April 15, 2002

By TODD PITMAN

KHOJA KOTKAI, Afghanistan (AP) _ They would have made an easy target: a steady stream of buses and trucks, minivans and taxis, spewing up a trail of dust as they trundled down the valley road.

Explosions and bursts of anti-aircraft fire rang through nearby hills, and two tanks fired shells toward a mountainside.

In most places, factional fighting on the road ahead would have been enough to make a driver pull over. But in war-ravaged Afghanistan, few seemed to mind.

Not the dozens of passing vehicles. Not the children herding goats. Not the bored-looking soldiers watching the battle between two rival commanders from the top of a red shipping container partially buried in the dirt.

“I don’t think anything about it. I don’t care,” said 23-year-old Sherali, who was busy changing a flat tire. “This is Afghanistan. We’re used to it.”

Sherali spoke just minutes before a tank rumbled past his car, turned onto the valley floor, and began pounding an enemy position in the distance. Like many Afghans, he only uses one name.

It’s unclear what sparked the weekend clashes between Gen. Zafar Uddin and Ghulam Rohani Nangialai in the valley around Khoja Kotkai, about 30 miles west of Kabul.

Government officials called it an isolated turf battle between two longtime rivals and said it posed no threat to interim leader Hamid Karzai’s fragile administration.
Karzai’s government, which came to power in December soon after the fall of the Taliban, is faced with trying to secure peace in a country battered by 23 years of war.

But government authority is uncertain in hills like these just outside the capital. Much of the countryside remains under the control of local warlords, who sometimes take up arms against each other for patches of territory.

On Saturday in Khoja Kotkai, soldiers totting rocket-launchers at a crumbling roadside mud hut peaked around a corner to watch a duel between two trucks mounted with heavy guns _ one from each faction.

One of the trucks fired from the top of a hill toward Uddin’s men, then quickly disappeared from view. An artillery shell ripped into the dirt about 150 feet from one of Uddin’s trucks, prompting a blast of return fire.

Asked why authorities let civilian traffic drive through a battle-zone, Haji Aqa Gul, who is loyal to Uddin, shrugged.

“This is not serious fighting,” he said. “If it really gets heavy, we’ll close the road.”
Much of the highway from Kabul to Kandahar is unpaved and racing through gunfire is not an option, particularly for large trucks so laden with cargo they sway from side to side as they roll over the ruts.

Abdul Gani, a 28-year-old hauling a load of tea, made the trip through Khoja Kotkai with a young nephew aboard and said his truck’s top speed was only three miles an hour. The green Mercedes Benz truck was intricately painted with yellow and blue flowers, and had a string of iron chimes hanging off the back.

Gani said the fighting “wasn’t too bad,” but said he had to pull over for about two hours some three miles from Khoja Kotkai.

“I heard bullets whipping past and saw some people running across the plain. So I stopped until the fighting died down.”

Gani dismissed the brief delay, saying he was once obliged to stop on the same road for 20 days during a particularly heavy round of factional fighting in 1994.

At Khoja Kotkai, many of the vehicles drove through as if no skirmish was taking place. Some were probably unaware.

None of Uddin’s soldiers, deployed at several checkpoints along the road, had bothered to mention the fighting as they waved him through, Gani said.

Perhaps it was hard to tell.

About two dozen yards off of one stretch of road, two soldiers lay in a dirt trench, huddling with Kalashnikovs.

Farther down the highway, inside another hut bombed out years ago during fighting with the former Soviet Union, one soldier slept on a weathered carpet aside stacks of bread and empty tea glasses.

Outside, a dozen troops stood idle and joked as occasional automatic weapons-fire peeled from a hilltop across the road.

As the two sides fought sporadically, two American helicopter gunships cruised over the hills on a separate mission.

Later, four double-rotor Chinook choppers made the same run low through the valley. Several foreign soldiers aboard _ it was unclear where they were from _ waved as they flew over the front line.

Gani said he didn’t have any other option.

“Of course we are afraid to drive on these roads when there’s fighting, but we have to make a living. There’s no other way.”

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

_uacct = “UA-2438408-1″;
urchinTracker();

June 4, 2004

By TODD PITMAN

BUNIA, Congo (AP) _ Nights at the Uruguayan U.N. military camp. Days in a courthouse surrounded by barbed wire, with U.N. peacekeepers on guard outside. Death threats all the time.

This is life for the small team of judges and prosecutors dispatched here from Congo’s distant capital to help restore the rule of law _ and central government authority _ to a tense region still ruled by the gun in the wake of a five-year war.

