AP - July 30, 2001

MOSCOW (AP) -- A Communist was declared the winner Monday of the governor's race in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod region -- once considered a showcase for post-Soviet market reformers. But he immediately announced he was leaving the party.

Gennady Khodyrev received 59.8 percent of the vote in Sunday's run-off. Incumbent Ivan Sklyarov received 28.25 percent, said Yelena Katysheva of the regional election commission.

Voter turnout was less than 38 percent, with some voting against all candidates, Katysheva said.

Khodyrev, a member of parliament, ran on a Communist ticket, but repeatedly said he would cooperate with the Kremlin.

On Monday, Khodyrev announced he was leaving the Communist Party in order to serve the region as ``a uniting governor.''

``I think President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who is not a member of any party, can be an example to us,'' he said on NTV television.

Nizhny Novgorod, a Volga River city about 250 miles east of Moscow, is known as the hometown of many of the country's leading liberals.

PARIS (AP) -- Guy Hermier, a French Communist Party deputy and leading figure in leftist politics in the southern city of Marseille, has died. He was 61.

Hermier died Saturday evening in a Marseille hospital after battling cancer for several months.

Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin lamented the loss of a ``companion'' who had loyally supported all fights dear to the left.

``Guy Hermier was a man of deep convictions, profoundly attached to the engagements and values which had inspired and guided his life as a militant and as a deputy,'' Jospin said Sunday.

Hermier had been a member of the Communist Party since 1958.

He was elected as deputy for Bouches-du-Rhone in 1978 and had been identified as a ``radical reformist'' member of the Communist Party during the 1980s. He also was director of the weekly magazine Revolution between 1980 and 1994.

BERLIN (AP) -- Germany's phase-out of nuclear power will begin in 2003, when the first of 19 plants to be closed under an accord between the government and utilities will go off-line, a state official said Friday.

The E.ON utility has filed a plan to close down the Stade plant west of Hamburg -- Germany's oldest -- in the second half of 2003, then dismantle it over 10 to 12 years, Lower Saxony state Environment Minister Wolfgang Juettner said.

The move follows an agreement by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and top power company executives last month to gradually shut down Germany's nuclear plants, a cause championed by the center-left government since it came to power in 1998.

The deal sets a standard life span of 32 years for existing plants, which means Germany's newest nuclear plant would shut down in 2021.

Stade, in operation since 1972, will close about a year earlier than foreseen under the agreement, Juettner said.

Some 100,000 tons of steel and concrete and up to 3,000 tons of slightly radioactive material will have to be dismantled, he said. The highly radioactive spent fuel rods will be sent to France for reprocessing.

Nuclear plants provide almost a third of Germany's electricity. The government says the phased shutdown will allow time to build up other sources, including renewable energy.

Schroeder took office promising to negotiate an end to nuclear power, a goal championed by the environmentalist Greens party, his junior coalition partner. However, many anti-nuclear activists would like to see a quicker shutdown.

Editor's commentary: It is really hard to believe that something like this might happen. Germany that is widely accepted as European leader and economy giant is heading for 1920s, time of chaos and anarchy that ravaged Germany and produced Adolf Hitler. Theoretically it is currently impossible to produce enough clean energy especially for economic giant as Germany without nuclear power plants. The only alternative would be coal burning power plants that would further pollute Germany not to mention higher costs. How do you retire one third of your energy source without any real alternative? I doubt that Schroeder thinks of solar panels or wind power. If California can't exploit enough those resources than Germany certainly has no way to do it. If Schroeder thinks that building more coal burning power plants will please Greens then he should think again. Germany is known as country without many energy resources and this decision can destroy German economy. It looks like Italy is heading for European leadership with experienced and proven businessman PM while Great Britain and Germany are slipping into oblivion. This is what happens when you vote for extreme left.

MINSK, Belarus (AP) -- Police beat and detained some 20 people who rallied Friday to celebrate Belarus' independence from the Soviet Union, a holiday abolished by the country's hard-line president.

Several hundred Belarusians from the youth opposition movement Zubr, or Bison, had gathered to march across the capital, Minsk. The rally was to mark Independence Day, which President Alexander Lukashenk has rejected as an official holiday because he wants to unite his country with Russia.

Celebrating Belarus' independence is considered a statement of dissent, which Lukashenko has tried to suppress.

The demonstrators sat on the ground, holding up portraits of opposition figures who have disappeared over the past years in Belarus, and began chanting ``Long live Belarus!'' and ``Where are these people?''

Opposition members say they suspect the government of having a hand in the disappearances. Lukashenko denies the government is involved.

Unidentified men began kicking and stiking the demonstrators. Police arrived and began making arrests, beating some as they were forced into police cars. At least 20 were held, according to Oleg Bebenin, a leader of the opposition movement Charter-97.

Activists said those detained were released later in the day.

Friday was the anniversary of the day in 1990 when the Belarus Soviet state first declared its intention to secede from the Soviet Union. Lukashenko later combined the day with the celebration of Belarus' liberation from German occupation during World War II.

MOSCOW, Jul 27, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Visiting U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday re-affirmed Washington's intention to go on testing its controversial missile defense shield even if no agreement is struck with Moscow.

"President Bush made it very clear that he believes there is a threat, a new threat, and we will need to move, to go beyond ABM so that we can have a serious testing and evaluation program that gets us a solution to the threat," Rice said after meeting President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.

U.S. President George W. Bush "has not set a specific deadline, but it should be obvious to all concerned that the president believes that this is something that will happen relatively soon," she said. "The testing program will proceed."

Her comments confirmed Monday's statement by Bush, who warned that "if we can't reach agreement, we're going to implement" the missile defense shield, which Russia opposes, saying it could spark a new arms race.

Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have agreed to link negotiations on missile defense to bilateral nuclear arms cuts, a proposal that Rice said was "heavily discussed" during her meetings with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and Security Council secretary Vladimir Rushailo.

"President Bush has said that the United States intends to bring down its strategic forces to the level commensurate with its concern about deterrence," Rice said. "He wants to do it at the lowest possible level."

But she re-affirmed the United States' desire to scrap the ABM, and create a brand new strategic stability architecture.

"The ABM is very restrictive," she told reporters after her Kremlin talks. "We don't want to be constantly accused of violating the ABM treaty, that's why we are talking about going beyond, and not line by line."

"The question now is not are moving forward, but how we are moving forward, and this is considerable progress," she said.

MOSCOW, Jul 27, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) The Russian military authorities Thursday imposed fresh restrictions on the movement of journalists in war-torn Chechnya, forbidding them from moving around on their own, ITAR-TASS reported.

Russian reporters based at the main military headquarters outside Grozny from now on may only leave the base when accompanied by a military press officer, officials told the news agency.

Previously, accredited journalists could work relatively freely, organizing trips through the local pro-Moscow Chechen administration and other Russian government agencies.

