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Judy Dempsey LETTER FROM EUROPE BERLIN When fighters from the out- lawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party killed 24 Turkish soldiers in the eastern province of Hakkari, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, im- mediately ordered 10,000 soldiers to cross into Iraq and find the militants. ‘‘This is an operation to get results,’’ Mr. Erdogan said. Besides provoking one of the largest ground operations against the Kurdish fighters in recent years, the resurgence of the group, known as the P.K.K., shows the difficulties Ankara now faces in adjusting a foreign policy that was based on its ambitious ‘‘zero prob- lems’’ strategy in the region. ‘‘The zero problems strategy in prac- tice meant dealing with autocratic re- gimes. So when the Arab Spring happened, it exposed the fundamental flaws of that policy,’’ said Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, an inde- pendent research group in Istanbul. ‘‘The zero problem policy was over- optimistic, almost naïve in the belief that difficult problems could be solved easily,’’ Mr. Ulgen added. Turkey may now be paying the price for its belated defense of human rights in the region, most notably in Syria and Iran. Ankara is abuzz with speculation that these countries may have been be- hind the P.K.K. attacks. Syria and Iran are accused of sup- porting the P.K.K. right from the begin- ning in 1984, when the P.K.K. started fighting the Turkish state to have the 20-million-strong Kurdish population recognized as a minority within its own autonomous Kurdish region. When Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and De- velopment Party was elected in 2002, it developed a foreign policy aimed at re- aligning the country’s role in a highly volatile region consisting of the Cau- casus and the Middle East. That zero problems policy was de- signed by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in order to build strong eco- nomic, political and social ties with Turkey’s immediate neighbors. In practice, that policy meant shifting away from Turkey’s traditional reliance on the United States and its close mili- tary ties with Israel to a regionally based strategy aimed at Turkey becom- ing the main player in the neighborhood. As a first step, Ankara improved ties with the Syrian regime. Human rights played no role between Damascus and Ankara even though Ankara has used that argument to champion the rights of the Palestinians. Nothing came of an initiative to medi- ate between Israel and Syria on the Golan Heights. The lack of success was due to Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip in 2008-9, which angered the Turkish public, as much as to Ankara’s overcon- fidence in its diplomatic overtures. There were attempts, too, at negoti- ating a solution to the Iranian nuclear program, which is worrying the United States in particular. Again, Ankara paid scant attention to the crackdown on the Iranian opposi- tion, much to the disappointment of civil society movements in the region. This damaged Turkey’s foreign policy credentials, according to analysts. Its Iran initiative proved to be unsuccess- ful diplomatically. As for Turkey’s attempts at normaliz- ing relations with its neighbor Armenia, with whom diplomatic ties were severed in 1992, the zero problems policy has not lived up to expectations, either. After secret talks in Switzerland, in 2009 a protocol was signed with the hope of restoring diplomatic ties and reopening of the borders. The thaw ended soon. Azerbaijan, which traditionally has had very close ties with Turkey, was from the outset suspicious about any breakthrough. The Azeri authorities feared they would lose leverage over Armenia if restoring diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey was not linked to the resolution of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Since 1994, Nagorno-Karabakh has been held by Armenia. The ethnic Azeri population has fled the enclave, while ethnic Armenians have mostly fled Azerbaijan. As a result of Azerbaijan’s condi- tions, the talks have stalled. Instead of trying to maintain the momentum even at the risk of poorer ties with Azerbaijan, Mr. Erdogan backed away. ‘‘Turkey should have remain focused on the Armenian issue, which, after all, is its immediate neighborhood, instead of broadening its foreign policy,’’ said Richard Giragosian, director of the in- dependent Regional Studies Center in Yerevan, Armenia. ‘‘Turkey did not have the capacity for resolving the conflict with Ar- menia,’’ said Tom de Waal, a specialist on the Caucasus at the Carnegie En- dowment for International Peace in Washington. ‘‘Turkey wanted to run before it could walk.’’ Then came the Arab Spring. Suddenly, Turkey realized that it was running a serious risk of being shunned by the newly emerging demo- cratic forces because it had paid so little attention to human rights in its zero problems policy. It quickly rein- vented its strategy. Turkey was one of the first countries to aid Libya’s rebels, providing $300 mil- lion in cash, and it was one of the first to call for the resignation of the former Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. Its change of heart with Syria and Iran is even more radical. Turkey is now openly criticizing the Syrian re- gime. Its relations with Iran are also strained, especially as Ankara agreed last month to deploy part of the U.S. missile defense shield on its territory. If Turkey continues to pursue a for- eign policy anchored on human rights, it can win respect and support in the region. But no such policy can work, say analysts, if Turkey excludes the Kurds from it. E-MAIL: jdempsey@iht.com The hazards in Turkey’s new strategy IN OUR PAGES ✴ 100, 75, 50 YEARS AGO 1911 Athletics Defeat Giants NEW YORK After a five days’ enforced rest, due to a rain that made Shibe Park, Philadelphia, a huge wading pool, the Giants met the Athletics to-day [Oct. 24] at Philadelphia in the fourth game of the world’s championship baseball series, ‘‘Connie’’ Mack’s men plucking victory from seeming de- feat in the first innings. The score was 4 to 2. Al- though many thousands went over to Phil- adelphia, as many more packed Broadway and Herald square all the afternoon, watching every move on the ‘‘Evening Telegram’s’’ playograph and yelling themselves hoarse. 1936 Reich Sides With Italy Publicly MUNICH In a laconic communiqué, issued from his mountain home at Berchtesgaden following a four-hour conference there today [Oct. 24] with Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister, Chancellor Hitler announced the German govern- ment had decided to recognize the Italian empire in Abyssinia. Coming as it does on the final day of the week the Führer’s move must be added to the list of his famous ‘‘Saturday surprises.’’ It is not to be doubted that today’s communiqué will result in irritation in London, where Chancellor Hitler has no desire to cause unnecessary irritation. 1961 U.K. Prepares for Radiation LONDON Britain will supply powdered milk for its infants if Russia’s continuing nuclear tests raise to the danger level the increasing volume of radi- oactive Iodine-131 in whole milk here caused by the recent Soviet atomic blasts. Defense Minister Harold Watkinson told the House of Commons of the plan today [Oct. 24]. He said, however, that ‘‘the present level of radioactive Iodine on milk here is well below not only the danger level but what is called the warning level.’’ Radioactive Iodine-131 can damage the thyroid gland. It is taken in by cows on the grass they eat. BAZUKI MUHAMMAD/REUTERS PerilrisesinBangkok FloodingengulfedpartsofthecityonMondayaftermostofitscanalgateswereopenedonFriday,divertinganestimatedeightmillioncubicmeters of water a day around the east and west of Bangkok and down the Chao Phraya River. Since August, Thailand’s worst flooding in five decades has killed at least 356 people. Transition in a land on edge CAIRO BY NEIL MACFARQUHAR With the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia tumbling and much of the re- gion churning this past February, Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, the veter- an Saudi interior minister who is ex- pected to be elevated to crown prince this week, swept into a private Riyadh home where he had summoned leading editors and columnists to dinner. Inabelligerentmood,helecturedthem about how the Tunisians were basically French, and the Cairenes louche urban- ites, whereas Saudis were bedrock Arabs who relished their traditional political system, according to several accounts. A question about whether the king- dom would improve its dismal relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was surely coming to prominence in Egypt, ignited a tirade: Prince Nayef lambastedthequestioningjournalist,ex- coriating him as a terrorist sympathizer and raging on until 4 a.m. about the many plots targeting the House of Saud. It was a classic moment in the long public service of Prince Nayef, who has been interior minister since 1975. He is ostensibly open, Saudi experts say, yet so utterly convinced of his own world view and so bent on eradicating any real or perceived threat to the rule of his family — with particular animosity to- ward Iranians, Shiite Muslims or Islam- ist extremists — that, they say, he seems entirely unreasonable at times. But many analysts dismiss as too simplistic a popular perception that he is only a staunch champion for the many social and religious conservatives in the birthplace of Islam. ‘‘Nayef is widely seen as a hard-line conservative who at best is lukewarm to King Abdullah’s reform initiatives,’’ said an October 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable that was obtained via WikiLeaks. ‘‘However, it would be more accurate to describe him as a conservative prag- matist convinced that security and sta- bility are imperative to preserve Al Saud rule and ensure prosperity for Saudi citizens.’’ The cable goes on to describe his mul- tifaceted personality as ‘‘elusive, am- biguous, pragmatic, unimaginative, shrewd and outspoken.’’ With King Abdullah, 87, just out of the hospital for back surgery, Crown Prince Sultan dying of cancer last week with the next heir unnamed, and Saudi Ara- bia’s being perceived as the heart of the counterrevolution in an unsettled re- gion, Saudis found themselves more on edge than usual over the weekend. For the first time since the kingdom was founded in 1932, the heir died before the monarch — who in the past always chose his own successor. But in 2006, King Abdullah formed an Allegiance Council meant to decide the question of succession and at some point open it to a younger generation. Many hope the council, believed to have 33 members at present, will exer- cise its prerogative for the first time by anointing Prince Nayef. Prince Talal and other older brothers unlikely to be named king might delay it by horse trad- ing. But it could happen as early as Tues- day, to allow those attending Prince Sul- tan’s funeral to both voice condolences and to pledge fealty to the new heir. ‘‘People are really concerned about how the succession is going to proceed,’’ said Khalid Dakhil, a political analyst, noting that there was great hope the king would inaugurate the council. ‘‘The point is to have a law, to have an institution, to have a legal procedure,’’ he said. ‘‘It is a step in the direction of political and constitutional reform.’’ Prince Nayef, born in 1933, has never shown much enthusiasm for reform or open government. He displays a strong work ethic, putting in long hours at the ministry, and he does not overtly in- volve himself in his private business deals, Saudi analysts said. His sprawling ministry controls a paramilitary force of about 130,000 men, the secret security services, all the na- tional and local police, customs and im- migration, the coast guard and the bor- der guard, among other institutions. It is also responsible for the religious po- lice who ensure public respect for strict Islamic practice, like women wearing veils and stores closing at prayer times. Since the Arab uprisings began in January, his ministry has instigated crackdowns and rule-tightening. Among them has been a running dragnet to arrest anyone whose political activism might be designed to start a movement. One woman spent an un- precedented nine days in jail last spring for challenging the Saudi ban on women driving, while about half a dozen more face court cases and possible flogging. The police arrested five young activists in the past couple of weeks for putting up two short YouTube videos highlight- ing poverty and shoddy government construction. Human rights organizations estimate that thousands of political prisoners lan- guish in jail. In April, the government introduced a press law pushed by Prince Nayef that made it illegal to threaten national secu- rity or insult Islam as well as its senior representative, the Grand Mufti. ‘‘It is safer to shoot someone than to talk in the media,’’ joked Abdulaziz M. AlGas- im, a lawyer. Prince Nayef has a reputation for re- jecting any criticism of the kingdom’s puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam, which is both the main pillar of Saud rule and a source of instability. He blames Is- lamic extremism globally on the Muslim Brotherhood, feeling betrayed that the kingdom took in members while they were being persecuted by Egypt’s Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s, only to have them establish a competing political ideology. But that does not necessarily signal that he is devout. ‘‘There is a distinction between being cautious and being reli- gious,’’ said Robert Lacey, an author of two books about the kingdom. After the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, Prince Nayef infamously supported the favorite Middle East conspiracy theory that the attacks were a Jewish plot and insisted that it was impossible that 15 of the 19 hijackers could have come from Saudi Arabia, or that if they had, they were misled by the Muslim Brother- hood. ‘‘The Saudis are being framed,’’ he said at a news conference at the time. Prince Nayef reversed course with en- ergy after Al Qaeda ignited a series of bloody terrorist attacks inside the king- domin2003.HeputhisU.S.-educatedson Mohamed in charge of the effort, eventu- ally appointing him assistant minister. One brother is already his deputy, and he brought in another son, Saud, earlier this year, making his close relatives re- sponsible for the four top positions in the Interior Ministry. Yet in an interview with The New York Times in 2001, he denied that the family played favorites. Prince Nayef is believed to have eight children from at least two wives, accord- ing to a book about succession by Joseph A. Kechichian, who noted that family is- sues were notoriously difficult to con- firm. The prince is one of the powerful Sudeiri seven — seven brothers, includ- ing the late King Fahd and Prince Sul- tan, named after the tribe of their moth- er, a favorite wife of King Abdul Aziz. Prince Nayef’s identification with the conservative factions could change once he shifts away from the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of enforcing much that they hold dear, and has to ap- peal to a broader segment of society. ‘‘We tend to label these guys as liberal or conservative, Islamist or moderate, pro-U.S. or anti-U.S.,’’ said Gregory Gause, a specialist on Saudi Arabia at the University of Vermont. ‘‘Frequently we get it wrong because they do play roles in terms of constitu- encies.’’ Main contender for heir to Saudi throne seen as hard-line but pragmatic JAMAL NASRALLAH/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi interior minister, at a military show in 2008. He is expected to be elevated to crown prince this week, following the death of Prince Sultan. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 | 3THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES . . . . World News europe CANER OZKAN/REUTERS An earthquake survivor being removed on Monday from a collapsed building in Ercis. After more than 200 aftershocks rocked the area, rescuers continued sifting through debris. ERCIS, TURKEY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Five people were pulled out alive Mon- day from the rubble in eastern Turkey after a 7.2-magnitude quake leveled buildings and killed more than 270 people. Four of the five survivors were rescued after one called for help with his cellphone. Dozens of people were trapped in mounds of concrete, twisted steel and construction debris after scores of build- ings in two cities and mud-brick homes in nearby villages collapsed or were severely damaged in the earthquake. Worst-hit was Ercis, an eastern city of 75,000 that is near the Iranian border and lies in one of Turkey’s most earth- quake-prone zones. About 80 multistory buildings collapsed in Ercis. Yalcin Akay was dug out from a col- lapsed six-story building in the city with a leg injury after he called a police emer- gency line on his phone and described his location, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported. Three others, including two children, were also res- cued from the same building 20 hours after the quake struck, officials said. Later, a 21-year-old woman, Tugba Altinkaynak, was rescued after being trapped beneath rubble for about 27- hours. There was no immediate informa- tion on her condition. Her father, Nevzat, said she was at a family lunch with 12 other relatives when the quake hit. Four of them were pulled out alive earlier. After more than 200 aftershocks rocked the area, rescuers continued sift- ing through mounds of debris for the Survivors found in Turkish quake LONDON BY SARAH LYALL After a bad-tempered European sum- mit meeting on Sunday in which he was publicly berated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Prime Minister Dav- id Cameron was greeted on Monday by rebellion from members of his own political party, questioning whether Britain should be part of the European Union at all. Defying orders from the government to adhere to the party line, legislator after legislator from Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, which leads the co- alition government, fulminated in Par- liament against the European Union and its tendency, in their view, to un- fairly siphon money, sovereignty and authority from Britain. At issue was a motion, opposed by the government, calling for a referendum on whether Britain should withdraw or renegotiate the terms of its membership. David Nuttall, the Conservative member of Parliament who introduced the measure, said it was as if Britain had boarded a train that had suddenly be- gun ‘‘careering off at high speed,’’ adding on cars all the way. ‘‘You are locked in and have no way of getting off,’’ he told the House of Com- mons. ‘‘Worse still, the longer you are on the train, the more the fare goes up, but there is nothing you can do about it, as negotiation with the guards and the driver is virtually nonexistent.’’ With the leaders of all three main parties — the Conservatives and their junior coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, and the Labour opposition — all commanding backbenchers to vote against the measure, it had no chance of passing. But with debate scheduled until 10 p.m., and 70 to 90 Conservative back- benchers predicted to vote in favor, the exercise exposed a huge and potentially lethal schism within Mr. Cameron’s Conservative ranks. Mr. Cameron and his government, struggling with little result so far to pull Britain out of its continuing financial crisis, have walked a precarious line on Europe ever since taking power in 2010. To mollify the right wing of the Conser- vative Party as well as a generally Euro- pean-averse public, they have talked like euro-skeptics, criticizing E.U. bu- reaucracy and waste and speaking again and again of ‘‘British sover- eignty’’ and ‘‘British values.’’ On the other hand, despite not being part of the euro zone, they have re- mained very much a part of Europe, with an economy inextricably tied to Europe’s, and have been integral in re- cent negotiations about its financial crisis. The dispute with Mr. Sarkozy at the weekend summit meeting came when the French leader accused Mr. Cameron of lecturing and disparaging members of the euro zone, even though Britain retains the pound and does not use euros. ‘‘You have lost a good opportunity to shut up,’’ Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Cameron, according to British newspaper ac- counts. ‘‘We are sick of you criticizing us and telling us what to do. You say you hate the euro, and now you want to in- terfere in our meetings.’’ Speaking in the debate Monday, Wil- liam Hague, the foreign secretary, said the government had extracted impor- tant concessions from Europe, includ- ing a provision absolving Britain of lia- bility for future euro zone bailouts and an agreement that non-euro countries will have a say in the final bailout pack- age later this week. The government has also promised to hold a referendum on any new European treaty that would transfer additional sovereign powers from Britain to the European Union, Mr. Hague pointed out. ‘‘I believe this prop to be the wrong one at the wrong time,’’ he said. ‘‘It would cut across a European policy that I believe has the best chance of success for this country.’’ Internal battles over Britain’s rela- tionship with Europe have long divided a fractious Conservative Party. Some- times the party has succeeded in keep- ing them private; often, they have ex- ploded into public consciousness, inevitably with harmful results. The debate on Monday, wrote Tom Newton Dunn in the influential Sun tabloid, brands Mr. Cameron ‘‘as a weak incompetent who has failed to change his suicidal party one iota in 15 years.’’ He added: ‘‘Much of this is his own fault. He let the genie out of the bottle by exploiting heartfelt Euro-skepticism among many well-meaning Tories when it suited him.’’ Indeed, in The Evening Standard on Monday, Mr. Cameron took care to burnish his anti-Europe credentials, saying he was ‘‘driven as mad by the bu- reaucracy’’ as everyone else. George Eustice, a Conservative mem- ber of Parliament, said the government had not in fact been dealing effectively with the emergency. ‘‘What’s led to this current problem is a sense that the government doesn’t have any serious intention of sorting the European Union out,’’ he said. VATICAN CITY BY ELISABETTA POVOLEDO The Vatican on Monday called for an overhaul of the world’s financial sys- tems and once again proposed the es- tablishment of a supranational author- ity to oversee the global economy, saying it was needed to bring more democratic and ethical principles to a marketplace run amok. In a report issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Vati- can argued that ‘‘politics — which is re- sponsible for the common good’’ must be given primacy over the economy and finance and that existing multinational institutions like the International Mone- tary Fund had not been responding ad- equately to global economic problems. The document grows out of the Roman Catholic Church’s concerns about eco- nomic instability and the widening in- equality of income and wealth around the world, issues that transcend the power of national governments to ad- dress on their own. Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turk- son, the president of the council, said as he presented the report: ‘‘The time has come to conceive of institutions with universal competence, now that vital goods shared by the entire human fam- ily are at stake, goods which the indi- vidual states cannot promote and pro- tect by themselves,’’ he said, citing the document. ‘‘That is what pushed us.’’ The language in the document is dis- tinctively strong. ‘‘We should not be afraid to propose new ideas, even if they might destabilize pre-existing balances of power that prevail over the weakest,’’ the document states in its conclusions. The message prompted comparisons to the rallying cries of protest move- ments that have been challenging the fi- nancial world order, like the indignados in Madrid and the protesters in New York and other cities around the world. Still, Vatican officials said the docu- ment was not a manifesto for dissidents. ‘‘The document proposes ideas that seem to be in line with those proposed by the indignados, but really we are in line with the Magisterium of the church,’’ said Bishop Mario Toso, secre- tary to the pontifical council, referring to the church’s teaching authority. ‘‘It is a coincidence that we share some views.’’ The document is a reminder that the Catholic Church, without getting direct- ly involved in policy making, still seeks to shape its principles. ‘‘To function correctly, the economy needs ethics, and not just of any kind, but one that is people-centered,’’ the document states, paraphrasing an en- cyclical that Pope Benedict XVI issued in 2009 calling for greater social respon- sibility in the economy. Though the pope was not involved in drafting the document, ‘‘the Holy Father and the Holy See are following these matters with particular concern,’’ Car- dinal Turkson said. He added that the pope was ‘‘constantly calling not just for joint action but for examination of every facet of the problem: social, economic, cultural and spiritual.’’ The cardinal noted that the document wastimedto‘‘makeacontributionwhich might be useful to the deliberations of the G-20 meeting’’ next week in Cannes but was also directed ‘‘to the entire world.’’ The report is highly critical of ‘‘an economic liberalism that spurns rules and controls’’ and fuels social injustice. International institutions must become ‘‘more representative, and with greater levels of participation and legitimacy,’’ Bishop Toso said, to achieve ‘‘free and stable markets regulated by an appro- priate legal framework and working to- wards sustainable development and so- cial progress for everyone.’’ ERCIS DISTRICT MERKEZI DISTRICT TURKEY IRAN Tabanli Lake Van Lake Ercek Van Celebibagi Ercis Site of earthquake 30 km TURKEY Black Sea DETAIL IRAN IRAQ missing as family members waited anxiously nearby. Cranes and other heavy equipment lifted slabs of con- crete, allowing residents to dig for the missing with shovels. Generator- powered floodlights ran all night so the rescues could continue. Aid groups scrambled to set up tents, field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to re-enter their homes. Many exhausted residents spent the night outside, light- ing fires to keep warm. ‘‘We stayed outdoors all night,’’ Serpil Bilici said. ‘‘I could not sleep at all.’’ Referring to her 6-year-old daughter, she added: ‘‘My children, especially the little one, were terrified. I grabbed her and rushed out when the quake hit, we were all screaming.’’ The bustling, larger city of Van, about 90 kilometers, or 55 miles, south of Er- cis, also sustained substantial damage, but Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said search efforts there were winding down. Mr. Sahin said he expected the death toll in Ercis to rise, but not as much as initially feared. He said rescue teams were searching for survivors in the ru- ins of 47 buildings where dozens could be trapped, including a cafe. Rescue and relief efforts continue as thousands are left without shelter Vatican is urging overhaul of global financial systems Embargo may force WikiLeaks to close LONDON BY JOHN F. BURNS Julian Assange, founder of the anti- secrecy organization WikiLeaks, said Monday that a 10-month ‘‘financial blockade’’ that has sharply reduced donations to his Web site could force it to shut down by the end of the year. Calling the blockade a ‘‘dangerous, oppressive and undemocratic’’ attack led by the U.S. government, he said at a news conference that it had cost Wiki- Leaks ‘‘tens of millions of dollars.’’ ‘‘If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade,’’ he said, ‘‘we will not be able to continue by the turn of the new year. If we don’t knock down this blockade, we will not be able to contin- ue.’’ Financial companies including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Un- ion have refused since the end of last year to allow their systems to be used for donations to WikiLeaks, he said, de- stroying ‘‘95 percent’’ of its revenue and leaving it running on cash reserves for the past 10 months. An aide said dona- tions were running at less than $10,000 a month. Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks had been forced to halt the work necessary to pro- cess tens of thousands of secret docu- ments it has received, instead mounting lawsuits in the United States, Australia, Scandinavian countries and elsewhere, as well as filing a formal petition with the European Commission, to try to re- store donors’ ability to use normal fi- nancing routes. WikiLeaks publishes previously un- disclosed documents from whistle blowers and others. It drew worldwide attention last year when it released or passed to media organizations huge slices of secret U.S. government cables on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the media organizations the group worked with were The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian. Mr. Assange held the news confer- ence while in London on a brief break from his effective house arrest on a country estate a two-hour drive from the city. Limits on his movements are part of the bail conditions imposed on him last year while British courts decide whether to extradite him to Sweden over accusations that he sexually abused two women during a visit in the summer of 2010. A British appellate rul- ing on the extradition, pending for months, is expected at any time. At the news conference Monday, Mr. Assange said both he and WikiLeaks were the victims of a ‘‘conspiracy to smear and destroy’’ them that had been led by the U.S. Treasury, U.S. intelli- gence agencies and ‘‘right wing’’ forces including powerful financial corpora- tions led by Bank of America and its Visa credit card division. He told report- ers that the attack had also included ‘‘high-level calls’’ for the assassination of him and others associated with Wiki- Leaks, though he offered no details to support the allegation. The finances of WikiLeaks, and of Mr. Assange personally, have been part of the controversy that has swirled around the organization for the past year, since it began its release of secret Pentagon and State Department documents with a video it called ‘‘Collateral Murder,’’ an edit of in-cockpit footage from an Apache helicopter in Baghdad that mounted an attack that killed several Iraqis, including two Reuters journa- lists. Internal disputes at WikiLeaks led to the resignations of several of Mr. As- sange’s closest associates, and one of the issues they raised concerned his maintaining tight, even secretive con- trol of WikiLeaks’ finances. Earlier this year, the Wau Holland Foundation, an organization that has operated as a channel for WikiLeaks donations, issued a report saying that WikiLeaks raised a total of $1.8 million in 2010 and spent slightly more than $550,000, leaving an apparent surplus of about $1.3 million at the start of 2011. A representative of Wau Holland who appeared with Mr. Assange on Monday said its work in raising and channeling donations had also been halted by the American financial measures, but Wau Holland did not reply immediately to a request sent after the news conference by e-mail seeking details of WikiLeaks’ current financial status. The sense of an organization in in- creasing financial desperation was heightened last month when a collection of memorabilia associated with Mr. As- sange was put up for sale on eBay. The items included a sachet of coffee Mr. As- sange smuggled out from Wandsworth Prison, where he was briefly held before bail was set in the extradition case, and an ‘‘exclusive’’ photograph of Mr. As- sange at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, where he has been sequestered during his months on bail. The highest bid offered for the sachet was £320, or $510, while the starting price for the photo- graph was set at £600. It sold for £1,271. A laptop computer said to have been used in the preparation of the secret U.S. government cables that WikiLeaks released was posted at a ‘‘buy it now’’ price of £350,000, with the opening bid set at £6,000. It received no bids. Gang members were minority in English riots LONDON REUTERS Those who took part in rioting in Eng- land this summer were younger, poorer and less educated than most Britons, but only a minority were gang members, contrary to claims by politicians, accord- ing to official data released on Monday. Five days of serious disorder in cities across England in August were dissip- ated only by the deployment of thou- sands of police officers on the streets. Prime Minister David Cameron blamed ‘‘criminality,’’ saying that street gangs were at the heart of the problem, and he rejected accusations that gov- ernment austerity measures had alien- ated youths in poorer communities. But an analysis by the Home Office and the Justice Ministry of those arres- ted during and after the riots showed that gangs had not been a major factor. Only 13 percent of those arrested na- tionwide were reported to have been af- filiated with a gang, and most police forces outside London registered a fig- ure below 10 percent. ‘‘Where gang members were in- volved, they generally did not play a pivotal role,’’ the Home Office report said, although it said there were ex- amples of some orchestrated problems. The analysis, based on data available through mid-October, showed that there were over 5,000 crimes recorded during the five days of rioting, with almost 4,000 arrests. Nearly 2,000 people appeared in court. Most offenders or suspects came from socially deprived backgrounds and had criminal records. Half of those appearing in court were under 20, with a quarter aged 10 to 17. Of the adults, 35 percent were jobless, compared with a national average of 12 percent. LUKE MACGREGOR/REUTERS Julian Assange said Monday that Wiki- Leaks was under a ‘‘dangerous’’ attack. Cameron’s own party rebels at his stance on U.K.’s membership PARBUL, TV VIA REUTERS David Cameron heard a raft of E.U. com- plaints from Conservatives on Monday. Conservatives vent frustration at E.U. INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE4 | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 . . . . world news europe africa BRIEFLY Europe ZURICH Rightist party loses ground, paving way for power struggle The rightist Swiss People’s Party has lost support in a parliamentary elec- tion, paving the way for inter-party haggling as different groups seek to have the greatest representation in the power-sharing government. The party lost about 3.6 percentage points from the last election, but it was still on track to be the biggest party, with 25.3 percent of the vote, according to a projection by Swiss television after the Sunday election. The party’s nearest rivals, the center- left Social Democrats, are expected to take 17.6 percent of the vote, 1.9 percent less than in the 2007 election, though they were still set to increase by one their number of seats in Parliament. Support for the new, smaller Green Lib- eral Party and Conservative Democrats stopped the Swiss People’s Party’s as- cent, and suggests that the public is tir- ing of its relentless campaigning against immigration. (REUTERS) KIEV Authorities open another case against former prime minister Efforts to free former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko from prison ap- peared to suffer a setback Monday when Ukrainian authorities announced that they had opened another criminal investigation against her. Ms. Tymoshenko, the country’s top opposition leader, was sentenced this month to seven years in prison after be- ing convicted of abuse of office in a case that the United States and the Euro- pean Union condemned as politically motivated. The prosecutor general’s office said Monday that it had revived an investi- gation into allegations that Ms. Ty- moshenko embezzled 25 million hryvna, or about $3 million, and evaded 20 million hryvna in taxes when she headed an energy company about 15 years ago. (AP) PRAGUE Legalizing medical marijuana is studied A government advisory body in the Czech Republic is working on a new law to legalize growing and consuming medical marijuana. The experts pro- posed Monday that marijuana be ex- ported or grown locally by registered firms licensed for such activity. (AP) PARIS BY MARLISE SIMONS Antonio Cassese, who helped found two international war-crimes tribunals and who was often described as the chief ar- chitect of modern international criminal justice, died on Saturday at his home in Florence. He was 74. He had had leukemia. After receiving the diagnosis some years ago, he under- went taxing treatments but worked ever harder, staying late in his office, writing on weekends and helping students. In books, law journals and decisions from the bench, Mr. Cassese expanded the body of international law that had lain mostly dormant since the Nurem- berg and Tokyo trials after World War II. He taught law at the University of Florence, the European University In- stitute and the University of Oxford. In 1993, he became the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a court established by the United Nations to deal with war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990s. He proved to be something of a mav- erick among normally discreet justices. Invariably affable but outspoken, he prodded fellow lawyers and Western governments into providing more sup- port for the fledgling tribunal. And he played a central role in defining rules that would guide it and that have since served as a model for other tribunals and courts. Among his early decisions, seen as controversial at the time but widely ac- cepted since, were several that changed basic precepts of international criminal law. One was that war crimes could be punished not only in wars between na- tions, but also in conflicts within a par- ticular country. In another, he wrote that even if there was no war going on, massacres, torture and other atrocities committed by governments or groups could be found to be crimes against hu- manity and punished accordingly. ‘‘Perhaps more than any other per- son, Antonio Cassese was both the vis- ionary and the architect of international criminal justice,’’ said Theodor Meron, an American judge who will take over next month as president of the Yugoslavia tribunal. Most recently, Mr. Cassese was pres- ident of the Special Tribunal for Leba- non, created by the United Nations to try those accused of killing Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri and 22 others. He resigned as president this month as his health failed but stayed on as a judge. Claude Jorda, a former judge from France at the Yugoslavia tribunal, said that when Mr. Cassese arrived in The Hague, he was a great legal scholar with no idea what it meant to be a judge. ‘‘But he did know that the new tribunal was theoneandperhapsonlychancetomake international justice work,’’ Judge Jorda said. ‘‘Failure was unthinkable to him.’’ Mr. Cassese, who was born on Jan. 1, 1937, in Atripalda, Italy, had hoped to study philosophy or sociology. He said his father, whom he once described as an impecunious civil servant, urged him to pursue a more secure career. He chose law; a bonus was that he was offered free board and lodging at the University of Pisa if he did so. In an essay called ‘‘Soliloquy,’’ a per- sonal history, he wrote that he initially found it difficult to learn the hard disci- pline and the rigorous logic of law. But eventually he became known for schol- arly work ranging from numerous es- says to books including ‘‘The Tokyo Tri- al and Beyond: Reflections of a Peacemonger,’’ based on his conversa- tions with a Dutch judge, B.V.A. Roling. Mr. Cassese won many awards for his work, including the 2009 Erasmus Prize in the Netherlands. He used the prize money to help law students publish their papers. He was editor in chief of The Oxford Companion to International Criminal Justice, a reference work, and founded The Journal of International Criminal Justice, which became a pres- tigious forum for debate. Mr. Cassese insisted on the need for continuous debate because internation- al law was gradually emerging, and as such, reflecting the common conscience of mankind. But he said it was vital to re- main skeptical about harsh laws. ‘‘Laws may and should be improved if they are not up to reality,’’ he said frequently. To remind himself, he kept these words from Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and poet, on his office wall in The Hague: ‘‘I am by nature a man who is difficult to control. I reject with out- rage any authority that does not rest on my respect. And I regard laws only as provisional and changeable proposals for regulating human intercourse.’’ Patricia M. Wald, a former U.S. judge who also served on the Yugoslavia tribunal, said, ‘‘There are moments in history when one individual can make a great difference, and he was such a man.’’ OBITUARY Antonio Cassese; helped develop law on war crimes 2 Nairobi explosions fuel fear of terrorism BEN CURTIS/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Kenyan police officers guarding the scene of what they suspected to be a grenade blast at a pub in central Nairobi on Monday. A second blast hours later reportedly killed at least one. NAIROBI FROM NEWS REPORTS Two explosions struck Nairobi on Mon- day, killing one person and increasing fears that Islamist militants from So- malia were acting on threats to terrorize the city after Kenya sent hundreds of troops into Somalia last week. The Kenyan Red Cross said one per- son was killed and eight wounded in an attack Monday night, The Associated Press reported, after a grenade attack early in the morning had wounded at least a dozen people in a bar in Nairobi, the police said. Part of Nairobi’s business district was cordoned off by police officers and sol- diers investigating the first attack, which took place at a small, back-street pub. There were few outward signs of an attack, but crowds of people tried to see what some Kenyans feared could be a series of terrorist strikes. ‘‘We have been expecting this,’’ said Samson Njoroge, a business executive among the onlookers. ‘‘This may be just the beginning of something else.’’ Over the past few days, the Kenyan public had been warned about possible terrorist attacks aimed at shopping malls and nightclubs, and the U.S. Em- bassy issued a warning Saturday that it had received information of ‘‘an immi- nent threat of terrorist attacks’’ and specifically advised Americans to stay away from malls and nightclubs. But the attacks Monday still took people by surprise. The pub where the first occurred is small, relatively un- known and tucked away down a back-al- ley street. ‘‘The other big buildings have securi- ty, so they take advantage of such back- streets,’’ Mr. Njoroge said. ‘‘It’s scary.’’ According to Kenyan police officials and the owner of the bar, a man hurled a hand grenade into the nightclub about 1 a.m. No one immediately claimed re- sponsibility for the attack, and the po- lice did not announce any arrests. Police officials said nothing was being ruled out and refrained from blaming Al Shabab, an Islamist militant group in Somalia. Of the dozen or so people wounded, the police said three were in serious condition. Inside the bar, a wall was cratered with pockmarks said to have come from grenade fragments. A video from the bar earlier in the day posted on YouTube showed pools of blood between a scramble of fallen beer bottles. ‘‘We are shocked,’’ said Charles Mwaura, the owner of the pub, who de- scribed his joint as a ‘‘common-man’s place.’’ ‘‘We can’t understand why,’’ he said. Mr. Mwaura said that at the time of the attack the bar was mostly empty and that he himself had already knocked off for the evening. ‘‘We couldn’t expect such a thing at this hour,’’ he said. Last week, Al Shabab, which is fight- ing Kenya, the African Union and assor- ted independent militias, threatened to attack Nairobi in retaliation for the Kenyan incursion into Somalia to attack Shabab positions. ‘‘Do not let the flames of this war spill into your country,’’ the group warned in a statement. Al Shabab has also threatened Burun- di, which has contributed thousands of soldiers to the African Union peace- keeping force in Somalia. Burundian troops sustained heavy losses last week in a battle against Al Shabab in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, and Al Shabab released photographs of dead Burundian peacekeepers, some with their heads chopped off, one with a huge machete plunged into his chest. ‘‘You now have a choice to make,’’ Al Shabab told Burundi on Monday. ‘‘Either you call for the immediate with- drawal of your troops from our country, or you shall receive the bodies of your remaining sons delivered to you in bags. Think long. Think hard.’’ Kenya’s news media have voiced sup- port for the country’s incursion into So- malia, which has been a source of in- stability for years. In the past two months four Westerners have been kid- napped from Kenya. Kenyan officials have said that Somali militants are threatening Kenya’s econ- omy, which depends hugely on tourism. Some Kenyans seemed to agree Mon- day and said they supported the Kenyan military operation in Somalia. ‘‘It’s a good thing, because if they go on coming to attack our people, our economy will go down,’’ said Joy, 22, a woman who sells mobile phones near the scene of the attack and who did not want to disclose her last name. ‘‘We hope there will be peace.’’ But compared with some of Kenya’s neighbors, including Ethiopia, Uganda and South Sudan, Kenya’s military has scant experience waging war, and there are worries that the country has bitten off more than it can chew. ‘‘They are just jumping into confu- sion,’’ said Thomas Gasheru, 30, a taxi driver in Nairobi. ‘‘We should choose another way.’’ (AP, IHT) Islamist attacks foreseen in retaliation for Kenya’s incursion into Somalia after Colonel Qaddafi’s capture estab- lish that he was killed shortly after fight- ers captured him Thursday, following a NATO airstrike on a Qaddafi-armed convoy leaving Surt, where he had spent two months as a fugitive following the fall of Tripoli, the capital. One of his feared sons, Muatassim, also was cap- tured in Surt and killed, apparently while in custody. The videos showed victorious fighters manhandling Colonel Qaddafi, who ap- peared bleeding and distressed but con- scious, after they pulled him from a large drainage pipe where he had hid- den after the NATO assault destroyed part of his convoy. Subsequent video shows his abused corpse, with at least one bullet wound to his head. Transitional National Council mem- bers have said Colonel Qaddafi was killed during a gunfight between his captors and Qaddafi loyalists in Surt. But the testimony of the videos casts doubt on that explanation. ‘‘In response to international calls, we have started to put in place a com- mission tasked with investigating the circumstances of Muammar Qaddafi’s death in the clash with his circle as he was being captured,’’ Mr. Abdel-Jalil told journalists in the eastern city of Benghazi, the birthplace of the revolu- tion that ousted Colonel Qaddafi in late August. On Sunday, Mr. Abdel-Jalil formally proclaimed to thousands of revelers in Benghazi that the revolution was offi- cially over. The announcement laid the basis for elections and a new govern- ment within 20 months, but left un- answered the enormous challenge con- fronting the interim leaders over how to disarm and unify the brigades of anti- Qaddafi fighters who brought him down and are a law unto themselves. While Libyans nationwide have been celebrating Colonel Qaddafi’s death, Mr. Abdel-Jalil also said many were disap- pointed that he would not stand trial for the crimes committed during his brutal 42-year tenure. He also offered a possi- ble new explanation for how Colonel Qaddafi died, suggesting that his own men may have killed him so that he would not implicate them in his litany of atrocities. ‘‘Let us question who has the interest in the fact that Qaddafi will not be tried,’’ he said. ‘‘Libyans want to try him for what he did to them, with executions, imprisonment and corruption. Free Libyans wanted to keep Qaddafi in pris- on and humiliate him as long as possi- ble. Those who wanted him killed were those who were loyal to him or had played a role under him. His death was in their benefit.’’ There was no immediate comment on Mr. Abdel-Jalil’s announcement from the brigade of fighters from the port city of Misurata credited with capturing both Colonel Qaddafi and his son and taking their bodies to Misurata. The city suffered enormously from attacks by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces during the height of the seven-month revolution. Authorities in Misurata have put the deteriorating corpses of both Colonel Qaddafi and his son on public display in a meat locker while they have argued over where and when to bury them. As of Monday evening, there was no reso- lution. Reuters reported from Misurata that both corpses were beginning to darken and decompose. Guards have been dis- tributing surgical face masks to visitors to help minimize the smell. Over the weekend, another Qaddafi son Seif al-Islam, who remains at large, issued a vow from an undisclosed loca- tion to avenge his father. ‘‘We continue our resistance,’’ he said in an audio message broadcast by Al Ar- rai, a Syrian television station that had also broadcast Colonel Qaddafi’s screeds against his enemies while he was a fugitive. ‘‘I’m in Libya, alive, free and intend to go to the very end and exact revenge,’’ the audio message said. ‘‘I say go to hell, you rats and NATO behind you. This is our country, we live in it, and we die in it, and we are continuing the struggle.’’ Adam Nossiter reported from Benghazi, Libya, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Kareem Fahim contribute report- ing from Surt, Libya. New leaders to investigate Qaddafi’s death amid mob LIBYA, FROM PAGE 1 FRANCOIS MORI/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the chairman of the Transitional National Council, acknowledged calls by foreign powers and rights groups for an investigation into how Colonel Qaddafi died. THAIER AL-SUDANI/REUTERS Guards distributed surgical masks in the freezer where the body of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, center, is being stored in Misurata. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 | 5THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES . . . . africa middle east americas world news Moderate Tunisian Islamists lead in vote TUNIS BY DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK A moderate Islamic party appeared to emerge as the big winner in Tunisia on Monday as preliminary results leaked out in the voting for an assembly to draft a constitution and shape a new govern- ment in this small North African coun- try, where a revolution in January in- spired uprisings across the Arab world. The party, Ennahda, won at least 30 percent of the votes cast on Sunday, and officials of the party said at a news con- ference that it had come out ahead in nearly every voting district. Ali Laredi, a top official of the party, said it expect- ed to receive possibly more than 50 per- cent when the final results were tallied. Calling his party ‘‘the most modern- ist’’ Islamic political movement in the Arab world — meaning the most com- mitted to principles of democracy and pluralism — Mr. Laredi predicted that it would now ‘‘lead the way’’ for others around the region. Ennahda officials were already begin- ning discussions to form a unity govern- ment with the four or five other more lib- eral parties that were expected to get representation in the assembly. Millions of Tunisians cast votes in the election, which was widely watched as the possible pioneer for votes in Egypt and Libya, where longtime autocrats were ousted by uprisings energized by Tunisia’s revolution. There had been some expectation that Ennahda would to win at least a plurality of seats in the assembly. The party’s leaders had vowed to create an- other kind of new model for the Arab world, one reconciling Islamic prin- ciples with Western-style democracy. Final results are expected to be com- puted within days. In the meantime, those still struggling through the postrevolutionary uncertainty of places like Libya and Egypt watched Tunisia ‘‘with a kind of envy,’’ said Samer Soli- man, a professor at the American Uni- versity in Cairo and an Egyptian politic- al activist. Libyans and Egyptians acknowledge that Tunisia was not only the first but also the easiest of the Arab revolutions, because of its relatively small, homo- genous, educated population and be- cause of the willingness of the Tunisian military to relinquish power. The suc- cess of Tunisia offers inspiration, but perhaps few answers, for Egyptians or Libyans who hope to follow in its foot- steps. Libya’s interim leaders on Sunday proclaimed their revolution a success and laid out an ambitious timetable for the election of their own constituent as- sembly. But they have yet to solve the problem of unifying the loosely organ- ized brigades of anti-Qaddafi fighters under the control of an interim author- ity to govern Libya until then, much less lay the groundwork for elections. And with Egypt a little more than a month away from a vote for a new par- liament, its interim military rulers have so far balked at adopting many of the election procedures that enabled Tunisia’s election to proceed smoothly. Among them are inking voters’ fingers to ensure people vote only once, trans- parent ballot boxes, a single election day rather than staggered polls, and weeks of voter education before the bal- loting. Also, in Egypt, the interim mili- tary rulers have not agreed to relin- quish any of the army’s power over either the next parliament or a planned constitutional panel. For Tunisians, though, the scenes at the polls on Sunday — a turnout far above expectations, orderly lines stretching around blocks, satisfied smiles at blue-inked fingers — already seemed to wipe away 10 months of anxi- ety and protests over the future of the revolution that ousted Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. For the first time in their his- tory, many Tunisians said, they expect an honest count of their ballots to deter- mine the country’s future. ‘‘Today is the day of independence,’’ said Amin Ganhouba, 30, a technician. ‘‘Today we got our freedom, and our dignity, from the simple act of voting.’’ In a statement issued after the polls closed on Sunday, President Barack Obama congratulated Tunisians for ‘‘the first democratic elections to take place in the country that changed the course of history and began the Arab Spring.’’ BEIRUT BY ANTHONY SHADID AND STEVEN LEE MYERS Robert S. Ford, who as the U.S. ambas- sador to Damascus has played a high- profile role in Syria since the uprising began there this year, has left the coun- try after receiving ‘‘credible threats against his personal safety,’’ U.S. Em- bassy officials said Monday. The departure was just the latest turn in the tumultuous tenure of Mr. Ford, whose visits to restive cities like Hama and attendance at a funeral for a slain activist have made him a visible figure. Syria responded later in the day by re- calling its ambassador to Washington, The Associated Press reported. Since the uprising erupted in March, Mr.Fordhasbeenvocalinhiscriticismof the government crackdown, even post- ing statements on his Facebook page. Haynes Mahoney, chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, said no date had been set for Mr. Ford’s return and cautioned that his departure did not mean that the United States had formal- lywithdrawnMr.Ford.Mr.Mahoneywill act in Mr. Ford’s place while he is gone. ‘‘We’re focusing particularly on the incitement in the media, an incitement campaign, I should say, conducted by the Syrian regime, which we hope will stop,’’ Mr. Mahoney said by phone. ‘‘At this point, we can’t really say when he will return. I hope it will be soon. But it will depend on our assessment of the in- citement and the security situation.’’ Mr. Mahoney declined to specify the threats, though Mr. Ford has frequently been a target of sharp government crit- icism in the state news media. Mr. Ford, who arrived this year to fill a post that had been vacant since 2005, traveled to Hama in July, when govern- ment forces had withdrawn and demon- strations had begun. The visit appar- ently infuriated the government and, weeks later, a released prisoner said in- terrogatorshadsoughtthenamesofSyr- ians seen in videos escorting his car. Steven Lee Myers reported from Wash- ington. Party wins at least 30% and begins unity talks with more liberal groups ZOHRA BENSEMRA/REUTERS Tunisians gathered in Tunis on Monday to demonstrate against the moderate Islamic party Ennahda. Officials of the party said that it was leading in nearly every voting district. BRIEFLY United States NEW YORK Suspect pleads not guilty to Saudi assassination plot An Iranian-American man who U.S. of- ficials say has links to Iran’s security forces pleaded not guilty in federal court Monday to plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington in a bomb attack. Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, who was ar- rested Sept. 29 in New York, faces sev- eral charges, including conspiracy to murder a foreign official, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to commit an act of terror- ism. Another man, Gholam Shakuri, was also charged in the plot but is be- lieved to still be in Iran. U.S. prosecutors accused the two men of planning to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, by planting a bomb in a Washington restaurant. The Iranian government denies any involvement. (REUTERS) WASHINGTON Last of big Cold War bombs to be dismantled in arms cuts The United States will dismantle the last of its Cold War-era B53 nuclear bombs this week, the most destructive weapon in the country’s arsenal, the National Nuclear Safety Administra- tion said Monday. The 10,000-pound, or 4,500-kilogram, bomb is the size of a minivan and con- tains about 300 pounds of high explo- sive surrounding a uranium core. It was designed to be dropped from a B-52 bomber and produce an explosion 600 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Dismantling nuclear weapons is part of President Barack Obama’s goal to re- duce their role in U.S. national security, Thomas D’Agostino, the under secre- tary of energy for nuclear security and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a state- ment. (BLOOMBERG) CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE South Pole engineer heading home A sick American engineer who was air- lifted from the South Pole to New Zea- land says she is making her way back to the United States. Renee-Nicole Douceur was evacuated two months after she began experiencing vision, language and memory problems while working at the National Science Foun- dation’s South Pole research station. Doctors believe she had a stroke. (AP) Economic prosperity helps re-elect Argentine leader BUENOS AIRES BY ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO President Cristina Fernández de Kirch- ner has cruised to re-election, riding Ar- gentina’s wave of economic prosperity in her quest to continue the political dy- nasty begun by her late husband, Néstor Kirchner. As recently as two years ago, Mrs. Kirchner had seemed like a long shot to win a second four-year term. Her com- bative style, highlighted by a heated dis- pute over agricultural export taxes, sent her approval ratings below 30 per- cent. Economists predicted doom for the subsidy-heavy economic model first orchestrated by Mr. Kirchner to help the country recover from its economic col- lapse in 2001; rising inflation and accu- sations of doctored economic statistics clouded her prospects. But on Sunday, one year after her hus- band died of a heart attack, Mrs. Kirch- ner, Argentina’s first elected female president, completed a remarkable political turnaround. With about 97 per- cent of voting stations tabulated, she was leading with about 54 percent of the vote, while her closest challenger, Her- mes Binner, with the Broad Progressive Front, had about 17 percent. The ample margin would be enough to avoid a run- off and be the widest victory since de- mocracy was restored in 1983. In a speech late Sunday in Plaza de Mayo, Mrs. Kirchner called for national unity and thanked the ‘‘multitudes of young people’’ who supported her. The economy emerged as the central issue on voters’ minds. By many mea- sures, Argentina is booming: the econo- my is expected to grow 8 percent this year, the fastest growth in Latin Amer- ica; employment has reached record levels; and the poverty rate has been cut by more than half since 2007, the gov- ernment said. The country continues to benefit from heavy government spend- ing, high commodity prices and demand from China for its agricultural products. Still, by re-electing Mrs. Kirchner, 58, voters seemed willing to look past some troubling signs. Inflation has soared to more than 20 percent in the past year, second only to Venezuela’s among ma- jor Latin American economies, econo- mists said. And the government has continued to govern with a heavy hand and little tolerance for opponents, in- cluding among the news media. The opposition failed to unite behind a candidate. Rivals like Eduardo Duhalde, a dissident Peronist, and Ricardo Alf- onsín,asenatorandsonofRaúlAlfonsín, the first civilian president after the dicta- torship, divided the anti-Kirchner vote. ‘‘This election really seemed to defy the normal rules of politics,’’ said Mi- chael Shifter, the president of the Inter- American Dialogue in Washington. ‘‘But that is what happens when things are going well in the economy and there is a dearth of alternatives.’’ The Argentine government has con- tinued to insist that the inflation rate is less than 10 percent, but the Internation- al Monetary Fund and private econo- mists say the government data are un- reliable. The issue has resonated less with voters because salaries have roughly kept pace with inflation, thanks to the Peronist government’s tight rela- tions with union chieftains. Mrs. Kirchner, a former senator, was first elected president in 2007 with promises to continue the economic model employed by her husband, who as president steered the country out of financial collapse but decided not to run for re-election, supporting his wife’s candidacy instead. Mr. Kirchner had hewed to a strategy of keeping Argentina’s currency, the peso, heavily devalued from its 1990s levels, a move that made exports more competitive and spurred growth in man- ufacturing. But it also entailed subsidies for food and fuel and spending on social programs to win lower-income voters. During her campaign in 2007, Mrs. Kirchner vowed to re-engage Argentina with the international community, which Mr. Kirchner had largely es- chewed while in office. He cut off talks with the International Monetary Fund after Argentina defaulted on $95 billion in foreign debts. But the promised dé- tente did not materialize, and foreign in- vestors stayed away, especially after signs emerged that the government’s statistical agency was doctoring eco- nomic data, including the inflation rate. As a result, Argentina has remained largely unable to borrow abroad, and it receives relatively little foreign direct investment, lagging behind Colombia and Peru and receiving less than half the amount flowing into Chile, accord- ing to the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Charles Newbery contributed reporting. DANIEL GARCIA/AFP President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Buenos Aires after being re-elected. U.S. envoy leaves Syria after threats to his safety Many people expressed faith that the act of voting itself would change Tunisia for the better, no matter who won. Some argued that democracy would make public officials more accountable. ‘‘The people in power know that we are keeping a watchful eye,’’ said Kamel Abdel, 45, a high school philosophy teacher voting in the crowded slum of Tadamon. Others predicted an almost magical transformation. ‘‘There is going to be social justice, freedom, democracy, and they are going to tackle the unemployment issue,’’ Mo- hamed Fezai, a jobless 30-year-old col- lege graduate, declared confidently. Hend Hasassi contributed reporting. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Partners The bestselling pan-African magazine Media Partners Sponsors In today’s fast-changing world, education is a passport to opportunity and inclusion. It is also key to resolving the many challenges faced by individuals and societies. The third World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) brings together over 1,200 innovators from more than 100 countries and multiple sectors who will seek and debate fresh solutions. Under the theme Changing Societies, Changing Education, WISE 2011 will identify best practices which empower and inspire, and which can invigorate entire education systems. Learn about these pioneering projects and ideas, and become part of our diverse and growing interactive community at: www.wise-qatar.org WISE_Tweets facebook.com/wiseqatar World Innovation Summit for Education Building the Future of Education INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE6 | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 . . . . Views editorial opinion InternationalHerald Tribune THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON Publisher InternationalHerald Tribune 6 bis rue des Graviers, 92521 Neuilly Cedex France Tel: +33 1 41 43 93 00 E-Mail: iht@iht.com Internet address: global.nytimes.com Subscriptions: subs@iht.com Tel: +33 1 41 43 93 61 Classified: +33 1 41 43 93 85 Regional Office, Asia-Pacific: #1201, 191 Java Road, Hong Kong Tel. +852 2922 1188 Fax: +852 2922 1190 The Americas: Regional Office, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018 Advertising Tel. +1 212 556 7707 Fax: +1 212 556 7706, Circulation Tel. (toll free) +1 800 882 2884 or +1 818 487 4540 Fax: +1 818 487 4550 ihtus@espcomp.com U.K.: Advertising Office, 1 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1NU Tel. +44 20 7061 3500 Fax: +44 20 7061 3529 S.A.S. au capital de 240.000 ¤. RCS Nanterre B 732021126. Commission Paritaire No. 0513 C 83099 ©2011, International Herald Tribune. All rights reserved. ISSN: 0294-8052. 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The full text of the Contributor Policy appears on the Internet at: http://www.ihtinfo.com/press/contributorpolicy.html MARTIN GOTTLIEB Editor, Global Edition ALISON SMALE Executive Editor TOM REDBURN Managing Editor PHILIP McCLELLAN Deputy Managing Editor URSULA LIU Deputy Managing Editor KATHERINE KNORR Assistant Managing Editor RICHARD BERRY Editor, Continuous News RICHARD ALLEN News Editor SERGE SCHMEMANN Editor of the Editorial Page PHILIPPE MONTJOLIN Senior Vice President, Operations ACHILLES TSALTAS Vice President, Circulation and Development CHANTAL BONETTI Vice President, Human Resources JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA Vice President, International Advertising CHARLOTTE GORDON Director of Strategy and Marketing RANDY WEDDLE Managing Director, Asia-Pacific SUZANNE YVERNÈS Chief Financial Officer Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, Président et Directeur de la Publication The United States and the Euro- pean Union should ac- knowledge that Russia is not a de- mocracy, and act accordingly. Time to lean on Russia The beauty of institutions The Euro- pean Union was created not to de- liver heav- en, but to prevent an- other hell. It’s doing just that. Israel’s occupational burdens Ronald R. Krebs As the Palestinian quest for statehood grinds on at the United Nations, those who really hold the Palestinians’ fate in their hands — the people of Israel — are more pessimistic than ever about the prospects for peace. According to a survey published in late September, two thirds of Israelis hold no hope of ever achieving peace with the Palestinians. But the poll also revealed a striking contrast: 88 percent say that Israel is a good place to live. Is- rael may be more isolated diplomatic- ally than at any time since the dark days of the 1970s, but with the Israeli economy booming and with terrorism largely under control, the vast majority of Israelis seem to believe that they can live indefinitely with the status quo. They cannot. Israel’s future — as a democratic, Jewish and prosperous state — faces real threats, but more from within than from without. The Is- raeli-Palestinian conflict does threaten Israel, but not, as the Israeli right would have it, because militant and even seemingly moderate Palestinians plan to drive the Jews into the sea. Rather, the conflict threatens Israel be- cause of the havoc it continues to wreak on the country’s internal politics. First and foremost, the ongoing occu- pation has fueled an aggressive ethno- religious nationalism that has become increasingly prominent since the second intifada. This is happening mostly because Israelis have grown de- spondent over the prospects for peace: They believe Israel has tried every- thing to end the conflict and has been repaid only with terrorism, obstruction and global opprobrium. Israelis have not felt this alone and embattled for a generation. The country’s abiding sense of anxi- ety has advanced the fortunes of, among others, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his stridently nationalist party, Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home). Together with allies in the right- wing Likud and the purportedly moder- ate Kadima, members of Yisrael Beitenu have attempted to silence Israe- li NGOs focused on human rights and civil liberties. They have passed laws that seek to restrict Israeli citizens’ right to protest the occupation by boy- cotts. And they have the independence of the Supreme Court in their sights too. Israel’s bulwarks against the forces of il- liberal nationalism are crumbling. Among the victims of this growing ethnocentrism are Israel’s Arab cit- izens, today, over 20 percent of the country’s population. Long subjected to discrimination, Arab citizens have also, in the past decade, suffered increasing hostility from the Israeli government. Since 2009, Knesset members from the three largest parties have put forward a parade of anti-Arab bills, from a man- date that all new immigrants swear an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state to a provision that would end Ar- abic’s status as an official language. It is no surprise, then, that Arab cit- izens have come to feel that they will never be treated fairly in an Israel defined as a Jewish state. In 2009 over half viewed a Jewish and democratic Is- rael as inherently racist, and nearly 75 percent endorsed using all legal means to transform Israel from a Jewish state into a binational one. It is hard to see how Jewish and Arab citizens can escape the cycle of mutual distrust and provocation as long as the occupation continues to structure Isra- el’s political discourse. The occupation has impeded a serious national conver- sation about how Israel should negoti- ate the inherent tensions between its ethno-religious and civic identities. Finally, the occupation has exacer- bated the challenge that ultraorthodox (haredi) Jews pose to Israel’s prosper- ity. Historically, haredi parties ex- ploited divisions over Israel’s territori- al future to become free-agent kingmakers, selling their support to left- or right-leaning governing coali- tions in exchange for massive commun- al subsidies. The haredi burden on the Israeli economy is large and growing, and it rightly worries those responsible for Is- rael’s economic future. But this cannot end as long as Israeli governments rise or fall on the support of haredi parties. The occupation stands at the center of these challenges to Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic and prosperous state. All is not lost, however. A centrist governing coalition could still halt Isra- el’s slide toward illiberalism, offer its Arab citizens hope for equality and justice, and compel its burgeoning haredi population to earn their keep rather than live off the state. But to do that, Israel must first pull out of the West Bank and resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. Of course, Israel cannot end the occu- pation alone. The needed Palestinian leadership has too often failed to mate- rialize. But Israel’s commitment to peace has also too often been half- hearted. Its leaders must do all they can to end the conflict — to ensure Isra- el’s very survival as the Jewish state and liberal democracy its founders en- visaged. RONALD R. KREBS is associate professor of political science at the University of Min- nesota. A longer version of this article ap- pears in the November/December 2011 is- sue of Foreign Affairs. TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES A majority of Israelis believe they can live indef- initely with the status quo. They cannot. Guy Verhofstadt Mikhail Kasyanov Twenty years ago, soon after the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia’s progress to- ward freedom and democracy seemed irreversible. As a member of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Secu- rity and Cooperation in Europe, Russia committed itself to uphold a number of democratic principles and to safeguard basic freedoms and the rights of its people. The Russian Constitution, adopt- ed in 1993, stipulates that Russia is a fed- eral democratic state committed to the rule of law. Today none of that appears to be true. The federal status of Russia was de- stroyed by Vladimir Putin’s shift to a de facto appointment of regional gov- ernors. The basic precepts of the rule of law are challenged daily as court de- cisions are subjected to the interests of the authorities. Dissenters in Russia are silenced and have no legal recourse against such oppression. Democracy in Russia is in retreat. Elections to the lower house of Parlia- ment scheduled for Dec. 4 have been undermined by the denial of official re- gistration to opposition parties repre- senting different parts of the political spectrum, the last example being the People’s Freedom Party in June. Whatever credibility these elections still had was erased by the recent an- nouncement that President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin would swap posts after the presidential election is held in March 2012. In effect, Russians are being presen- ted with a stage-managed campaign be- tween political forces loyal to the Krem- lin. Responsibility for this lies solely with the current political leadership. This poses a major challenge. Russia is an integral player in matters of global security, business and economic rela- tions. The time has come to acknowl- edge openly and honestly that Russia is not a democracy, but an increasingly fra- gile state run by an authoritarian regime that aims to bully not only its own cit- izens but also the rest of the world. It is time to hold a broad, public debate in the West on how democracy and the rule of law can be supported inside Rus- sia and how the rest of the world should relate to Russia, its rulers and Russian society, including the opposition and in- dependent civil society organizations. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 started a process that eased Cold War tensions in Europe and provided a base for civil rights movements in the Communist bloc. This historic document served as a vocal manifesto against antidemocratic regimes in Europe. We aim to initiate a new Helsinki process by opening a dis- cussion on Russian democracy — again in Helsinki — on Nov. 9-10. Practical steps we might consider in- clude refusing to accept the impending Russian elections as legitimate. Fur- thermore, Russia should not get defer- ential treatment in the Council of Europe or O.S.C.E., and the Russian parliamentary delegation should not receive a warm welcome in Strasbourg. Cooperation with Russian leaders should be conditioned on their compli- ance with international conventions to which Russia is a party. Moreover, Rus- sian officials involved in corruption and the oppression of freedom should be ex- posed to real sanctions. However awk- ward this may be for traditional E.U. realpolitik, it is reasonable in the cur- rent circumstances to consider postpon- ing the planned E.U. summit meeting with Russia scheduled for December, after the charade of the elections in the lower house of Parliament. The E.U.- Russia Partnership and Cooperation Agreement currently under negotiation should also better reflect these realities. It is time that Russia’s true friends speak out. GUY VERHOFSTADT, former prime minister of Belgium, is leader of the Liberal and Democrat caucus in the European Parlia- ment. MIKHAIL KASYANOV, former prime minister of Russia, is leader of the opposi- tion People’s Democratic Union in Russia. Roger Cohen GLOBALIST LONDON Jean Monnet, the postwar ar- chitect of European unity, once wrote: ‘‘Nothing is possible without men, but nothing is lasting without institutions.’’ When humankind fails, the best institu- tions save it from the brink. The forging of the European Union is up there with the U.S. Constitution as an act of creat- ive genius. Loving an entity is hard, given the in- tangibility of the thing, but I love the bland Brussels institutions that gave my generation a peace denied its forbears — all those young men engraved in stone and granite on melancholy town squares across Europe. It’s a measure of the success of the European Union that peace is now taken for granted by its half billion inhabitants. Nobody pauses at the memorials. These days I find my- self wanting to shout: ‘‘Remember!’’ That’s a tall order when people glide from France to Germany and onto Po- land, across the killing fields of old, without pause for a border, and the Basque separatists of ETA have just laid down their weapons in Europe’s last armed confrontation. Yet I detect a dawning sense of the gravity of Europe’s crisis — its political rather than financial peril — in the parallels being drawn between dying for Danzig in 1939 and paying for Athens in 2011. These are dangerous times. Helmut Schmidt, who as a German is hard- wired to the nature of cataclysm and at 92 knows what sacrifice brought a bor- derless Europe, declared as much the other day, lambasting ‘‘anyone who considers his own nation more impor- tant than common Europe.’’ There are plenty of such people these days, driv- en by frustration or boredom or petti- ness to the refuge of the tribe. The euro’s creation was an irrevoc- able political decision. The currency, however, had the misfortune to be birthed just as the idealism that fired Europe’s integration sagged. The feder- alist implications of a common cur- rency met the fissuring rancor of com- placent Europeans. They had been lulled by the end of the Cold War, irked by European bureaucracy and wearied by the E.U. expansion to post-Commu- nist states. The bad history uppermost in the minds of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl had faded. If ever a crisis was foretold, it’s the euro crisis. But the danger is broader. European frustration with remote, seemingly un- accountable institutions has spread in- to a wider anger against the impunity of the powerful and the richness of the ever richer. Growing numbers of people feel that the levers of globalization’s compounding advantages are manipu- lated by the privileged few. From Man- hattan to Milan, the Occupy movement is saying ‘‘Enough Already!’’ No, European leaders retort, we need more — more budget-cutting, more sac- rifice to set our houses in order after the debt-driven binge of this century’s first decade. Just as the euro had to row against an unraveling tide, so the auster- ity prescribed to save the currency now has to row against a tide of skepticism. Jean Arthuis, a French senator, gave this recent assess- ment of the state of the West: ‘‘Global- ization led us, through outsourcing, to give up our pro- ductive substance and opt for the comfort of consumption, while other states became the produ- cers of what we consumed on credit: on our side sovereign debts, on the other sovereign wealth funds.’’ Many Europeans and Americans ex- perience that shift day to day as lost jobs, the disappearance of the credit that cushioned relative decline, grow- ing disparities between rich and poor, a feeling of powerlessness, too many bills to pay, a gathering sense of injustice, and growing anger toward hapless politicians outstripped by markets they cannot control. ‘‘Capitalism is crisis,’’ says a big ban- ner of the Occupy movement at St. Paul’s in London. Indeed it is. As Joseph Schumpeter noted, ‘‘Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.’’ The trick is to convince people that crisis is creative more than it is destructive — and that’s not happening right now. The European Union was created for such a moment. It was meant to guar- antee the impossibility of the worst — not to deliver Europeans to postmod- ern bliss but to save them from the hell that began almost a century ago in 1914 and did not really stop until the Conti- nent lay in ruins in 1945. Now, thankfully, the big bazookas are financial. Roll them out, whatever the subsequent cost in inflation. Irrevocable means just that: The euro cannot be turned back. There is no soft euro exit imaginable, only mayhem and danger. Recapitalize the banks. Bulk up on the rescue fund. Turn bankers’ Greek haircuts into buzz cuts. Do whatever it takes. Germany, ushered from ruin by the European Union, must lead the safeguarding of the euro or risk the loss of the stability that it prizes above any- thing. The best institutions are also self-cor- recting mechanisms. They work like the checks and balances of the U.S. Con- stitution. They turn crisis into opportu- nity. In time the euro’s defense will de- mand a federative leap forward. That will be good for Europeans even though they cannot see it now. You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen. MALARIA VACCINE PEDDLING FEAR A vaccine to protect children against malaria has been shown moderately effective in a large clinical trial — an achieve- ment that could save millions of lives. The vaccine, known as RTS,S and made by GlaxoSmithKline, is the first ever to be shown effective against a human disease caused by para- sites. When tested in 6,000 infants aged 5 to 17 months in seven sub-Saharan nations, it reduced the risk of infection with severe malaria by 47 percent during the year after the shots, far less than the 90 percent efficacy rate typically sought for other vaccines. There are other big hurdles still to surmount. There are hints that the protection may wane over time, and results from administering a booster shot won’t be known until 2014. Side effects could pose a problem; seizures and fevers were higher among children given the vaccine. If final results of this ongoing study, which involves more than 15,000 children in all, show that the vaccine is safe and ef- fective, the goal is to deploy it in 2015. Glaxo has pledged to sell the vaccine at its manufacturing cost plus 5 percent that will be spent on research on malaria and neglected diseases. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation deserves major cred- it. Glaxo spent $300 million over 25 years to develop the vac- cine for military personnel and travelers but was unwilling to pay for pediatric trials for impoverished nations without a partner. The Gates Foundation donated $200 million to drive the research to completion, and Glaxo expects to add another $100 million of its own. The fight against malaria has made gains thanks to effec- tive drug treatments, insecticide-treated bed nets and pro- grams to spray the interior walls of houses. With the vaccine, health experts are talking with renewed optimism about eradicating malaria entirely. But it will take vigilance and money to stay ahead of resistant mosquitoes and parasites. At one o’clock in the morning Friday, in one of its rushes to get out of work and back to fund-raising, the U.S. Senate took up a measure to strip the Justice Department of the power to charge and try any non-American terrorism suspect captured anywhere in the world. It was an outrageous usurpation of executive authority and a mockery of the values on which the United States was founded. It sought to eliminate the only ef- fective tool the country has to punish terrorists, the federal courts, and create a system of unchecked military detention with no judicial or even Congressional review. And yet 47 sen- ators voted for the measure, introduced by Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican who is a favorite of the far right. The measure failed, but there is still a bill pending in the Sen- ate that is very nearly as bad. That version was attached to the annual military budget bill through a deal between Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and John McCain, the committee’s senior Republican, after G.O.P. members of the panel proposed an even worse amend- ment. Mr. Levin made the compromise despite the objections of his majority leader, Harry Reid, the Justice Department, the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon. The Senate measure would mandate military custody for any non-American citizen who is accused — not proven to be, but simply accused — of being a member of Al Qaeda, or of planning or carrying out an attack on the United States or any country deemed to be an ally at any particular time. That means that if the F.B.I. is interrogating a man who tried to blow up Times Square, and he says he is with Al Qaeda, the Justice Department would have to stop the investigation and turn him over to the military. There are so many terrible things in this bill. Here are just a few of them: It could cripple F.B.I. investigations of terror- ism suspects; it’s a step toward making permanent the Guantánamo prison, a blot on America’s reputation and an increased danger to any soldier captured in battle; there is no provision for judicial review of the decision to send a pris- oner to military detention; the government has mistakenly detained hundreds of men (that we know of) on suspicion of terrorism in the last 10 years; it’s unnecessary since civil courts have a track record of success in convicting terrorists. When the United States is finally restoring its global stand- ing after the damage of the Bush years, the measure seems sure to enrage American allies and give new comfort to its enemies. The White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon have been trying to tinker with the Levin amend- ment to lessen the damage. But the real answer — the only one that safeguards American lives and safeguards Ameri- can values — is to kill it. A vaccine against malaria has shown promising results in a clinical trial. But there are big hurdles still to surmount. Turn bankers’ Greek hair- cuts into buzz cuts. Do whatever it takes to safeguard the euro. RAQUEL MARIN TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 | 7THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES . . . . for the first 8 weeks Offer expires December 31, 2011 and is valid for new subscribers in France only. Copies are hand delivered by 7am in many key cities throughout France. The introductory rate above is available for the first eight weeks when paying by credit card. Your credit card will be automatically charged in arrears after each four-week billing period. At the end of your introductory period, delivery will continue at the regular rate unless you notify us otherwise. Subscribe to the International Herald Tribune for just ¤6.25a week with this special 8-week home delivery offer and get IHT All Digital Access for free. Worth $25per month, the IHT All Digital Access package includes full access to the IHT news apps for iPhone and iPad featuring extra videos, photo galleries and business guides, plus unlimited access to the award-winning NYTimes.com, including the Global Edition. 8 weeks for only ¤6.25 per week Save 68% off the cover price Free newspaper delivery to your home or office Full access to IHT apps for iPhone and iPad Unlimited free access to NYTimes.com SUBSCRIBE NOW: subs.iht.com/8weeks or call 00800 44 48 78 27 and quote offer code 8WKC FOR ONLY ¤6.25per week commentary letters views James Carroll In his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney walks a high wire — tethered at one end to doubts about his ideologi- cal authenticity, and at the other to prej- udice within his own party against his Mormon religion. When Romney de- livered an intensely hawkish defense policy speech at a South Carolina mili- tary college, one could speculate that he was responding to both sentiments. Not only did he ally himself with the idea — popular among evangelical Protestants — of America as a Christi- an nation with a divine mandate for global supremacy, but he also presen- ted himself as a true believer in 20th- century Cold War orthodoxy. Before the audience of cadets at The Citadel earlier this month, the Republi- can front-runner plotted a path of huge military spending increases. Even in the era of Tea Party slashing, Romney vowed to reverse both ‘‘the hollowing out of the Navy’’ and ‘‘Obama-era cuts to national missile defense.’’ He de- clared himself ready to prolong Amer- ica’s deployment in Afghanistan. Rom- ney’s broader warnings had a hysterical edge, as if the United States faces So- viet-scale threats; as if Obama’s own defense secretary weren’t Washing- ton’s most vocal defender of Pentagon spending. The ‘‘massive’’ cuts Romney referred to — a bipartisan consensus forged in the summer debt crisis — are, in fact, marginal reductions planned over the next decade to a military budget that nearly doubled over the last one. But you wouldn’t know that from Romney’s Cassandra screeches. All of this could be taken as continued Republican idolatry of an ever-immune military, yet Romney’s Cold War ana- chronism sets him apart. It would be simplistic — and perhaps unfair — to trace Romney’s exceptionalist views on defense to his religion. Yet one could hear echoes not just of Brigham Young, who saw the Mormons as agents of America’s ‘‘manifest destiny,’’ but also of the original revelation of Joseph Smith, which located the Garden of Eden in America, and expects America to be the site of Christ’s militant return. What could be more triumphalist than that? Then again, the belief that, as Rom- ney put it, ‘‘God did not create this country to be a nation of followers’’ also resonates with many American Prot- estants. Whatever the source of this be- lief, Romney thinks we Americans have become too modest. ‘‘As president of the United States, I will devote myself to an American century,’’ he declared, placing himself firmly among a second group: national-security conservatives. Never mind that America has already claimed one century; the phrase was coined by Henry Luce in 1941. But that chest thumping soon seemed false. What competition with Moscow actually set in motion in the national psyche was the farthest thing from the positive expans- iveness of a self-confident and hopeful country. During the Cold War, despite the rhetoric, there was nothing manifest about America’s destiny. Instead, the na- tion was seized by spasms of self-doubt and worst-case thinking, a dread of the future embodied in the insane manufac- ture of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The apocalyptic stridency of Romney’s speech now, so unlike the up- beat spirit of Mormonism, brings that self-defeating fear back from the grave. Worst-case planning as military doc- trine creates its own hazards, and the first American century showed that. The Pentagon’s overheated expansions were driven by a succession of ‘‘gaps’’ — bomber gap, missile gap — that defined the nightmare of Soviet mili- tary supremacy, but always turned out to be fantasies. At The Citadel, Romney warned of China’s coming naval superi- ority (neglecting to mention that China has one aircraft carrier, while the U.S. Navy has 11). Yet nothing will more forcefully push China into full-bore mil- itary competition with the United States than the anti-China weapons de- velopment Romney wants. Manifesting all the symptoms of Cold War obsess- ive-compulsive repetition, Romney sounded alarms about an all-purpose gap, in which America is universally outgunned. What he wants to fill it with is himself. To skeptics, Romney sounds like a half-baked Elvis impersonator, lip- synching away but without making any actual music. Still more absurdly, he performs this routine on his high wire, between questions about his authenti- city and his religion. But Romney has a new problem: The wire he aims to string for the nation stretches across an abyss. BOSTON GLOBE Paul Krugman If it weren’t so tragic, the current Euro- pean crisis would be funny, in a gal- lows-humor sort of way. For as one res- cue plan after another falls flat, Europe’s Very Serious People — who are, if such a thing is possible, even more pompous and self-regarding than their American counterparts — just keep looking more and more ridiculous. I’ll get to the tragedy in a minute. First, let’s talk about the pratfalls, which have lately had me humming the old children’s song ‘‘There’s a Hole in My Bucket.’’ For those not familiar with the song, it concerns a lazy farmer who com- plains about said hole and is told by his wife to fix it. Each action she suggests, however, turns out to require a prior ac- tion, and, eventually, she tells him to draw some water from the well. ‘‘But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.’’ What does this have to do with Europe? Well, at this point, Greece, where the crisis began, is no more than a grim sideshow. The clear and present danger comes instead from a sort of bank run on Italy, the euro area’s third- largest economy. Investors, fearing a possible default, are demanding high interest rates on Italian debt. And these high interest rates, by raising the bur- den of debt service, make default more likely. It’s a vicious circle, with fears of de- fault threatening to become a self-ful- filling prophecy. To save the euro, this threat must be contained. But how? The answer has to involve creating a fund that can, if necessary, lend Italy (and Spain, which is also under threat) enough money that it doesn’t need to borrow at those high rates. Such a fund probably wouldn’t have to be used, since its mere existence should put an end to the cycle of fear. But the poten- tial for really large-scale lending, cer- tainly more than a trillion euros’ worth, has to be there. And here’s the problem: All the vari- ous proposals for creating such a fund ultimately require backing from major European governments, whose prom- ises to investors must be credible for the plan to work. Yet Italy is one of those major governments; it can’t achieve a rescue by lending money to it- self. And France, the euro area’s second- biggest economy, has been looking shaky lately, raising fears that creation of a large rescue fund, by in effect adding to French debt, could simply have the ef- fect of adding France to the list of crisis countries. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. You see what I mean about the situ- ation being funny in a gallows-humor fashion? What makes the story really painful is the fact that none of this had to happen. Think about countries like Britain, Japan and the United States, which have large debts and deficits yet re- main able to borrow at low interest rates. What’s their secret? The answer, in large part, is that they retain their own currencies, and investors know that in a pinch they could finance their deficits by printing more of those cur- rencies. If the European Central Bank were to similarly stand behind Euro- pean debts, the crisis would ease dra- matically. Wouldn’t that cause inflation? Prob- ably not: whatever the likes of Ron Paul may believe, money creation isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy. Furthermore, Europe actually needs modestly higher overall inflation: Too low an overall inflation rate would con- demn southern Europe to years of grinding deflation, virtually guarantee- ing both continued high unemployment and a string of defaults. But such action, we keep being told, is off the table. The statutes under which the central bank was established supposedly prohibit this kind of thing, although one suspects that clever law- yers could find a way to make it hap- pen. The broader problem, however, is that the whole euro system was de- signed to fight the last economic war. It’s a Maginot Line built to prevent a re- play of the 1970s, which is worse than useless when the real danger is a re- play of the 1930s. And this turn of events is, as I said, tragic. The story of postwar Europe is deeply inspiring. Out of the ruins of war, Europeans built a system of peace and democracy, constructing along the way societies that, while imperfect — what society isn’t? — are arguably the most decent in human history. Yet that achievement is under threat because the European elite, in its arro- gance, locked the Continent into a mon- etary system that recreated the rigidit- ies of the gold standard, and — like the gold standard in the 1930s — has turned into a deadly trap. Now maybe European leaders will come up with a truly credible rescue plan. I hope so, but I don’t expect it. The bitter truth is that it’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed. And the even more bitter truth is that given the way that system has been performing, Europe might be bet- ter off if it collapses sooner rather than later. From Russia with lies Meanwhile ELENA GOROKHOVA In the summer of 1973, when I was 18, I camped on a Black Sea beach with a Ukrainian boy named Boris, whose blue eyes and sun-bleached hair made my knees wobble every time I looked in his direction. Had my mother dis- covered this transgression (I was sup- posed to be vacationing at my girl- friend’s family’s dacha), I would have felt a shame greater than what befell me six years later, when I betrayed my country by marrying an American and leaving Russia. But that summer, the Crimean sun, the turquoise sea and Boris’s cinnamon tan led me astray into the adult world of vranyo. Vranyo is a Russian word for lying — a special form of lying. I learned of it in a Leningrad nursery school from Aunt Polya, who was in charge of the kitchen and who wasn’t really my aunt. She loomed over us with a pitcher of warm milk and a tray with slices of buttered bread that had absorbed all the rancid smells of the kitchen, watching closely to make sure we ate and drank every- thing. We all knew she was watching us, she knew that we knew, and we knew she knew that we knew. She gave us surprise glances, and we chewed di- ligently, pretending we didn’t expect her to look. We all played the game: My sister played it at school, and my par- ents played it at work. All of us preten- ded, the watchers and the watched. When I recently opened The New York Times and saw Vladimir Putin — soon to become, once again, Russia’s president — walking out of the Black Sea with two nearly intact ancient am- phorae in his hands, the vranyo alarm went off. I immediately thought of Bor- is, who 38 years earlier dove to 75 feet, only to emerge with small amphora shards — broken pieces of necks and handles — that archaeologists working nearby offered to buy for a gallon of lo- cal wine. At the time we both wanted the wine, but somehow our respect for history prevailed, and the amphora shards sat on a shelf in my apartment in Leningrad for many years. So how was Putin able to find these artifacts? In the picture he wears a wet suit and an oxygen mask as if he had gone to great depths. But why did the am- phorae, which had presumably been sit- ting under water for 2,600 years, look so clean? The smell of vranyo was so strong I had to put down the paper. I was sure that thousands of Russians were smirking in recognition of the old pretending game: Putin was lying to us, we knew he was lying, he knew we knew he was lying, but he kept lying anyway, and we pretended to believe him. It was clear he couldn’t have found the ceramic jugs on his Black Sea dive. Numerous archaeolo- gical expeditions had been searching for these artifacts for decades. Even if there were still a few left to be dis- covered, what were the chances of the 59-year-old prime minister diving to the murky depths of millennial history? But then it occurred to me that a great number of Putin’s constituents The hole in Europe’s bucket A true believer were born during or after perestroika. They were never forced to march in an October Revolution Day parade. They didn’t grow up with only two major newspapers, The Truth and The News, or know the standard joke that there is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News. They never had an Aunt Polya to teach them about vranyo. While I envy this uncommunist genera- tion, I do see one deficiency: It has lost the ability to detect a lie. A week later, The New York Times reported that the Putin Black Sea dive was a setup. The ancient amphorae had been found during an archaeolo- gical dig and placed in six feet of water. Putin didn’t need a wet suit. All he needed to do was bend down, wrap his fingers around the handles and look in- to the camera. Did those young Russians who nev- er learned about vranyo believe in the Putin who waded out of the sea, clutch- ing history? Did they see him as a he- ro? The picture had everything to make our hearts flutter with patriotic pride: a strongman defying time and human limitations. My own heart warmed not to Putin but to the photo- graph’s Black Sea backdrop. It made me pine for my youth, for the Crimea and for blue-eyed Boris. I never told my mother about that summer, having tucked away the month of salty wind and sleeping on the beach into the dark attic of vranyo. And my mother has never asked me, pretending to be- lieve my story about a girlfriend’s dacha. ELENA GOROKHOVA is the author of ‘‘A Mountain of Crumbs,’’ a memoir about growing up in Soviet Russia, published by Simon & Schuster in 2010. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Qaddafi’s demise Despite Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s cruel denial of justice to countless vic- tims during his brutal reign over Libya, the images depicting his final moments at the hands of rebel fighters are dis- turbing. As with Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi’s violent death — and the subsequent public display of his corpse — will not mark the beginning of peace in Libya, but will result in expressions of sym- pathy for a man who deserved no sym- pathy. The new Libyan leaders have re- peatedly asserted their commitment to uphold the rule of law and to respect hu- man rights. They failed their first real test. SANDER VAN NIEKERK, THE HAGUE It’s disconcerting to hear some people express queasiness over Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s unfortunate but surely un- planned death. As the saying goes, those who live by the sword — as Qad- dafi did with brutality and viciousness — often die by the sword. One wonders if those people who claim to be unnerved by Qaddafi’s killing had objections to the deaths of the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mus- solini and the Romanian dictator Nic- olae Ceausescu. JAMES ADLER, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS We all knew she was watching us, she knew that we knew, and we knew she knew that we knew. It’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed as one rescue plan after an- other falls flat. INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE8 | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 . . . . world news united states asia CORRECTIONS • An article Oct. 7 about an Argentine woman’s grappling with disclosures that her supposed father, a lieutenant colonel, was not her father but instead was responsible for murdering her par- ents and taking her as his child during the country’s ‘‘dirty war’’ described a character in a feature film incorrectly. The film, ‘‘The Official Story,’’ was about a girl — not a boy — who was taken from her family. • An article Friday about Randi Zucker- berg, a sister of Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, referred impre- cisely to the circumstances under which Mr. Zuckerberg declined to comment for the article. After the reporter told Ms. Zuckerberg that her brother had de- clined to be interviewed, Ms. Zucker- berg said she would e-mail him. But while a representative of Ms. Zucker- berg acknowledges that she did e-mail Mr. Zuckerberg to tell him about the ar- ticle, the e-mail did not explicitly re- quest that her brother agree to an inter- view. • A series of photographs published Sept. 26 in the Fashion Special Report were not fully credited. The credit should have been Triennale di Milano/ Mauro Tosca. WASHINGTON BY PETER BAKER Tan and ruddy-faced, the U.S. secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, took his seat in a hearing room one morning this month ready for battle. The enemy, he warned lawmakers ominously, was ‘‘a blind, mindless’’ one that could ‘‘badly damage our capabilities’’ and ‘‘truly devastate our national defense.’’ Mr. Panetta meant not Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents, but a cre- ation of Congress poised to inflict what he deemed unacceptable budget cuts on a Pentagon that, he admitted, had ‘‘a blank check’’ in the decade after the at- tacks of Sept. 11, 2001. ‘‘After every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hol- lowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts that im- pacted on equipment, impacted on training, impacted on capability,’’ he said. ‘‘Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake.’’ As President Barack Obama’s C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last spring. Now, as defense secretary, he is charged with closing the books on multiple fronts — last week Col. Muammar el- Qaddafi was killed in Libya, and the last U.S. troops were ordered home from Iraq by the end of the year. But his biggest challenge ahead, in addition to guarding Mr. Obama’s na- tional security flank heading into an election year, may be retrofitting the U.S. military for a new era of austerity. The issue has been front and center on Mr. Panetta’s current Asia tour, which on Monday took him to Japan. Over the weekend, at a regional meet- ing of defense ministers in Bali, Indone- sia, he acknowledged Asian concern about Pentagon cuts and said that the United States would maintain its ‘‘force projection’’ in the region. ‘‘It is one of these watershed points,’’ former Senator David Boren, co-chair- man of the President’s Intelligence Ad- visory Board, said of the U.S. military’s present moment. ‘‘It’s just like the end of the Cold War, when you’re about to shift gears and we’re going to have to reprioritize what we have to do.’’ That daunting task has fallen on Mr. Panetta, a 73-year-old former civil rights chief, congressman, budget di- rector and White House chief of staff whose career dates to the days of Pres- ident Lyndon B. Johnson. Returning to Washington from his California walnut farm in 2009, Mr. Panetta knew little of fighting wars. What he did know was Washington institutions, a trait that made him a throwback to the so-called wise men commanding respect across party lines. Who else these days is con- firmed 100 to 0 by the U.S. Senate? But you don’t get to 100 to 0 without compromise or evolution. The Demo- crat and Cold War dove who opposed President Ronald Reagan’s contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s and President George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War of 1991 has become a war-on-terror hawk, au- thorizing more drone strikes in Paki- stan than President George W. Bush did. The critic who denounced torture dur- ing Mr. Bush’s tenure took office and ar- gued against investigating whether it happened. The co-author of the Iraq Study Group report calling for with- drawing troops recently pressed to keep more troops there. The careful positioning has made Mr. Panetta one subject on which Mr. Obama and many Republicans agree. ‘‘I’m a Leon Panetta fan,’’ said former Representative Pete Hoekstra, who is no Obama fan. ‘‘He’s fairly hawkish and aggressive on national security issues,’’ agreed Representative Mike Rogers, the House intelligence chairman. How long that lasts, of course, re- mains uncertain. Mr. Panetta is tread- ing into dangerous territory as he searches for $450 billion in defense cuts over 10 years. If a new congressional debt committee cannot forge a deficit- reduction agreement by late November, Mr. Panetta faces what he calls a ‘‘doomsday mechanism’’ mandating an additional $500 billion in cuts. The issues on the table are enormous — the financial health of a debt-ridden country, military readiness to confront a still-dangerous world and many thou- sands of jobs and contractor businesses in congressional districts around the United States. Moreover, Mr. Panetta faces a kaleido- scope of interests within his own build- ing, where officers have mastered the art of lobbying for their own programs, resisting cost-cutting lawmakers and wearing down defense secretaries. Will thistimebedifferent,orhasawar-weary electorate changed the dynamics? ‘‘The real test for the country, as well as for the administration,’’ Mr. Panetta said over breakfast in his Pentagon of- fice, ‘‘is going to be whether or not ulti- mately we can’t deliver on trying to solve the economic issues, but also de- liver on the issues that I’m involved with in terms of war and peace.’’ A son of Italian immigrants from Monterey, California, Mr. Panetta came to Washington in 1966 as a Republican and later became director of the Office for Civil Rights, until his aggressive en- forcement of desegregation prompted President Richard M. Nixon to fire him. Returning home, he switched parties and ran for Congress in 1976, rising to chairman of the House Budget Commit- tee before being tapped as President Bill Clinton’s budget director and later chief of staff. ‘‘He was a major contributor to the success that my husband had,’’ Secre- tary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview, recalling the deficit reduction package he helped negotiate that paved the way for a balanced budget. ‘‘He is a problem solver, a strong leader and manager. He also calls it like he sees it.’’ The decisions Mr. Panetta makes — whether cutting an aircraft carrier, scal- ing back the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or paring back expensive health care costs for active and retired service members — could determine whether the military could still fight two land wars simulta- neously, confront new types of high-tech warfare and fulfill promises to its veter- ans. Pentagon critics argue deep cuts would simply trim bloat. Military spending has doubled since the Sept. 11 attacks, to $688 billion from $316 billion, with 1.4 million men and women cur- rently in uniform. Even excluding the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the base budget has increased 78 per- cent in 10 years. Yet much of that growth has benefited districts of lawmakers torn between taming the deficit and de- fending jobs and businesses back home. ‘‘That is where his contacts’’ in Con- gress will pay off,’’ said Bruce Riedel, who led an Obama administration re- view of Afghanistan. ‘‘But he’s still go- ing to have to tell the services that they’ll have to do with less money.’’ If Mr. Panetta’s warnings against ex- cessive defense cuts have won favor among generals, they fit a pattern of ad- apting to whatever institution he runs. He arrived at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2009 with little experience in spycraft, yet won over a building of people suspicious of outsiders. Mr. Panetta, who in 2008 criticized Mr. Bush for turning the United States into ‘‘a nation of armchair torturers,’’ be- came a champion of the C.I.A. within the Obama administration. His advocacy of a truth commission vanished and he in- sisted on redacting legal memos author- izing harsh tactics. Those who saw Mr. Panetta as a re- former were disillusioned. ‘‘It was so disappointing to me,’’ said Ilana Sara Greenstein, a former C.I.A. officer and a vocal agency critic. ‘‘I felt like early on he just became co-opted.’’ Mr. Panetta has not shown his hand about how he plans to alter the military or his vision for what war will look like in the future. But his very appointment signaled the growing integration of intel- ligence and armed forces. During his 28- month tenure at the C.I.A., Mr. Panetta authorizeddronestrikesabout200times, underscoring the evolution of warfare. In a world of diffuse threats — rather than a cold war, he says America faces a ‘‘blizzard war’’ of myriad challenges — Mr. Panetta is the one with his finger on the trigger. And nothing prepared this Catholic school student and antiwar lib- eral for ordering someone’s death in the middle of the night. ‘‘I suddenly realized at the C.I.A. that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people,’’ he said on his plane heading to Afghanistan last summer. ‘‘In many ways, it was life-and-death decisions about an enemy who we were confronting. In this job,’’ he added, ‘‘I have to make life-and-death decisions about our people.’’ Either way, he said, ‘‘I’ve said more Hail Marys in the last two years than I have in my whole life.’’ WASHINGTON BY ADAM LIPTAK AND MICHAEL D. SHEAR Most of the Republican presidential as- pirants are issuing biting and sustained attacks on the federal courts and the role they play in American life, reflect- ing and stoking skepticism among rightists about the judiciary. Rick Perry favors term limits for members of the Supreme Court. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul say they would forbid the court from deciding cases concerning same-sex marriage. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum want to abolish the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, calling it a ‘‘rogue’’ court that is ‘‘consistently radical.’’ Criticism of ‘‘activist judges’’ and of particular Supreme Court decisions has long been a staple of political campaigns. But the new attacks are raising broader questions about how the legal system might be reshaped if one of the critics is elected to the White House next year. Mitt Romney, who has been the front- runner in opinion polls during much of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has shied away from the far-reaching comments of his rivals. At a forum in South Carolina, he dismissed the idea of a congressional confronta- tion with the Supreme Court over abor- tion, saying, ‘‘I’m not looking to create a constitutional crisis.’’ But his rivals have shown no such re- luctance. The complaints are in line with those candidates’ general opposition to federal authority. Like the elected branches of the federal government, they say, the federal judiciary has be- come too powerful and intrusive. ‘‘If you want to send a signal to judges that we are tired of them feeling that these elites in society can dictate to us,’’ Mr. Santorum said at an event in Ames, Iowa, ‘‘then you have to fight back. I will fight back.’’ Many of the candidates’ proposals concerning the federal courts would, even with congressional backing, face daunting constitutional obstacles. Yet Congress can limit spending on the courts, short of cutting judges’ salaries, and it may well be able to narrow the ju- risdiction of the federal courts in impor- tant ways. The candidates’ criticism reflects a growing desire on the right for a return to a court system that they say the coun- try’s founders envisioned. The political calculus is similar, too. The rise of the Tea Party in states like Iowa and South Carolina has created a receptive audience for candidates who raise doubts about whether the court system is hindering the causes that these voters believe in. ‘‘These threats go far beyond normal campaign-season posturing,’’ said Bert Brandenburg, executive director of JusticeatStake,aresearchandadvocacy group that seeks to protect judicial inde- pendence. ‘‘They sound populist, but the proposal is to make courts answer to politicians and interest groups.’’ The right has achieved significant vic- tories through the federal court system in recent years. The Supreme Court de- livered the presidency to George W. Bush, interpreted the Constitution to guarantee an individual right to bear arms and allowed corporations and un- ions to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. The Republican candidates have fo- cused their anger at court rulings on so- cial issues like abortion, same-sex mar- riage and the role of religion in public life. Many Republicans are looking to the Supreme Court for vindication in the political battle with President Barack Obama over his health-care overhaul. Those issues hold the potential to fire up the party’s base and to provide crucial support in the primaries. ‘‘There’s an even more dramatic overstep on the part of the courts now,’’ said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a rightist legal advocacy group. ‘‘With the grass- roots revolution on the ground and the Tea Party movement, there’s a desire for a return back to first principles.’’ ‘‘I don’t think it’s an anti-court move- ment,’’ Ms. Dannenfelser added. ‘‘It’s a purifying of the court — trying to return it to where it should be.’’ Hogan Gidley, a senior adviser to Mr. Santorum, said that on the campaign trail, the courts issue plays well with ‘‘those who care about the Constitution and the legal system.’’ ‘‘They move to the edge of their chairs,’’ he said. ‘‘They want to know what he’s going to do with the court sys- tem. It absolutely resonates.’’ In attacking the courts, the Republi- can candidates sometimes seem to hedge their vows to remain faithful to the Constitution. Many of their propos- als aimed at curtailing the power of the courts would require amendments to it. Section 1 of Article III, for instance, confers life tenure on federal judges, saying they ‘‘shall hold their offices dur- ing good behavior.’’ But Mr. Perry, in his book ‘‘Fed Up!,’’ wrote approvingly of proposals ‘‘to institute term limits on what are now lifetime appointments for federal judges, particularly those on the Supreme Court or the circuit courts, which have so much power.’’ Whatever the difficulty of achieving that change, it draws some support in legal circles. ‘‘Perry’s idea has been ad- vanced by me and numerous other aca- demic critics of the court,’’ said Paul D. Carrington, a law professor at Duke. ‘‘On this point, he is absolutely right.’’ Mr. Perry also wrote about allowing Congress to override Supreme Court decisions by a two-thirds vote. This, too, would require a constitutional amend- ment, assuming that the power of judi- cial review that the Supreme Court es- tablished in 1803 continues to be accepted. But that precedent, which gave the Supreme Court the last word in inter- preting the Constitution, has its critics. Mr. Gingrich, for instance, told the Val- ues Voter Summit in October that ‘‘judi- cial supremacy is factually wrong, it is morally wrong and it is an affront to the American system of self-government.’’ GENEVA BY NICK CUMMING-BRUCE AND CHOE SANG-HUN The United States and North Korea began two days of talks here Monday that American officials have said will test the ground for a possible resump- tion of wider discussions on North Ko- rea’s nuclear program. A convoy of vehicles brought Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea’s first vice for- eign minister, to the U.S. mission in Geneva exactly on schedule at 10 a.m. for the first round of talks with a team of American negotiators led by President Barack Obama’s special envoy for North Korea policy, Stephen W. Bos- worth. Clifford Hart, the American spe- cial envoy for the talks, said the U.S. and North Korean delegations met for about two hours and made initial presenta- tions that he described as ‘‘useful.’’ American officials said last week that the discussions were intended to deter- mine whether North Korea was ‘‘seri- ous about engaging in talks and ful- filling its commitments under the 2005 joint statement of the six-party talks and its nuclear, international obliga- tions, as well as take concrete steps to- ward denuclearization.’’ North Korea agreed in September 2005 to abandon its nuclear programs in exchange for economic assistance and diplomatic incentives from other parties to the six-party talks, which in- clude China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, in addition to North Korea and the United States. But the agreement collapsed in a dis- pute over how thoroughly North Korea should reveal its nuclear activities and subject its nuclear facilities to outside inspections. North Korea’s continuing nuclear activities, its testing of missiles and the lethal shelling of a South Korean island — as well as the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel, which the South said was attacked by the North — all added to the chill in relations. The Geneva meetings nonetheless follow hints of a thaw, including talks in New York in July between American and North Korean officials. The prospect of talks came amid a background of criticism that both the United States and South Korea were withholding aid for political reasons, ty- ing it to progress in negotiations. North Koreans, especially children, urgently need outside aid to fight ‘‘ter- rible levels of malnutrition,’’ the United Nations’ humanitarian chief said Mon- day. ‘‘Six million North Koreans urgently need food aid, but the outside world is not giving enough,’’ the official, Valerie Amos, said in a news conference after a fact-finding trip to North Korea last week. ‘‘We need to remember the most vulnerable people in North Korea are victims of a situation over which they have no control. They are suffering from no fault of their own.’’ Officially, the United States and South Korea say they do not link humanitarian aid to political issues. Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul. U.S. and North Korea cautiously open discussions Republicans put judiciary on notice Most seeking nomination for president issue biting Supreme Court critiques Charting Pentagon’s new course Era of austerity brings deep challenges to a veteran of Washington Mr. Panetta oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Now he is charged with closing the books on multiple fronts. YURIKO NAKAO/REUTERS Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta with U.S. and Japanese forces at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo on Friday. Over the weekend he ac- knowledged Asian concern about Pentagon cuts and said that the United States would maintain its ‘‘force projection’’ in the region. SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES-AFP Michele Bachmann has said she would forbid the courts from deciding cases on same-sex marriage. Many of the Republicans’ proposals would require amending the Constitution. global.nytimes.com/ artsguide @ aroundtheworld Must-visit artsevents 1st/Business Class Worldwide Boutique Consolidator – up to 50% off. Special fares for round-the- worlds, cruises & hotels. 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Most credit cards accepted Need to place a classified ad?General UK +44 207 061 3510 France +33 1 41 43 92 06 The Americas +866 459 1121 Asia +601 2697 4088 TO PLACE AN AD CALL IHT Classifieds TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 | 9THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES . . . . 60- .-)- .)+64 special report Is violence ever justified? In recent weeks in New York, a dramatic trial ripped down the veil that often shrouds family affairs. Years of abuse culminated in the killing of a former police officer by his wife; the grown children could spend years repairing the damage to their once-normal family. BY DAN BILEFSKY She had always admitted to killing her husband, using two guns to fire 11 bullets inside thecouple’shome in the NewYork borough of Queens. But she insisted she had no choice: if she had not shot him, he would have surely killed her first. On Oct. 6, a jury in the U.S. State Su- preme Court in Queens agreed, clearing the woman, Barbara Sheehan, of second-degree murder charges in a case that was viewed as a strenuous test of a battered-woman defense. Her son and daughter, the children of her slain husband, wept with joy. During the trial, the jury heard how Ms. Sheehan had been relentlessly abused by her husband, Raymond Shee- han, a former police sergeant, during their 24 years of marriage. But the crit- ical question at trial was whether Ms. Sheehan was in imminent danger when she killed her husband; New York State’s self-defense law justifies the use of lethal force when a threat to a per- son’s life is deemed immediate. The trial offered two narratives so diametrically opposed that jurors said it had often been difficult to decipher who the real Barbara Sheehan was. In one version, Ms. Sheehan and her children testified that Mr. Sheehan smashed her head against a cinder- block wall during a family vacation in Jamaica in 2007, threw boiling pasta sauce at her and punched her in the face the evening before the killing took place in their home in February 2008. But prosecutors characterized Ms. Sheehan as a pathological liar who ex- ecuted her husband because she des- pised him after years of a dysfunctional marriage, and then cloaked herself in a false story of abuse to escape justice. The physical evidence appeared un- persuasive: Mr. Sheehan had been shaving before he was killed; his body was found on the bathroom floor, the faucet still running. Ms. Sheehan testified that the couple had a fierce argument the day before, and she had decided to leave, carrying one of her husband’s guns for protec- tion. When her husband saw her, she said, he reached for a gun on the bath- room vanity and aimed it at her. The trial often bore the hallmarks of a dysfunctional wake. Rather than shar- ing sentimental memories about the late Mr. Sheehan, his own children conveyed a palpable relief that he was dead. The divisions of the Sheehan clan were on display in the courtroom. Ms. Sheehan’s children, siblings and friends sat in pews on one end of the courtroom, wearing purple ribbons in solidarity with victims of domestic violence. Mr. Sheehan’s twin brother, Vincent, sat as far away as possible on the oppos- ite side. He cringed uncomfortably as witness after witness testified about Raymond’s behavior, including making death threats to his wife by showing her crime-scene photos of dead bodies, and taking his loaded semiautomatic hand- gun with him to the bathroom. Ms. Sheehan sat in the front, at times clutching her heart and sobbing when the events of Feb. 28, 2008, were recoun- ted over and over again. The case had also divided the jury: a day before the verdict was reached, the jurors said they were hopelessly dead- locked. Nonetheless, the jury of nine women and three men unexpectedly reached a consensus on their third day of deliberations. Ms. Sheehan was ac- quitted of murder and of a gun-posses- sion charge, but was found guilty of a second gun-possession charge, which carries a sentence of 31/2 to 15 years. Her sentencing is expected next month. Whatever the true motives for the killing, proving that Mr. Sheehan was an abidingly hateful man was not enough to exonerate Ms. Sheehan of murder, legal experts said. For that to happen, a jury must be convinced that she reasonably feared an imminent threat to her life when she shot him. Among the several daunting chal- lenges for the defense were explaining why Ms. Sheehan did not just leave her husband or call the police. The defense sought to build a case that Ms. Sheehan suffered from battered- women’s syndrome, in which an abused woman, conditioned by years of violence and threats of death, is said to feel in- creasingly helpless, trapped and impot- ent in the face of her aggressor. Marshaling this argument requires detailing the abuse suffered in forensic detail to explain her mental state and to show that, like an experienced combat veteran, she knew when to act in self-de- fense to avoid being killed. Jacquelyn C. Campbell, an expert wit- A New York jury accepts battered-woman defense in shooting of husband Pushed to the edge, vindicated in court PHOTOGRAPHS BY ULI SEIT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Breaking point Barbara Sheehan, above center, in court. Her defense lawyer, Michael G. Dowd, below, argued she had been relent- lessly and violently assaulted by her husband. DEFENSE, PAGE 10 BY DAN BILEFSKY Minutes before she killed her husband, Barbara Sheehan was on the computer, proofreading her son’s religion paper. That same morning, she had also surfed the Web for travel bargains and read about celebrity couples — hardly the be- havior of a woman in fear for her life, as a prosecutor sought to show at her murder trial. But to Ms. Sheehan’s lawyer, Michael G. Dowd, her actions seemed com- pletely logical. Doing seemingly prosaic things while under severe duress, he said, was the hallmark of an abused woman like Ms. Sheehan, conditioned to operating in a combat zone. If any lawyer would know, it would be Mr. Dowd, a lanky and ruddy-faced man with an unlikely area of expertise. For the past 30 years, Mr. Dowd has defended battered women who have killed their husbands, sometimes with a carving knife, a semiautomatic hand- gun or a machete. He has handled so many of these cases that he has been called the ‘‘black widow lawyer’’ by some of his peers. ‘‘It is very emotionally difficult to take such cases; they really get to me,’’ said Mr. Dowd, 69, who addresses the His own past in check, lawyer represents wives who kill abusive spouses Defending battered women, with empathy born of grit court in an avuncular, booming voice that seems calculated to disarm jurors. ‘‘This may be my last one.’’ For Mr. Dowd, his seminal battered- woman case occurred in 1987, when he marshaled a self-defense argument to secure an acquittal for Karen Straw, a New York woman who stabbed her hus- band to death after he had raped her at knifepoint in front of her two children. Ms. Straw had sought a protection or- der, and the case drew national atten- tion in the United States to the moral conundrum of abused women who kill their aggressors. Mr. Dowd, the father of three daugh- ters, has since defended nearly two dozen women who have killed their hus- bands; only one served prison time, and the rest were exonerated or received lesser sentences. Hismainlegalweaponhasbeentheso- called battered-woman defense, in which the abused woman who has killed her spouse recounts the horrors of her abuse in graphic detail to prove to the jury that she reasonably feared for her life. Legal experts have said that the Shee- han case — which ended Oct. 6 with Ms. Sheehan’s acquittal on murder charges but a conviction on a gun charge — was among his most daunting yet. Ms. Sheehan, a school secretary, had said that she shot her husband 11 times in self-defense on Feb. 18, 2008, after he pointed a gun at her head. Mr. Sheehan, a former police sergeant, had been shav- ing in the bathroom of their home in the Howard Beach area of New York City. LAWYER, PAGE 10 Mr. Dowd, who grew up in a working- class family in a nearby neighborhood, is himself no stranger to overcoming ad- versity — something that perhaps has given him the gumption to take on cases marked by heartbreak and betrayal. In 1986, he was involved in a corrup- tion scandal after he revealed that his company, which had a contract with the city to collect overdue parking fines for the New York City Parking Violations Bureau, had paid about $30,000 in kick- backs over an 18-month period to a local official, Donald R. Manes. In return, his company was to receive a lucrative parking ticket collection contract. Recalling the events, Mr. Dowd was emphatic that he had not bribed Mr. Manes, but rather had been extorted. Mr. Dowd would go on to expose the cor- ruption by blowing the whistle on Mr. Manes to Jimmy Breslin, then a colum- nist for The New York Daily News, over several pints of Guinness in the back- room of Costello’s, a legendary Irish bar, since closed. As the scandal erupted, Mr. Manes committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart. Mr. Dowd, for his part, be- came the star witness for the U.S. gov- ernment prosecutor investigating the case, Rudolph W. Giuliani. He got im- munity from prosecution but was sus- pended from practicing law for five years for violating the state disciplinary code for lawyers. Mr. Giuliani characterized Mr. Dowd at the time as a Serpico — a whistle- INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE10 | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 . . . . is hers to control, and that anyone violat- ing that control is committing a crime. But Norway is still one of 127 coun- tries in the world — including 12 mem- bers of the European Union — that do not explicitly criminalize rape within marriage, according to a survey of women’s access to justice published by U.N. Women last July. While all Western nations have now removed exemptions for husbands from rape legislation, preconceptions about sexuality in marriage live on, said Laura Turquet, chief author of the U.N. 2011 Progress of the World’s Women report. Norway and other Scandinavian countries got there relatively early, in the 1960s and 1970s. But Germany only removed its spousal exemption in 1997. In 1993, North Carolina became the last U.S. state to do so. Until 1992, Britain had a common-law principle that assumed the marriage contract implied consent. Ms. Turquet sees explicit criminaliz- ing of spousal rape as crucial, both sym- bolically and practically. ‘‘Rape is rarely what our societies make it out to be: a random act by a stranger jumping out 60- .-)- .)+64 special report country’s largest shelter organization, the Secretariat of the Shelter Movement. But at least 80 percent of these cases are never brought to official attention and only 10 percent of those that are end in a conviction, the Justice Ministry says. Nowhere is this taboo more stubborn than in the family home, long con- sidered off-limits for law enforcement and the state. ‘‘The statistics tell us that the safest place for women is outside, on the street — most rapes happen at home,’’ said Tove Smaadahl, general manager of the Shelter Movement. In a 2005 survey by the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, 9 percent of female respondents in a relationship reported experiencing sexual assault. ‘‘No, we don’t have equality between men and women,’’ Ms. Smaadahl said, ‘‘not until we have addressed the issue of relationship rape.’’ SEX, MARRIAGE AND THE LAW Through- out much of history, marital rape was considered a contradiction in terms. Rape law in many countries used to be in the same category as property theft, committed by a man against another person. It eventually evolved into some- thing closer to breach of contract by the raped wife, whose family’s honor was now compromised, before finally — and relatively recently — building on con- sent and the notion that a woman’s body VIOLENCE, FROM PAGE 1 PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIMEN GRYTOYR FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE Free and helping others One woman who had been raped and beaten by her ex-husband and father of her daughters got a divorce and now volunteers in a women’s shelter outside Oslo. Here she is walking with her daughters in Tjome, Norway. from hiding,’’ she said. ‘‘Explicit legisla- tion accompanied by clear protocols send a very clear message to the police and the courts that sexual violence is never a private matter.’’ The dearth of official and internation- ally comparable data is telling, particu- larly in the European Union, a bloc that meticulouslytracksanythingfromtraffic accidents to the number of manure stor- age facilities across its 27 countries. If domestic violence and human traf- ficking have received more attention in recent years, rape and sexual assault remain largely forgotten — and misun- derstood, said Liz Kelly, director of the Child and Women Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University. Contrary to conventional wisdom, rapists tend to be well known to victims and often commit their assault in a private location, research from the past two decades suggests. According to a 2009 study of 11 Euro- pean countries co-authored by Ms. Kelly, one of the rare international com- parisons so far undertaken, 61 percent of rapes took place in a private space, most frequently the home of the victim or perpetrator. Two-thirds of suspects were known to the victim, and 25 per- cent were current or former partners. Injury rates in rapes appear to be far higher in victims of former and current partners. The 2009 European study found severe injuries in 50 percent and 40 percent of those cases respectively, against 24 percent in stranger rape. These findings challenge widely held notions that partner rape is the most dif- ficult to prosecute. Instead, as chron- icled in the 2009 report, prosecution and conviction rates look deeply biased: Forty percent of rapes in which the per- petrator did not know the victim but was successfully identified were prose- cuted, with conviction rates of more than 70 percent. By contrast, only 14 per- cent of suspects in partner rape were convicted. Suspects of immigrant origin were particularly likely to be punished. ‘‘The more closely the suspect fits our stereotypical rapist, the more likely he is to be convicted,’’ said Ms. Kelly. ORDINARY GUYS AND AMBASSADORS’ WIVES The husband of the Norwegian woman who fled that desperate night in March 2008 is a car mechanic described by her friends as ‘‘an ordinary guy.’’ When the couple first met he was charming and flattered her with flowers, chocolates and what seemed like story- book love. He courted her parents by shopping for them and won her girl- friends’ approval with tall good looks. ‘‘Everybody loved him,’’ she recalled. Six months later, he proposed, and a year later, the violence started. The first time her husband raped her, she said, he had become jealous when another man asked her to dance. ‘‘When we came home his eyes were totally black,’’ she said. ‘‘He was rough. He hurt me and I said, ‘No, no, no.’ After- ward he was sorry and promised that it wouldn’t happen again.’’ Over the years, she camouflaged bruises with makeup. She saw less and less of her friends to avoid uncomfort- able questions — and jealousy fits that so often set her husband off. When she finally took her husband to court, he admitted beating and threat- ening her but was acquitted of the rape charges. The judge issued a one-year re- straining order, and her own mother urged: ‘‘Go back to your husband.’’ ‘‘This is why so few women go to the police,’’ lamented Inger-Lise W. Larsen, who has run Oslo’s main women’s shel- ter since 2007. ‘‘It takes a lot to come for- ward, and often, you get little in return.’’ In a nondescript apartment building in centralOslo,Ms.Larsenhasgivenrefuge tothedaughtersandsistersofimmigrant men intent on avenging family honor — but also the wives of ambassadors, po- licemen and company directors. Some 350 women and 300 children come each year. Seventy percent have endured sexual, physical and psychological vio- lence for at least four years before they show up at the shelter’s armored door. Norwegian women and middle-class women of any background tend to be more embarrassed about being raped and beaten than the growing number of lower-income immigrant women in the shelter because they are expected to be that much more emancipated, psychol- ogists and rape counselors say. ‘‘These women have built this whole identity, this fantasy about a relation- ship and a family,’’ said Anne-Cecilie Johnsen, a psychologist who specializes in rape counseling. ‘‘The people around them believe it, and it’s very hard to ad- mit that it isn’t true.’’ When children are involved, it is even harder to walk away. Another woman who was sexually abused by her now ex-husband for years would have left him much earlier but for their daughter, she said. There was the impossible admission that ‘‘the father of your child is a rap- ist,’’ she said, and the concern that this labeling would forever color not just her own but also her daughter’s life. But there was also a lingering fear that leav- ing might be worse than staying. ‘‘As long as you stay in the marriage you have a certain amount of control,’’ this woman said. ‘‘Yes, you are beaten up; yes, you are raped. But you can also manage the situation and keep him away from the child.’’ ‘NOT JUST A FEMALE ISSUE’ Knut Storberget, the minister of justice and police, has made violence against wom- en a priority. He recently joined a U.N. initiative of men against violence against women, along with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain and the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. One important message: ‘‘This is not just a female issue,’’ said Mr. Storber- get’s deputy, Astri Aas-Hansen, who has commissioned an ambitious study profiling rapists to better combat ste- reotypes. Norway’s infrastructure to deal with rape cases is dense. Every county has a rape assault center, a medical facility where rape victims are offered free counseling and medical care and ex- amined for forensic evidence, irrespect- ive of police involvement. Every police district is obliged to have at least one of- ficer trained to deal with domestic vio- lence, including sexual assault. The le- gal definition of rape is broad and includes situations where the woman is incapable of giving consent. The trouble, says Helle Nesvold, a doctor at Norway’s oldest rape assault center, is that good intentions still do not always translate into good results. Most rape victims, particularly of spousal abuse, do not come to the hospi- tal for the forensic exam, she said. As many as 60 percent of those who do choose not to involve the police. Evi- dence gathered in a five-step process piles up in an archive. ‘‘Even in cases reported to the police, they don’t always pick up all the evi- dence we collect,’’ Ms. Nesvold said, pointing to a room full of files. But, she added, ‘‘the situation is gradually im- proving.’’ GENDER EQUALITY AND BACKLASH Why is sexual violence still so prevalent in countries where gender equality has made such gigantic strides? Some ex- perts, like Ms. Kelly, argue that as a so- ciety moves to redistribute power be- tween genders, there might be a transitional period where violence rises as the last expression of male domination. ‘‘As women gain in status, earn more money and take their rightful place in society, some men may resort to their physical strength,’’ Ms. Kelly said, not- ing that most couple rape is ultimately based on a feeling of emasculation. In the long term, most observers con- cur that the best antidote to violence is greater gender equality across the board. ‘‘The more independent women are from men and the more equal in terms of pay, status, education and ev- erything else, the more likely are we to clamp down on this type of crime,’’ said Ms. Aas-Hansen of the Justice Ministry. ‘‘When a crime has happened in it, the bedroom ceases to be private.’’ Louise Loftus contributed reporting from Paris. Hidden violence in an equal society ‘‘You have to be ready to call the man you once loved a rapist. I just couldn’t do it before. But that night I knew, if I didn’t leave him, I would die.’’ Ready for change Inger-Lise W. Larsen in a room of a women’s shelter she runs in Oslo, above. A former victim of marital rape always has her bags and pepper spray ready, left. Rapists tend to be well known to victims and often commit their assault in a private location. INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2011 | 11THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES . . . . tional information, it is not possible to explain this as an acute problem in Sweden or a result of better legislation, reporting and prosecuting. Norway provided no information on rape for any of the surveyed years — from 2003 to 2007. Falling conviction rates in the 1990s and 2000s, even as the number of vic- tims reporting sexual assault to the au- thorities increased, led to calls from vic- tim support groups for a European framework that codifies the definitions, reporting and judicial responses of member states. But in order to legislate, an accurate picture of the current problem must be available. In 2010, the European Council noted the continuing lack of ‘‘timely, reliable, accurate and comparable data, both at national and E.U. level’’ and lamented the lack of a ‘‘detailed E.U.-level study on violence against women,’’ which lim- ited the understanding of the extent of the violence and impeded any attempts to create a framework to respond to it. Mr. Nevala’s team has been assigned to remedy this lack. To get past the problems inherent in comparing official crime statistics, the team — from the E.U. Agency for Fun- damental Rights, largely a research and evidence collection agency — will con- duct a prevalence study, involving care- fully tailored interviews with individu- als. They will approach 27,000 women of varying ages and social status — includ- ing women who have never been vic- tims of sexual violence — in the member states and Croatia. And to make sure they get it right, the questions have been in development for several months. Results are expected in 2013. ‘‘We’ll conduct qualitative inter- views, essentially asking the same question in many different ways,’’ Mr. Nevala said. ‘‘We want to make sure that respondents have understood, and we have different ways of testing that they’ve understood.’’ special report 60- .-)- .)+64 ness on domestic violence from Johns Hopkins University, likened an abused woman to a dog who receives a shock every time it tries to leave a cage, even- tually remaining frozen in place, even when the cage door is left opened. Battered-women’s syndrome became so widely accepted as a defense in the early 1990s that some U.S. states gran- ted clemency to women imprisoned for assaulting or killing their mates. But the prosecutor in the Sheehan case, Debra Pomodore, attacked the syndrome as little more than ‘‘pseudo- science’’ embraced by the defendant out of desperation to stay out of prison. Moreover, Ms. Pomodore argued, be- ing abused was not an excuse for an open season on killing men; of the nearly four million women abused each year by their husbands in the United States, only 500 to 600 killed them, she said. She portrayed Mr. Sheehan, a former DEFENSE, FROM PAGE 9 crime-scene investigator , as a doting fa- ther and husband who was unfairly de- monized. Ms. Pomodore described for instance how he had hosted a Sweet 16 party for his daughter, Jennifer, at a fancy catering hall, where she lit a candle for her parents, and wore a tiara and blue satin dress. Portraying the defendant as a fabulist who exaggerated her abuse, Ms. Pomodore showed the jury a photo of the Sheehans embracing lovingly on a vacation in San Diego in 2007 as they mimicked an iconic photo of a World War II sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. In a withering cross-examination that was perhaps the most uncomfortable moment in a monthlong trial that fea- tured many, Ms. Pomodore insinuated that Ms. Sheehan had been driven to murder because her husband had forced her to engage in his perverse sexual fantasies, including watching him masturbate while he wore an adult blower — who had exposed the rot. But he was also shunned by others in the clannish local legal fraternity, who did not forgive his transgressions. Mr. Breslin, now 81, said Mr. Dowd had erred but had since redeemed him- self by championing the underdog. ‘‘He’s a good man, and good is good,’’ he said. ‘‘But it was a pretty stupid thing he did, giving bribes to a dunce like Manes. What was he, crazy? I mean, look at what you got and behave. But he has since done good.’’ Mr. Dowd has long since put the scan- dal behind him. But he said that being the victim of extortion had marked him deeply, paradoxically empowering him as a defense lawyer by helping him to understand the powerlessness of his fe- male clients. ‘‘Men don’t often get into a position where they feel helpless,’’ he said. ‘‘Un- derstanding that feeling gave me in- sight into what it feels like to be com- pletely trapped, just like an abused woman.’’ Sue Osthoff, director of the Phil- adelphia-based National Clearing House for the Defense of Battered Wom- en, said Mr. Dowd had carved out a lead- ing niche in a harrowing and difficult area of the law. ‘‘After his suspension, he could have done something else,’’ she said. ‘‘But I think he saw this incredible injustice that people don’t help these women who have been so hurt.’’ Mr. Dowd said that social attitudes to- ward abused women had changed radi- cally since he first started to try such cases in the 1980s. Back then, he said, prosecutors would use a woman’s poor housekeeping skills and bad cooking to justify her husband’s abuse. Abused women who had killed their husbands were encouraged to plead insanity rather than face trial. In addition to defending dozens of abused women, Mr. Dowd has also defended American members of the Ir- ish Republican Army who were smug- gling arms to Northern Ireland in the 1980s. As a reminder of his calling, he still keeps a metal poker with an evidence tag hanging from it in his home in the Bayside neighborhood. The poker, he said, is bent from the years it was used to pound a woman’s thighs and back. Vindication in U.S. courtroom for battered-woman defense A career in defense of the abused LAWYER, FROM PAGE 9 BY LOUISE LOFTUS Data collection in the European Union is legendary. On agriculture, labor, indus- try and crime, amongst other things, there is a wealth of information that en- ables European institutions to legislate and regulate for their 27 sovereign members — members that have their own issues, culture and complexities. But information on rape and domestic violence, notoriously difficult to collect and compare in any meaningful, accur- ate way, is a hole in this framework. Most individual E.U. member states do collect data, but collection is often spotty and definitions of rape and vio- lence are widely different in different justice systems. Meanwhile, good data collection, combined with a system that enables victims to report attacks, pushes up reporting rates, meaning that the countries that are working hardest to improve conditions can come off the worst in attempts to compare figures. ‘‘It’s a common misconception that the data is there, and really people are quite shocked when they realize that comparative data just doesn’t exist in Europe,’’ Sami Nevala, a statistician from the Union’s Freedoms and Justice Department, said by telephone. ‘‘For various reasons — prosecution discrepancies, differences in levels of awareness, the structure of the criminal justice system of that country’’ — pan- European studies of existing data have proved impossible, Mr. Nevala said. The European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics is an an- nual crime report for member states. Its 2010 edition measures rape convictions, but only 22 out of 27 states have provided data for 2007 — the most re- cent year available. Sweden, ranked fourth out of 134 countries in terms of gender equality in the World Economic Forum’s 2010 gender gap report after Iceland, Nor- way and Finland, was also ranked fourth in the number of rape convictions per 100,000 in 2006. But without addi- E.U. data on rape pose complex set of challenges ‘‘Comparative data just doesn’t exist in Europe.’’ diaper or women’s clothes. When the Sheehans’ daughter Jen- nifer, now 25, a chemotherapy nurse, took the stand, she said the outward ap- pearance of domestic bliss belied a fam- ily so dangerously explosive that her fa- ther would punch her mother in the face when they got stuck in traffic. Jennifer broke down when the prose- cutor questioned her about the $234,000 she had received from Mr. Sheehan’s life insurance policies, sug- gesting that Ms. Sheehan had killed her husband so the family could benefit financially. ‘‘Can’t you see it wasn’t about the money?’’ Jennifer said, bursting into tears. ‘‘He was worth more alive than he is dead.’’ Jennifer did not attend her father’s fu- neral. But she did go to his wake. ‘‘I just wanted to see for myself,’’ she told the court, ‘‘that he was dead.’’ Her brother, Raymond, 21, said he had gone to a college in a different state be- cause he feared that his father’s behavi- or might push him to commit suicide. Outside the courtroom after the ver- dict, Ms. Sheehan, a school secretary, could not contain her tears, clasping the hands of her children. Her lawyer, Mi- chael G. Dowd, said she would not be speaking to reporters. ‘‘There is no joy today,’’ he said. ‘‘The only thing that can bring joy to this family would be to bring them back 17 years before the first blow was struck.’’ During an interview, the jury fore- woman, Barbara Fleisher, said jurors ultimately decided to exonerate Ms. Sheehan of murder because the family’s accounts of chronic and vicious abuse had rung true. She said they had be- lieved that Ms. Sheehan reasonably feared she faced an imminent threat of bodily harm when she shot her husband the first time. ‘‘We believed she was justified with all the things she went through over the years,’’ she said. ‘‘We didn’t believe that Raymond Sheehan was the perfect fam- ily man or the photographs that were supposed to make him look like a pil- lar.’’ She said the jury had decided to find Ms. Sheehan guilty of possessing the second weapon, since she had shot her husband even after he no longer posed a danger. The verdict, she indicated, was something of a compromise. Mr. Sheehan’s twin brother, Vincent, said it was a ‘‘bad verdict.’’ Asked if his brother would be able to rest in peace, he said: ‘‘I think the truth is what makes you rest in peace — not what 12 citizens say about it. But this is the system and you’ve got to live with it. ‘‘People make decisions based on emotion,’’ he added. Ms. Fleisher said the jury’s impasse had been overcome once jurors agreed that they had several doubts about the prosecution’s case. In particular, she said the jury doubted the attempt to show that Mr. Sheehan’s bizarre sexual behavior had been a motive for a mur- derous rage. Legal experts said the verdict was a vindication for the battered-woman de- fense. ‘‘The case is a good marker of the will- ingness of jurors to realize that a history of abuse can inform a woman’s sense of the need to act in self-defense,’’ said Holly Maguigan, a law professor at New York University. Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said the case was a cautionary tale that those claiming domestic abuse should not take the law into their own hands. ‘‘This is a terribly sad and tragic case,’’ Mr. Brown said. ‘‘A family has been torn apart. Their two children will have to pick up the pieces.’’ The jury said Ms. Sheehan faced an imminent threat. Differences in systems for reporting make comparisons difficult THE GLOBAL EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES .
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