Their means: A single courthouse serving 5 million people in the vast northeastern district of Ituri.

“It’s not enough, but it’s a start,” said chief prosecutor Chris Aberi, one of 12 judicial officials who constitute the government’s sole presence in this small, wild-east town of dirt roads, crumbling buildings and rampant poverty.

Troubles in Ituri started brewing in 1998, when this stretch of dense forests and rock-strewn hills was nominally taken over by Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed rebels who seized much of the northeast.

The rebels’ weak authority allowed long-standing ethnic feuds to boil over in a separate conflict in 1999 between rival Hema and Lendu ethnic militias that’s seen 50,000 people killed since.

Congo’s war officially ended in 2002, but the transitional government serving until planned 2005 elections is still struggling to regain control over the vast nation.

President Joseph Kabila’s administration suffered back-to-back crises this week when renegade commanders seized the eastern city of Bukavu on Wednesday, setting off riots in the capital Thursday that saw at least two protesters killed by U.N. forces. The violent demonstrations resumed Friday despite the renegades’ promise to pull out of Bukavu, south of Bunia.

In Ituri, violence has grown ever more brutal over the last several years, worsened by struggles to control the region’s mineral wealth. In 2003, massacres and reported cannibalism drew world condemnation and a French-led intervention force.

The United Nations took over the peacekeeping mission in Ituri late last year. Increasing its strength to 4,800 troops, the United Nations has expanded operations to several towns outside Bunia and detaining dozens of militia leaders allegedly responsible for planning massacres and other killings.

But with no mandate to try them, the U.N. workers looked to Kinshasa _ and urged the government to establish a presence here to do the job itself.

In mid-January, Congo’s government restaffed the Bunia courthouse for the first time since May 2003.

“When we got here, we found a widespread climate of impunity” had taken root, said chief judge Jean Ekabela, whose predecessor was detained last year by a local militia, the Union of Congolese Patriots _ a move that effectively closed the court.

“When anybody with a gun can do just about anything, justice doesn’t mean much in the eyes of the people,” told The Associated Press at his office inside the newly reopened courthouse, a single-story building surrounded by coils of concertina wire.

Outside, U.N. troops in white Humvees eyed passers-by from behind machine guns, inspecting those who entered. Blue-helmeted peacekeepers manned sandbag fortresses in the middle of traffic circles.

Some people said things were changing for the better, with the public beginning to respect the magistrates.

“People are starting to fear them,” Issa Pirmohamed, a local businessman, said. “They’ve seen militia leaders arrested, and now they’re starting to see them tried. It’s a good sign.”

But other Bunia residents have given the magistrates from Congo’s distant west a cold welcome, deriding them as “Djadjambo,” or foreigners, Ekabela said.

After work, they are all escorted home to several houses perched in the middle of a dusty, heavily guarded military camp for flak-jacketed Uruguayan peacekeepers. They rarely leave, Aberi said.

The court relies heavily on U.N. troops, who are holding about 70 militia detainees at several U.N. bases in Bunia, to do its enforcing.

The shortcomings of the 260-strong local police force, which has neither vehicles nor weapons, were apparent in April, when 36 prisoners escaped from a lightly guarded jail.

Despite the obstacles, judges have issued over a dozen verdicts in cases involving rape, murder, robbery and the illegal possession of arms.

The first trial of real significance _ that of a militia leader named Matthieu Ngundjolo _ got under way in April amid repeated protests by his supporters.

Though no violence has been reported, the head of U.N. operations in Ituri, Dominique McAdams, said such high-profile trials should be held elsewhere in Congo for security reasons.

By trying militia leaders locally, “you put everybody in jeopardy, the entire justice staff,” McAdams said during an interview at U.N. headquarters. “You have to be realistic. Here, you don’t have peace yet.”

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

May 3, 2007

By TODD PITMAN

BAQOUBA, Iraq (AP) _ Across the walls of the villas they seized in the name of their shadow government, black-masked al-Qaida militants spray-painted the words: “Property of the Islamic State of Iraq.”

They manned checkpoints and buried an elaborate network of bombs in the streets. They issued austere edicts ordering women not to work. They filmed themselves attacking Americans and slaughtered those who did not believe in their cause.

For months, al-Qaida turned a part of one Baqouba neighborhood into an insurgent fiefdom that American and Iraqi forces were too undermanned to tackle _ a startling example of the terror group’s ability to thrive openly in some places outside Baghdad even as U.S.-led forces struggle to regain control in the capital.