Since the start of the Russian crackdown in Chechnya on October 1, 1999, Moscow has kept tight control on the media's activities in the secessionist republic, particularly on foreign journalists.

In recent months, pro-Moscow Chechen officials have spoken out increasingly about widespread abuses by Russian soldiers during security sweeps, with several civilians reported to have died after being detained.

BELGRADE, Jul 26, 2001 -- (dpa) The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) caucus in the Serbian parliament has fallen apart and will lose the absolute majority, but the overall coalition will survive, the Belgrade daily Politika said Thursday.

Three member parties of the coalition, President Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), New Serbia (NS)and Movement for Democratic Serbia (PDS), decided earlier to form their own factions in the parliament.

After the three parties pull their deputies into their own formal "clubs", DOS would have 117, instead of 176, seats in the parliament of 250.

DSS, the largest in the breakaway group, decided to step out of DOS factions at all levels of the legislature after Serbia overrode a federal suspension to extradite the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to the international war crimes tribunal last month.

The PDS reportedly wants more exposure on national television, which it would have after its faction leader, according to rules, gets more time behind the microphone.

The NS leader Velimir Ilic, who shot to fame as one of the key leaders in the protest that toppled Milosevic last October, came into conflict with Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic over his desire to run for president of Serbia with DOS backing.

Though the DOS group would remain as the ruling coalition in almost all municipalities, Serbia and Yugoslavia, some officials saw the DSS move as a first step in preparation for future elections and a possible obstacle to reforms.

"It violates the coalition agreement and might hamper the reform process," said spokeswoman of the Democratic Alternative, one of 18 partners in DOS, accusing the three splintered parties of a "race for political points".

Officials of the three parties were stressing that their stepping out of the DOS caucus was by no means an end of the coalition, formed last summer with the single declared goal, to beat Milosevic at federal elections.

However, some signals indicating otherwise also emerged.

"We have achieved our primary goal ... it is wrong to think of DOS as of some sort of a broad national front," PDS spokesman Slobodan Vuksanovic.

The three opposition parties in the Serbian parliament, grouped around Milosevic in the former regime, have a total of 74 seats.

MINSK, Jul 26, 2001 -- (RFE/RL) Unknown persons on 24 July burglarized the editorial office of the Minsk-based independent newspaper "Den" and removed four computers, Belapan and RFE/RL's Belarusian Service reported.

The robbery occurred following the newspaper's preparation of a special 250,000-copy special issue on the disappearances of people in Belarus.

Last week, the "Den" office was robbed after the newspaper published documents implicating high law-enforcement officials in the assassination of opposition figures Yury Zakharanka and Viktar Hanchar as well as ORT cameraman Dzmitry Zavadski.

"Den" Editor in Chief Alyaksandr Tamkovich noted a similarity between the two robberies, saying that the thieves managed to get into the office without breaking doors or windows, and mainly targeted equipment critical for the newspaper publication.

The "Den" editorial office is located on the premises of the well-guarded state-owned motion-picture company Belarusfilm.

WASHINGTON, Jul 26, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Yelena Bonner, widow of Nobel prize-winning human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, on Wednesday compared the silence regarding Moscow's war in the rebel republic of Chechnya to that on the Holocaust.

Bonner spoke to Representatives and their guests of massacres, "cleansing operations" and mass graves perpetrated by Russian forces in Chechnya acting with impunity.

"I understand that speaking all these statistics, it threatens to become so much that it's hard to grasp," Bonner told a small lunch gathering hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy.

"In one cleansing operation, in 30-35 degree Celcius heat, villagers were taken to a field, their papers were checked, then people were ordered to strip and stand on corrugated iron sheets -- like a frying pan. Many people died right there in the field."

"Years ago when people were being taken by the Nazis to (camps) and word came back of what was happening there, the reaction was complete disbelief. And I understand when I talk about Chechnya, it is the same," she said.

Bonner also criticized what she said was the international community's double standard when it came to Chechnya.

"The political genocide of the Chechen people is ignored or covered over, forgiven for Russians ... but genocide in other parts of Europe are condemned, and effective measures are taken," she said, speaking through her interpreter and son Alexander Semyonov.

"As long as this problem is not resolved in a humane way, it is impossible to speak of a human rights situation in Russia," she said, calling on the U.S. Congress to speak against the abuses in the war-shattered republic.

"I think that to stop the genocide should be the moral imperative for the Congress," she said.

Born in 1923, Bonner met Sakharov in 1970 and the two married in 1972, dedicating their lives to human rights. Her father, a prominent Armenian Communist, was arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938. Her mother served years of hard labor as the wife of a traitor.

KIEV, Jul 26, 2001 -- (dpa) Using some of the toughest language heard yet from an American official, U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice Wednesday told the Ukrainian government to find the killers of two independent journalists or forget about foreign investment, the Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.

Rice, U.S. President George W. Bush's in-house specialist on the former Soviet Union, was in Kiev on a two-day working visit. Her comments were in dramatic contrast to statements made by officials from the previous Democratic administration.

Speaking on the deaths of web site editor Georgy Gongadze and television editor Ihor Aleksander, Rice argued the prosecution of the case was not only of domestic Ukrainian interest.

"The (Ukrainian) government understands that the world is watching the course of events in Ukraine," Rice said.

Gongadze's headless body was found in a forest outside Kiev last November. Attackers wielding baseball bats killed Aleksandrov outside his Donetsk apartment last month.

Before their deaths, both Gongadze and Aleksandrov made public information critical of the government of President Leonid Kuchma. Police have arrested no suspects in either case.

The police investigation has been slow, contradictory, and often unprofessional. After Gongadze's death became public knowledge, Ukrainian law enforcers confiscated the body from a rural morgue and refused to admit they were holding it for more than a week.

Until the two investigations become transparent, the world "will have difficulty having a dialogue" with Ukraine, Rice said.

Kuchma has repeatedly denied complicity in the journalists' deaths and has said he wants a full investigation. Kuchma's opponents say he ordered the attacks.

The largest demonstrations since Ukrainian independence came out against Kuchma earlier this year over the scandal. Kuchma has experienced difficulty getting western heads of state to meet with him in public.

Kuchma sacked a Minister of the Interior and the head of the secret police over the slow investigation. He has said his government would spare no efforts to bring Gongadze's and Aleksandrov's murderers to justice.

Rice said the Kuchma administration should make sure upcoming parliament elections are open and fair.

Ukraine selects a new parliament next March. Some political observers are already predicting a drastic shift in the political landscape, with the elections installing a new house majority willing to throw Kuchma out of office.

Kuchma openly used regional and local governments to assist him in a 1999 re-election bid.

"We are concerned not only about the day of elections, but the election process," Rice said.

She hinted U.S. aid might be forthcoming to maintain stability in the former Soviet republic during the run-up to the election.

"The administration of the United States understands the importance of financing civil society in Ukraine, especially on the eve of elections," she said.

