Blessed olive leaves, Kenyan olivewood bowl, William Morris olive and oak leaf print

n the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing. Ezekiel 47.12

hen the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Revelation 22.1-2

he wrongdoers shall be sternly punished. As for those that have faith and do good works, they shall be admitted to gardens watered by running streams, in which, by their Lord's leave, they shall abide for ever. Their greeting shall be: 'Peace!' Koran 14.23

Our library collects books on indigenous and nomadic peoples, to value them. Yet these are the sectors of populations singled out for discrimination, injustice, and poverty, to the benefit of the sector that has power. Myths are told against them to 'justify' this injustice, Plato's 'Myth of the Metals', the lie that many are iron, slaves, labourers, others are silver, the educated, one is gold, the ruler in charge of this system of injustice. Sparta exhausted itself with its army to keep down its helots, robbing its own people of their childhoods in rearing them to its violence. In South Africa it was apartheid. In Germany, anti-Semitism, in Israel being anti-Palestine. In Ireland it still festers. Throughout Europe it is the fear and mistrust of the legally marginalised Rom. It is the deliberate creating of poverty, then the blaming of its victim. Tragically, too, those subjected to unforgiveable injustice may then inflict it in turn on others. Traumas which reverberate across the world and down the generations. Traumas that breed terrible wars. Traumas that can be deliberately engineered to rear violent warriors.

Our cemetery is filled with persons who in the nineteenth century wrote against slavery and for the rights of children and women and nations. Amongst our tombs is that of Nadezhda, brought to Florence at fourteen in Champollion and Rosellini's Expedition to Egypt and to Nubia, she having been a black Nubian slave, her tombstone tells us in Cyrillic, and baptised into a Russian Orthodox family. In Russian her name means 'Hope'. Our cemetery is filled with statues of Hope and with friends of Florence Nightingale.

James Piotrowski wrote a letter to the Guardian recently from his military prison cell in Colchester. In it he describes the events that he experienced while deployed on the frontline of the invasion of Iraq in 2003

On one of the first days after we breached the border, our section went firm while the American gunships' Cobra helicopters cleared a village. It was an awesome sight, but an hour or so after it was chaos as cars came racing out of the village. I remember one car came up to me. Immediately I knew there was something wrong as the driver started to get out. His wife and kids had been shot to pieces and were bleeding badly. This man brought them to me to help them. All I could do was look at them in shock knowing that we couldn't use our kit on them to help because we only had enough for ourselves. The father was told to carry on down the line until he finds a medic. I don't think they would have survived much longer anyway.

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Things were OK for a while after that. We got shot at, mortared, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] fired at us but that is what we were trained for so that didn't bother us too much.

About two weeks into the battle Fusilier [Kelan] Turrington was shot in the neck by a sniper and died there and then on the spot. He was just lying there because no one would go near him because of sniper fire. It seemed like he was there for hours. It was like time stopped, not nice at all.

One night our section was dug in, in trenches on Bridge 3 and in the middle of my stag [guard duty]. We got hit hard by enemy artillery which was landing 10 to 15 metres away. It was the most awful sound and it felt like the ground just opened up and tried to swallow us.

Because we were the initial fighting force, we didn't stop to mess around with dead bodies [Iraqis]. There was a little girl clinging on to her dead dad screaming her eyes out. We never had time to stop. We just pushed on past as the next line of soldiers behind us would sort it out.

Once we got to the outskirts of Basra, we went firm, put a ring of steel around it. No one could come out. It was like the wild west. The enemy were constantly trying to have a pop but they never had a chance. I was watching them get cut down by our tank shells, cut in half by our machine guns. I was next to my best mate, Chris McDade, who was on the machine gun when he shot a raghead in half. Chris is now being treated for PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] as well.

I look back on these incidents a lot. Some of them haunt me and have ruined my life. I get bad flashbacks and nightmares. It makes everyday life very difficult for me.

When we came back from Iraq there was no help, no nothing for any of us as the army don't believe in PTSD and it is frowned upon.

It didn't affect me straight away. I couldn't tell I was on the path to self-destruction but it all started going wrong for me during our tour in Northern Ireland. Our platoon commander killed loads of kittens and I just flipped because I had seen enough deaths in Iraq and now this.

Every time I went out with my mates I was like a timebomb waiting to go off. I was fighting three or four times a night. I wouldn't sleep because of the dreams. I was living on Pro Plus to keep me awake. Lucky I never turned to drugs like some other lads did.

When I used to come home I was sleeping in the garden. I couldn't go in any clubs because the loud music used to sound like tanks firing and used to trigger me off, I was that bad. One minute I would be fine, the next I would be back in Iraq - that's how intense the flashbacks were. In the end I ended up having an SA80 rifle with me at home because I never felt safe without it and because no one was helping me. I ended up taking matters into my own hands.

To this day I still have to spend nights sleeping on the floor of my cell. I have received no help for my condition since I have been in Colchester prison. The doctors just tell me that there is nothing wrong with me and say it is down to a personality disorder.

The only doctor who has helped me is Dr Jones. I have spent a month in an intensive care unit under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. All they did was pump me full of anti-psychotic drugs. It was only at a hospital in Wales [Dr Jones's clinic] where I was getting the proper treatment and help for my condition. I was there for six months. Then one morning the civvy police came and took me back to Birmingham for questioning on some motoring offences which I was supposed to have committed the night before - which sounds crazy because I was in Wales. I was then released from police custody to go back to the hospital. But the military police were waiting outside for me and took me into army custody.

