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SIT-4-23-1; Thurs., April 23, 1998 (5:00 PM EST)

* Strategic Issues Today - in the News:

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* 1. Kossovo-Metohija: A Big Army v. KLA Fight

* 2. France & Karadzic: A Diplomatic Scandal gets Attention

* 3. Rwanda: The Right to Execute Mass Murderers

* 4. Brazil: Murder & Crime in Sao Paolo

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* ãApril is the Cruelest Monthä - ãFor the Childrenä Update: The Clintonian CIA has announced a special Web-site designed for Children; presumably featuring less complex country studies. I feel nurtured, donât you?

* Yesterday the launch of Amnesty Internationalâs Childrenâs Rights Crusade clashed Earth Dayâs ongoing crusade to manipulate brainwashed children and adults. Today, NOWâs sexist and exclusionary ãTake your Daughter to Work Dayä clashes with a worldwide Holocaust-Shoa Remembrance Day, an unfortunate hogging-in by the feminists.

* Mr. Skakel informs me that AmeriCares is sending a flight into Baghdad with supplies for hospitals all around the country. Unfortunately his plate is over-full and he cannot, himself, go this time. His prior trips for AmeriCares were into the Kurdish zone. We discussed the Kosovo Albanian issue some more overnight. Steve takes strenuous exception to sloppy reportage by Barbara Crossette in todayâs New York Times associating AmeriCares with Ethical-Leftist operations of other groups inspired by Ramsey Clark. AmeriCares is less concerned with Baghdad, than with assuring some supplies wind up in Basra, Kirkuk and places where Shiites and Kurds will get some of the supplies; hence its association with the Royal Jordanian Air Force and its full, documentary clearances from all official parties. AmeriCares can be reached at 1800 486-4357 and through their own Website: (www.americares.org) as well as through the SIRIUS Website. Drew Hannah and Guy L. Smith are the vice-chairmen and speaking to the Media. Send a contribution. As for the other groups, who often hold themselves above the law and substitute secular ethics for religious morals, pretentious as they may be, they are delivering aid to those in need as opposed to braying and I respect those who ãdoä and who ãdeliverä far more than those who merely talk, march, demonstrate and shout on both sides of the aisle.

* About my Environmental views and credibility in that arena: Let me just say that I took the first course ever offered at any US University on Ecology and the Environment at the Yale Forestry School in 1972-73, having already studied some geography (U of Maryland night school), geology and forestry at my fatherâs knee, in the Scouts and in the Army. We recycled newspapers as Boy Scout fundraising and I loaded lots of trucks. I have studied geology in recent years with some grizzled field geologists, and study paleontology, archeology and weather as much as I can. SIRIUS will fairly present the need for Conservation while debunking the mythology of pseudo-environmentalism of the Leftâs ãnature fakersä --a term Teddy Roosevelt applied to Jack London and other poseurs.

* I have interesting stuff stacking up in my electronic and paper archives, much already digested into my forthcoming anthology of ideas Lessons Learned: Public Wisdom and Popular Follies from 3000 BC to the Present. I have just formatted it for Windows 95 in MSWorks (what other software could I use?) and as soon as Mr. Doblin and I figure out the technical details, I plan to offer this as a retrievable database via the SIRIUS Website. Versions for certain other MSWorks compatible softwares can be created, too. and you can surf through its 1000 pages and 3MB of data using the ãFindä function in a twinkling, until I can get an index built --a Herculean task I donât relish. I expect to market the draft data base for $10, with a one-year right to up-date for free, as I continue to fine-tune the 5500-plus inclusions and add occasional insights.

1. Kossovo-Metohija - Army v. KLA Fight

* The fighting Goran and I anticipated yesterday broke out as I was still uploading SIT 4-22/3 last night. Jovan Kovacic, a reliable Reuters reporter confirms the press hasnât got down to the fighting yet, but Serb sources told him there had been about 200 KLA-types intercepted near a border village and that fighting continued into the morning with numerous casualties and a substantial number of live prisoners taken by the Serb forces. As to the referendum, it is overwhelmingly against foreign mediation, as everyone expected. It is odd to think that those police attacks on the KLA villages of Prekaz and Srbica took place 7 weeks ago, now. By the way, the KLA has murdered several more Albanian loyalists in intervening weeks.

* 2. France & Karadzic:

* Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, both under indictment for alleged War Crimes, particularly with regard to the 1995 liquidation of the Srebrenica Safe-Zone, are in an interesting fix --what ãGame Theoryä practitioners call ãThe Prisonersâ Dilemma. In that analytical model, two felons are held by the police and each offered a plea bargain deal for turning on the partner as a witness. ãWill my partner rat me out?ä Each asks himself, knowing that if they both keep quiet and with weak evidence they may get off scot-free, but if the partner takes the deal, the questioner will take the severest punishment.

* There has been much speculation this month that Karadzic is negotiating with the Special War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague and Karadzic is known to have prepared and published a 144-150 page book, in Serb and English, documenting his innocence and attempts to get the Army to conform with the Geneva Conventions. I think we will see Karadzic face the court in the near future and I expect he will present himself voluntarily; he has retained American lawyers.

* Today, in The New York Times, Steven Erlanger reports from Washington, that when NATO was preparing an attempt to arrest Karadzic, while he was still in some power, a French Army officer within NATOâs IFOR Command allegedly tipped Karadzic off in advance. Again the Socialist government of France is denying, just as they are denying complicity in Rwanda in 1993-94 under the old Mitterand regime. As we see, the Socialist Gauls are increasingly perfidious in their attempts to maintain their independent Gallic leadership in world affairs.