Rice also discussed land reforms and an oil pipeline across Ukraine connecting the Black Sea to Europe with her Ukrainian counterpart.

WASHINGTON, Jul 26, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in remarks published Wednesday the United States should deal with China from a position of military strength, and he suggested that Beijing faces trouble ahead as it attempts to reconcile economic reform with political repression.

In an interview with The Washington Times, Rumsfeld said the U.S. confrontation with Beijing over a downed U.S. reconnaissance aircraft last April revealed the jockeying for position and power within the civilian leadership.

Asked the best U.S. military posture for dealing with China, Rumsfeld said, "Militarily, I never believed that weakness was your first choice. I have always felt that weakness was provocative, that it kind of invites people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't think about doing."

"And so to those who would argue that the United States should be something other than strong and capable of contributing to peace and stability in the world, I would argue that history says to the contrary," he said.

Under Rumsfeld's direction, the Pentagon has given greater emphasis to Asia as part of a revamping of U.S. strategy that is expected to reshape the size, character and disposition of U.S. military forces.

Rumsfeld, who described himself as an "old fashioned" realist, said that while China was reaching out economically to the world, it was increasing its defense budget by "some probably double-digit figure" and building up its short and long-range missiles.

"How do I view it? I guess it doesn't surprise me," he said. "Here is a country that apparently has the wherewithal to do that. They have decided that it's important for their view of the themselves to be the factor in the region."

"And they are making significant investments and not just in immediate capabilities, but they are making significant investments in future capabilities," he said.

Rumsfeld questioned how China will be able to reconcile a relatively free-market approach to economics, with the outside influences that trade and computers bring, "with a dictatorial emerging political system that lacks the political freedoms that we enjoy and (that) many, if not most, successful economies enjoy."

"I happen to be in the camp that suggest that that's an awfully tough thing to do, that repression does work, but if you try to do it while you are simultaneously achieving a high-growth economic through extensive interaction with other nations in the world, you are putting at risk your ability to repress," he said.

He added that "money is a coward. People vote with their feet. If you create an environment that's inhospitable to investment, the inevitable result is that investment will dry up," he said.

Reflecting on last April's collision between the U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and a "hot-dogging" Chinese fighter jet, Rumsfeld said Beijing's hidden succession struggle played a big part in its reaction.

"It certainly sharpens your understanding of some of the dynamics that go on inside that country and the relationships between the military and the civilian side," he said.

"Probably how the jockeying for position in leadership positions and power inside the civilian leadership is affected by external events that come out of nowhere," he added.

WASHINGTON, Jul 25, 2001 -- (dpa) Taiwan could be welcomed under the protective umbrella of President George W. Bush's proposed missile defense system, a top State Department official said Tuesday.

The remarks by John Bolton, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, appeared likely to rile Beijing, which views with suspicion any military contacts between the United States and Taiwan.

At a briefing for foreign reporters, Bolton was asked about Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian's recent proposal for the United States, Japan and Taiwan to collaborate on the development and testing of missile defense systems.

"President Bush has made it clear in his earlier remarks that the defense of Taiwan is something we regard as very important, and this could well be an element of it," Bolton said.

He held out the prospect of consultations with Taiwan authorities "as our research and development continues for theater-wide and other missile defense systems".

Earlier, Chinese ambassador Yang Jiechi told an audience of journalists at the National Press Club that "the Taiwan question, if not properly handled, will cause serious harm to U.S.-China relations".

"History has shown that careful handling of the Taiwan question is the key to stable U.S.-China relations," Yang said. He urged the Bush administration to "honor its commitments" in three communiques signed by the two governments in 1972, 1979 and 1982 that spell out U.S. acceptance of "one China".

Despite those communiques, the United States has long maintained an ambiguous commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. In April, Bush angered Beijing when he told a television interviewer the United States would do "whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.

In recent years, Beijing has denounced U.S. plans to develop theater missile defense systems, viewing it as aimed at thwarting Beijing's capability to attack the island, which it views as a renegade province.

Such plans have now been folded into Bush's more wide-ranging missile defense proposal, which he has said could protect U.S. allies and "friends". Bolton's statement was the first official acknowledgment that Taiwan may be included.

VIENNA, Jul 25, 2001 -- (dpa) A regional media organization called on Yugoslavia on Wednesday to clear up unsolved murders of journalists and act against "intimidation and harassment" of the press.

In an open letter to President Vojislav Kostunica, the Vienna- based South East Europe Media Organization (SEEMO) expressed concern over press freedom violations in Yugoslavia and Serbia.

Listing a number of examples, it said that on 12 July, Predrag Radojevic, a regional correspondent of the Belgrade daily Blic, was summoned by police at Valjevo for an "informative talk" about his work.

Radojevic had previously written a number of articles on local political affairs.

Five days later Dusanka Novkovic, a regional correspondent of the Belgrade daily Blic, was also summoned by police. Novkovic had reported about the financial problems of a local company.

SEEMO, an affiliate of the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI), urged Kostunica to guarantee that the actions of the police would not be repeated.

Kostunica should "ensure that all journalists working in Yugoslavia have the right to practice their profession without fear of harassment or intimidation", it said.

SEEMO said it was also concerned for the safety of Milica Ivanovic, a reporter of the Belgrade news agency Beta and contributor to the Belgrade daily Blic in the town of Leskovac.

Ivanovic received a death threat on July 19 after an article she wrote about the local authorities' expulsion of an Albanian craftsman from his shop in the town.

Threats had also been made against Petar Milinov, correspondent of the Greek Ionian TV in Belgrade. There had recently been a number of other threats against journalists.

"SEEMO urges the Belgrade authorities to do everything possible to ensure the safety of journalists in Yugoslavia and Serbia", said the letter signed by the organization's secretary general Oliver Vujovic.

It also called on the authorities to bring to justice the killers of Serbian journalist Milan Pantic, shot dead on 11 June in the town of Jagodina, and to clear up the murder of a media executive in 1999.

CAMP BONDSTEEL, Yugoslavia (AP) - President Bush (news - web sites) ventured into the recovering Kosovo province Tuesday, telling U.S. troops he hopes to speed the day when peace is self-sustaining here and they can go home.

The president brought with him a defense spending bill passed by Congress that includes $1.9 billion to boosts pay, benefits and health care for American troops. He signed it before thousands of cheering soldiers in green camouflage fatigues.

Bush told the troops of Camp Bondsteel that their mission in Kosovo is vital to block those who use religious and ethic differences to perpetuate violence. He said America's diverse military serves as an example of peaceful coexistence for Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Full story here.

BEIJING, Jul 23, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) China said Monday it planned to build a huge monument celebrating the 50th anniversary of its takeover of Tibet at the Potala Palace, the first such structure at Lhasa's most famous landmark, formerly the Dalai Lama's winter residence.

The 35-meter high monument would "manifest the sublime spirit of the People's Liberation Army and their great contribution to the peaceful liberation of Tibet," the official Xinhua news agency said.