It seems the whole thing was a set-up to take me out of the hospital because the following week the civvy police got in touch and said due to no evidence, no charges are being brought against you. If this is the case why was I not returned to the hospital? I have turned into a political prisoner. I'm a hot potato. No one wants to get involved with me.

There are four of us from the same area who have grown up with each other and joined the army together: myself, Elliott Nash, Chris McDade and John Connelly. All four are on our way out of the army because Iraq has changed us mentally.

Chris is being seen by doctors for PTSD and is awaiting medical discharge. Elliott Nash went Awol because it all got too much for him and the army was offering no treatment and he is now waiting for his discharge papers. John Connelly went Awol for the same reasons as Elliott and is now in Colchester with me awaiting his discharge.

That's four young lads the army has mentally screwed up and not helped, who put their life on the line not just for Queen and country but to look out for their comrades, including the officer who wants us all out of the unit.

So, the future looks dim for us four. No one in the army has looked out for us. Now we face being in and out of hospitals and prisons because the army has simply neglected us.

Survivors were 'traumatised' after being used as extras in a re-creation of the Rwanda killings

A BBC-funded film about the Rwandan genocide billed as an 'authentic re-creation' of a real-life story, is facing criticism for exacerbating the trauma experienced by genocide survivors.

Backed by the Rwandan government, shot on location in the country and to be premiered there this week, Shooting Dogs was intended to raise awareness of the conflict. Aid organisations are now saying that it was a shot with a lack of sensitivity so soon after the events.

The film, which stars Hugh Dancy and John Hurt, tells the story of a massacre at a school, L'Ecole Technique Officielle, during the genocide in 1994. It includes scenes in which machete-wielding Interahamwe militia close in on the building, hacking women and children to death. It was filmed where the atrocity took place, using many local people, including genocide survivors, as extras and members of the crew.

Aid workers have expressed concern that some local people were traumatised by witnessing the reconstruction. On one occasion, students from a nearby school had to be taken to hospital and sedated when they suffered flashbacks after overhearing the chants and whistles of the angry mob. One member of the crew suffered a breakdown when he was taken back to the street where he had been forced to hide down a manhole for three months to escape the killers.

'In Rwanda, if you see a machete being wielded it doesn't matter if it's for a film - it seems real,' said Mary Kayitesi Blewitt, director of the UK-based Rwandan charity Survivors' Fund. 'When the shoot was over, we had to step up trauma counselling. It took some people six months to overcome the anxiety, fear and paranoia.'

Like two other recent films about the genocide - Sometimes in April and Hotel Rwanda - Shooting Dogs is due to be screened in Kigali this month.

'We're providing pamphlets and counselling to prepare people for seeing it,' said Blewitt. 'What really hurts is that the BBC will be making money from the film, but it has not put a penny into the organisations dealing with all this.'

A Unicef spokesman said: 'It's important to highlight issues like the Rwandan conflict, but reliving these experiences can be traumatic for children and we encourage journalists and others who work with survivors to adhere to our guidelines.'

David Belton, who wrote and produced Shooting Dogs, said that he 'deeply regretted' the incident with the students. 'We took great pains to avoid local people being confronted with the disturbing scenes, and had two trauma counsellors and medical staff on hand.

'I have been in close communication with the Rwandan government and organisations working there since we left, and none of them has mentioned any subsequent problems. We made the film in Rwanda because the Rwandans wanted us to. They were appalled that Hotel Rwanda was filmed in South Africa, with South African actors.'

Helen Bamber, director of the Helen Bamber Foundation for conflict survivors, criticised the decision not to vet any of the extras about their involvement in the 1994 massacre. Those who were likely to have perpetrated the killing, mainly from the Hutu tribe, were cast alongside their Tutsi victims. 'Who knows what kind of emotions that stirred up for the victims, and what kind of tensions it left behind?'

· Linda Melvern, author of A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide, argues in The Observer today that the film is inaccurate and misrepresents the BBC's role in reporting the atrocities. David Thompson, head of BBC Films, disputed this. 'As with all dramas there is some degree of artistic licence.'

During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship - A-bomb technology

Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer survived the extermination camp, married soon after the war and moved to South Africa.

Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.

Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.

Reitzer was unusual among Jewish South Africans in her open enthusiasm for apartheid and for her membership of the NP. But she was an accepted member of the Jewish community in Johannesburg, working for the Holocaust survivors association, while Jews who fought the system were frequently ostracised by their own community.

Many Israelis recoil at suggestions that their country, risen from the ashes of genocide and built on Jewish ideals, could be compared to a racist regime. Yet for years the bulk of South Africa's Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefited and thrived under its protection, even if some of their number figured prominently in the liberation movements. In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.

Afrikaner anti-semitism
Apartheid sought to segregate every aspect of life from the workplace to the bedroom, even though whites in practice were dependent on black people as a workforce and servants. Segregation evolved into "separate development" and the bantustans - the five nominally "independent" homelands where millions of black people were dumped under the rule of despots beholden to Pretoria.

When the Nationalist party government first gained power in Pretoria in 1948, the Jews of South Africa - the bulk of them descendants of refugees from 19th-century pogroms in Lithuania and Latvia - had reason to be wary. A decade before Malan became the first apartheid-era prime minister, he was leading opposition to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany entering South Africa. In promoting legislation to block immigration, Malan told parliament in 1937: "I have been reproached that I am now discriminating against the Jews as Jews. Now let me say frankly that I admit that it is so."

