GAZA STRIP: A TUSSLE FOR POWER

GAZA STRIP: A TUSSLE FOR POWER

What's going on in Gaza? After a series of kidnappings of local police officials as well as French aid workers, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat streamlined the chaotic Palestinian security services last week into three branches--a move long demanded by Palestinian reformers and Western governments--and appointed new chiefs to oversee them. Then, after protests over one of his allegedly corrupt nominees, he withdrew the appointment. With Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei threatening to resign unless he was given true control of the government, it looked as if an internal reform movement was finally gaining steam.

What's really happening, though, looks more like an old-fashioned power struggle. Fatah activist Jamal Abu Habal says the kidnappings were an attempt to gain ammunition against the Arafat cronies who until now have controlled the majority of security forces in Gaza. Abu Habal and others, like Palestinian lawmaker Marwan Kanafani, say senior security officers would routinely take bribes or blackmail businessmen. Some helped run brothels in Gaza, and would "film rich people in compromising situations and extort money from them," says Abu Habal. According to him, ousted police chief Ghazi Jabali, kidnapped for eight hours on July 16, confessed on videotape to some of the abuses while being held hostage at gunpoint. At least twice before in recent months, Abu Habal says, militants have abducted security officers and videotaped their confessions before freeing them. "This was a struggle between a few individuals over control and turf," says Kanafani, who represents Gaza City in the Palestinian Legislative Council.

While neither Kanafani nor other officials in Gaza will point the finger at anyone in particular, many observers see the hand of Mohammed Dahlan, the 43-year-old former chief of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service, at work. Though he quit the job in 2002, members of Preventive Security are fiercely loyal to Dahlan, and British and U.S. mediators see him as a future leader. With Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pushing withdrawal from Gaza, Dahlan and others in Arafat's Fatah party are well aware that their chief rival will be Islamist group Hamas, in large part because of its reputation for incorruptibility. Dahlan recently told news-week he was working on changing Fatah's image. "Gaza can be like Kabul or it can be like Dubai," he said. "We have to change everything... I was from the Authority, and we made mistakes." Those of others, too, may well be revealed.

NATO: An Impotent Force

NATO's intervention in Kosovo, in 1999, was hailed as a victory for humanitarian interventionism. But the real test of the alliance came this March, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, when ethnic riots engulfed the former Yugoslav province. The objective facts are grim: over a 48-hour period, mobs of Albanians numbering in the tens of thousands attacked Serbian villages across Kosovo, burning houses and Orthodox churches and displacing more than 4,000 people. By and large, says HRW, "NATO peacekeepers locked their gates and watched as Serb homes burned." In the village of Svinjare, Albanian crowds rampaged right outside the gates of a NATO base.

Five years after expelling Yugoslav forces, NATO has failed--miserably--to adapt to changing circumstances, says HRW. Instead of recrafting its mandate to involve genuine peacekeeping, it behaves as though it were still there to deter a Serbian re-invasion. "They don't need tanks, but riot gear and soldiers trained in dealing with public disorder," one angry U.N. official told HRW. NATO's failures only make a difficult situation worse.

SCANDALS

Note Taker

Why did the story about the Justice Department's probe of ex-national-security adviser Sandy Berger's mishandling of classified documents break last week? That is the question many in Washington were asking after the disclosure forced Berger to resign as a top adviser to John Kerry. The FBI was first called in last fall after national-archives employees reported that Berger, during three visits, left with copies of a Clinton administration report on the handling of foiled millennium terror plots. The FBI, NEWSWEEK has learned, completed its probe in January. The matter had been sitting at Justice for months, and prosecutors, while viewing Berger's conduct as a serious breach, were uncertain they had ground to bring a criminal case. Dems called the leak political, noting it coincided with the eve of the Democratic convention and the 9/11 report's release. Another unanswered question is what was in the documents Berger took. The report, one source said, found serious lapses in the government's response to the terror threat. It said the FBI needed better translation capabilities and that more effort should be put into monitoring foreign students. The report alleged there could be terrorist sleeper cells already operating in the United States. One reason the document is still secret may be that it said that stacks of intercepted communications between a Brooklyn mosque and suspected terrorists in Afghanistan were among volumes of raw intel that sat around untranslated.