Thubten Samphel, a spokesman for the Tibetan government exiled in Dharamsala, India, said the monument would be an insult to Tibetans, as they considered the so-called "liberation" an invasion.

"That's not appropriate, because the Potala Palace has special meaning for Tibetan people. For the Chinese government to install a monument in the Potala Palace will not go down well with the Tibetan people," Samphel told AFP.

"They may see this as bringing liberation for Tibet but from Tibetan people's perspective, it's been 50 years of untold suffering for Tibetan people.

"To have this humiliation enshrined in the Potala Palace is a daily reminder of the humiliation for Tibetan people."

The vast, white-walled Potala Palace -- one of the best-known symbols of Tibet for foreigners -- is the second most important building for Tibetans, after the Jokhang Temple, Samphel said.

The temple is the most important spiritual site, whereas the 17th century palace, built for the fifth Dalai Lama, has great political significance because it is associated with the old Tibetan regime.

Samphel said Beijing probably chose the palace as the site for the monument because it used to be the winter residence and private monastery for the Dalai Lama, the most revered spiritual leader for Tibetans.

Beijing considers the current Dalai Lama, who fled to India following a failed uprising against Chinese rule, a dangerous separatist intent on restoring independence for Tibet.

The Potala, which also used to be the Tibetan government's treasury, is now a museum and a popular tourist attraction.

Samphel said the monument would be the first Chinese government addition at the palace, other than the Chinese flags hoisted during important Chinese holidays.

The report did not say where in the Potala exactly the monument would stand, although a source said it was being planned for a square in front of the palace.

Xinhua said the monument was designed by Qikang, a professor at the Southeast University in eastern China, and was expected to be completed in November.

China seized control of Tibet in 1950 in what it considered a "peaceful liberation" and tried to legitimize its rule in 1951 with an agreement which the exiled Tibetan government does not accept because it was signed by Tibetan leaders under duress.

Beijing has ruled the Himalayan region with an iron fist since, with human rights groups alleging widespread human rights abuses and attempts to destroy Tibetan culture.

BEIJING, Jul 23, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) A founding member of the outlawed China Democracy Party (CDP) has been freed from a labor camp ahead of a visit to Beijing by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, the dissident said Sunday.

Han Lifa, 39, said from his home in Shanghai that he was released Saturday after serving two years at a labor camp there for refusing to say an anti-U.S. slogan and criticizing anti-U.S. protests following the May 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Han said he had not expected to be released and was expecting his term to be extended because he had threatened to sue labor camp officials for human rights violations and that they had warned him he would not be released on time.

"I think my release could be related to Powell's visit. They could've kept me in there as long as they wanted or they could have kept me under house arrest like last time, but they didn't," Han said.

Powell will be the highest ranking U.S. official to visit China since President George W. Bush came to power at the beginning of the year. He is due to arrive on July 28.

China is eager to improve Sino-U.S. relations, which have been rocky since Bush took office, and wants to create a positive atmosphere for Powell's trip and Bush's upcoming visit in October.

In 1998, Han along with key CDP member Wang Youcai and other CDP members, established the democracy party and in an unprecedented act, tried to register it as a real opposition force to the Chinese Communist Party.

China arrested most CDP leaders, with more than 45 members remaining in jail, said Frank Lu, director of the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Han is one of the few released.

He was first arrested in 1989 and sent to three years in a labor camp for participating in the pro-democracy movement at the time.

In 1995, he was again given a three-year labor camp sentence for taking part in similar activities. He was released in 1998 but placed under house arrest.

He was arrested for the third time in October 1998 and sentenced to serve nine months in a labor camp for helping establish the CDP.

His sentence was extended by two years when he refused to say "Down with America" during a meeting by labor camp officials following the embassy bombing.

He later wrote a letter to the U.S. consulate in Shanghai disagreeing with the "blind nationalism" shown by Chinese students protesting against the embassy bombing, which killed three Chinese nationals.

Han said Sunday he lived in "subhuman" conditions in the camp.

"Every day they beat me," Han said, adding that when a guard once beat his head until it was bleeding, he threatened to file a complaint with the procuratorate. After that, guards ordered prisoners to beat him, he said.

"They asked Shanghai prisoners to beat me, but they refused. They told the guards they had no arguments with me.

"Later they convinced prisoners from other provinces to beat me so they can be released early. During one beating session, I screamed for half an hour, but no guards came," he said.

Han said he plans to sue the labor camp for extending his prison term and mistreating him.

MINSK, Jul 23, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Opposition parties in Belarus said Saturday they had agreed to field a single candidate against incumbent Alexander Lukashenko in the country's presidential election, set for September .

Vladimir Goncharik, 61-year-old leader of the country's largest trade union, gained the backing of four other opposition leaders who said they were withdrawing their candidacies.

The five said they believed their alliance could win against Lukashenko if the vote was free and fair.

Lukashenko, 46, a former collective farm boss whose regime is frequently denounced by Western governments, has ruled the former Soviet republic since July 1994.

Because of their boycott of the legislative elections in October 2000 -- elections marred by irregularities, according to the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) -- the opposition has had little experience of campaigning against a populist and omnipresent president.

MOSCOW, Jul 24, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Fifteen people drowned in Moscow's ponds and lakes on Monday, most of them drunk, as the death toll from the heatwave in the Russian capital continued to climb, Interfax news agency reported on Tuesday.

Emergency services said the intense heat often combined with alcohol abuse had been behind 240 drownings since the beginning of summer, with many of the victims trying to cool off in the water in an advanced state of drunkenness.

The heatwave, with temperatures soaring to 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), is expected to continue for some weeks, according to meteorologists.

By LARRY MARGASAK and JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) - Documents that the Democratic Party and unions have sued to keep secret reveal a campaign strategy in which labor and party officials served side by side on committees that directed the Democrats' election activities in each state.

While labor's support of Democrats is well known, the documents show labor leaders had veto power over Democratic Party plans in 1996 by virtue of their large donations and seats on the steering committees in each state.

AP obtained the documents from officials involved in various federal investigations of unions and from groups that got some documents when they were briefly released by the FEC this spring, then abruptly pulled from public display under threat of litigation.

The documents detail extensive discussions between labor and party leaders on how to contact, register and influence voters to support Democrats and show where unions in some instances drew their money to accomplish the mission.

In one case, a New York hospital workers union, Local 1199, spent $250,000 from its strike defense fund for a $2.7 million effort called the '96 Project' aimed at holding congressional Republicans accountable for their support of Newt Gingrich's ``Contract with America,'' the records show.

Full story here. Check out CPUSA support of Democrats during recent elections 2000 here.

MINSK, Jul 18, 2001 -- (dpa) Police psychologists pronounced six Belarussians accused of cannibalism mentally fit to stand trial, the Interfax news agency reported.

The group includes a woman, her son, a male factory worker, a female cafeteria employee, and two unemployed men.