Watch an Apache gunship fire a helfire at insurgents in Baqouba in April, 2007.

U.S. forces took back the entire Tahrir neighborhood during a weeklong operation that wrapped up Sunday in Baqouba, a city 35 miles northeast of Baghdad that al-Qaida declared last year the capital of its self-styled Islamic caliphate.

Though the operation was a success _ it forced the guerrillas to either flee or melt into the population _ soldiers say the extremists are likely to pop up anywhere else that’s short on American firepower.

Indeed, even as the Tahrir operation took place, insurgents stepped up attacks on a new police post in the adjacent Old Baqouba district _ which was also cleared recently _ pounding it daily and killing Baqouba’s police chief in a suicide car bombing.

Insurgent teams, meanwhile, have tried to infiltrate back into Tahrir, U.S. Capt. Huber Parsons said Tuesday.

When U.S. forces began pouring into the embattled district last week, residents said it was the first time they’d seen significant numbers of coalition troops since last fall. U.S. troops set up a combat outpost in northern Tahrir several months ago.

But to the south, residents recounted watching helplessly as masked fighters came and went freely in past months, piling weapons into the back of vehicles and taking over the homes of Shiites who had either fled or been killed.

“We were terrorized,” said one man. “We wondered, Where is the government? Why have they forgotten us? Why does nobody come here to help?”

Baqouba has been wracked by violence for years. But insecurity has skyrocketed since late last year, partly because Sunni militants fleeing Baghdad’s security crackdown have sought refuge here.
An estimated 60,000 people have fled the city of 300,000, most of them Shiites driven out by Sunni hit squads. Meanwhile, vital government subsidized food and fuel shipments, which normally flow in from Baghdad, ceased arriving because of political corruption in the capital, said Col. David W. Sutherland, whose 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, is responsible for security in Diyala province.

“In an insurgency, if you don’t have faith in the government or security forces … you turn to those who will offer you a better way,” Sutherland said. “The terrorists were able to drive a wedge between the government and the people. But we’re reversing that.”

The battle for Baqouba picked up in mid-March.

U.S. commanders rushed in Stryker infantry battalion which helped clear, and eventually calm, the southern district of Buhriz, once the city’s most violent area. While American forces fought there and in Old Baqouba, they watched neighboring Tahrir spin out of control.

Parsons said video from an unmanned aerial drone last month showed suspected al-Qaida militants searching vehicles at a checkpoint. They held back from destroying it, choosing to “track them to see where they were going, where they lived,” Parsons said.

Then, for eight days in early April, al-Qaida battled fellow insurgents from the nationalist 1920 Revolution Brigades, who residents said were trying to resist the terror group’s bid for control. The nationalist fighters ran out of ammunition and fled.

With the district firmly in al-Qaida’s hands, local leaders and sheiks called on American and Iraqi soldiers for help.

U.S. forces first sent road-clearing teams into southern Tahrir April 22. Insurgents fired mortars and popped out of windows with rocket launchers, destroying three de-mining robots. Tanks and infantry blasted surrounding buildings, killing more than a dozen attackers.

The next day, Parsons moved three of his platoons into central Tahrir on foot. All three came under fire. The day ended with a 30-minute firefight at dusk in which rounds ripped through palm groves. Apache helicopters shot Hellfire missiles at a house insurgents had fled to, lighting the sky in thunderous blasts.

Watch some of the firefight.

Fighting eased afterward. Soon, previously empty streets were teeming with crowds of people who shook soldiers’ hands as they passed.

Residents recounted watching groups of masked men dig into roads with jackhammers in recent weeks, planting bombs and stringing copper wire to trigger them from houses and schools.

The militants mostly kept to themselves, but they distributed puritanical leaflets commanding women to cover themselves in black from head to toe, and stay home from work. They ordered tea shops shut and warned men not to smoke water-pipes.

“No one dared ask them why,” said one father. Those who did drew unwanted scrutiny _ and a possible death sentence, he said.

Families told of Shiites who went shopping and never returned. One man said his brother had been kept and beaten in a makeshift prison with two dozen others.

At night, masked men stormed homes, robbing and carrying out extra-judicial killings. “Nobody knew whether they were al-Qaida or the police or just common criminals,” said a baker named Ali. “It was total lawlessness.”

Like other residents interviewed, Ali declined to give his full name in fear of reprisals from insurgents.

