Reuters - September 28th, 2005

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Myanmar's military rulers are still holding more than 1,100 political prisoners despite last July's release of 249 such detainees, a U.N. human rights investigator reported on Wednesday.

Monks, lawyers, teachers, journalists, farmers, politicians, student leaders, writers and poets are among those the reclusive Southeast Asian nation is detaining on political grounds, special rapporteur Paulo Sergio Pinheiro of Brazil said in a report to the 191-nation U.N. General Assembly.

``The immediate release of all 1,100 political prisoners would send a powerful signal to the people of Myanmar and the international community that the government is seriously committed to a genuine process of reconciliation and to constituting a participatory democracy in Myanmar,'' he said.

Pinheiro has visited Myanmar six times since the U.N. Commission on Human Rights asked him to keep an eye on its human rights performance in 2000.

He has not been allowed back since November 2003 despite repeated requests. He based his 2005 report on ``information collected from a variety of independent and reliable sources.''

U.S. and British diplomats say they will try again in October to raise human rights abuses in Myanmar in the 15-nation U.N. Security Council after being blocked from getting the issue on the council's agenda in June when Russia objected.

The military has run the country formerly known as Burma since 1962, refusing to hand over power after the National League of Democracy, the party led by opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won a 1990 election.

The government in Yangon has promised to restore democracy through reforms including freeing political dissidents and drafting a new constitution.

But there have been no signs this year of political or constitutional changes and Suu Kyi remains under house arrest, where she recently celebrated her 60th birthday, Pinheiro said. She has spent nine of the past 16 years behind bars or under house arrest.

Although a national convention is drafting a new constitution, its work will lack credibility ``as long as it fails to adequately represent the people of Myanmar,'' he said.

NEW DELHI (AP) -- The documents paint a sordid picture of India's Cold War alliance with the Soviet Union: newspapers bankrolled by the KGB to plant thousands of articles and agents making midnight deliveries of suitcases full of cash to the prime minister's house.

It was a time, a KGB official said, when ''the entire country was for sale.''

The revelations, in a newly published book based on KGB archives, have embarrassed India's ruling Congress party -- in power then and now -- and have been a field day for the press.

''Indira's India was KGB playground,'' read the headline in India's Sunday Times, referring to then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

But analysts said the accounts, from a recently a published book based on notes that KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin smuggled out of Moscow when he fled to Britain in 1992, are unlikely to have a major impact on current politics -- with India now a firm U.S. ally.

Congress Party spokeswoman Jayanti Natarajan told The Hindu daily that the book's allegations were ''preposterous,'' dismissing it as an attempt by the Western media at ''maligning leaders of the Third World.''

The Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, seized on the book as an opportunity to rally against Congress, now headed by Indira Gandhi's daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, saying Congress owed the Indian people an explanation.

''The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World,'' published last week in Britain, is the second volume based on the archivist's notes.

Mitrokhin, who died last year at 82, took handwritten notes from thousands of top-secret documents while he was supervising the 10-year-long move of the KGB's foreign intelligence archives to a new site, according to his co-author, Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge University history professor.

The two chapters on India detail the deep penetration of Ghandi's Congress-led government and the Communist Party of India by the Soviet espionage agency.

In the early 1970s, the region was an important Cold War battlefield. The Soviet Union was allied with India, while India's archrival Pakistan had the backing of the U.S. and China.

But according to the book, the Soviets did not rely on Indian feelings of socialist fraternity to ensure support, trying instead to manipulate the government through bribes and propaganda.

''We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government,'' the book quotes former senior KGB official Oleg Kalugin as saying. ''It seemed like the entire country was for sale,'' he said.

Mitrokhin's notes describe how a senior New Delhi-based KGB operative, identified as Leonid Shebarshin, personally delivered millions of rupees to Indira Gandhi's principal fundraiser, Lalit Naryan Mishra, in late night meetings.

However, the book makes it clear that Ghandi herself was not on the KGB payroll and probably had no idea of the source of her party's funds.

The KGB did try to influence Gandhi by fueling her paranoia that the CIA was plotting her downfall.

In doing so, the spy agency infiltrated the media. By 1972, the KGB had 10 Indian newspapers on its payroll and had planted 3,789 articles, many alluding to CIA attempts at regional subversion, the book said.

Even before she came to power, the book said the Soviets cultivated Indira Gandhi's friendship, surrounding ''her with handsome, attentive male admirers'' on her first visit to Moscow in 1953.

