were camped as refugees in parts of Indonesia, with as many as 230,000 refugees estimated to have been forcibly deported to Indonesia’s province of West Timor last month.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, voiced concern that Indonesian authorities were asking the East Timorese in West Timor whether they wanted to return.

UN officials received assurances this week that all the refugees would be allowed to return to East Timor, but were worried that they may be too intimidated to admit to Indonesian forces that they wanted to go back.

Support for UN embargoes against Libya and Iraq may be weakening but the UN Security Council has found a new target for sanctions: Afghanistan and its ruling Taliban movement.

There were few objections when the United States and Russia introduced a draft resolution in the Council Wednesday that would impose an international ban on all flights by Afghanistan’s Ariana airline and freeze the Taliban’s overseas assets.

The draft resolution, which may come to a vote next week, urged the Taliban to hand over Saudi financier and suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden “without further delay” so that he could be put on trial.

Bin Laden, head of the Islamist al-Qaeda organisation, was accused by US authorities of planning the Aug. 7, 1998, bombing of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.

In retaliation, US warplanes stuck at targets in Afghanistan two weeks later but Taliban leaders claimed that Washington had not provided proof of bin Laden’s involvement.

The United States unilaterally imposed a ban on Ariana flights two months ago and has lobbied heavily for the proposed UN sanctions. Even such longtime opponents of sanctions as Russia and China hesitated to back the Taliban’s radical Islamists.

Russia, increasingly concerned about radical Islamists in general, pushed for sanctions aginst the Taliban and China indicated it would not cast any veto but would abstain from any sanctions vote – as long as it was targeted at the Taliban leadership.

At a time when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Khadafi’s Libya are slowly emerging from cumbersome sanctions regimes, the Taliban – which controls some 95 percent of Afghanistan – is not recognised by the United Nations as the government and has become a uniquely isolated state.

Many traditional opponents of sanctions – including two neighbouring states, Iran and India – were sympathetic to efforts to punish the Taliban.

Iran accused the Taliban, a radical Sunni group, of conducting massacres against Shi’a Muslims while India has alleged Afghan involvement in training Kashmiri separatists.

As a result, as one UN ambassador put it, governments have “no major problems” in passing a resolution which could in effect cut Afghanistan off from the outside world.

Currently, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the only country which allows flights by Ariana airlines.

Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the Taliban’s representative in New York, conceded recently that he was “not very optimistic” that the Islamic group would be able to prevent the imposition of sanctions. “They want chaos and anarchy to prevail,” he said of the nations which favoured sanctions.

Ironically UN sanctions regimes have not fared well in recent years.

This year, amid signs of dwindling support for a flight ban against Libya, the United States and Britain struck a deal for a trial of two Libyan bombing suspects in the Netherlands – a move which led to the suspension of UN sanctions on Tripoli.

Meanwhile, Washington and London backed an effort to suspend export sanctions against Iraq if Baghdad allowed renewed UN weapons inspections. Yet China, France and Russia threatened to block any such resolution, arguing that it did not go far enough in lifting the entire nine-year-old embargo on Iraq.

Afghanistan, however, is a different case.

More than three years after the Taliban seized the Afghan capital, Kabul, and imposed its unusual form of Islamic rule – including the drastic seclusion of women and crackdowns on religious and ethnic minorities – it has won recognition from only three countries: the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The UN seat for Afghanistan remained occupied by representatives of former President Berhanuddin Rabbani’s government, which largely was in exile in neighbouring states and controlled only a small strip of the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s record on everything from women’s rights to drug control, if anything, has worsened since it strengthened its grip over the country.

Last month, the UN Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) reported that Afghanistan was estimated to have produced 4600 metric tonnes of raw opium this year, the highest level recorded for any country.

That amount, UNDCP added, represented a 120 percent increase in Afghan opium production in just 12 months.

Last month, Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN special rapporteur on violence against women, reported that the Taliban had one of the most misogynist administrations she had encountered. “I have never seen suffering like in Afghanistan,” Coomaraswamy declared.

She said that she received reports of widespread beatings and harassment of women, as well as their exclusion from education and employment.

The movement’s record has been so poor that some diplomatic sources have claimed that Pakistan – perhaps its firmest ally – had quietly decided not to oppose the UN sanctions campaign.