Insurgents blocked roads with concrete barriers taken from coalition forces. One checkpoint was so permanent that U.S. troops found a schedule naming those who manned it daily.

In some empty homes, guerrillas knocked small holes in the walls to use them as sniper positions. Below some, bullet casings littered the floor.

Half a dozen of houses containing weapon stashes, as well as one booby-trapped villa with a 155mm artillery shell rigged to blow behind its front door, were leveled. Many stashes were pointed out by residents.

One cache of rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs was found simply leaning against a wall in the back room of an abandoned home, along with handcuffs, ski masks, radio handsets and a video camera. A tape inside it showed a “Husky” American bomb disposal vehicle trying to de-mine a road in Baqouba.

Parsons eyes widened when he saw it: the driver and the vehicle work with his Stryker unit.
On the video, machine-gun fire erupted amid cries of “Allahu Akbar,” God is Great, targeting the vehicle and a de-mining robot.

The footage cut abruptly to an unrelated, final scene: A closeup of a blood-splattered corpse whose blindfold had been pulled from his face. The man looked Iraqi and appeared to have been tortured.

Soldiers said they believed al-Qaida operatives had lived in Tahrir, using homes there as a kind of rear base. In the living room of one home residents said served as a medical aid station for wounded fighters were empty beds, neck braces and x-rays scattered across the floor.

Although insurgents claimed many houses in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq, they tried to erase their work with splotches of white paint two months ago _ realizing the proclamations might be too conspicuous. On some gates and walls, the paint was too thin to cover the black Arabic lettering.

The Islamic State is a coalition of eight insurgent groups. Late last month, it named a 10-member “Cabinet” complete with a “war minister,” an apparent attempt to present the Sunni coalition as an alternative to the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Parsons assured each family that U.S. troops and police would stay behind to keep insurgents out after he left, and establish a new police station.

Al-Qaida “had months and months to run rampant because we didn’t have the forces available to come in here until now,” Parsons said. “They controlled this neighborhood, but they don’t anymore.”

Copyright 2007 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

July 24, 2002

By TODD PITMAN

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) _ Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.

It’s even tougher when you’re a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.

Valentine Strasser became the world’s youngest head of state when he seized power in 1992 at the age of 25. But the limelight didn’t last _ four years later, he was ousted in another coup.

“I’m basically living off my mother now. She’s been very supportive,” the 35-year-old said at a neighborhood bar on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital.

“It’s been tough. I’m unemployed, but I’m coping.”

It was well before noon and the former president was doing what he often does on weekdays: Joking around with friends, playing checkers and sipping diligently on a plastic cup of palm wine _ a cheap and highly potent alcoholic brew.

In contrast to the days when he commanded an army and courted the favor of foreign presidents, Strasser today seems to have reverted simply to being just another neighborhood kid.

Gone are the crisp military fatigues, new suits and wraparound sunglasses. In their place: A baseball hat worn backward, a Bob Marley T-shirt, dark green shorts and a pair of ‘Air’ Nike sneakers.

Asked how he spends his time now that he doesn’t have to rule the nation, Strasser took a drag of his cigarette and thought for a moment.

“I’ve been drinking palm wine,” he said. “You shouldn’t say that. But this is a democracy now. So go ahead.”

Things were very different a decade ago when Strasser, then a captain known for winning disco contests, headed up a group of twentysomething officers demanding unpaid salaries.

The protests snowballed into a popular coup that ousted dictator Maj. Gen. Joseph Momoh in April 1992.

Strasser was hailed as a savior by many. Even today, Freetown residents say he changed things for the better, drastically cutting inflation, cleaning up the capital and putting the long defunct national TV station back on air.

He and his junta _ known as “the boys” because most were only in their 20s _ scored points by waging war, if unsuccessfully, on the nation’s hated rebels.

But Strasser was no angel. The young ruler was widely criticized when his government executed two dozen alleged coup plotters without trial on a Freetown beach.

Strasser promised to hand over power in democratic elections in 1996. But he was beaten to the punch by his No. 2 man, Brig. Julius Maada Bio, who overthrew him in a bloodless coup in January that year.

Strasser was forced into exile and soon ended up in Britain, where the United Nations arranged a special scholarship for him to study law at Warwick University in Coventry.

University spokesman Peter Dunn said the former dictator spent 18 months at the school before dropping out, saying in a letter that he’d run out of money.

Media reports at the time said Strasser slipped away to London and changed his name to Reginald to avoid the press and potential enemies. In 2000, his student visa expired and he was deported.