''The Russians have been so sweet to me,'' she wrote in a letter to her father Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister.

The book's revelations made front-page headlines in many of India's newspapers and dominated editorial pages for the last week.

But analysts said the book would likely have little impact on Indian politics.

''While this is important historical information, the major political parties have not made much of it,'' said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst. ''None of the key players are around anymore. The Soviet Union has gone.''

WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- Exit polls showed Polish voters ousted the nation's scandal-prone government of ex-communists in parliamentary elections Sunday, giving a broad majority to two center-right parties that have promised tax cuts and clean government.

Prime Minister Marek Belka's defeated government had said it would withdraw Poland's troops from Iraq by Dec. 31, though it might keep some officers there as advisers. The challengers said they might be open to keeping them there longer if a ''new contract'' can be negotiated with the United States.

Projections based on exit polls by state television showed the socially conservative Law and Justice Party with 27.8 percent and the free-market Civic Platform with 24.1 percent. The governing Democratic Left Alliance, which has been plagued by Europe's highest unemployment rate and scandals, lagged behind with 11.2 percent.

An exit poll for private TVN-24 showed similar results, with Law and Justice polling 28.3 percent, Civic Platform 26.3 percent and the Democratic Left Alliance 11.1 percent.

The results showed voters eager for change in choosing the two right-wing parties, both of which have roots in the Solidarity trade union movement that toppled communism in 1989-90. However, the turnout of 40 percent was the lowest since then.

But as voters in Germany did a week ago, they sought to put the brakes on all-out cuts to welfare state benefits, giving first place to Law and Justice -- a party that mingles free-market economics with concern for social equality and government programs.

After the release of the exit polls, Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said he had a mandate to become prime minister, citing a deal with Civic Platform.

''The agreement was that whoever wins the election has the prime minister post, and then this applies to me as the head of the winning party,'' Kaczynski said.

State TV projections showed the two parties winning 305 seats in the 460-seat lower house, easily a majority but short of the two-thirds they would need to alter the constitution.

Before the election, Civic Platform leaders said a new government would only consider extending Poland's deployment in Iraq if it was offered a new ''contract'' with the United States. Otherwise, Polish troops will begin packing up after the current deployment ends Dec. 31.

Poland leads a multinational force of 4,000 in Iraq, with 1,500 of those troops coming from Poland.

Since Warsaw sent ground troops to the U.S.-led war in Iraq in 2003, frustration has grown over unfulfilled expectations. Even though Washington never made concrete promises, Poles hoped their sacrifices would gain them visa-free travel to the United States, lucrative contracts in reconstructing Iraq and more U.S. investment for Poland's economy and science.

The topic, however, has been largely absent from the campaign, which has focused largely on domestic issues.

The ruling party has seen some successes -- including strong economic growth early on and last year's entry into the European Union.

But stubbornly high unemployment -- now at 17.8 percent -- and a series of scandals have undermined the party's standing.

Pawel Golebiewski in Warsaw said he voted for Law and Justice because of the party's promise to battle crime and corruption.

''Four years ago, I voted for the Democratic Left Alliance, but I regret it now,'' the 27-year-old state office clerk said. ''What they showed in those four years in office deserves punishment, all those dishonest deals that they carried out.''

Sunday's election is the fifth fully free vote since Poland's transition from communism to multiparty democracy in 1989.

No government since then has been re-elected, and power has swung between reformed communists and parties rooted in the anti-communist Solidarity movement.

''We have won, everything shows we have won,'' Kaczynski said. ''We have won as a party and what's more important we have won as a program, as a certain idea for Poland, and this should turn out to be decisive.''

Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk conceded that Law and Justice earned more votes than his party, a market-oriented group favoring a 15-percent flat tax on incomes, value-added tax and corporations.

''I want to say to the competition at Law and Justice -- we congratulate you. You won the election,'' Tusk told supporters at party headquarters.

Poland also will hold presidential elections Oct. 9, with a likely runoff vote two weeks later.

Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski, the identical twin brother of the Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is one of two leading candidates in that race. The other is Tusk.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski has said that, if his brother wins, he would renounce the premiership in order to spare Poland the confusion of two leaders who look alike.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - An international lawyer for billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky said on Friday that authorities had revoked his visa and told him to leave Russia, hours after the jailed tycoon lost his appeal against a fraud conviction.