Yet the Taliban has countered that its opponents – such as Rabbani’s ousted regime – had similarly poor records, without arousing international condemnation.

Mujahid contended that for years, “not a single women” was allowed in the schools run by their opponents in refugee camps in Pakistan, and added: “Did you raise your voice?”

Mujahid doubted that the Taliban would change its posture against extraditing bin Laden if sanctions were imposed. Bin Laden, he claimed, posed no threat since “he is being patrolled by a special committee” while he resided in Afghanistan.

UN officials Wednesday urged Indonesia to provide them access to hundreds of thousands of East Timorese living in the Indonesian province of West Timor.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Sadako Ogata, sent a letter to the Indonesian government protesting Jakarta’s plans to register East Timorese in West Timor without international supervision.

“In the interest of the displaced population and the credibility of the return operation, UNHCR must have unhindered access to all displaced persons, whose decisions must be made on internationally confirmed expression of free choice,” Ogata wrote.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said that Indonesian authorities were asking the East Timorese who had taken refuge in West Timor to register before they would be returned.

On the registration forms, Eckhard said, refugees were asked whether or not they wanted to return to East Timor, stay in West Timor or be trasferred to another part of Indonesia.

UN officials are worried that the presence of pro-Indonesia militias – blamed for the violence since East Timorese voters opted for independence in an Aug. 30 ballot – have been present in, and possibly in control of, the refugee camps.

“Under the current circumstance, there is not even a minimum guarantee that the people can answer freely,” a UNHCR statement said.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, whose Atlanta-based Carter Centre monitored the August vote, said that access to the West Timor camps was critical following reports that the militias had executed refugees, held them against their will and recruited males for militia membership.

“I am deeply disturbed that many refugee camps in parts of Indonesia are effectively under the control of the armed East Timorese militias, who, in some instances, are being actively supported by the Indonesian military and police,” Carter said.

Carter added that, after some three weeks in the camps, the refugees deserved to return home if they so chose.

“The government of Indonesia must ensure that all Timorese residents or refugees, no matter where they are located in Indonesia, are protected by the police and local government,” he said.

Indonesian officials contended that some 230,000 East Timorese had been in camps in Kupang, Atambua and other parts of West Timor since last month’s violence in East Timor.

Although Jakarta claimed that the refugees wanted Indonesia’s protection from the violence, Indonesian officials agreed on Sunday to allow quick repatriation of the refugees and to grant UNHCR and the Red Cross access to the camps.

UNHCR said it expected to airlift refugees back to East Timor “within days” – but so far, there were no signs that the agency would be given full access to see the refugees.

Xanana Gusmao, the leader of the East Timorese independence movement, told reporters here last week that the refugees were being held in “concentration camps” in terrible conditions, and must be returned immediately.

“They are living in gfear in very poor conditions of health and security,” Gusmao said.

Officials here wondered why Indonesia was holding the refugees despite clear signals that many thousands of East Timorese wanted to return home. The Carter Centre was concerned that Indonesia intended to resettle the refugees to other parts of Indonesia, including the island of Sulawesi, as well as West Timor.

With the Australian-led International Force for East Timor, or Interfet, now in control of much of the island state, UN and other officials also are concerned that many Timorese towns have been found to be empty of people.

In Liquica, only between 15,000 and 20,000 people – out of an original population of some 50,000 – are believed to be living in nearby areas, UNHCR said. Most of the population there have been living off wild fruit in nearby hills since mid-September, the agency added.

A UNHCR assessment team also found the villages of Luidapar and Maubere “deserted,” with the few remaining people reporting that the inhabitants of the towns have been moved to the West Timorese city of Atambua.

On Wednesday, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the Nobel laureate and senior Catholic cleric in East Timor, returned to the capital, Dili, where he urged East Timorese to come back to their homes from hiding places in the hills and mountains.

A shooting incident, in which Interfet officers shot and killed two militia members near the town of Suai on Wednesday, underscored the dangers that persisted, particularly in the western parts of East Timor.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Tuesday urged the 15-nation Security Council to accept an ambitious plan for the United Nations temporarily to administer East Timor.

The proposed mission, the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET), would last for two to three years and involve nearly 9,000 troops being deployed in the territory along with 200 military observers, Ann said.