South African anti-semitism had grown with the rise of Jews to prominence in the 1860s, during the Kimberly diamond rush. At the turn of the century, the Manchester Guardian's correspondent, JA Hobson, reflected a view that the Boer war was being fought in the interests of a "small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race". Fifty years later, Malan's cabinet saw similar conspiracies. Hendrik Verwoerd, editor of the virulently anti-semitic newspaper, Die Transvaler, and future author of "grand apartheid", accused Jews of controlling the economy. Before the second world war, the secret Afrikaner society, the Broederbond - which included Malan and Verwoerd as members - developed ties to the Nazis. Another Broederbond member and future prime minister, John Vorster, was interned in a prison camp by Jan Smuts's government during the war for his Nazi sympathies and ties to the Grey Shirt fascist militia.

Don Krausz, chairman of Johannesburg's Holocaust survivors association, arrived in South Africa a year after the war, having survived Hitler's camps at Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen when much of his extended family did not. "The Nationalists had a strongly anti-semitic platform before 1948. The Afrikaans press was viciously anti-Jewish, much like Der Stürmer in Germany under Hitler. The Jew felt himself very much threatened by the Afrikaner. The Afrikaner supported Hitler," he says. "My wife comes from Potchefstroom [in what was then the Transvaal]. Every Jewish shop in that town was blown up by the Grey Shirts. In the communities that were predominantly Afrikaans, the Jews were absolutely victimised. Now the same crowd comes to power in 1948. The Jew was a very frightened person. There were cabinet ministers who openly supported the Nazis."

Helen Suzman, a secular Jew, was for many years the only anti-apartheid voice in parliament. "They didn't fear there would be a Holocaust but they did fear there might be Nuremberg-style laws, the kind that prevented people practising their professions. The incoming government had made it clear that race differentiation was going to be intensified, and the Jews didn't know where they were going to fit into that," she says.

Many South African Jews were soon reassured that, while there would be Nuremberg-style laws, they would not be the victims. The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel's struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism.

Many Afrikaners saw the Nationalist party's election victory as liberation from bitterly hated British rule. British concentration camps in South Africa may not have matched the scale or intent of Hitler's war against the Jews, but the deaths of 25,000 women and children from disease and starvation were deeply rooted in Afrikaner nationalism, in the way the memory of the Holocaust is now central to Israel's perception of itself. The white regime said that the lesson was for Afrikaners to protect their interests or face destruction.

"What the Nats were trying to do was protect the Afrikaner," says Krausz. "Especially after what was done to them in the Boer war, where the Afrikaner was reduced almost to a beggar on returning after the war, whether it was from the battlefield or some sort of concentration camp. They did it to protect the Afrikaner, his predominance after 1948, his culture."

There was also God. The Dutch Reformed Church, prising justifications for apartheid out of the Old Testament and Afrikaner history, seized on the victory over the Zulus at the battle of Blood River as confirming that the Almighty sided with the white man.

"Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity," says Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa's intelligence minister and Jewish co-author of a petition that was circulated amongst South African Jewry protesting at the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

"This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was 'a land without people for a people without land', so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest."

Anti-semitism lingered, but within a few years of the Nationalists assuming power in 1948, many Jewish South Africans found common purpose with the rest of the white community. "We were white and even though the Afrikaner was no friend of ours, he was still white," says Krausz. "The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was 'the blacks this and the blacks that'. And I said to them, 'You know, I've heard exactly the same from the Nazis about you.' The laws were reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws. Separate entrances; 'Reserved for whites' here; 'Not for Jews' there."

For decades, the Zionist Federation and Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa honoured men such as Percy Yutar, who prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years). Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg's largest orthodox synagogue. Some Jewish leaders hailed him as a "credit to the community" and a symbol of the Jews' contribution to South Africa.

"The image of the Jews was that they were following Helen Suzman," says Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria. "I think the majority didn't like what apartheid was doing to the blacks but enjoyed the fruits of the system and thought that maybe that's the only way to run a country like South Africa."

The Jewish establishment shied away from confrontation with the government. The declared policy of the Board of Deputies was "neutrality" so as not to "endanger" the Jewish population. Those Jews who saw silence as collaboration with racial oppression, and did something about it outside of the mainstream political system, were shunned.

"They were mostly disapproved of very strongly because it was felt they were putting the community in danger," says Suzman. "The Board of Deputies always said that every Jew can exercise his freedom to choose his political party but bear in mind what it is doing to the community. By and large, Jews were part of the privileged white community and that led many Jews to say, 'We will not rock the boat.'"

Common aims
Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster - a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler - to make a state visit.

Leaving unmentioned Vorster's wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster's past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".

Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Vorster's visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.

"We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.

"We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate."

Alongside the state-owned factories turning out materiel for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.

Going nuclear
The biggest secret of all was the nuclear one. Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bombs. Israel was embarrassed enough about its close association with a political movement rooted in racial ideology to keep the military collaboration hidden.

"All that I'm telling you was completely secret," says Liel. "The knowledge of it was extremely limited to a small number of people outside the security establishment. But it so happened that many of our prime ministers were part of it, so if you take people such as [Shimon] Peres or Rabin, certainly they knew about it because they were part of the security establishment.

"At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating."

So did many politicians. Israeli cities found twins in South Africa, and Israel was alone among western nations in allowing the black homeland of Bophuthatswana to open an "embassy".

By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts.

"There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights," says Kasrils. "The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."

There are important differences. Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.

White South Africa and Israel painted themselves as enclaves of democratic civilisation on the front line in defending western values, yet both governments often demanded to be judged by the standards of the neighbours they claimed to be protecting the free world from.

"The whites [in South Africa] always saw their fate in a way related to the fate of the Israelis because the Israelis were a white minority surrounded by 200 million fanatic Muslims assisted by communism," says Liel. "Also, there was this analysis that said Israel is a civilised western island in the midst of these 200 million barbaric Arabs and it's the same as the Afrikaners; five million Afrikaners surrounded by hundreds of millions of blacks who are also assisted by communism."