A Moscow court on Thursday night threw out Khodorkovsky's appeal against his conviction for fraud and tax evasion though they reduced his jail sentence by one year to 8 years.

Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian lawyer who has been an outspoken critic of the Kremlin throughout the Khodorkovsky case, said FSB state security officers came to his Moscow hotel on Thursday night.

They annulled his visa and gave him 24 hours to leave the country. ``If I'm not on a plane by 5 p.m. today I'll be arrested,'' Amsterdam told Reuters.

Amsterdam, principal point of contact for the international media since Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint in October 2003, has been insistent in his comments that the prosecution of the tycoon was engineered by the Kremlin and aimed at punishing him for political ambitions.

Officials from the FSB state security service could not be immediately reached for comment.

Meanwhile, Russian penal authorities were quoted by Interfax news agency as saying Khodorkovsky, 42, and his co-accused Platon Lebedev, would be transferred from their remand jail in Moscow to a prison camp to serve their sentence some time in the next 10 days.

BERLIN (AP) -- Official results in Germany's parliamentary election Sunday, with votes counted in 298 of 299 districts. Voting in the final district, in the eastern city of Dresden, has been delayed until Oct. 2.

Final vote percentages and seat totals from the last election, in 2002, in parentheses:

Social Democrats: 34.3 percent, 16.15 million votes (38.5 percent, 251 seats).

Christian Democrats: 35.2 percent, 16.59 million (38.5 percent, 248 seats).

Free Democrats: 9.8 percent, 4.62 million votes (7.4 percent, 47 seats).

Greens: 8.1 percent, 3.83 million votes (8.6 percent, 55 seats).

Left Party: 8.7 percent, 4.09 million votes (Ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism: 4 percent, 2 seats).

The remaining approximately 4 percent of the vote was split among more than 20 smaller parties and independent candidates.

Turnout: 77.7 percent (79.1 percent).

Editor's commentary: It is almost certain that SDP will stay in power but this time they will share it with former Stasi killers from DDR.

NEW DELHI (AP) -- India's government was infiltrated in the 1970s by the Soviet Union's feared KGB intelligence agency, which bribed officials with millions of dollars in order to hold sway over its South Asian ally during the Cold War, according to a recently released book.

''The Mitokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World,'' says a high-ranking KGB officer used agents to persuade then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to declare a state of emergency in India in 1975. The officer was identified as Leonid Shebarshin, who served in New Delhi in the mid-1970s.

The emergency allowed India's government to arrest opposition politicians and freeze civil liberties for 19 months.

''We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government -- in intelligence, counterintelligence, the defense and foreign ministries and police,'' former Soviet head of counterintelligence Oleg Kalugin was quoted as saying by the book's authors, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitokhin, a former KGB officer.

The Sunday Hindustan Times, The Asian Age and some other Indian newspapers carried excerpts from the book.

The book said Soviet money subsidized many Indian election campaigns, and nine unnamed ruling Congress party candidates in 1977 polls were KGB agents, the Sunday Hindustan Times said.

''In 1975, 10.6 million rubles were said to have been spent to firm up then-Prime Minister Gandhi's support and to undermine her opponents,'' the newspaper quoted the book as saying.

The book named Lalit Narayan Mishra, the Congress party's principal fund raiser, as a direct recipient of KGB money. It said the KGB successfully convinced Gandhi that Mishra's death in a bomb blast in 1974 was a ''CIA hit-job.''

Gandhi lost power in the 1977 polls.

The book is based on files from the KGB's archives which Mitokhin brought to British intelligence in 1992, said co-author Andrew, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University in Britain.

The Congress party dismissed the claims.

''One can't even comment on them,'' said Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a Congress party spokesman.

However, Singhvi said the Soviet Union was a source of strength for India in the Cold War era. '' We are proud of it,'' he said.

D. Rajah, a leader of the Communist Party of India, which supported the Soviet Union, said the authors' claims were ''untrue, false and concocted.''

The KGB documents also accused the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency of fomenting an insurgency in India's remote northeast and a Sikh separatist movement in the northern state of Punjab, the book said.

BRASILIA, Brazil, Sept 15 (Reuters) - The lawmaker who triggered a political crisis over bribes and illegal funding has been thrown out of the Brazilian Congress, the first expulsion over a scandal that has plunged the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva into turmoil.