U.S. AFFAIRS: Foreign Vote

In a closely divided nation where the last presidential contest was decided by just 537 votes, both U.S. political parties are upping efforts to court America's estimated 6 million expatriate voters. In the past, expats--especially military voters--have consistently leaned Republican. This time around, organizers for both parties say that the Iraq war has made Americans overseas more conscious of the importance of their vote, and all ballots are being contested fiercely. Diana Kerry, Democratic candidate John Kerry's sister, has hit the campaign trail everywhere from Mexico to France, Germany and Britain. And the number of countries hosting chapters of Democrats Abroad has more than doubled since the 2000 election, from about 30 to more than 70.

The Bush-Cheney team is working to woo the world, too. Former veep Dan Quayle recently traveled to Germany to stump for Republican votes, and George P. Bush, the president's nephew, is scheduled to swing through Europe and, possibly, his mother's home country of Mexico. At least one major Republican group is planning an ad campaign in foreign papers.

So far the extra attention seems to be paying off for both camps. Democrats Abroad chapters report that their voter-registration results have doubled, while Republicans say they've seen a similar increase. And overall requests for voter-registration applications from Americans living overseas have surged; with several months to go until Election Day, federal officials say more than 340,000 have already been sent out, compared with 250,000 for all of 2000. Maybe the world will have a say in this year's U.S. elections after all.

BUSINESS

Invest in Iraq

Baghdad bonds, anyone? The Iraqi financial system has begun to revive, with the reopening in late June of the Iraq stock exchange and last week's 150 billion dinar ($100 million) sovereign bond issue. The bonds are crucial because they allow the government to establish a baseline interest rate for investors. Ideally, this would encourage the creation of other investment vehicles. But in the short term, Iraqi debt and equity markets are likely to remain "a dinar affair," says Jan Randolph, chief economist for World Markets Research Centre in London. Analysts expect that Iraqi bonds will pay 5 to 8 percent interest, probably not enough to entice foreign banks, given the myriad political risks. So it's likely that the main buyers will be Iraq's own banks.

The newly reopened stock exchange is likely to remain a local market for now, too. But even though it closed during the war, its reopening has already attracted some new financial listings and should have "a powerful psychological effect," says Randolph. If the new bond issue does encourage a wave of new lending, at least there will be a place for Iraq's new businesses to list.

INTERNET: A Blog Blanket

South Korea may be one of the most wired societies in the world, but some Koreans are beginning to wonder if Seoul is truly ready to embrace that status. Last Thursday a university student in the capital was fined for posting political parodies on the Internet. In 2003 some 18,000 Web sites were censored for crimes such as "undermining law and order." And since late June, about 50 Web sites have been shut down for allegedly trying to post the video of the execution of South Korean hostage Kim Sun Il. Authorities have also blocked large Weblog services, cutting off thousands of blogs that did not offer the video. Officials claim the blanket ban is merely a technical matter: although they could shut down Korean sites, they couldn't be as targeted with foreign blogs. Bloggers, though, worry that average Koreans are coming to accept infringements on the free flow of information as normal. Kevin Kim complains on his site, Big Hominoid, that Korea "has not come far out of the shadow of its military dictatorship past." While that may be extreme, Robert Koehler, whose blog, the Marmot's Hole, is one of the most popular English-language sites about Korea, says, "there seems to be this idea among Korean Netizens that the Net [is] a forum for expressing the power of nationalism." Trying to help the country's reputation, though, may only end up hurting it.