When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel's security establishment balked. "When we came to the crossroads in '86-'87, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, 'You're crazy, it's suicidal.' They were saying we wouldn't have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it's probably true," he says.

Forgetting the past
Shimon Peres was defence minister at the time of Vorster's visit to Jerusalem and twice served as prime minister during the 1980s when Israel drew closest to the apartheid government. He shies away from questions about the morality of ties to the white regime. "I never think back. Since I cannot change the past, why should I deal with it?" he says.

Pressed about whether he ever had doubts about backing a government that was the antithesis of what Israel said it stood for, Peres says his country was struggling for survival. "Every decision is not between two perfect situations. Every choice is between two imperfect alternatives. At that time the movement of black South Africa was with Arafat against us. Actually, we didn't have much of a choice. But we never stopped denouncing apartheid. We never agreed with it."

And a man like Vorster? "I wouldn't put him on the list of the greatest leaders of our time," says Peres.

The deputy director general of Israel's foreign ministry, Gideon Meir, says that while he had no detailed knowledge of Israel's relationship with the apartheid government, it was driven by a sole consideration. "Our main problem is security. There is no other country in the world whose very existence is being threatened. This is since the inception of the state of Israel to this very day. Everything is an outcome of the geopolitics of Israel."

When apartheid collapsed, the South African Jewish establishment that once honoured Percy Yutar - the prosecutor who jailed Mandela - now rushed to embrace Jews who were at the forefront of the anti-apartheid struggle, such as Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and Ruth First.

"I received these awards from international Zionist organisations claiming that it was my Judaic roots that had driven me," says Suzman. "When I said I didn't have a Jewish upbringing and that I went to a convent which didn't influence me either, they said it was not actively but instinctively."

For Kasrils, the embrace was short-lived. "They spent years denouncing me for 'endangering the Jews' and then suddenly they pretend they've been at my side all through the struggle. It didn't last long. As soon as I started criticising what Israel is doing in Palestine they dropped me again," he said.

Nowadays, the language of the anti-apartheid struggle has found favour with the Jewish establishment as a means of defending Israel. South Africa's chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, has called Zionism the "national liberation movement of the Jewish people" and invoked the terminology of Pretoria's policies to uplift "previously disadvantaged" black people. "Israel is an affirmative-action state set up to protect Jews from genocide. We are previously disadvantaged and we can't rely on the goodwill of the world," he said. Rabbi Goldstein declined several requests for an interview.

In 2004, Ronnie Kasrils visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effect of Israel's assault on the West Bank two years earlier in response to a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people. "This is much worse than apartheid," he said. "The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale."

Petition of conscience
More than 200 South African Jews signed a petition that Kasrils co-authored with another Jewish veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Max Ozinsky, denouncing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and drawing a parallel with apartheid. The document, called A Declaration of Conscience, prompted a furious debate within the community. Arthur Goldreich - one of Mandela's early comrades-in-arms who also fought for Israel's independence - was among those who signed but he attached an addendum recognising the impact of the suicide bombings on how Israelis view the Palestinians.

Kasrils acknowledges the effect of the bombers but says that Israel's "apartheid strategy" was under way long before the suicide attacks began. He notes the resemblance of the occupied territories to South Africa's patchwork of homelands - the bantustans - that were intended to divest the country of much of its black population while keeping the best of their land.

Today, about six million Israelis live on 85% of the area that was Palestine under the British mandate. Nearly 3.5 million Palestinians are confined to the remaining 15%, with their towns and cities penned between Israel's ever-expanding settlement blocks and behind a network of segregated roads, security barriers and military installations.

You might say that Israel and the old South Africa were caught out by history. The world of 1948 into which the Jewish state was born and the Afrikaners came to power cared little about the "dark peoples" who stood in the way of grand visions. Neither government was doing very much that others - including British colonists - had not done before them.

And if Israel was fighting for its life and forcing Arabs out of their homes at the same time, who in the west was going to judge the Jews after what they had endured?

But colonialism crumbled in Africa and Israel grew strong, and the world became less accepting of the justifications in Pretoria and Jerusalem. South Africa's white leadership eventually accepted another way. Israel now stands at a critical moment in its history.

With Ariel Sharon in a coma, it is unlikely that we will ever know how far he intended to carry his "unilateral disengagement" strategy after the withdrawal from Gaza and a part of the West Bank. Like FW de Klerk, who initiated the dismantling of apartheid, Sharon might have found he had set in motion forces he could not contain - forces that would have led to a deal acceptable to the Palestinians.

But to the Palestinians, Sharon appeared intent on carrying through a modified version of his longstanding plan to rid Israel of responsibility for as many Arabs as possible while keeping as much of their land as he could.

While Tony Blair was praising the Israeli prime minister for his political "courage" in leaving Gaza in August last year, Sharon was expropriating more land in the West Bank than Israel surrendered in Gaza, building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements, and accelerating construction of the 400-plus miles of concrete and barbed wire barrier that few doubt is intended as a border.

Palestinians said that whatever emasculated "state" emerged - granted only "aspects of sovereignty" with limited control over its borders, finances and foreign policy - would be disturbingly reminiscent of South Africa's defunct bantustans.

Take the roads. Israel is rapidly constructing a parallel network of roads in the West Bank for Palestinians who are barred from using many existing routes. B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, describes the system as bearing "clear similarities to the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa".