Soon after, he made his way back to Sierra Leone, which is only now emerging peacefully from a decade of civil war in which rebels abducted children into their ranks and killed, raped and maimed tens of thousands of civilians.

Unlike many of the world’s former heads of state, however, Strasser was not treated to a generous government stipend or given a plush mansion or bodyguards.

A house he built for himself on the edge of town was burned down by aggrieved soldiers in 1999, so he moved into his mother’s two-story house across the street.

The government says Strasser is not entitled to benefits because he took power by force. Strasser concedes the point but says he should be treated better.

Last year, the government called on citizens not to throw stones at the former head of state, who without a car, was wandering around Freetown on foot.

But Strasser is still immensely popular among some, and may be able to capitalize on it. In five years, he’ll be eligible to run for president _ something he says he’s considering.

Charismatic, muscle-bound and six-foot-two, he’s the dominant figure at the bar he often frequents, which stands tenuously together with bamboo poles and plastic sheeting somehow obtained from the U.N. World Food Program.

Whatever the future holds, Strasser will always have his high-profile past to relish.

“Oh it was good. I was the youngest … head of state in the whole wide world,” he said with a guffaw, looking around the bar for support.

Then he leaned forward with a wide smile and slapped a high-five on the hand of someone sitting across from him.

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Note: The photos above were taken from the Internet. The first is an AP file photo of Strasser. When photographer Christine Nesbitt and I tried to interview him for this story, he refused to have his picture taken.

July 12, 2001

By TODD PITMAN

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) _ Bolanle Ijikelly wasn’t too surprised when armed robbers broke through the wall of her apartment with a sledgehammer one night last month and started carting away her valuables.

The week before, they’d sent her entire apartment block a note to let everyone know they’d be stopping by.

In Lagos, thieves are so sure of getting away with crimes they hand-deliver notices alerting intended targets they’re coming _ so even the poorest victims will have some cash on hand to steal.

The rationale is simple: Those with no money and nothing worth stealing are often beaten _ or shot.

In a city where police were cleared last month to shoot suspected criminals on sight, everyone’s got a crime story to tell.

The anonymous message penned on a sheet of paper and pasted to the wall of Ijikelly’s rundown apartment block was blunt:

“We are coming to Block 31 to rob each flat and no flat will be exempted.”

Many tenants fled. Others stayed home during the day but slept elsewhere after dark.
Some, like Ijikelly, were so resigned to their fate they chose to stay and wait.

“I knew they were coming, so I prepared an envelope with 650 naira ($5) in it to give them,” the 47-year-old teacher said.

Ijikelly and her five children woke to the sound of gunfire, got dressed and soon met eight armed men who crawled through the hole they knocked in her wall.

Two hours, 13 ransacked apartments _ and no arrests _ later, officers finally chased off the robbers.

That the police came at all was remarkable. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, only 12,000 officers are deployed to protect a population of 13 million.

Few residents expect much help. The poorly paid police force is best known not for foiling crimes, but for extorting bribes from drivers at checkpoints around town.

Left on their own, many residents barricade neighborhood streets with gates and lock themselves up inside houses with barred windows.

Few have telephones at home to call for help.

When the sun goes down, many parts of the city are plunged into darkness because electricity is so scarce.

Moving around at night can be eerie _ and dangerous.

“I try to get home as early as possible. Nowhere is really safe,” said Akin Ajose-Adeogun, a 42-year-old civil servant.

“We usually hear gunshots every night somewhere in the distance. It’s like we’re under siege.”
Robbers frequently operate in groups of 50 or more, hitting not just single houses but entire streets.

Sometimes they stuff nails into shoes or oranges and toss them onto bridges to blow out the tires of passing cars. Bands of thieves then converge on the car and rob the occupants.
Shootouts with police are common.

Gruesome crime stories make headlines in local newspapers every day and robbers have become infamous for acts of brutality.

Actress Patience Oseni, 37, said a gang of thieves who lost one of their men during a robbery last month in the Bariga neighborhood returned a few days later _ and gunned down two dozen residents in revenge.

Lawyer Femi Odutola said one group even attacked a police station this month in another act of revenge, killing two officers.

But the violence goes both ways.

Oseni said she saw police kill five suspected robbers as she was going to church one Sunday in June.

“They didn’t ask too many questions. They just took them out on the street in front of the station and blew their heads off,” Oseni said. “It’s jungle justice.”

Some civilians, tired of all the crime, have shown little sympathy for thieves.