BOOKS

Activism Lives

Hope dies last. So said retired American farmhand Jessie de la Cruz, commenting on the struggle for farmers' rights shortly before the United Farm Workers union was formed in 1962. So, too, says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Studs Terkel in his book "Hope Dies Last: Making a Difference in an Indifferent World." Just published internationally, the book captures the voices of more than 50 Americans--ranging from well-known figures like folk singer Arlo Guthrie to ordinary citizens like Andrew McNeil, a bike messenger in New York--who have lived through some of the country's most critical moments over the past century. But the book is more than just a window on America's past: the vignettes also trace an interesting perspective on the contemporary United States, a land where many liberals feel that hope has died and "passivity appears to be the order of the day." As he describes union protests in the 1930s and the civil-rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, Terkel insists that a growing body of young activists is following in the legacy of their ancestors. It is in the small acts--for instance, a woman from Chicago asking her employer to lower her salary below the taxable income and donate the rest to charity--that the American consciousness still flourishes. Indifferent to the world and passive as Americans sometimes may seem, Terkel argues, they can still be counted on to rise up and make a difference during troubled times.

MOVIES

Maria's Life as a Mule

Growing up is hard to do. Especially when the only way to make a decent living is to swallow half a kilo of heroin. "Maria Full of Grace" follows 17-year-old Maria (played by Colombian newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno) from her job dethorning roses at a flower plantation outside Bogota to New York, to which she travels as a drug mule, transporting heroin in exchange for $5,000. The work is dangerous (Maria swallows 62 grape-size latex pellets filled with heroin; if they were to burst, she would die), but the celluloid depiction of Maria's predicament is far from exaggerated--although a fictional tale, this is also real life. Each year, hundreds of mules cross borders to fuel the illicit-drug trade. They often end up in jail or dead.

Although it's his first feature film, director Joshua Marston--who also wrote the script--pulls off a documentary-like realism with the gritty cinematography one would expect of a seasoned pro. The 30-year-old from California did his research, too, consulting Orlando Tobon, a real-life hero of the Colombian community in Jackson Heights, New York, who has helped repatriate the bodies of almost 400 drug mules.

The meetings paid off: "Maria Full of Grace" is a bleak but gripping glimpse into one of the world's darker realities. The film's only fault: Marston didn't find a bigger part for Tobon, who makes just a minor cameo as Don Fernando, a character inspired by his own story.

COMICS A Mayor Takes On 'Dark Forces'

For months, Mexico City Mayor and 2006 presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has complained about his opponents' dirty tactics, suggesting that the right is conspiring against him. Now his worst fears are appearing in comic-book form. "The Dark Forces Against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador," published and distributed free of charge to 2.2 million Mexico City doorsteps, has Lopez Obrador's critics up in arms. For one, they argue, his use of city-government funds to publish it is unethical. And the comic book reeks of propaganda--Nazi propaganda at that, according to one Mexican daily.

In reality, the comics are less slanderous than shamelessly self-promotional, depicting the mayor as a stoic public servant constantly under attack by opponents--in one story line inspired by a scandal this February, a pack of monsters masterminds the videotaping of one of Lopez Obrador's ministers receiving cash from a prominent businessman. The mayor could use some help; his support declined after he denounced a June anti-crime rally as a conspiracy. And the comic format is appealing to his base of lower-middle- class Mexicans, who are not considered regular newspaper readers. Whether that'll be enough to best his enemies is still unclear.

Q&A: Matt Damon

The talented Mr. Damon is back in action as on-the-run Jason Bourne in "The Bourne Supremacy." He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Sean Smith.

The first "Bourne" gave your career a boost.

Before "The Bourne Identity" came out, the last two movies I had kind of headlined were "The Legend of Bagger Vance" and "All the Pretty Horses," and the word on the street was that "Bourne" was going to be a turkey. It was like my third strike.

Instead, it was a home run. Does being "hot" and then "not hot" make you cynical?

It was kind of like the rose-colored glasses came off. It's not personal. I understand. But, yeah, part of you is like, "F---ing a--holes!"

The studio PR machine is saying you did a lot of your own stunts.

Any time you hear an actor bragging about doing his own stunts, you know he's full of s--t. There's nothing so dangerous that you could get hurt. The only thing that scared me was some underwater stuff where I don't have a tank. It wasn't that bad, but I kept waking up in the middle of the night taking huge gulps of air.

This is your first sequel. In the fall you'll have your second, "Ocean's 12."

Yeah. I'm a whore. Nah. It's not like you're doing the sequel to some crass movie like...

I can't say it, man. You've got to say it.

"Armageddon."

[Laughs] There you go.