Police suspect them of beheading an unidentified man during a drinking session and then eating some of his limbs and organs.

It was the first known incidence of cannibalism by the group, police believe.

The suspects are believed to have disposed much of the evidence in a Minsk canal, where joggers and dog walkers eventually discovered it.

If convicted of cannibalism and murder, the suspects could receive death sentences. A trial date has not yet been set.

The US State Department has said it considers as credible allegations that the Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko or his close entourage are involved in the disappearance of up to 30 opposition figures.

The information has been provided by two Belarussian investigators who have been granted political asylum in the US after fleeing Belarus.

The high-profile disappearances include some of President Lukashenko's key opponents: Yuri Zakharenko, the former Interior Minister; Viktor Gonchar, the former Chairman of Belarus's Central Electoral Commission; and Dmitri Zavadksi, who once worked as President Lukashenko's personal cameraman.

Full story here.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Serbian authorities have begun to exhume bodies from yet another mass grave believed to be part of an alleged cover-up of Kosovo war crimes linked to former President Slobodan Milosevic.

Belgrade's chief magistrate, Vida Petrovic-Skero, issued a statement Monday announcing ``an ongoing exhumation of a large number of unidentified bodies'' at a grave site near another recently investigated mass grave in Batajnica, near Belgrade. The statement did not provide any other details.

Earlier this year, Serbian police revealed they were investigating a case involving a freezer truck containing some 80 bodies that was dumped into the Danube River near the Romanian border in April 1999, hundreds of miles outside Kosovo.

The truck and its cargo were removed and authorities say the bodies were later buried in a police training camp near Batajnica. After weeks of investigation, authorities exhumed 38 bodies presumably of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, the victims of a brutal 1998-99 crackdown by Milosevic's regime.

But on Monday, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, warned against assumptions regarding the ethnicity of the victims.

He urged the Serbian Justice Ministry and Belgrade district court not to hand over bodies being exhumed to U.N. authorities in Kosovo ``because they could be victims of Serbian nationality.''

Relaying grievances of relatives of Serb victims in Kosovo, Kostunica warned in a statement against ``premature and irresponsible statements about'' the victims' being ethnic Albanian before an official inquiry is carried out, according to the state Tanjug news agency.

In a separate development over the weekend, the government's Internet site quoted a police official, Capt. Dragan Karleusa, as saying about 50 bodies -- apparently of Kosovo Albanians -- surfaced in April 1999 from a hydropower lake at Perucac, about 90 miles southwest of Belgrade, and were later buried in a nearby mass grave in Serbia proper.

Police, now controlled by the pro-democracy authorities who unseated Milosevic in October, have accused the former Yugoslav president of ordering top police and military commanders in March 1999 to remove all evidence of civilian casualties from the Kosovo crackdown.

Several mass graves believed to contain some 800 bodies recently have been discovered in Serbia proper, far from Kosovo, a Serbian province where Milosevic's security troops are believed to have killed up to 8,000 ethnic Albanians. The crackdown ended after 78 days of NATO bombing against Yugoslavia.

Milosevic was extradited to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, last month to face charges of crimes against humanity in Kosovo. He was indicted for alleged command responsibility in the murders of more than 600 people and the displacement of 740,000 ethnic Albanians.

There are other high-ranking indicted suspects who remain at large and live freely in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. These include Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, former army chief of staff Col. Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, former Serbian Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic and former Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic.

All were close aides of Milosevic and were indicted by the tribunal.

BEIJING (AP) -- Falun Gong said police in an eastern Chinese city have gang-raped detained female followers of the group, but a police official on Monday denied the claim.

Falun Gong claimed the assaults in Xintai were officially authorized parts of the government campaign to destroy the spiritual group. A police officer at the Xintai Public Security bureau said the report was not true.

``It's impossible for such a thing to have happened. We've noticed that many rumors about torture on Falun Gong members were widely spread overseas, but they are all fabricated,'' said the officer, who would give only his surname, Li.

The Xintai city government and its judicial bureau refused to comment.

A statement faxed to reporters by Falun Gong said a special task force in Xintai stripped women, beat them with bamboo sticks and shocked them with electric batons. The group's statement didn't say when the assaults took place or how many women were involved.

``Many female practitioners' hands and feet were cuffed and raped by police in the vehicles,'' said the statement. ``Afterwards, a local police even boasted about such an action during his casual conversation.''

The group also said officials stripped 18 women and threw them into cells full of male prisoners at a labor camp in Shenyang, the capital of the northeastern province of Liaoning.

Falun Gong drew millions of members during the 1990s with its mix of Eastern philosophies and regime of meditation and light exercise.

Beijing banned the sect in 1999 as an ``evil cult,'' worried that its size and organizational strength could challenge communist rule.

Thousands of followers have been sent to labor camps, where officials say they are given counseling to persuade them to leave the group.

VLADIVOSTOK, Jul 16, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Russia's poverty-ridden far east is the main supplier of sex slaves for the Asian Pacific region, with over 50,000 women exploited in China and South-East Asian countries, according to experts here.

"The ease with which slaves are exported is astounding. A whole exporting system has been developed here," the region's deputy prosecutor general Konstantin Chaika lamented, adding that dozens of slave-traders from both Russia and China take part in the human trafficking.

It is almost impossible to find the women and return them home, even if their relatives promptly alert the law enforcement agencies, the head of the local search FSB security service search team, who identified himself as Alexei S., told AFP.

The sex slaves are often sold out of China and disappear without a trace.

"So far, the only example of success we have are the three girls who were returned home to Primorye from Myanmar," Alexei said, adding that the FSB security service had had to smuggle the girls out in secret after they spent three months in a brothel.

The girls left home in hopes of a high-paying job abroad, aided by a Russian employment agency that arranged their transport to China. However, once in China, their passports were taken away and the girls learned their fate.

In Myanmar, where the kidnapped women were sold, one of the three managed to make a call to her father, a well-known Primorye writer, who alerted the authorities.

But more often sex slaves vanish, beaten to death for disobedience, their bodies well hidden, Alexei said, adding that there are no official estimates of how many Russian women fell victim to such treatment.

In June, the Russian foreign ministry was told that three women, natives of Primorye, were hospitalized in Lupanshui, China, after they were cruelly beaten up by security guards in a bar where they were working.

Two of them, aged 20 and 21, died shortly afterwards, and the third is in critical condition, officials said.

However, the chances that the case will be investigated in China are slim, as many brothels and casinos are under the police's patronage, a self-named "sex tourist" told a local Internet site.

"But the main issue is not the Chinese, but our impotence and our state's indifference," the site said.

The problem was discussed this week at an international seminar aimed at developing a program to fight the slave trade, especially in Russia's far east's southernmost Primorye region.

Hosted by the Vladivostok organized crime research center and University of Washington's center on transnational crime and corruption studies, the seminar featured experts from all over Russia, Ukraine and the United States.

