Al-Ahram Weekly | International

		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 1 - 7 March 2001 Issue No.523
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Devious diversions
AS THE juicy details of secret information drops, payment in jewels and late-night computer hacking unfold, the arrest of former FBI counterintelligence specialist Robert Philip Hanssen last Sunday is quickly becoming both a lurid spy-thriller and an embarrassing exposé of weak internal security at the FBI. Among a populace where Mission Impossible-style movies and 007 never go out of style, the nabbing of the 25-year FBI veteran comes as no surprise. But for the government agencies struggling under the scandal, the question is how -- and why.
After the incarceration of CIA double-agent Aldrich Ames in 1994, intelligence officials long suspected another mole in their midst, but Hanssen wasn't even on the short-list. Documents fortuitously turned over by a Russian source finally identified a trail that led them to Hanssen, who has apparently been providing highly-classified information to Russian intelligence for over 15 years now.
Government authorities were astonished to find that Hanssen had never been submitted to a lie detector test and FBI director Louis Freeh announced this week that tests will be administered randomly from now on -- beginning with himself.
Fair-weather friend
WHEN the going gets rough -- head for another country. This motto of kings, disgraced leaders and fallen military strongmen is all the more apt for former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who happens to also hold Japanese citizenship. Peru may have always been his home, but his ancestral homeland is all the more important these days, particularly since Japan holds no formal extradition treaty with Peru. But that didn't stop the Peruvian Congress from charging Fujimori with abandonment of office on Friday, an all-important move that strips the runaway leader of the five-year immunity usually granted to former presidents. Criminal charges are expected to follow quickly.
Plagued by mounting corruption charges that had enflamed his former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos and implicated numerous top figures, Fujimori made an unannounced detour to Japan while returning from an international conference last November. When it became clear he intended to stay, Congress fired him from office. But the road to vindication will be difficult. Montesinos's whereabouts are still unknown and Japan has made it clear it does not intend to extradite Fujimori.
Acts of war
SETTING a new precedent for war crimes investigations, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted three Bosnian Serb commanders of raping and torturing women in the town of Foca, outside Sarajevo. While rape has been covered by other war crimes tribunals -- notably, that dealing with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda -- the landmark case is the first time sexual slavery has been tried as a war crime, not an individual one. The convictions, announced last Thursday, mean that prosecutors have forged new ground in the delicate lexicon of war crimes terminology.
Prosecutors argued that Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic were guilty of crimes against humanity for their efforts to use rape systematically as an instrument of war during the 1992-1995 conflicts in the Balkans. Following the capture of Foca in 1992, Serb commanders set up internment centres -- so-called rape camps -- where predominantly Muslim women and children were held and traded among Serbian forces and local Serbs. Testimony describing dehumanising torture was given by 16 victims in the case.
Let down
ANTI-NUCLEAR protesters descended on the Taiwanese capital Taipei on Saturday enraged by an abrupt turnaround by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on the issue of a long-controversial nuclear power plant project halted last October. Demonstrators swelled to an estimated 10,000, calling for a referendum to settle the dispute once and for all. Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian gathered the support of numerous anti-nuclear groups in last year's March elections by running on a platform of environmental consciousness and specifically targeting the plant, which would be the country's fourth.
The $5.4 billion project was launched in the 1980s against vehement popular objections and is now one-third complete. Protesters, including a number of high-profile DPP members, say they feel cheated by the policy reversal, saying that Chen has gone back on his word. In fact, strong opposition forces, which outnumber the ruling DPP, forced the project back onto the drawing table by accusing Chen of circumventing the law with a unilateral declaration. Given the power wielded by opposition lawmakers, it is highly unlikely that the issue will ever be decided by plebiscite.
Compiled by Nyier Abdou

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