Reuters - August 22nd, 2006

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Kurds told Saddam Hussein's genocide trial on Tuesday how jets dropped poison gas smelling of rotten apples on mountain villages, but former aides insisted they had targeted only Iranian-backed Kurdish rebels.

Taking the stand in Baghdad on the second day of the former president's second capital trial, first witness Ali Mustafa Hama said: ``Birds were returning to their nests. I saw eight to 12 jets patrolling the sky. There was greenish smoke from the bombs. There was a smell of rotten apple or garlic.

``People were vomiting,'' he said. ``We were blinded. We were screaming. There was no one to save us, only God.''

One woman gave birth in the raid and her baby died at once.

During cross-examination, defense counsel asked Hama how he could tell the aircraft were Iraqi. He said his village had no problems with Iranian forces, so he doubted they would have dropped poison gas. Hama also admitted that he had helped shelter Kurdish guerrillas.

Saddam himself challenged the witness, asking: ``Who told you to say this?''

Two of Saddam's former military commanders, among six fellow defendants charged with war crimes, had earlier been allowed to make brief statements in their defense, in which they portrayed the 1988 Anfal -- Spoils of War -- campaign as a legitimate response to Iraqi Kurds fighting alongside Iran against Baghdad.

``We were fighting an organized army,'' said Sultan Hashim, commander of Task Force Anfal and later defense minister.

BEIJING (Reuters) - The trial of a blind Chinese rights activist ended in disarray on Friday with his main attorney detained until the hearing ended and the defendant rejecting two officially appointed stand-in lawyers.

Chen Guangcheng, 34, a blind, self-taught legal activist who drew international attention last year by accusing local officials of enforcing late-term abortions in a population control drive, went on trial in Linyi city in the eastern province of Shandong. His wife was barred from attending.

Xu Zhiyong, a law academic from Beijing, was held for 22 hours by police in Shandong, where he was preparing to defend Chen against charges of disrupting traffic and destroying property during a protest there in February, according to other lawyers defending Chen.

``It's obvious the authorities did not want us to defend Chen Guangcheng,'' Xu, a member of a district people's congress in Beijing, told Reuters. He has taken up many controversial cases but advocated using legal channels to advance rights.

The court appointed two stand-in lawyers whom Chen had never met and who knew nothing about the case, said defense lawyer Li Fangping. Li was briefly detained with a third defense lawyer and accused of theft apparently to prevent them from defending Chen.

``Chen Guangcheng fiercely protested. He was so angry that he threw up several times,'' Li said, quoting Chen's brother who attended the trial. ``The court hearing broke the law. We demand a retrial.''

The court had ignored Chen's application to make Xu his attorney and refused to properly consider an application to delay the trial, Li said.

Li said he had tried to attend the trial as an onlooker but hundreds of police surrounding the courthouse blocked him and other citizens, while two other lawyers who have worked for Chen sought Xu's release. It was not clear when police would announce the verdict.

CONCERTED CRACKDOWN

In what appeared to be part of a concerted crackdown, Gao Zhisheng, a combative human rights lawyer who has campaigned for Chen's release, was taken into police custody ``for questioning for his suspected involvement in criminal activities,'' Xinhua said without offering details.

``There is no doubt in my mind that there is a concerted crackdown on rights lawyers under way,'' Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

``This seems to have been sanctioned by the highest level and they're really sending a chilling message to lawyers in China.''

Gao, 42, has been one of China's boldest advocates for a variety of controversial causes, including labor activists, protesting farmers and members of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual group. On Tuesday, police detained Gao in Shandong, where he was staying with his sister.

Chen's family and supporters say the charges against him were concocted. His case has become a symbol of the current struggle between Chinese rights campaigners and police.

Ten prominent intellectuals, including lawyer Zhang Sizhi and Ying Songnian, a member of parliament, decried Xu's detention.

``What happened today was the relevant authorities deliberately seeking to use barbaric, terrorizing means to attack the defense attorneys and prevent a fair trial tomorrow,'' they said in the statement issued over the Internet.

Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, told Reuters on Friday that police had blocked her from leaving her village to attend the trial.

``I don't know what Chen Guangcheng or I did to get this treatment,'' she said. ``Why are they afraid of people doing what they have the right to do?''

KAMENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- The bodies of more than 1,000 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre have been exhumed from the largest mass grave found to date in Bosnia-Herzegovina, forensic experts said Thursday.

Experts began digging in June near the eastern Bosnian village of Kamenica, close to the border with Serbia, where they have found eight other mass graves. The team has exhumed 144 complete and 1,009 partial skeletons.

''This is the largest mass grave so far found,'' said Murat Hurtic, head of the forensics team.

Along with the remains, experts found 14 documents indicating the victims were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, which became the site of Europe's worst mass execution since World War II when Serb troops in 1995 overran the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, which the United Nations had declared a safe zone. As many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slain.

The excavation team said it found bullets mixed with body parts, and plastic and cloth bindings around the victims' arms.

The remains were heavily damaged, a typical feature of ''secondary'' mass graves to which victims' bodies are moved from an original burial site in an attempt to hide a crime, experts said.

Much of the moving in this case was done with bulldozers, which complicates the identification process because parts of the same body can be found in two or even three different mass graves, experts said.

Forensic teams have been uncovering mass graves throughout Bosnia in recent years, collecting the remains and extracting DNA to be matched with family members. Once a match is found, the body is returned to the family for burial.

Of the 3,500 bodies of Srebrenica victims excavated so far, 2,500 have been identified through DNA and some 2,000 buried in a cemetery in the Srebrenica suburb of Potocari, where the victims last were seen alive before being rounded up by Serb soldiers and taken for execution.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police hauled off a small group of people on Thursday who had arrived in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to protest what they say are bad vaccines which have crippled their children, one of the demonstrators said.