Editor's commentary: Government brothels in China are great attraction for perverts around the world. FSB claims that they are unable to stop export of Russian women to China are ridiculous. They manage to stop Western spies but can't stop kidnapping of their own women!?

MOSCOW, Jul 16, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Pro-Tibet groups have vowed to wage a seven-year campaign against Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games, which they decried as a repetition of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics.

"The IOC (International Olympic Committee) has already once committed a grave mistake, in 1936, by allowing Hitler to host the Games in Berlin. Tibetans strongly feel that the IOC have repeated that historic mistake," the groups said in a statement obtained by AFP early Saturday.

"It's impossible to carry out free Games in Beijing as long as political suppression and misery prevail in Tibet," a pro-Tibet spokesman said.

The protesters pledged to launch a worldwide campaign against the Beijing 2008 Olympics and what the "morally and politically unjustifiable decision" to award China the games, a move which they said would harm the Olympic movement as a whole.

Many rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, politicians and dissidents worldwide have denounced the IOC's decision, citing China's poor human rights record.

Tibet's government-in-exile in India condemned the decision, saying the move gave an "international stamp of approval" to China's human rights violations.

However, some countries, including Vietnam and South Korea, welcomed the IOC's choice, which plunged Beijing into a frenzy of celebration.

Editor's commentary: 1936 Olympics are remembered also as a huge victory for Jesse Owens who won 4 gold medals and humiliated Hitler and his racist views. If Tibetans manage to find someone to do the same thing then maybe there is a hope for them to get even with Beijing government. Chinese police will have to behave good during Olympics because the whole world will be watching. The best thing to do is to have streakers to run during Olympic events and promote their cause. "CCP sucks!", "Free Tibet!" are just examples. On how to successful streak you can check out here.

MOSCOW, Jul 16, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Russian President Vladimir Putin and French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin spoke on the telephone late Friday on the further development of bilateral ties between Russia and France, the Kremlin said.

Putin and Jospin discussed "practical issues" of Russian-French ties, which have lately been very strong, the Kremlin spokesman said, but declined to give further details.

Jospin was in Moscow to attend the 112th International Olympic Committee's session, in order to support Paris's bid for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Editor's commentary: I bet they have discussed more on how to intimidate Chiraque and Jospin's payroll. Unfortunately for Jospin, comrade general Putin prefers China who got Olympics instead of socialist run Paris. It is better for Jospin to discuss his retirement in Russia instead.

A mass grave thought to contain the reburied bodies of Kosovo Albanians earlier dumped in a refrigeration lorry in a reservoir has been found in south-west Serbia, Serbian police say.

The grave is thought to contain 60 or more bodies, presumed to have been killed by former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's security forces during their 1999 crackdown in Kosovo.

The grave with 60 or more bodies was located near the Perucac hydroelectric reservoir.

Full story here.

MOSCOW, Jul 11, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Russia's military commander in Chechnya reprimanded his troops Wednesday for committing "wide-scale crimes" while conducting so-called cleansing operations in the separatist republic last week.

ITAR-TASS quoted General Vladimir Moltensky as telling Russian command at their Khankala military base that "wide-scale crimes were committed during passport checks in Sernovodsk and Assinovskaya.

"Those who conducted the cleansing operations in Sernovodsk and Assinovskaya did so in a clumsy, lawless fashion, destroying everything and then pretending they knew nothing about it," the general said in the unprecedented attack on his own troops.

He added that crimes had also been committed in similar operations in other regions of Chechnya.

Human rights campaigners and a Russian parliament deputy say that at least five people have been found murdered and more than 20 are still missing following the sweep by federal troops.

The case is being investigated by Russian prosecutors and two federal soldiers have already been relieved of their duties for their participation in the incident.

On Tuesday, Aslambek Aslakhanov, who served as Russia's sole parliament deputy from Chechnya, told reporters that five people were found murdered after federal troops entered the village of Kurchaloi.

He said eight other remain missing, adding that most people were only able to return to their homes after paying heavy bribes to the troops.

The Russian human rights defense group Memorial for its part said that seven people were still missing at Sernovodsk and 12 others at Assinovskaya.

POTOCARI, Bosnia (Reuters) - More than 3,000 Bosnian Muslims guarded by U.S. peacekeepers prayed in a meadow near Srebrenica on Wednesday for thousands of compatriots killed by Serb forces in Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.

U.S. troops as well as local Serb police were out in force along the road to Srebrenica and near the old battery factory in the suburb of Potocari where a lightly armed Dutch U.N. force had watched helplessly in July 1995 as Muslim men and boys were separated from families and led away by Bosnian Serbs.

Eight thousand Muslims were reported missing and are presumed to have been killed by Serbs, either in cold blood or as they tried to flee Srebrenica after nationalist Serb forces overran it despite its wartime status as a U.N. ``safe area.''

As the mourners set off, NATO peacekeepers were deployed to deter possible assaults by Serbs angry at being blamed for the Srebrenica bloodletting, but no incidents were reported.

The convoy of about 80 buses was re-routed at the last moment to avoid passing through the center of the large, post-war Serb town of Bratunac -- on the main road to Srebrenica -- where some 100 people gathered. Along the road, some Serbs flashed their traditional nationalist three-finger salute.

In the meadow across from the battery factory, about 3,100 mourners, many of them women and elderly, prayed and unveiled a foundation stone for a memorial center that will be established alongside a graveyard for the victims' remains.

``I just remember the gate shutting as they (Bosnian Serb soldiers) took them away,'' said Mihreta Husic, who saw her father for the last time near the factory.

During the ceremony outside the ancient eastern Bosnian silver-mining town, which is now part of post-war Bosnia's Serb republic, some women wailed and afterwards many more broke down.

NEVER AGAIN

Mustafa efendi Ceric, the head of Bosnia's Islamic Community, said in a speech that his people had gathered to pray so that the atrocities of Srebrenica never happened again.

Ceric said Serbs risked collective guilt for crimes committed in Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war as long as they could not come to terms with what was done in their name and indicted war criminals remained free.

``There should not be collective guilt but you should also not hide criminals behind the people,'' he said.

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander General Ratko Mladic, indicted by the U.N. war crimes court for the Srebrenica massacre, are believed to be hiding in the mountainous wilds of Serb-run eastern Bosnia.

Asked about the whereabouts of Karadzic, Mladic and other perpetrators of the Srebrenica crime, Amor Masovic, head of the Bosnian Muslim State Commission for Missing Persons, replied:

``Some of them are already in the U.N. jail. Some of them are still free and are maybe watching us from somewhere nearby.'' Masovic's commission has exhumed about 6,000 victims of ``ethnic cleansing'' throughout Bosnia.

Wednesday's mourners were the largest number of Muslims to visit the Srebrenica area since the war.

Srebrenica, an overwhelmingly Muslim town before July 1995, is now populated almost totally by Serbs, many of them refugees from areas now in Bosnia's post-war Muslim Croat federation.