Roberto Jefferson of the Brazilian Labor Party was expelled after a heated session that lasted late into Wednesday night.

The move indicated that more lawmakers may fall victim to the effort to clean up the mess from the worst political crisis to hit the world's fourth-largest democracy in more than a decade.

Jefferson went down fighting. "I took off the emperor's clothes. I showed Brazil what Lula and the (ruling) Workers' Party are," he said in a 40-minute tirade.

The scandal broke in June when Jefferson exposed in a newspaper interview what he said was a scheme run by the Workers' Party to buy votes in Congress from allied politicians and to secure illegal campaign funding.

A stream of revelations and accusations followed, detailing an elaborate scheme of slush funds and kickbacks. The scandal has ruined the Workers' Party reputation for honesty and badly damaged Lula's chances of re-election next year.

Lula himself has not been directly implicated and has vowed to root out and punish corrupt officials. Four senior party officials have already lost their jobs.

But the personal popularity of Lula, a charismatic figure who carried the hopes of Brazil's poor when he was elected in 2002, has dropped to a record low, a poll showed this week.

"My notion of President Lula is that he is a hustler, lazy. He likes flying around in airplanes. He doesn't like good governance," Jefferson said in his final address to Congress.

"If he didn't commit a crime by action, he committed it by omission."

Jefferson was expelled on the grounds that his party, a member of the ruling coalition, took illegal funds from the Workers' Party. He launched his accusations while he was under investigation for running a bribery scheme at the national postal service and critics say he was seeking revenge because of the government's lack of support.

Supporters say he acted bravely to expose wrongdoing.

In the Congress session, 313 deputies voted for expulsion and 156 against. Jefferson is now banned from public office for eight years from the end of his current mandate.

Around 20 more deputies also face possible expulsion over the scandal. Opposition parties have also demanded the removal of the Lower House president, Severino Cavalcanti, who is accused of extortion. Cavalcanti has used his position to block impeachment requests against Lula.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Yellow jackets of the Falun Gong sect, green Taiwan independence flags and the multicolored banners of the Free Tibet movement appeared in Toronto on Saturday to remind China's President Hu Jintao of nagging political issues back home.

In noisy but peaceful demonstrations of the kind that would get them arrested or worse back in communist-ruled China, protesters dogged Hu even on the tourism break on his state visit to Canada.

The 62-year-old leader was a focus for hundreds of exiles ranging from Chinese who want to go home one day to a democratic China to Taiwanese, Tibetans and Uighurs who wish to become independent neighbors of the world's most populous country.

``We welcome you -- to get China out of Tibet,'' read the homemade T-shirt of one young man among some 150 Tibetans, many in traditional dress, who rallied as Hu attended lunch and then dinner with Canadian business leaders and officials.

Echoing the independence demands of the Tibetans, whose remote Himalayan region was annexed by the Chinese in 1950, a small group of Uighurs rallied under a powder blue flag with a white Islamic crescent.

The Uighurs' home in northwestern China's vast, oil-producing Xinjiang province was briefly known as East Turkestan after World War Two and some of the 9 million Uighurs want independence again.

Hu's motorcade entered his Toronto dinner venue through a rear exit and avoided the raucous street protests, drawing a tart response from veteran Taiwanese activist Albert J.F. Lin.

``When you are the president of the world's most populous country and you have to sneak in the back door, that's a disgrace,'' said Lin, whose Formosa Association for Public Affairs rejects China's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, a self-ruled island.

But Hu could not have avoided the yellow-clad adherents of Falun Gong, who draped banners in at least 10 places across the freeway from Toronto to Niagara Falls denouncing a brutal six-year Chinese crackdown on their quasi-religious movement.

On Thursday in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin urged Hu to improve human rights in China and open dialogue with Tibet and Taiwan. The Chinese leader was noncommittal in his public comments on those issues.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - You can choose your friends but not your family.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan escaped charges of corruption in a report on the Iraqi oil-for-food program released on Wednesday, but evidence was presented that his son Kojo brandished his father's name to avoid paying taxes on a luxury car and lied repeatedly while under investigation.

Kofi Annan said the report was ``deeply embarrassing.'' One of the most embarrassing points for the soft-spoken Nobel Peace Prize winner from Ghana must be the role of his own son.