They say that their children were vaccinated against Japanese encephalitis B in 2003 in the southern province of Guangdong, and that the vaccine has paralyzed their sons and daughters.

China's Health Ministry told Reuters last month that they had found no problem with the vaccines.

But that has not convinced the families, some of whom gathered outside the large clock counting down the days to the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the city's central Tiananmen Square on Thursday morning.

Police briefly held a reporter who tried talking to them, saying they were ``not ordinary tourists,'' though they added they did not know who they were.

``We were taken away by the police a little while ago,'' Liang Yongli, father of one of the children, told Reuters by mobile telephone. ``I don't know where we are but there seem to be lots of people like us here.''

He declined to say more.

Tiananmen, scene of a bloody government crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, is a magnet for popular protest.

People from all over China flock to Beijing hoping to seek redress from the central government over perceived wrongs suffered in the provinces, and many come to the various government offices round the square.

Fake or bad drugs have killed dozens of people in China in recent years and raised questions about drug safety.

Public fears grew in 2004 after China revealed that at least 13 babies had died of malnutrition in the eastern province of Anhui after being fed fake baby milk with no nutritional value.

MINSK, Belarus (AP) -- Four Belarus election monitors detained before March's presidential election were sentenced Friday to prison terms from six months to two years.

The four members of an independent monitoring group were charged with taking part in an unregistered organization that infringed on citizens' rights in this authoritarian former Soviet republic.

The Minsk Central Court sentenced Nikolai Astreiko, the head of the Partnership monitoring organization, to two years. Activist Timofei Dranchuk was sentenced to one year while Enira Bronitskaya and Alexander Shalaiko received six months at the closed-door trial.

The State Department condemned the conviction of the election monitors.

''The politically motivated trial continues a disturbing pattern by the authorities to intimidate civil society activists and to further erode the democratic process in Belarus,'' said department spokesman Sean McCormack.

McCormack urged Belarus to free the four from prison ''and all those being held on politically motivated charges.''

The Partnership received funding from the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute and had planned to deploy independent observers at the elections, but security services detained the four in late February.

''This is a political punishment for those who wanted to openly and legitimately observe the elections,'' Belarus' main opposition leader, Alexander Milinkevich, told The Associated Press. ''It's intended to scare those who defended their right to watch the government's hands to try to prevent massive vote fraud.'' He called the verdict ''extremely cruel.''

President Alexander Lukashenko, dubbed ''Europe's last dictator'' by Washington, won another five-year term in the March election denounced by the opposition as rigged.

Lukashenko, who has ruled the nation since 1994, has quashed Belarus' independent media and jailed critics, as well as accusing the United States and other Western countries of seeking to overthrow him.

The United States and European Union imposed financial sanctions and a visa ban on Lukashenko and other officials following the election, citing widespread arrests and repression of opponents during and after the campaign.

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovich, humiliated in the 2004 ``Orange Revolution,'' was set to be voted in as prime minister on Thursday after signing a commitment not to reverse the country's pro-Western policies.

President Viktor Yushchenko, architect of the revolution that overturned the old order in Ukraine, reluctantly chose ''co-habitation'' with the Moscow-leaning Yanukovich in the early hours of Thursday to end four months of political deadlock.

Parliament was expected later in the day to approve Yanukovich's nomination and cement a ``grand coalition'' uniting the president's Our Ukraine Party with Yanukovich's Regions group and smaller allies.

Before that, Yanukovich and Yushchenko formally signed a declaration of principles on the formation of a coalition government which the Ukrainian president said would safeguard the ideals of the revolution.

But a leading figure in the revolution said the agreement letting Yanukovich head the government betrayed those ideals.

``I call this document a political capitulation of the Orange camp,'' said Yulia Tymoshenko, an estranged ally of the president who is now in opposition.

The document included a commitment to continue Ukraine's drive toward NATO and EU membership and ensure the central bank and courts are independent from political interference.

``With this document, Ukraine's politicians are confirming that the current foreign and domestic policies are irreversible,'' Yushchenko said at the start of a signing ceremony in the presidential administration.

The new cabinet will be dominated by Yanukovich's supporters but with ministerial posts for the Yushchenko camp in proportion to the number of seats it controls in parliament, said Yanukovich aide Taras Chornovil.

``Our Ukraine will be offered some fairly key posts ... That issue has already been agreed,'' he said.

Yanukovich, who favors closer ties with traditional ally Russia, was expected to announce his cabinet on Thursday or Friday.

His Regions party has 186 seats in the 450-seat parliament. Our Ukraine has 86. The Communists and Socialists -- Yanukovich allies -- have 51 seats between them.

Editor's commentary: It is clear to anyone now that democracy and people's will do not exist in Ukraine. Ukrainians clearly voted in majority for pro-democracy Orange coalition while in the end their will was overturned by Russian imperialist interests and traitor Yushchenko. Socialist party of Ukraine simply switched sides after elections and joined coalition of Russian stooges to help Yanukovich (man who stole elections once) win majority. Legitimate PM Yulia Tymoshenko was first sacked by Yushchenko last year thanks to his weakness and inability to protect sovereignty of Ukraine against Russian imperialist interests and now he has joined with Yanukovich to become just another traitor and Russian lackey. All he ever cared was to become president just like Kuchma. Yushchenko was and still is a protege of convicted criminal George Soros so that explains his true maggot nature. All they care is about greed and power while democracy and people's interests are used only as propaganda lies.