More than 30 ambassadors and senior officials from the European Union also attended the commemoration.

Last year a smaller commemoration passed peacefully, but Serbs in Bratunac stoned some of the buses as they passed. Local Serb residents believe they were the real victims of the war, citing attacks by Muslim forces early in the conflict.

RECENT VIOLENCE HEIGHTENS CONCERN

Muslim worshippers and Western officials were attacked by a mob during Serb nationalist riots in May at a ceremony to rebuild a mosque, heightening concern over the Srebrenica event.

Husein Djekic, who said he spent 38 days in the hilly woods near Srebrenica before escaping to Bosnian Muslim-held territory during the war, said he would not return to his Bratunac home, which had in any case been burned.

``You can't move around freely there,'' he said, glancing up as a helicopter from the NATO-led force SFOR, which deployed after the war, swooped over the column of buses crawling slowly through Serb-controlled territory.

Bosnian Serb police lined the route to the site and were concentrated in Bratunac, where U.S. troops stood on a rooftop. Several dozen curious onlookers stood waiting for the buses.

The day after the Srebrenica ceremony, local Serbs will launch construction of their own nearby monument for 1,300 Serbs they say were killed in the area during the war.

The remains of some 4,500 Srebrenica victims stored in the nearby town of Tuzla, in Bosnia's Muslim-Croat half, will be buried in the meadow near the town after DNA tests to try to identify them. Two hundred more were unearthed just this month.

Husic remembered Mladic coming to talk to fearful inhabitants of Srebrenica as his troops flooded through the enclave. ``He made out as if everything would be okay,'' she said.

MOSCOW, Jul 9, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday he was opposed to restoring the death penalty despite recent calls for ending a moratorium, saying the state had "no right to grant itself a divine right."

Editor's commentary: Chechens probably wonder when the death penalty was abolished for them. Mass murder of Chechens is continuing without trials. Why reestablish death penalty when you can kill people without court proceedings. The same thing is going on in other parts of Russia. Political dissidents are murdered every day without any trial. Who cares about death penalty in Russia? It is good to be hypocrite these days in Russia.

MOSCOW, Jul 9, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Interpol has informed Russia that it will not place exiled former media boss Vladimir Gusinsky on its register of fugitives, the agency's secretary general said in a statement obtained by AFP on Monday.

"I wish to inform you that after careful study of the elements of the case ... I have decided that information supplied by the (Interpol office in) Moscow concerning the proceedings undertaken by Russia against your client, in his quality of general manager of Media-MOST, should not be registered in our files," Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble wrote.

"I consider that the case has a predominantly political character," Noble added in the letter, which is dated July 3.

Russia had previously appealed to Interpol to place Gusinsky, who headed the private Media-MOST company that has since been taken over by the state-dominated gas giant Gazprom, on its list of most wanted fugitives.

Gusinsky is currently living in exile in Spain, in a bid to avoid a fraud case launched against him by the Russian government.

His associates argue that the charges are politically motivated, and were launched in a bid to break up his media empire, which at one point included the country's most respected television news source, NTV.

BELGRADE, Serbia, July 6 — Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said today that the police believed that 800 victims of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 had been buried in mass graves and promised that the guilty would not elude responsibility.

Mr. Mihajlovic, a leading member of the alliance that ousted the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, last year, said the police would learn who had ordered the "monstrous operation" to send bodies to mass graves across Serbia.

He spoke at a news conference just over a week after the Serbian government sent Mr. Milosevic to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague to face charges stemming from the Kosovo conflict.

"No one in Serbia will sleep in peace and have a clear conscience until the truth is found and justice done," Mr. Mihajlovic said.

The authorities have announced finding three mass graves with 110 bodies, believed to be Kosovo Albanians. Mr. Mihajlovic said the figure of 800 bodies included those exhumed from the three mass graves and was based on information gathered after that finding. In May, the police accused Mr. Milosevic and top aides of covering up evidence of possible war crimes committed in military operations against ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo. They said they arrived at the findings while investigating a truckload of corpses dumped in the Danube in the 1999 NATO bombing.

Mr. Mihajlovic said the police were determined to find every mass grave in Serbia, including Kosovo. "We can expect around 800 bodies of victims in all possible locations in the whole of Serbia," he said. "We want to identify the victims, return them to their families so that they can be buried in a dignified way."

The police, who have a special war crimes section, are trying to establish how the deaths occurred. The police, Mr. Mihajlovic said, are cooperating with the United Nations mission in Kosovo and other organizations that could have information on crimes against Albanians or Serbs.

"At least 2,960 people have been sentenced to death and 1,781 executed in the last three months of China's "Strike Hard" campaign against crime," Amnesty International said today. "More people were executed in China in the last three months than in the rest of the world for the last three years."

"Like the other 'Strike Hard' campaigns before it, this crackdown is unlikely to have a lasting impact on China's growing crime problem. The campaign is nothing short of an execution frenzy -- a huge waste of human life," the organization said.

Full press release here.

BEIJING, Jul 5, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) An influential Chinese periodical reported Thursday that torture was still routinely used by police and investigating prosecutors to extract confessions from suspects.

"Extracting confessions through torture has in no way been thoroughly brought under control and has caused death and injuries," a four-page report in the Outlook Weekly said.

An independent study by China's parliament carried out in six cities and provinces between 1997 and 1999 discovered 221 cases of extracted confessions which resulted in the deaths of 21 criminal suspects, the report said.

"Those who extract confessions through torture do not believe they are accumulating false evidence or creating unjust cases, they believe their judgment is correct," it said.

The magazine said other major reasons behind the use of torture were a lack of presumption of innocence in China's legal system and an over-dependence on confessions as prime evidence in trials.

In order to curb the practice, a criminal suspect should be given the right to remain silent, interrogations should all be recorded, lawyers should be present during interrogation and suspects should be allowed the right to give direct testimony in the court room, it said.

The article appeared as China's top law enforcement official Luo Gan urged stronger implementation of a three month-old "strike hard" crackdown on crime that has already resulted in at least 1,300 executions.

"For those big and heinous crimes that occur during the 'strike hard' period, we must investigate and solve the cases faster and try and sentence (the criminals) faster," Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.

Diplomats in Beijing have counted around 1,300 executions in official media reports alone since President Jiang Zemin launched the anti-crime drive in early April, while thousands of criminal suspects have also be rounded up and charged.

China executes more criminals annually than the rest of the world combined, but the total number is a closely-guarded state secret which human rights groups say is far higher than published figures suggest.

MOSCOW, Jul 5, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Russia's Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov sent a message of support Wednesday to "political prisoner" Slobodan Milosevic and assured him that "hundreds of thousands" of people here stood behind the jailed former Yugoslav leader.

"In the name of hundreds of thousands of Russian Communists, I send you a message of solidarity and support," Zyuganov wrote in a telegram sent to the UN detention unit in The Hague, to which Milosevic was extradited Thursday.