He insisted that quick approval of the force was necessary at a time when an estimated 500,000 of East Timor’s 850,000 people had been displaced by violence from pro-Indonesia militias and some Indonesian security forces.

“The civil administration is no longer functioning,” Annan wrote in his report to the Security Council. “The judiciary and court systems have ceased to exist; electrical services, such as water and electricity, are in real danger of collapse.”

The violence which followed the Aug. 30 self-determination ballot in East Timor was so severe that hardly any buildings were left undamaged in the capital, Dili, while the towns of Ainaro and Cassa were “completely destroyed.” Wide areas of other town, like Atsabe and Maliana, had been destroyed by fire, according to the report.

Before UNTAET was deployed, the United Nations must deploy 460 police officers, as well as legal experts and civil affairs officers, throughout the country to handle urgent security and administrative concerns, Annan said.

By the end of this month, some 8,000 troops led by Australia were expected to be deployed in East Timor, as part of the multinational Intervention Force for East Timor, or Interfet.

Indonesia, which invaded East Timor in 1975, has reduced its troop presence to a token force of some 1,200 soldiers.

Approval of the UN’s [peace-keeping plans was unlikely to occur until the end of this month, since the United Nations was forced to wait for the Indonesian legislature to accept the results of the vote in which 78.5 percent of East Timorese voters opted for independence from Indonesia.

Also the US Senate had 15 days to consult before Washington could support any UN peacekeeping operations – a delay which could push back a Council vote until late October.

However, Bernard Miyet, UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, said Tuesday that Annan had urged the Council to approve UNTAET as soon as possible, so that the UN troops could replace Interfet quickly without any security vacuum in East Timor.

“We are already preparing the transition,” he said. “We want a seamless transition…in which there is no gap between the end of Interfet and the beginning of UN administration.”

Miyet estimated that it would take between two and four months to deploy UNTAET, but said he was confident that countries would be willing to lend troops. Some soldiers and equipment, he added, could be donated by Australia and other Interfet forces.

In the meantime, he added, some 180 UN police are ready for deployment in the East Timorese capital, Dili, and nearby in Darwin, Australia.

Many Asian countries have offered to participate in the UN force and Australia – which currently had some 4,500 troops in East Timor – was expected to decrease its own participation as Asian troops arrived, observers opined.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer confirmed last week that Canberra was prepared to scale back its contribution once the UN peacekeeping force was established.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad argued that a more Asian force was preferable, although he cautioned that Malaysia and other cash-strapped nations could not afford a long-term deployment.

The UN force would be paid for by a standard assessment among member states, in which the United States pays for 31 percent of peacekeeping costs and European countries account for a heavy share of the funding. But Miyet noted that the United Nations alsowas relying on a trust fund to help rebuild East Timor’s shattered infrastructure.

Japan has contributed 100 million dollars to the trust fund, while Portugal – East Timor’s former colonial power – gave five million dollars.

Miyet argued that the new operation may be more costly and logistically challenging that other recent missions, such as the UN administration in Kosovo, because of the amount of destruction that was wreaked in recent weeks.

“Right now, we have a situation in which everything has been burned, looted – all our capacity has been destroyed,” Miyet said.

Yet the United Nations also has some advantages in the upcoming mission, including the support of the Timorese and the pro- independence movement, the National Council for Timorese Resistance.

The mission would be one of the most massive undertaken by the United Nations.

Annan wrote that the world body would establish an “effective administration”, help develop a constitution for East Timor and organise elections and build institutions for the territory’s independence. The entire process was expected to last two to three years.

It would include providing advisors on civil administration, legal and judicial affairs, policing and other key functions.

Miyet added that the amount of future work would depend on how many trained professionals remained in East Timor – a territory which for the past 23 years has relied on civil structures provided by Indonesia.

Even now, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were camped as refugees in parts of Indonesia, with as many as 230,000 refugees estimated to have been forcibly deported to Indonesia’s province of West Timor last month.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, voiced concern that Indonesian authorities were asking the East Timorese in West Timor whether they wanted to return.

UN officials received assurances this week that all the refugees would be allowed to return to East Timor, but were worried that they may be too intimidated to admit to Indonesian forces that they wanted to go back.