The army, which describes roads from which Palestinians are forbidden as "sterile", says the policy is driven solely by security considerations. But it is evident that the West Bank road system is a tool, along with the 400-plus miles of barrier, in entrenching the settlement blocks and carving up territory. "The road regime is not by legislation," said Goldreich. "It's by political decision and military orders. When I look at all of those maps and I look at the roads, it's like Alice in Wonderland. There are roads that Israelis can go on and roads Palestinians can go on, and roads Israelis and Palestinians can go on." The roads, the checkpoints, the fence - all "by edict. I look at it and ask, what is the thinking behind this?"

Three years ago, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the former Italian prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, as telling dinner guests at a Jerusalem hotel that, on a visit to Rome a few years earlier, Sharon had told him that the bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. When one of the guests suggested to D'Alema that he was interpreting, not repeating, Sharon's words, the former prime minister said not. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister," he said. With Sharon out of politics, his successor Ehud Olmert has pledged himself to carrying through the vision of carving out Israel's final borders deep inside the West Bank and retaining all of Jerusalem for the Jewish state.

So is it apartheid?
Stepping into modern Israel, anyone who experienced the old South Africa would see few immediately visible comparisons. There are no signs segregating Jews and non-Jews. Yet, as in white South Africa then and now, there is a world of discrimination and oppression that most Israelis choose not to see.

Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate and harass Palestinians at checkpoints and settlers paint hate-filled slogans on the walls of Arab houses in Hebron. The police stop citizens who appear to be Arabs on West Jerusalem streets to demand their identity cards as a matter of routine.

Some Jewish communities refuse to allow Arabs in their midst on the grounds of cultural differences. One Jewish settlement mayor tried to require Arabs who entered to wear a tag that identified them as Palestinians. In the 1990s, rightwingers menaced shopkeepers into sacking Arab workers. Those who complied were given signs declaring their shops Arab-free. Sometimes the hatred is explained away as religious discrimination, but the chants at the football matches go "Death to Arabs" not "Death to Muslims".

The Israeli press largely ignores the routine of occupation despite the fearless reporting of some journalists on the disturbing number of children who die under Israeli guns (more than 650 since the second intifada broke out in September 2000, of which a quarter were younger than 12 years old); the abuse of Palestinians by settlers, and the humiliations meted out at the checkpoints.

The eight-metre-high wall driven through Jerusalem is almost invisible to residents of the Jewish west of the city. Because of the geography, most of the city's Jews do not see the concrete mammoth dividing streets and families, and the demolished homes - just as most of South Africa's whites steered clear of the townships and were blind to what was being done in their name.

Shortly after arriving in Jerusalem, I was invited for dinner at the home of a liberal Israeli family. The guests included an American magazine publisher, a prominent historian and political activists. The conversation turned to the Palestinians and degenerated into a discussion of how they do not "deserve" a state. The intifada and suicide bombings were seen to justify 37 years of occupation and offset whatever crimes Israel may have committed against the Arabs under its rule.

It was all very reminiscent of conversations in South Africa, and indeed the popular Israeli view of Palestinians is not so far from how many white South Africans thought about black people. Opinion polls show that large numbers of Israelis regard Arabs as "dirty", "primitive", as not valuing human life and as violent.

Sharon recruited into his government men who openly called for wholesale ethnic cleansing that would more than match apartheid's forced removals. Among them was the tourism minister, Rehavam Ze'evi, who advocated the "transfer" of Arabs out of Israel and the occupied territories. Even the Israeli press called him a racist. Ze'evi was shot dead in 2001 by Palestinians who said his policies made him a legitimate target.

But Ze'evi's views did not die with him. An influential Likud MP, Uzi Cohen, said Israel and its western allies should demand that a part of Jordan be carved off as a Palestinian state and that Arabs in the occupied territories should be given 20 years to "leave voluntarily". "In case they don't leave, plans would have to be drawn up to expel them by force," Cohen told Israel radio. "Many people support the idea but few are willing to speak about it publicly." Cohen is among 70 Israeli MPs who have backed a bill to establish a national memorial day for Ze'evi and an institute to perpetuate his ideas.

In 2001, Sharon appointed Uzi Landau as his security minister, a position from which he openly advocated that Palestinians should be forced to move to Jordan because they were in the way of Israeli expansion in the West Bank. "For many of us, it's as though they [the Palestinians] are encroaching on our very right to be there [in the occupied territories]," he said.

Sharon rarely objected to the expression of such views, and when he did it was not because they were racist or immoral. The prime minister told Likud party members who pressed him to expel Palestinians that he could not do so because the "international situation wouldn't be conducive".

"We've always had the fanatics talking of greater Israel," says Krausz, the Holocaust survivor in Johannesburg. "There are blokes who say it says in the Bible this land is ours, God gave it to us. It's fascism."

Colonial dispossession
Yossi Sarid, a leftwing Israeli MP, said of a cabinet minister who agitated for the forced removal of Arabs: "His remarks are reminiscent of other people and other lands which ultimately led to the annihilation of millions of Jews." They are also reminiscent of comments by PW Botha, who went on to become South Africa's president. Speaking to parliament in 1964 as minister for coloured affairs, he said: "I am one of those who believe that there is no permanent home for even a section of the Bantu in the white area of South Africa and the destiny of South Africa depends on this essential point. If the principle of permanent residence for the black man in the area of the white is accepted then it is the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it in this country."

There was a time when large numbers of Israelis agreed with Ze'evi and Cohen, but over the past decade they have come to support the creation of a Palestinian state as a means of ridding themselves of responsibility from the bulk of Arabs. Separation. Apartheid.

But South African apartheid was more than just separation. "Apartheid was all about land," says John Dugard, the South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor. "Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied territories], particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank."