"We view this so-called extradition to The Hague as an abduction, as a harsh infringement of human rights, as a crime," Zyuganov wrote in the telegram, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.

Zyuganov also wished Milosevic "strong will and confidence in the righteousness of your cause."

Milosevic is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1998-99 crackdown against the ethnic Albanian population in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The prosecution has also said it was planning to add charges in October for the former Yugoslav strongman's involvement in the 1991-95 war in Croatia and the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.

Milosevic is the first former head of state to ever appear before an international tribunal.

His trial is viewed as a test case for international justice that will be closely watched all over the world.

BEIJING, Jul 4, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) The Falun Gong movement Wednesday denied reports of a mass suicide by followers at a labor camp in northern China and accused guards of torturing 15 female practitioners to death.

A Falun Gong statement from New York said the authorities at the Wanjia reeducation through labor camp in the city of Harbin had been ordered to portray the deaths around June 20 as suicide.

The statement said the camp had been authorized to use "many different kinds" of torture against detained practitioners to ensure they renounced their belief in Falun Gong, which was outlawed in China in July 1999.

"Sources report that women were all tortured to death in the Wanjia Reeducation Center around June 20, and an unspecified number of Falun Gong practitioners are undergoing emergency treatment for injuries," it said.

The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said Tuesday that at least 10 Falun Gong followers had died in a mass suicide attempt by 16 practitioners.

The center said the suicide attempt came after the camp authorities extended the practitioners' detention in response to a hunger strike.

Labor camp officials denied the report when contacted by AFP.

An official at a police station in the town where one of the deceased lived confirmed to AFP that "several" Falun Gong followers had died.

"We were told (by the camp) several of them died, but they didn't tell us how many," said the police official at Lequn township in Heilongjiang.

He confirmed the center's report that one of the dead people was Zhao Yayun, a 51-year-old woman from the township.

A township government official also confirmed Zhao died by suicide and said her body was cremated Tuesday. Asked whether 15 others attempted suicide and 10 died, he said: "That's what I heard."

The issue of alleged Falun Gong suicides has become a major issue in the propaganda war between China and the movement.

In January five people identified by the government as Falun Gong practitioners set themselves on fire in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and two of them later died.

The Chinese authorities repeatedly showed grisly footage of the injured people and launched a massive new media campaign against the movement.

The Falun Gong headquarters in New York insisted the five were not members of the movement and that true believers would never commit suicide because it was against the teachings of the group's U.S.-based guru Li Hongzhi.

Li advocates a quirky blend of Buddhist-based philosophy that advocates clean living and forsakes traditional medicine.

China banned the Falun Gong movement three months after it organized a silent demonstration by 10,000 followers around the leadership's compound in central Beijing.

Since then hundreds of Falun Gong followers have been sentenced to prison terms and tens of thousands sent to reeducation camps. Human rights groups say more than 100 have died in police detention.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Slobodan Milosevic's appearance before the U.N. war crimes tribunal has raised hopes that his former wartime allies -- Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic -- soon will join him.

The two fugitives, who top the tribunal's most-wanted list, have been evading justice since the end of the Bosnian war in 1995. They stand accused of genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II.

Karadzic is known to be hiding in the mountains of eastern Bosnia, somewhere near the town of Foca. Those who have seen him recently say he has changed his trademark bushy hairstyle to a shaven head, has grown a large beard and dresses in black robes like a Serbian priest to evade NATO-led patrols who have orders to arrest him.

In the past, Karadzic often changed his hide-outs -- including Serbian Orthodox monasteries and specially refurbished mountain caves -- and traveled in ambulances with flashing lights to zip through NATO checkpoints undetected.

His associates say Karadzic has often visited his wife, Ljiljana, daughter, Sonja, and son, Sasa, in the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale, east of Sarajevo, under cover of darkness. He reportedly also has visited his sick mother in the mountains of neighboring Montenegro, and last year went to Budva on the Yugoslav republic's Adriatic coast.

Those in his inner circle have even claimed that Karadzic once sneaked into Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital which his troops shelled relentlessly for three years, and had coffee with his friends in a downtown cafe. Locals failed to recognize him in disguise, they say.

But one of his associates, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Karadzic is preparing to surrender to the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. The source said that Karadzic realizes he can't stay on the run forever, and is running out of money to pay the bodyguards who have been protecting him -- and now have begun to abandon him.

Karadzic has decided to testify against Milosevic in exchange for a lighter sentence, the associate said, and for the past two years has been collecting documents that would put the blame for Bosnian atrocities squarely on Milosevic.

For now, Milosevic -- who inspired the Serb rebellion in Bosnia -- has been charged only with war crimes in Kosovo, although the tribunal has said that indictments dealing with atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia also are being prepared.

Mladic led the 1995 Serb onslaught against the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica. Serb troops bombarded Srebrenica for five days and gunned down columns of refugees fleeing the town. At least 7,500 Muslim men and boys were reported dead or missing.

Mladic lived freely in Belgrade until Milosevic was ousted from power last October. He had shown up openly at soccer stadiums and had dined in plush restaurants.

When Yugoslavia's new pro-democracy authorities signaled that they might have to hand Mladic over to the tribunal, he apparently left the Yugoslav capital for Bosnia. But just last month, he was seen dining in a well-known Belgrade fish restaurant -- one that is also frequented by foreign diplomats.

Patrik Volf, the spokesman for Bosnia's top international official, High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch, said Milosevic's transfer to the U.N. court ``sets the stage for the arrest and transfer to The Hague of the remaining individuals indicted by the tribunal.''

``The High Representative thus expects that others such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, former Bosnian Serb leaders likewise indicted by the Hague Tribunal for their role in Bosnia's bloody war, will also appear shortly before the court in The Hague,'' Volf said.

Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister who was instrumental in Milosevic's sudden extradition last week, recently promised that all war crimes suspects living in Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, soon will be handed over to The Hague.

There are other high-ranking indicted suspects who remain at large and live freely in Belgrade -- at least for now.

They include Serbian President Milan Milutinovic; former army chief of staff Col. Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic; former Serbian Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic; and former Yugoslav deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic. All were close aides of Milosevic who were indicted along with him by tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity in Kosovo.

Of 27 indicted suspects still free, 15 are believed to be living in Yugoslavia while the rest are believed to be in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, the tribunal says.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Slobodan Milosevic refused to enter a plea at the U.N. war crimes tribunal on Tuesday, saying the trial is being held to justify NATO ``crimes'' in Yugoslavia. A judge entered a plea of innocent on his behalf.

Three judges, led by presiding justice Richard May of Britain, entered the courtroom just after Milosevic, who represented himself against charges of war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The former Yugoslav president, who has refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court, stood as the judges entered.

Full story here. For more on Milosevic's trial visit Hague Tribunal's official Milosevic page.