The image of the blue-bereted UN peacekeeper earlier this year was that of a soldier in retreat, after long United Nations missions to Angola and Macedonia, but the fortunes of the blue berets suddenly have shifted.

The UN Security Council is poised to approve 6,000 UN troops for Sierra Leone, in the world body’s first major African mission since its humiliating retreat from genocide in Rwanda and anarchy in Somalia.

It is also ready now for a major peacekeeping effort in East Timor, where a UN force is expected to replace the Australian-led International Force (Interfet) about four months from now.

If the mission to provide a transitional authority to East Timor is approved, it may last three years, some UN officials believe.

Other missions meanwhile are contemplated for hot spots so risky that the possibility of obtaining Council approval for UN peacekeeping was thought to be extremely low; places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.

What happened? Has the reputation of the UN ‘blue berets’ – badly hurt in the mid-1990s by ineffective missions in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Angola – turned around overnight?

Not exactly. More likely, many countries have decided that, in a choice between involving the United Nations and opting for inaction, the use of UN troops is worth a second look.

In many recent cases there has been a sea change – particularly by European states who want effective UN missions, with relatively modest mandates, to take over from cash-strapped and tired regional forces.

Unlike the burst of UN operations in the early 1990s – which saw the world body mount 17 missions involving more than 70,000 troops by the middle of the decade – the recent change up in peacekeeping activity mostly involves replacing regional forces on the ground.

In Sierra Leone, several European nations – most crucially Britain – decided in recent weeks to back the 6,000-member UN force to prevent the country from sliding back to disarray when the 12,000 mostly Nigerian troops of the ECOMOG regional force pull out.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan argued that it was time to replace the ECOMOG troops, particularly after Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo decided in August to draw down the force by some 2,000 soldiers every month until December.

Faced with the prospect of a massive Nigerian withdrawal as that country tried to repair its own shattered economy, Western nations quickly changed their tune on UN peacekeepers.

Revealingly, US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke threw his support behind the peacekeepers – even though the US State Department and Pentagon reportedly still disagreed over whether to authorise such a force. US troops, in any event, will not participate.

“ECOMOG has shouldered the burden long enough,” Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy concluded. “Let us ensure that the mission this Council agrees to send to implement peace is coloured blue, UN-authorised, UN-managed, UN-funded and that they are integrated as soon as possible with remaining ECOMOG forces.”

Although Axworthy’s words sounded a ringing endorsement of the value of the blue berets, they also pointed to the financial considerations at the heart of the proposed UN deployment.

Having a “UN-managed, UN-funded” force would mean that Nigeria no longer had to shoulder the costs of monitoring the shaky peace between the Sierra Leonean government and rebel Revolutionary United Front.

At the same time, integrating the “remaining ECOMOG forces” into the UN mission would allow Nigeria to keep several thousand troops in Sierra Leone – but in an operation paid for by UN assessments, and under UN oversight.

Similar plans were expected to be drawn up for East Timor, where Australia currently bears the greatest burden of the Interfet operation, which intends to deploy more than 7,000 soldiers throughout East Timor over the course of this month.

On the one hand, a UN armed force in East Timor would remove the major financial burden on Australia and many Asian states and get the United States – which is assessed to pay 31 percent of peacekeeping costs – and European states to pick up the slack.

That in turn would address the concerns of leaders like Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, who warned, “We cannot afford to send our troops and pay for them.”

On the other hand, the UN force for East Timor could fall prey to regional bickering, with several Asian states – notably Malaysia and Thailand – having taken Australia to task for what Mahathir called its “belligerent” posture in East Timor.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer conceded that, as more Asian troops enter East Timor, Australian forces – expected to rise to about 4,500 soldiers shortly – could withdraw. UN officials also predicted more Asians and fewer Australians in a UN force in East Timor.

Whether such a force would be more effective than Interfet, which has restored security to large chunks of East Timor in less than two weeks, is debatable.

Timorese independence activist and Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta publicly doubted the usefulness of some Asian troops and said, “We don’t need them.”

Yet inevitably, a UN peacekeeping operation is multinational, and many competing interests and geopolitical realities go into the shaping of the force. That is one reason why the new wave of expected UN troops may face the same problems that bedeviled the last wave.