Odutola saw one man caught July 5 trying to steal a car from the parking lot of the Lagos High Court.

A mob threw an old tire around his neck, doused him with gasoline and set him on fire.
“These things happen often,” Odutola said, holding a photo he took of the scene showing a charred corpse.

“But the fact that they burnt him to death right in front of the High Court shows how little faith people have in the criminal justice system.”

Since January, 183 robbers, 41 civilians and 14 police officers have been killed in Lagos, according to police statistics reported by the independent Guardian newspaper. Figures for the previous year put the death toll at more than 700.

Some residents would like to leave the city altogether. But not everybody’s got a choice.

“If I could get out of here, I would,” Ijikelly said. “But I can’t move. I can’t afford it.”

Copyright 2001 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

July 11, 2004

By TODD PITMAN

KISANGANI, Congo (AP) _ It’s counted diamond dealers, foreign soldiers and an ill-fated president among the guests. It’s been occupied by rebels who left behind astronomical bar tabs. It’s been splattered with bullets, littered with corpses, battered, broken, bruised and rebuilt.

In the city immortalized by Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the Palm Beach Hotel has seen it all, and survived _ much like the country itself.

“It’s been difficult really, but we managed. In Congo, we always manage,” says Gaspar Mande, the soft-spoken chief receptionist.

The brainchild of a general once close to the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the Palm Beach opened in 1995 _ just in time for an anti-Mobutu rebellion that swept the country a year later.

Perched on the banks of the Congo River, the whitewashed, two-story hotel easily dominated its lowbrow, bedbug-ridden competitors, offering 19 air-conditioned rooms and villas equipped with satellite TV.

Though modest by world standards, the Palm Beach had much to offer. For the mosquitos, there was bug spray. For power outages, generators. And for water shortages, water tanks ensured a 24-hour supply.

When rebels led by Laurent Kabila captured Kisangani in 1997, it didn’t take them long to check in. But not as paying guests. Heavily armed soldiers camped out six to a room, pillaging telephones, TVs, VCRs, alarm clocks and refrigerators.

Rebel commanders sent the hotel’s staff home amid the chaos, but invited them back weeks later after realizing their troops were occupying a potentially lucrative source of income.

“They needed money, so they kicked the soldiers out,” says one employee, Jeff Basilieki.

Congo has recently seen another surge in violence, with rebels battling government troops in the eastern city of Bukavu and gunfire rattling the capital, Kinshasa, twice since March. Kisangani, a northeastern city that was known as Stanleyville during Belgian colonial rule, has been spared so far.

Through the years, guests at the Palm Beach have included Lebanese diamond dealers, foreign journalists and Kabila, who went on to become president and was assassinated in Kinshasa in 2001.

The former leader slept in Villa 21, whose two rooms and salon now go for $180 a night.
“Kabila was just like the rest of them _ he didn’t pay,” Basilieki says.

In 1998, a second rebellion _ this time against Kabila _ brought another wave of penniless rebels.

Dozens slept in the courtyard with grenades and automatic weapons piled beside them. Some stood guard at the restaurant in wraparound sunglasses, holding rocket launchers like spears at the entrance to a tribal court.

Many a rebel had his hand wrapped around a cold beer.

According to Mande, a rebel group backed by the government of Rwanda left unpaid bills of $251,750, while their allies in a Ugandan-supported faction departed $55,000 in debt.
Asked how much of that was for alcohol, Mande says: “About half, at least.”

In 1999, the Palm Beach became a military base for Ugandan troops, whose tented camps and machine-gun nests _ erected in the hotel gardens _ made them a target for Rwandan forces with whom they’d fallen out in a dispute over mineral wealth.

In the first of two battles, 11 Ugandan soldiers were killed on the hotel grounds.
“They piled the bodies in the toilet,” Basilieki says. “They wanted to put them in the storage freezer, but it was destroyed.”

During another battle in 2000, rockets and mortar shells burst all around, shattering every window in the hotel and slicing palm trees with shrapnel. Gunfire smacked into concrete walls, and one twisted shell landed in front of the reception desk.

Through it all, staff dutifully kept the restaurant open, serving meals and drinks to journalists until supplies ran out. During artillery barrages, the employees slept in the hallways and ran ducking to the river to fetch water.

Somehow, everybody survived.

The fighting was bad for business. But it brought a welcome bedfellow _ the United Nations.
Hundreds of well-paid U.N. staff checked in as peacekeeping operations expanded, bringing new life _ and money _ to a suddenly fully booked Palm Beach.