Arthur Goldreich resists the temptation to use the comparison. "It is a viable, even attractive, analogy. I have in the past been very reluctant, and still am, to make the analogy because I think it's too convenient. I think there are striking similarities in all forms of racist discrimination," he says.

"I think to describe, let us say, the bantustanism which we see through a policy of occupation and separation: they all have their own words and their own implications and it is not necessary to go outside to find them."

Kasrils agrees. "Yes, there are enormous parallels with apartheid, but the problem with making comparisons is it actually distracts from the Palestinian context," he says. "We have to look for another definition. What struck me is dispossession, colonial dispossession. Most colonial dispossession took place over centuries through settlers and forced removals. In South Africa, that was a 300-year process. Here, it's taken place in 50 years; 1948, 1967 and the present in terms of the heightened nature of militarism in the West Bank and Gaza leading to the wall, which I don't see as a wall of security but a wall of dispossession."

Hirsh Goodman emigrated to Israel three decades ago after his national service in the South African army. His son moved to South Africa after completing his conscription in the Israeli military. "The army sent him to the occupied territories and he said he would never forgive this country for what it made him do," says Goodman, a security analyst at Tel Aviv university. He says Israel has a lot to answer for but to call it apartheid goes too far. "If Israel retains the [occupied] territories it ceases to be a democracy, and in that sense it is apartheid because it differentiates between two classes of people and separates and creates two sets of laws which is what apartheid did. It creates two standards of education, health, of dispensing funds. But you can't call Israel an apartheid state when 76% of the people want an agreement with the Palestinians. Yes, there's discrimination against the Arabs, the Ethiopians and others, but it's not a racist society. There's colonialism, but there's not apartheid. I feel very strongly about apartheid. I hate the term being abused."

Daniel Seidemann, the Israeli lawyer who is fighting Jerusalem's residency and planning laws, says that he used to reject the apartheid parallel out of hand but finds it harder to do so nowadays. "My gut reaction: 'Oh, no! Our side? My goodness, no!' I think there's a good deal to be said for that reaction to the extent that apartheid was rooted in a racial ideology which clearly fed social realities, fed the political system, fed the system of economic subjugation. As a Jew, to concede the predominance of a racial world view of subjugating Palestinians is difficult to accept," he says. "But, unfortunately, the fact of the absence of a racial ideology is not sufficient because the realities that have emerged in some ways are clearly reminiscent of some of the important trappings of an apartheid regime."

So perhaps the better question is how Israel came to a point where comparisons with apartheid could even be contemplated. Is it a victim of circumstances, forced into oppression by its need to survive? Or was the hunger for land so central to the Zionist project that domination was the inevitable result?

Krausz worked in Israel for several years soon after the birth of the state. "I recognised the conflict in trying to take land that the Palestinians had lived on for centuries. I realise the 1948 war of independence wasn't a right-and-wrong situation: a lot of Arabs not only fled voluntarily but were also encouraged to do so. What they would have done if there hadn't been a war, I don't know," he says.

"I know that where I drilled for oil was the site of an Arab village. Being South African, I used to go and visit family and friends on a kibbutz that was started by South Africans, including my cousin. I used to go roaming about the countryside there and I went through one abandoned and blown up Arab village after another."

States of fear
In Israel, at least until the late 1970s, the threat from its Arab neighbours was all too real. But fear also played a role among white South Africans, who watched with growing horror, and then terror, the tide of empire receding and black rule sweeping Africa. The accounts of white women raped in newly independent Congo and, years later, the scenes of whites fleeing Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia, were used by South Africa to terrify its white citizens into accepting increasingly oppressive measures against black people. Nevertheless, the fear among whites was real. They, like Israelis, saw themselves as in a struggle for their very existence.

Israel's critics say that as the threats to the Jewish state receded it came more and more to resemble the apartheid model - particularly in its use of land and residency laws - until the similarities outweighed the differences. Liel says that was never the intent.

"The existential problems of Israel were real," he says. "Of the injustice we did, we're always ashamed. We always tried to behave democratically. Of course, on the private level there was a lot of discrimination - a lot, a lot. By the government also. But it was not a philosophy that was built on racism. A lot of it was security-oriented."

Goldreich disagrees. "It's a gross distortion. I'm surprised at Liel. In 1967, in the six day war, in this climate of euphoria - by intent, not by will of God or accident - the Israeli government occupied the territories of the West Bank and Gaza with a captive Palestinian population obviously in order to extend the area of Israel and to push the borders more distant from where they were," he says.

"I and others like me, active after the six day war on public platforms, tried desperately to convince audiences throughout this country that peace agreements between Israel and Palestine [offer] greater security than occupation of territory and settlements. But the government wanted territory more than it wanted security.

"I am certain that it was in the minds of many in the leadership of this country that what we needed to do was make this place Arab-free. Mandela said to me once at Rivonia, 'You know, they want to make us unpeople, not seen.'"

But, as ordinary Israelis discovered, such a system cannot survive unchallenged. Apartheid collapsed in part because South African society was exhausted by its demands and the myth of victimhood among whites fell away. Israel has not got there yet. Many Israelis still think they are the primary victims of the occupation.

For Seidemann, the crucial issue is not how the apartheid system worked but how it began to disintegrate. "It unravelled because it couldn't be done. Apartheid drained so much energy from South African society that this was one of the compelling reasons beyond the economic sanctions and pressures that convinced De Klerk that this was not sustainable. This is what is coming to Israel."

Or perhaps the conflict will evolve into something worse; something that will produce parallels even more shocking than that with apartheid.

Arnon Soffer has spent years advising the government on the "demographic threat" posed by the Arabs. The Haifa university geographer paints a bleak vision of how he sees the Gaza strip a generation after Israel's withdrawal.