As Annan – formerly head of UN peacekeeping – admitted about missions like the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Yugoslavia, sometimes missions are given mandates by member states but not the resources to implement those mandates.

For many UN officials, the worst example was the six “safe areas” in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where understaffed and lightly armed troops proved no match for the Bosnian-Serb forces which overran the UN-guarded enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa in 1995, killing thousands of Muslim civilians.

Other examples are equally troubling. The US chief of the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM), Admiral Jonathan Howe, launched a futile, and immensely destructive, campaign to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed in 1993.

The mission wiped out parts of the capital, Mogadishu, and led to the deaths of two dozen US Army Rangers and the subsequent dimming of US support for UN peacekeeping.

Those failures taught the United Nations to tread carefully, and to avoid the assumption that the deployment of blue berets was, in itself, the solution to a crisis.

Whether ose lessons apply once UN soldiers take over from regional peacekeepers in West Africa and the Pacific islands remains open to question.

Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmao Tuesday pleaded for the reconstruction of East Timor and the quick deployment of international troops there to restore order after weeks of violence by pro-Indonesia forces.

Gusmao, freed three weeks ago from house arrest in Indonesia, made his appeal for international assistance as the United Nations announced that East Timor would need 135.5 million dollars in immediate emergency needs.

The Timorese leader met separately with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas Tuesday and declared that the situation of some 200,000 East Timorese, forcibly deported to West Timor, was especially dire.

“We need the multinational force to move fast into East Timor, to increase the number of troops there,” Gusmao, leader of the pro-independence National Council for Timorese Resistance (CNRT), said. Currently, only about half of the more than 7,000 Australian- led troops of the International Force, or Interfet, were deployed in East Timor.

Gusmao said that hundreds of thousands of East Timorese who had been moved to the Indonesian province of West Timor and to several Indonesian islands were in “very poor conditions of food and security. They live in fear.”

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said that UN and Indonesian officials were discussing the repatriation of the East Timorese refugees, approximately 230,000 of whom were in West Timor. But Indonesian officials said it was “too early to discuss their return,” Eckhard said.

Gusmao said that, during their meeting, Alatas had promised Indonesia would “contribute to the greatest possible extent to pacify East Timor and to repatriate the refugees.”

Jose Ramos Horta, Gusmao’s deputy and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, added that the CNRT had urged all governments to exert diplomatic pressure for the return of the Timorese refugees and called for a “mini-Marshall Plan” of assistance to the island state.

According to UN officials and reports from the territory, East Timor has been largely destroyed in the violence by the militias – reportedly aided by some Indonesian troops – since the Aug. 30 ballot in which nearly 80 percent of East Timorese voters opted for independence from Indonesia.

The UN report issued Tuesday said that at least 135.5 million dollars would be needed to handle the basic requirements for the next six months of the roughly 500,000 East Timorese who were driven from their homes because of the violence.

Of that amount, more than 40 million dollars is needed for food aid, 22.4 million for shelter and other support to refugees, 24 million for medicine and 21.7 million for clean water and sanitation.

Ramos Horta added that the World Bank and more than 30 countries have confirmed their intention to assess East Timor’s rebuilding needs jointly and to estimate the territory’s long-term requirements.

After several weeks when thousands of East Timorese are believed to have been killed and hundreds of thousands lived with little food in makeshift camps, Gusmao’s arrival at the United Nations struck a somber note.

“You have been through a lot, and we’ve been through a lot together,” Annan said at the beginning of his meeting with the CNRT leader.

Although the United Nations succeeded in carrying out the Aug. 30 ballot, which has started East Timor’s process towards independence, it has come under fire for ignoring reports that pro- Indonesia forces were planning massacres if the results went against them.

“It’s no secret that threats (of violence) were widely made,” conceded Ian Martin, head of the UN Assistance Mission in East Timor (UNAMET), which pulled most of its personnel from East Timor earlier this month. However, he argued, there had been no indication of the scale and degree of organisation of the violence.

Alatas told Gusmao that Jakarta also had been “shocked” by the violence.

In any case, Gusmao argued, “we had fought for 23 years for this opportunity” to choose whether or not to accept Indonesia’s occupation, and the Timorese remained grateful to the United Nations for the vote even despite the brutal aftermath.