The profits helped repair blown-out air conditioners and windows, and pay for two billiard tables.

Prostitutes crowded the bar. There was dancing until dawn.
“Those pool tables used to be going around the clock,” says Robert Powell, a U.N. logistics officer who works in the city. “It was great. There was nowhere else to go.”

The good times faded, though, after many U.N. staffers shifted west to the strife-torn town of Bunia.

But life has been slowly improving since a 2002 peace deal that unified the nation _ once split into rival rebel zones and occupied by foreign armies.

Today, a small shop inside the hotel sells cell phone cards, offering links to the outside world unheard of a couple years ago.

Water and electricity supplies are still uneven, but Mande has big dreams for upgrading the hotel. In the garden out back, he envisions customers dining at a planned cafe, taking in pleasant river views.

“There’s been a big change,” he says. “These days, everybody pays.”

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

August 22, 2004

By TODD PITMAN

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) _ The Marines screamed for a medic and tried to stanch the blood. But in the end, there was nothing they could do.

In a surreal battlefield of tombstones, in a Muslim cemetery thousands of miles from home, a young Marine lay unconscious after a mortar barrage, five minutes from death.

Lt. Cmdr. Paul Shaughnessy, a Navy chaplain, pressed a thumb across the motionless corporal’s blood-drenched forehead, made the sign of the cross and summoned the strength to perform last rites on a man he barely knew.

“I absolve you of all your sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” Shaughnessy said while kneeling beside Cpl. Roberto Abad, a 22-year-old from Los Angeles, just before he died Aug. 6. “May God, who gave you life, bring you everlasting life.”

As American troops cope with life _ and death _ on a faraway battlefield, military chaplains cope with them, offering prayers, comfort and spiritual advice to keep the American military machine running.

Since Aug. 5, U.S. troops have fought intense skirmishes with Iraqi militants loyal to firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf’s vast cemetery, believed to be the largest in the Muslim world.

Through a maze of tan-colored, Arabic-inscribed tombs, U.S. troops have scrambled onto mausoleums to open fire, taken refuge in underground crypts and, with bombs falling and bullets flying, wondered whether they might die here.

“Many of them had a great deal of reservation about going into a cemetery,” said Capt. Warren Haggray, 48-year-old Baptist Army chaplain living in Fort Hood, Texas.

“One of the things that I teach my soldiers from the Bible is that there’s a time for war and there’s a time for peace, and there are times that you just have to get out there and fight.”

Shaughnessy, a 54-year-old Roman Catholic priest from Worcester, Mass., had just finished a prayer service for a lance corporal, shot fatally in the neck by a sniper, when he joined a supply convoy to spend the night with Marines in the cemetery.

Crouched behind tombstones for cover, the Marines came under mortar attack at dusk.
One round exploded about 50 yards from Shaughnessy, who, after hearing calls for help, found two severely wounded Marines bleeding profusely.

Believing they would die, he performed last rites on both of them.

One was wounded in the thigh and survived, Shaughnessy learned later.

The second, pinned between two tombstones, did not.

Lacking a stretcher, the Marines put rifles under the corporal’s legs and back to move him out of the cemetery.

“The young Marines who carried him, they were switching off,” Shaughnessy said. “One, he was his buddy, he had blood all over him. He was pretty affected by it. He came back to his position, and I said, ‘You gotta take deep breaths.’ They lost a fellow Marine, and they knew they had to continue, but in their eyes, you could see the sadness.”

At such times, chaplains, who accompany military units unarmed, can help simply by being present.

“A lot of them wanted blessings during that time. You just didn’t know through the night what was gonna happen,” Shaughnessy said. “The first time you have an RPG or a mortar explode next to you it’s pretty sobering. The reality of death is more than just an abstraction. It matures them pretty fast.”

Few troops appear to have reservations about taking what they see as “enemy” life, though.
Chaplains help grease the wheels of any soldier’s troubled conscience by arguing that killing combatants is justified.

“I teach them from the scripture, and in the scripture I can see many times where men were told … to go out and defeat the enemy,” Haggray said. “This is real stuff. You’re out there and you gotta eliminate that guy, because if you don’t, he’s gonna eliminate you.”

Shaughnessy agreed.

“The Marine Corps is an assault-based entity. You have to have them ready to do some pretty nasty things. The danger is turning that off, that’s always the problem,” he said. “We want them to perform their duties in a moral and just way. I try to convey to them in the most cogent way I can that you don’t use excessive force, you don’t take innocent life.”