"When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day," he told the Jerusalem Post.

"If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."

I have been searching on the Internet for these images. Now Godfriends have sent them:

I was subjected to sexual abuse in Anglicanism, in my school and in my convent. But the authorities punished me for being the victim. My father, my brother and my son all met with sexual abuse by Anglicans when they were children, my brother and my son dying young in consequence. I became Catholic because Catholics came to see this as wrong and because they now accept punishment for it. I was told in Anglicanism that confession was voluntary and that the grave sins were not to be confessed. In Catholicism confession is required and particularly the gravest sins must be confessed.

Paedophilia is wrong. Paedophilia is deadly, for bodies, minds, souls. It is particularly so when perpetrated by religious.

Ampleforth College, the country's most celebrated Roman Catholic public school, is facing a series of lawsuits after it emerged that dozens of boys were sexually abused there over a 30-year period.

A number of former pupils who were abused by monks who taught at the college are preparing to take action.

Ampleforth is at the centre of the most serious child sex scandal that the Roman Catholic church has faced in England and Wales, after police discovered that Cardinal Basil Hume failed to alert them to abuse, both while he was Abbot of Ampleforth and after he became Archbishop of Westminster.

Police say they discovered clear evidence that Cardinal Hume became aware of abuse as early as 1975, but chose not to contact them or social services. They believe that the subsequent two decades of assaults on pupils at Ampleforth and its prep school might have been avoided if he had alerted the statutory authorities.

Three monks have now admitted sexual assaults upon pupils at the college and its prep school between the mid-60s and mid-90s, while a fourth has been removed from his post.

Three other members of staff who are alleged to have abused young pupils had died by the time police became aware of problems at the £21,400-a-year school in North Yorkshire.

In a civil action being brought at the high court in Manchester, a former pupil of Ampleforth's prep school is claiming damages "for personal injuries and consequential losses" caused by alleged assaults by its former head, Fr Jeremy Sierla, between 1990 and 1993. Fr Sierla was arrested and his rooms at the college were searched after police obtained a warrant, but he was released without charge. He and the college firmly deny the accusations.

Richard Scorer, the solicitor at Manchester firm Pannone who is bringing the claim, is also representing another former pupil whose abuser has admitted the offence.

Yesterday, one Ampleforth victim who is considering legal action told the Guardian how his tormentor, Fr Piers Grant-Ferris, was recognised by many boys to be a predatory paedophile, despite the college authorities' reluctance to admit the danger that the man posed. This man, Vincent (not his real name), also told how his whole life had been overshadowed by abuse which he suffered as a very young boy.

"Even as an eight- or nine-year-old we knew he was a ridiculous pervert," said Vincent. "He was fondling boys left, right and centre. He was obsessed with bottoms. He was always shouting out strange things like 'beat the bowels!'"

Grant-Ferris, 72, the son of a Tory peer, admitted 20 assaults on 15 boys at Ampleforth's prep school, between 1966 and 1975, when he appeared at Leeds crown court on Thursday.

The court heard that he would fondle some boys, strip and beat others, and would often insert thermometers up their anuses.

Police say that he was a "falsely pious" man who would impose punishments on pupils for imaginary offences, then beat them for sexual gratification.

Vincent, who was beaten with a stick by Grant-Ferris, is convinced that the true number of the monk's victims runs to three figures.

"Whenever a child fell ill at night after the nurse had gone, Piers would get his thermometers out. There has got to be hundreds who suffered these minor intrusions.

"There was a complete failure to address what was going on. It was completely hushed up. And it was not just the monks. Even at the time I could see that there were some lay masters who were there simply because of their affinity with teenage boys.

"Looking back, I feel embarrassed when I think of a man fondling me while saying 'Oh Vincent, you are such a good boy,' or 'Oh Vincent, isn't it a nice day?'"

A number of Vincent's close friends were also assaulted while they were at Ampleforth, he said. One friend in particular suffered serious abuse at the hands of a lay member of the college staff who has since died.

Vincent never settled at Ampleforth, despite remaining there for 10 years. He says he was frequently threatened with expulsion, but cannot be sure whether his teenage rebellions against the rigours of the school were rooted in the abuse that he suffered some time around his 10th birthday.

Similarly, he still has "a lot of anger" within him, but cannot fathom whether that is connected with the assaults. He remains single and childless while in his 40s, but is unsure whether the absence of a long-term relationship is a legacy of his encounters with Piers Grant-Ferris, or not.

"I am thinking of taking legal action, but how can I tell a solicitor exactly what this has cost me?"

Vincent's mother said that the discovery that he had been abused at Ampleforth had been "absolutely shattering". She said that she and her husband had been "delighted and full of hope" when he first attended the prep school, believing he would entering a caring environment. "Instead, my son has been damaged, and I am personally extremely angry. I went to see my parish priest about it, but he was of no help whatsoever."

Vincent's ordeal at Ampleforth has not made him cynical about those whose vocation is to raise and educate the next generation however: today he is a teacher.

From: "Marc Balestrieri" <mba@abm-online.com>
To: canonlaw@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 16:39:32 -0900
Subject: RE: [canonlaw] Membership in Forbidden Societies

Last year, I researched this question incidentally in regards to a canonical matter involving a Bonesman…

What is known of "The Order,” as it is called, its origins, operative tenets, growth in power, members, influence on the world history of the last 150 years, and core purpose, is disconcerting.