The task of rebuilding East Timor, however, appeared complex.

Indonesian entities – including some controlled by the military and by the family of the former Indonesian dictator, Suharto – own many of East Timor’s coffee plantations and timber resources. Despite the violence, Gusmao made clear that the CNRT did not intend to alienate Indonesian or other businesses.

“We will of course respect the right of people that legitimately had acquired economic interests in East Timor,” Gusmao said. He added that East Timor remains open for Indonesian investment.

Jorge Sampaio, president of Portugal, noted that the militias had destroyed the main property registry office in East Timor, complicating the determination of legitimate ownership further.

Many issues remained to be resolved once the United Nations set up a transitional authority in East Timor, which is expected to last for several years before the former Portuguese colony finally declared its independence. Annan conducted talks on the transition this week with Gusmao, as well as officials from Portugal and Indonesia, which had occupied East Timor since 1975.

Gusmao hoped that the UN transitional authority could be established quickly in East Timor. But Martin said that the United Nations would not exercise transitional authority until after Indonesia ratified the results of the Aug. 30 ballot – which was expected by late October or early November.

Support was growing Thursday among UN members, including many key Western powers, for a plan to deploy UN missions in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and other African conflict zones.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, speaking at an earlier Security Council discussion on crises in Africa, led the call for a 6,000 strong peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone, as well as consideration of further efforts in the Congo and elsewhere.

“Sierra Leone and the DRC need more than humanitarian palliatives,” Annan said.

He urged greater international commitment to peace efforts and other partnerships in Africa, arguing that “nations making good- faith efforts and adopting enlightened policies deserve much greater support than they are now getting.”

Last week, Annan proposed that the United Nations deploy a 6,000-member mission in Sierra Leone to monitor the Lome peace agreement brokered between the government and rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

The mission would replace, but possibly include, members of the 12,000-soldier ECOMOG regional force, whose large contingent of Nigerian troops was being withdrawn gradually. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who visited the United Nations last week, said that the replacement of ECOMOG soldiers by UN troops could help relieve Nigeria’s costly peace-keeping burden.

Salim Ahmed Salim, secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), said a UN force also would help to “stabilise the situation.”

In recent years, however, the United Nations was unable to mount large-scale operations in Africa – mainly due to US indifference.

The United States maintained a restrictive policy toward UN peacekeeping after the ill-fated 1993 effort by UN and US soldiers in Somalia to capture a Somali faction leader.

During the Security Council debate Wednesday, US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke supported sending military observers to Sierra Leone and that the United Nations should be “ready to introduce a full peacekeeping operation in December, when the Nigerians plan to leave.”

Holbrooke did not offer any details about how many soldiers the United States might be willing to authorise for either the Sierra Leone conflict or for the fragile situation in the Congo- Kinshasha.

Other diplomats, however, were more supportive of missions in Africa. Peter Hain, Britain’s Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, said the Security Council should be ready to accept Annan’s proposals on Sierra Leone “as soon as possible.”

Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy said the “risks and the costs for these operations must be assumed by us all.,

“Making this solely, or even primarily, a local responsibility, and simply passing around a hat to see what might be dropped into it, is shameful and inadequate.”

Axworthy said that the ECOMOG force, deployed by the Economic Community of West African States, “has shouldered the burden long enough” in Sierra Leone. Similarly, he said, “we may be faced with the need for robust, comprehensive peace operations in the DRC and possibly in Ethiopia-Eritrea.”

The reason so many forces would be needed followed hopeful reports that several African conflicts appeared to be losing steam – including the brutal RUF rebellion in Sierra Leone, the multi- national conflict in the eastern Congo and the year-long Ethiopia- Eritrea border war.

Annan said that, although the Lome agreement which granted RUF leaders amnesty was “far from perfect,” it responded to the “real desire for peace in that country and gives it a new lease on life.”

Last week, Zambian President Frederick Chiluba also urged the Security Council to support the Congo peace process, signed in Lusaka, that has committed the DRC government, several rebel entities and neighbouring governments to a cease-fire.

UN officials estimated that a minimum of 15,000 soldiers may be needed to patrol the DRC effectively and ensure peace among the various factions but the United States signalled it was unwilling to authorise more than 5,000 troops for the mission.