* There was a scandal in the UNâs days, during the Bosnian war, where an Anglo-Serb officer, Michael Stanley, proved to be the source of espionage to Gen. Mladic, right out of the UN HQ. His court-martial is in process.

* 3. Rwanda - War Crimes Executions & Critics

* There is much pious stewing coming from the UN, Amnesty International, Lawyers Without Borders and John Paul II, about Rwandaâs planned executions on Friday of some 33 convicted Hutu murders. This complex of enlightened internationalists of the First World uniformly oppose any death sentences for any crimes and argue that executing mass murderers hinders the process of national reconciliation. Those better grounded in the realities of genocide know that it is very cathartic to execute a butcher now and then, as with Munich and Eichmann.

* Per the AP: ãAmnesty International denounced the planned executions.

ã ``Executing people ... does not serve the interests of justice but further brutalizes a society which is trying to heal from the memories of recent atrocities,'' the group said in a statement.

ã ``It is time the Rwandese government sent a message to a traumatized population that killing is unacceptable and halt these executions,'' the statement read.

ã The 33 prisoners were convicted of involvement in the Hutu government-orchestrated slaughter of more than half a million people, most of them minority Tutsis, between April and July 1994. Ntezilyayo [a government spokesman] said the public, including reporters, could witness the executions, but no photographing or filming would be permitted...

ã The nation began its genocide trials in December 1996, and the first defendant was convicted and sentenced to death in early 1997. More than 125,000 people crammed into jails and prisons around the country are awaiting trial.

ã At least 330 people have been tried on various charges relating to the genocide, and 116 have been convicted and sentenced to death. Roughly one-third have been sentenced to life in prison. Twenty others were acquitted and the remainder received sentences of varying lengths.

ã Ntezilyayo said he hoped the executions would stem the ``beginnings of revenge attacks'' carried out by some genocide survivors.

ã Jean Baptiste Kayigamba, a Tutsi who lost most of his family and friends in the genocide, said the punishments could help heal deep wounds in the country. ``Of course, it's not much, but still this will be a guarantee that we will never go back to the era where people used to come, kill neighbors, butcher their cows, destroy everything and go free,'' he said.ä (AP-NY-04-22-98 2059EDT)

* It is argued that the criminals did not get state-of the-art trials, yet they all got representation and none had an air tight alibi; the numbers show a distribution of punishment that seems responsible. Executing 33 people after some 500,000 had been butchered seems not unreasonable under the circumstances, and it is the UN, Amnesty International et al, who were unable to stop the butchers at the time --as we used to say in Vietnam, ãxin loi!ä or ãSorry Îbout that!ä I will add that nobody is accusing the Kigali government of applying ãvictorsâ justice.ä

* Even as the stewing over these executions reaches a whining-pitch, next door in Burundi there was a nasty fight in a village 20 miles from the Capital, when the Burundi Army arrived to rescue a village being attacked by other Hutu butchers. Some 29 citizens and 43 Hutus were killed in the fight, along with 3 soldiers, per Todd Rittman of Reuters. Hutus killed cattle and burned 10 houses and were reportedly armed with machetes and hoes, not assault weapons.

* The problem with the UNâs War Crimes Treaties and tribunals is that they cannot execute even a Hitler or a Pol Pot, yet the UN and its friends are arguing for a permanent tribunal to take up the task of trying such monsters. Weâre mighty enlightened in New York, London, Paris and Geneva, but out there in the real world, men and boys butcher convenience store clerks, women and children in Illinois, Texas, Virginia, and Sao Paulo; and on a mass scale in Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire. Societiesâ laws will evolve as those societies progress over time and for now, a death penalty sometimes ought to be levied.

4. Murder & Crime in Sao Paulo, Brazil

* The murder rate in New York continues to decline below the 1964 level, thanks to vigorous police enforcement and other social factors. This from the AVIATION PROFESSIONAL's Hot Spots monitor, Special Ed. April 22, 1998; gun ownership is a material but not major factor in Brazil, which has gun control, and many of these crimes are not gun-related or result from gun thefts from property owners. Note: Sao Paulo has some 16 million souls, more than twice the populace of New York City, and represents the critical flaw of centralizing economic development in nation-building. ãBRAZIL - Record Level Of Violence Reported In Sao Paulo -

ã According to statistics released on 20 April by the state government, a record level of violence took place in S‹o Paulo last month, with an average of 25 people murdered every day in the city. The figures represent an 11.4 percent increase from March last year, making it the most violent month on record in S‹o Paulo's history. During the month, there were a total of 771 reported murders, about 340 violent robberies every day and more than 10,000 cars stolen in the city [323 per day]. The figures for violent robbery represent a 43 percent increase over the same period last year. In total, some 2,130 people have been murdered in S‹o Paulo this year [in 90 days Jan.-March!]. Police blame the surge in crime on unemployment, drug abuse and the ready availability of firearms, while others attribute the rise in violence to an inadequate police force.ä

* That murder rate (actually 23.67 per day) is at least double New Yorkâs worst year when scaled to the population differences, the ratio of 14 violent robberies per murder is outrageous, and further, the auto theft rate (about 323/day) though below the violent robbery rate, is out of hand.