One Marine deployed near the cemetery, following orders from his superiors, sprayed gunfire on a vehicle that failed to stop at a checkpoint after a series of warning shots, Shaughnessy said.

When the bullet-ridden car rolled to a halt, the Marine found two men and one woman, apparently civilians, dead or on the verge of death, inside.

“It bothered him immensely,” Shaughnessy said. “I told him the intention is important. You had warned them that they were in a combatant zone, your intent was not to take any civilian life, and morally, that’s significant.”

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

August 29, 2006

By TODD PITMAN

MARWAHEEN, Lebanon (AP) _ Last month, Khamel Ali Abdallah kissed his wife and six children goodbye, then put them on a bus to his native village in south Lebanon for summer vacation. He was supposed to join them a week later, but war between Hezbollah and Israel broke out.

He would see only one of them again.

The day after Abdallah’s family arrived in Marwaheen, a small hilltop village a stone’s throw from the Israeli border, Israel unleashed a barrage of artillery and airstrikes that reached Lebanon’s glittering Mediterranean capital of Beirut and beyond.

The assault tore giant craters into roads across the country, making it too dangerous for Abdallah to leave Beirut. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of charred cars still line the roads of war-wrecked towns, more than two weeks after a U.N. cease-fire ended the fighting, provoked by Hezbollah’s July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers.

Abdallah, 36, who holds jobs as a security guard and a coffee server at a communications company, called his wife in Marwaheen three times a day for the first three days of the war.

“She kept telling me ‘Beirut is dangerous, it’s being bombed, be careful,’” Abdallah said. “I told her ‘I’ll be fine, take care of yourself.’”

On the fourth day of fighting, he called at 7:30 a.m. “She told me ‘We are fine,’” Abdallah said, and he felt reassured.

He called back an hour later. This time there was no answer.

Abdallah managed to reach a brother in nearby Sidon on the phone, who told him he’d heard the family had fled Marwaheen after Israeli forces ordered residents via loudspeakers to evacuate within two hours.

The panicked family had rushed to the local U.N. headquarters and begged U.N. peacekeepers to protect them. The peacekeepers turned them away, and the group decided the only way out was to risk Lebanon’s deadly roads.

“There was a fire burning inside me. I couldn’t think. I could only worry,” Abdallah said of the uncertain hours that followed.

Glued to the television in his Beirut apartment, he saw a report about a convoy carrying civilians trying to flee Marwaheen that had been hit by an Israeli airstrike. More than a dozen were said to be dead.

A sick feeling came over him.

Desperate for news, he called his brother in Sidon. His brother told him he had something important to tell him, but he could not do it on the phone.

Abdallah knew what it was and wept.

Twenty-three people in the two-vehicle convoy were killed in the assault, carried out by an Israeli gunboat and an attack helicopter that strafed the survivors.

Only four people survived. One was Abdallah’s 6-year-old daughter, Lara, who miraculously crawled out of the burning wreckage without a scratch, but covered in blood and screaming.

Her aunt, Zeinab, said Lara was in her mother’s lap when the vehicle was struck and her mother’s body had shielded her. Zeinab survived only because she had stepped away from the vehicle, which had overheated or broken down, and was sitting by the road.

His wife and five other children _ a 2-year-old daughter and sons aged 8, 12, 13 and 14 _ were killed.

“God protected her, this little girl,” Abdallah said, cradling her in his lap. “I thank God. She is all I have left.”

Across south Lebanon, the yellow flags of Hezbollah fly over the rubble of destroyed houses. Hung across roads in Hezbollah strongholds, yellow banners proclaim “Our Blood has Won” in Arabic, French and English. The Islamic militia says it won an asymmetrical war simply by surviving.
But there are no Hezbollah banners in Marwaheen. Here black flags fly from rooftops.

“Nobody won this war,” Abdallah said, wearing black trousers and a black shirt.

He leaned down, put his cheek to Lara’s and ran his hand through her hair. She hopped down and ran giddily from room to room, too young to understand she’ll never see her mother and five brothers again.

On a wind-swept hilltop cemetery overlooking a deep valley, the 23 slain were buried Thursday in coffins under a patch of dark red earth. Simple cinder blocks topped with pictures kept in place by loose stones mark their locations until proper grave stones can be brought in.

“The Lebanese people, the civilians, we are the losers,” Abdallah said softly. “We have lost everything.”

Copyright 2006 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.