Holbrooke said that Washington supported Chiluba’s peace efforts, and would consider recommendations for future action by UN military liaison officers.

The hostility of some Asian countries to Australia’s peace-keeping efforts in East Timor sharpened here Wednesday with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad declaring the Australian troops were belligerent.

Mahathir met UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to discuss a possible scaling back of the Australians in the multinational International Force for East Timor (Interfet) and argued for a greater role by Asian troops .

“I think it is necessary that Australia scale down its peacekeeping force,” he said. “There are other ways of solving problems besides pointing guns at people.”

Mahathir contended that Annan had agreed that, as more Asian troops participated in peacekeeping in East Timor, some Australian soldiers – who were to comprise some 4,500 of about 7,500 Interfet troops – ccould be pulled out.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer agreed that Annan and Canberra both wanted to scale back the Australian presence eventually and include more troops from the Association of South- east Asian Nations (ASEAN).

But he defended Australia’s role so far as “successful” and said the Australian soldiers had shown great restraint in east Timor.

For now, there is no serious plan to reduce the number of Australian troops, with many soldiers from ASEAN countries still weeks away from deployment and cash-strapped Asian nations unwilling to foot the bill for a lengthy involvement.

The costs of Interfet, unlike UN operations, are met by participating governments.

Mahathir’s comments, however, underscored the suspicions of some of Indonesia’s Asian allies about Australia’s role in East Timor.

Last week, Thailand advocated restraint from the Australian troops, withthe Thai foreign ministry suggesting that Asian troops would be more “gentle” than the Australians.

Thai troops were due to form the second-largest contingent in Interfet, of about 1,500 soldiers, and will include the force’s deputy commander.

Mahathir echoed the argument that the troops need to behave with restraint, claiming that in recent media reports on East Timor, “I had seen pictures of Australian troops pointing guns at just about everybody.”

Downer retorted that “they haven’t shot anybody” and argued Interfet had shown restraint even though it was authorised, under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, to use force to restore peace to East Timor.

He noted that Malaysia – a member of the 15-nation UN Security Council – had voted along with the other nations to allow Interfet to use force.

Despite that mandate and the actions of pro-Indonesia militias who had “acted with the greatest of violence,” Downer said the operation so far had been peaceful.

In recent days, the troops have arrested and disarmed a few dozen suspected militia members.

Mahatir’s attitude infuriated Jose Ramos Horta, Nobel laureate and Timorese pro-independence activist, who said that Asian troops should not be involved in East Timor peacekeeping if they doubted the need for the operation.

“We don’t need them,” he said of the Asian troops.

Mahathir, for his part, has shown little fondness for Ramos Horta or the pro-independence cause in East Timor, declaring that it was now “almost standard that all those who oppose governments should be given Nobel Peace Prizes.”

In many ways, the dispute was not about whether Australian troops had done too much and all sides conceded there had been no fighting between Interfet and the pro-Indonesia militias – blamed for the destruction in East Timor.

It was about whether the United Nations and outside nations were right to intervene in East Timor at all.

For Mahathir, the problem started when the United Nations organised the Aug. 30 self-determination ballot in East Timor, when 78.5 percent of Timorese voters opted for independence from Indonesia.

“Indonesia should not have been forced to hold a referendum,” he argued, claiming that there had been “no killings” before the ballot – in contrast to accounts by rights groups which claim that some 200,000 East Timorese had been killed after Indonesia’s 1975 invasion.

Mahathir added that pro-Indonesia Timorese had felt “cheated” by the quick vote and “responded in the only way they knew how.”

Even after the displacement of some 500,000 of East Timor’s 850,000 people in recent weeks, and the killings of at least thousands of independence supporters, many Asian governments clearly sympathise with that argument.

Even though the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva voted Monday for an independent inquiry into East Timor’s violence, and urged Asian representation on the inquiry panel, most Asian nations either voted against or abstained from the resolution.

Yet greater Asian participation in East Timor peacekeeping is expected to occur only after Interfet gives way to a UN military operation, which is expected to be deployed once Indonesia’s legislature has formally accepted the Aug. 30 ballot results.

Officials here believe the UN force will not be deployed until at least four months from now.