Kojo Annan, now 31, was a consultant for the Swiss firm Cotecna S.A. that won a lucrative U.N. contract in Iraq and, contrary to his repeated denials, was closely involved in the 1998 bidding process. Around the same time, he lied in order to use his father's diplomatic privileges to avoid over $20,000 in taxes and duty on a Mercedes-Benz car, the report said.

``I think the report speaks for itself and he will have to speak for himself,'' Kofi Annan said of his son after he was presented with the results of a year-long probe into the Iraqi oil-for-food program which revealed inefficiency and mismanagement compounded by political tensions and corruption.

While the report from the committee headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker did not find ``reasonably sufficient'' evidence to conclude the secretary-general knew about Cotecna's bid or his son's involvement, it did fault him for failing to conduct a proper investigation.

Moreover Volcker noted that he had not said there was ``no evidence,'' merely that there was not conclusive evidence.

Phone records and documents that Cotecna had previously withheld showed Kojo made a string of phone calls to U.N. officials at key moments in the bidding process, including several to a family friend of the Annans, Diana Mills-Aryee, whom Kojo called ``Aunty'' and who worked in the U.N. procurement department.

While investigating Kojo's role in bidding for the contract, which was to inspect goods shipped to Iraq under the program, the committee stumbled across evidence of his purchase of the Mercedes-Benz, which he shipped to Ghana.

Kojo told Mercedes-Benz that the car needed to arrive in Ghana in time for Christmas for the secretary-general's use but the elder Annan never went to the country in December 1998.

``Kojo Annan saved approximately $20,644 by purchasing and shipping the car to Ghana under false pretenses,'' it said.

It added that while there was no evidence the car was paid for by Cotecna as compensation in connection with the Iraqi contract, it was not clear where all of the $39,056 purchase price came from. Kojo admitted he used his father's name to purchase the car without his consent but he received $15,000 around that time from his father, the report said.

The son of Annan's first wife, a Nigerian, Kojo, worked in West Africa as a consultant for Cotecna and is usually based in Nigeria.

Volcker said that while the investigation had found no corruption by the secretary-general, the criticism of Kofi Annan's behavior left unanswered questions.

``It's troublesome that we found his son involved in activities that were inappropriate,'' Volcker added.

Note: Full report is available here.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Russian diplomat was arrested in an overnight FBI raid and charged with helping a U.N. procurement officer launder bribes from contractors and taking a share of the money, an indictment said on Friday.

Vladimir Kuznetsov, a Russian Foreign Ministry official and the elected chairman of the U.N. General Assembly's budget advisory committee, was taken into custody by the FBI, Russian and U.S. officials said.

Kuznetsov later appeared in federal district court in khaki shorts and a green shirt and pleaded innocent.

The court offered to release him only if he could post a $1.5 million bond co-signed by three financially worthy parties and secured by $500,000 in properties and cash.

Even if released, he would remain under house arrest with an electronic monitoring device.

The arrest was only the latest scandal plaguing the world body following allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the defunct $64 billion U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq, and a senior procurement officer's admission he had demanded illegal payments from would-be U.N. contractors.

Kuznetsov was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to an indictment signed by U.S. Attorney David Kelley.

Sergei Trepelkov, a senior counselor in Moscow's U.N. Mission, said the mission had been told the charges against Kuznetsov were connected to the U.N. humanitarian aid program for Iraq. But the indictment made no mention of this.

Kuznetsov was accused of working with a co-conspirator who was not identified but was described as a U.N. procurement officer who appears to match the description of Alexander Yakovlev, who pleaded guilty last month to money laundering and was said to be cooperating with federal investigators.

ILLEGAL PAYMENTS

A U.N.-appointed commission investigating the oil-for-food program, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said Yakovlev pocketed more than $950,000 in illegal payments from firms seeking U.N. contracts and also solicited a bribe from a company seeking an oil-for-food contract.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton thanked Secretary-General Kofi Annan for promptly waiving Kuznetsov's diplomatic immunity on Thursday so the arrest could be made.

``This is now a serious law enforcement matter and we will have no further comment,'' Bolton said.

Annan also spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Kuznetsov is only temporarily on the U.N. payroll because of his job as chairman of the budget advisory committee.

The U.S. Attorney's office said Kuznetsov, a 48-year-old financial expert who is married and has two children, laundered hundreds of thousands of dollars obtained by the co-conspirator from criminal acts.

