World Watch

AFGHANISTAN
At Last, a Victory for the Anti-Taliban Forces
More than a month into the war in Afghanistan, opposition forces made a long-awaited breakthrough as Northern Alliance troops captured the strategic city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Control of the city could open up a vital supply route into the country from Uzbekistan, as well provide a sought-after airbase for U.S. and allied troops. U.S. fighter jets and B-52 bombers paved the way for the advance, pounding nearby Taliban defenses for days beforehand, while maintaining pressure on frontline positions near Kabul and around the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. As the air attacks escalated, human-rights groups expressed disquiet about the use of increasingly powerful ordnance, including 7,000-kg fuel-air bombs. Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf warned against continuing the bombing during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but protests had already started: in central Pakistan, police shot dead four demonstrators during a strike called by Islamic parties. European countries pledged troops and other support for the campaign, while France pressed for a U.N. conference on humanitarian aid.

SPAIN
No Pause in Terror
Two members of ETA confessed to police that two years ago the Basque terrorist organization planned to break a 14-month cease-fire by blowing up Madrid’s tallest skyscraper. The man and woman were detained after a car bomb explosion in the capital last week that injured nearly 100 people. Less than 24 hours after the Madrid bomb, two ETA men shot dead judge José MarÍa Lidón Corbi in the Basque city of Bilbao.

TURKEY
Hunger Deaths
Four people died after police raided a house where left-wing demonstrators were on hunger strike to protest conditions in the country’s prisons. Police said that the two men and two women set themselves on fire, but the hunger strikers’ friends claimed they were shot. Two inmates burned themselves to death in protest. More than 40 hunger strikers have died in the past year resisting the introduction of smaller cells in high-security jails.

THE PHILIPPINES
Devastating Storm
More than 300 people were feared dead after the ferocious tropical storm Lingling battered islands in the central and southern Philippines, triggering landslides, flattening houses and ripping out power lines. Rescuers dug through the mud in search of people missing on Camiguin, also known as Paradise Island. Eleven mineworkers died when a tunnel collapsed in Asia’s largest copper mine on Cebu, and 19 crewmen were feared dead after a cargo ship sank off the main island of Luzon. As rain and flash floods continued, other deaths were reported on Mindanao and Negros Islands.

MOROCCO
Breathing Easy
After marathon negotiations in Marrakesh, energy and environment ministers from more than 160 countries agreed on a complex set of rules for the implementation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Last-minute breakthroughs on the use of carbon-absorbing forests to offset emissions and the trading of pollution “credits” secured the support of Russia and Japan. The pact still requires ratification by 55 countries that together produce 55% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. The U.S. is responsible for about 25% of carbon dioxide emissions, but its refusal to sign on means that almost all other industrialized nations must ratify for the protocol to come into force.

ISRAEL
Foiled Bomber
As Israeli antiterrorist police encircled his hide-out in the West Bank village of Baka al-Sharkiyeh, a Palestinian suicide bomber died in an explosion. Even though Israel sought to lower tensions by ending its three-week occupation of Ramallah, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said that “the Palestinian Authority, and especially [Chairman Yasser] Arafat, use terrorism as a strategy.”

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC
A General Flees
Five days of violence followed an attempt by forces supporting President Ange-Félix Patasse to arrest sacked army chief General François Bozize. The President’s Libyan-backed troops tried to pick up Bozize, who was dismissed two weeks earlier, at his home in Bangui on charges of involvement in a failed coup plot in May. The clashes ended when the government said that Bozize had fled the capital city. He was later taken into custody by army officials in neighboring Chad.

BURUNDI
Rebel Kidnappings
Hutu rebels from the Front for the Defense of Democracy killed 35 civilians in attacks and kidnapped more than 300 teenage boys from schools near Ruyigi, 96 km east of the capital Bujumbura, and from Kayanza province in the northwest. Though a transitional government, sharing power between Hutus and Tutsis, took office on Nov. 1, FDD rebels still consider themselves at war with the Tutsi-dominated army.

ZIMBABWE
No Monitors
After opinion polls showed them trailing the opposition by nearly 6%, Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party announced in Harare that international monitors will not be allowed as observers of the forthcoming presidential election. The government ordered the arrest of the editor and a director of Zimbabwe’s only privately-owned newspaper, the Daily News, for allegedly breaking investment regulations. After a night in jail the two men were released on bail.

GREECE
Refugees Rescued from Sinking Ships
Zakynthos islanders bearing food and blankets applauded as a stricken Turkish ship crammed with 1,200 refugees was towed into port. But Greek authorities were less sympathetic to yet another boatload of illegal migrants, insisting that the refugees, mainly Iraqi Kurds, would be returned to Turkey. An Indonesian boat bound for Australia was less fortunate. Two women drowned after the Sumbar Lastari, carrying more than 160 asylum seekers, caught fire and sank off the northern Ashmore Reef.

JAPAN
Scientific Whaling
A Japanese fleet set out from the port of Shimonoseki to catch as many as 400 minke whales. The International Whaling Commission banned commercial hunting of the protected species in 1986, but allows catches for scientific research and the sale of whale meat from those catches. Environmentalists oppose the annual Antarctic expeditions because they say that the research is unnecessary and that it is really just a front for commercial whaling.

MEXICO
Killing Fields
Fears of another spate of murders took hold in the border town of Ciudad Juárez. The discovery of the remains of eight young women in fields close to the city brought back memories of the 57 rape-murders that began in 1993. Locals believed that the murders had been solved with the arrest of five bus drivers in March 1999.

CUBA
Hurricane Damage
Countries around the Caribbean counted the cost of Hurricane Michelle. The coastal areas of Honduras and Nicaragua suffered first as the most violent storm of the year — in which half the normal annual rainfall fell in just five days — killed 12 people. After bringing extensive flooding and mudslides to Jamaica, Michelle moved on to Cuba, where five people died. Crops, sugar mills and thousands of homes were destroyed. Despite its 40-year economic embargo, the U.S. offered to send assistance, provided that it benefited the Cuban people, not the communist government.