Kuznetsov set up an offshore company and opened a bank account in its name in the Caribbean island of Antigua. The co-conspirator then transferred the funds into that account between 2000 and 2005, the office said. After the co-conspirator told him of the secret payments, Kuznetsov agreed to take a share of the money, the office said.

Kuznetsov was elected by U.N. General Assembly members to a three-year term on the budget advisory committee in January 2003. The prestigious panel's 15 members, including a representative of the United States, then elected him as its chairman.

Committee members are not U.N. employees and do not normally enjoy diplomatic immunity. But the General Assembly voted to pay him for this work and granted him immunity because of his chairmanship.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi authorities plan to put Saddam Hussein on trial within five days after the Oct. 15 referendum on the new constitution, an official close to the proceedings said Thursday.

The official spoke after government spokesman Laith Kubba announced that Iraq had carried out its first executions since Saddam was ousted in 2003. Three men were hanged at 10 a.m. in a Baghdad prison for murdering three policemen.

U.S. officials scrapped the death penalty in 2003 but Iraqi authorities reinstated it after the transfer of sovereignty so they would have the option of executing Saddam if he is convicted of crimes committed during his regime.

''Saddam's trial will start right after the October referendum between Oct. 16 and at the latest Oct. 20,'' the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make the official announcement.

European Union countries have distanced themselves from legal proceedings against Saddam, refusing to provide forensic and other assistance, because of the prospect that Saddam may be put to death.

Iraqi authorities plan a series of trials for specific alleged offenses rather than lumping them together. The first trial will focus on the alleged massacre of hundreds of Shiites in Dujail in 1982 following a failed assassination attempt on Saddam.

Separate trials are expected for the gassing of Kurds at Halabja and the 1991 suppression of the Shiite uprising in the south, officials said.

The government announced Aug. 17 that the three men hanged Thursday had been sentenced to death by a court in Kut last May. The government statement said they also were convicted of kidnapping and rape.

''It was a difficult decision because we are living in a democratic atmosphere,'' the government spokesman said. ''This is the highest punishment taken against people who have conducted assassinations, and it aims at deterring criminals from going too far in their crimes.''

Iraqi officials say about seven other people, including one woman, have been sentenced to death. Their cases are under review or appeal.

Death sentences must be approved by the three-member presidential council headed by President Jalal Talabani, who opposes capital punishment. Talabani refused to sign the authorization himself but his office said he let one of his vice presidents, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, do so for him.

Editor's commentary: Thanks to EU run by Socialists and Communists on Moscow payroll, justice will never be served to Milosevic and other Balkan butchers. Hague tribunal doesn't have death sentence which means that Milosevic and the rest of criminals will not be executed for their crimes. Kostunica also quickly abolished death sentence in Serbia after fall of Milosevic's regime to protect mafia and organized crime from being delivered to justice. Men who murdered personally over 30-40 people with police holding detailed accounts and evidence of every murder can get only prison sentence. That is called humane. Victims are called vengeful when they ask for justice and there is an organized campaign against them to silence them up or even portray them as criminals who deserved what they got. There is not an honest and sane person on Earth that would say that Saddam, Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic should not be hanged and that world would not be a better place without them. So why then leaders of EU are going against will of people and sanity and try to protect these vile murderers who organized systematic extermination of millions of people. This is because they do not posses free will, they are just marionettes manipulated by forces of evil. They serve some imaginary dark lord praying on their weakness, feeble mindedness and total lack of moral values. Could it be a coincidence that leaders of EU kicked out any reference to the religion in EU Constitution and didn't even mention the largest religious group Christians at all. It is a lame excuse that because of few terrorists citing religious motives EU is going to sideline all religions. Saddam is supposedly an Islam follower while Milosevic and his gang of criminals are dedicated Christians. All of them are Moscow servants. Leaders of EU are not even talking about freedom of religion anymore. For them religion has become an enemy, something that must be destroyed. Freedom from religion is their current motto. And when religion is silenced then evil in humans can be finally free to destroy what is left of feeble-minded people. Is it a coincidence that all these terrorists and war criminals who used religious references are the one on Moscow payroll who got their supplies by number one Russian weapon dealer Victor Bout. Russia has lost it to forces of evil almost a century ago and even today people there are without any faith in good. At least EU can contain that evil, not allow to spread it around the world like evil from Pandora's box. That's why death sentence to people like Saddam and Milosevic is necessary in order to deliver justice, calm people and put fear out of their hearts.