In direct response to your enquiry, per se a Bonesman appears untouched by Can. 1374 CIC, abstraction made of any proof of the Society acting to subvert the Church. Per accidens, however, Bonesmen adhere to internal guiding principles of the Order, notably "The Ends Justify the Means," re-phrased whenever needed, which amoral error runs directly counter to Divine Faith as taught by St. Paul in the Sacred Scriptures in Romans III,8: « Non faciamus mala ut veniant bona ». As such, canonically, it appears that it is objectively gravely illicit per Can. 750-2 CIC to join the Society, since this pervasive guiding principle of the Order entails the rejection of a truth proposed to be held at least "de fide divina.”

Furthermore, the propositions which hold 1) that the Church does not have the right to inquire into secret societies, its tenets or its members, and 2) that it is licit to take an oath to secret leaders binding one to them by irreducible and absolute loyalty, have long been condemned, and still stand condemned under Can. 1371, n.1 CIC 1983, apart from any plotting to attack the Church. Any Catholic, therefore, joining Skull and Bones, which mandates the taking of such an oath, must be punished by a mandatory indeterminate ferendae sententiae penalty per the same aforecited Canon. Cfr. Instruct. S.Off. 10 May 1884, still operative; Leo XIII, Encycl. Humanum Genus, 20 Apr. 1884; Clement XII, « In Eminenti », 28 Apr. 1738; Benedict XIV, « Providas Romanorum », 18 Maii 1751; Pius VII, « Ecclesiam », 13 Sept. 1821; Leo XII, « Quo Graviora », 13 March 1825.

The Society has inherited, and still uses, clear Satanic rituals. As detailed in the Order's internal manuals which have come to light, the creed is a highly pragmatic version of Luciferianism framed by an operative Hegelian Dialectic. Such rituals and guidelines are not mere frivolities to Bonesmen. The core heresies and errors in theology present within "established" Freemasonry, v.g. the rejection of the existence of any absolute truth whatsoever and the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, etc. are extant within the hieratic structure and belief system of the upper echelons of the Society.

Historically, the Order is the continuation of the "Illuminati" branch in Bavaria. The Illuminati there were founded on 1 May 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt. When the Illuminati's plot to overthrow the legitimate government of Bavaria was discovered, it was dismantled by order of the Elector in 1786. Skull and Bones re-appeared at Yale soon thereafter in 1833, organized as Chapter 322 of the German branch of the Order. Its legal entity is the Russell Trust, founded in 1856, which has a certain influence over the Guaranty Trust Company of New York and Brown Brothers Harriman.

The principle of Hegelian conflict-creation of opposites leading to “betterment” dictates short and cyclical long-term policy-making of senior members of the Order exercising influence in their various spheres of power. Skull and Bones’ members have had a decisive influence in shaping the causes and the funding of World Wars I and II, Nazism and Communism, Capitalism and Marxism. Policy implementation is neither "Right" nor "Left" on the spectrum. Major sectors of society, from politics to education to finance, and especially energy have been dominated in the United States this century by members of the Order.

The Order's breadth of influence and reach has increased. During last year’s electoral campaign for the Presidency of the United States, both major Party candidates were identified by the Press as being active members of Skull and Bones. Both individuals have confirmed the fact publicly...

Account taken of these facts, Reverend and Dear Father, I humbly submit that any one invited to join the Order’s ranks advisedly decline the invitation.

If I can be of any further assistance, please feel free to call at (800) 916-9441 or by cell at (310) 927-5414.

-----Original Message-----
From: Fr. William Elder [mailto:william.elder@archny.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 11:13 AM
To: canonlaw@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [canonlaw] Membership in Forbidden Societies

A Catholic student at Harvard asked me if he would be prohibited from joining Skull and Bones, an elite secret fraternity that includes some U.S. presidents among its members. As far as I know, it does not plot against the Church (c.1374), but it seems rather sinister nevertheless. Does anyone know anything about this organization or any prohibition that might apply?

When I was the deaf students' advisor at an American university we made the shocking discovery that every member of our group, men and women, had been sexually abused, our deafness making us very vulnerable.

It is a sex abuse scandal that is as horrific as it is shocking. Children as young as four were serially abused by a paedophile at a school for the deaf in the 1960s. Yet the perpetrator has never been to jail.

An Observer investigation has uncovered a catalogue of sexual abuse that saw some of Britain's most vulnerable children attacked. Without the power to communicate, they were left exposed as a target for a man who didn't care whether they were girl or boy or whether it was day or night. Their stories touch on one of the last unexplored areas of child vulnerability - the treatment of deaf children in the past, who were often preyed on. The Observer has been told of other cases of abuse, both past and present, at schools for the deaf.

Despite a four-year police investigation, last March a judge ruled that the abuser, now 82, could not be prosecuted because the events happened too long ago and he would not get a fair trial.

Using sign language, interpreters and relatives, many of the man's victims have now been able to tell their story publicly for the first time.

In 1964, the man was found guilty of abusing nine deaf children but escaped with a £50 fine.

Ms Smith then got Mr Nichols to talk about his alleged victims, and the toll their deaths would take on their families. She urged him to surrender to the authorities.

Mr Nichols went on to speak about his despair. "He needed hope for his life. He told me he was already dead. He said: 'Look at me. Look at my eyes. I am already dead.' I said you are not dead. You are standing right here in front of me."

She showed him the book she'd been reading, The Purpose Driven Life. Mr Nichols was so struck by the passage she read aloud, he asked her to read it again.

"We serve God by serving others. The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige and position. If you can demand service from others you've arrived. In our self-serving culture with its 'me first' mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept."

The Guardian today, 4/3/05, in an article on teenagers, mentioned the following:

Adam Hochschild gives the heroes - and one heroine - of the anti-slavery movement their due in Bury the Chains, says Robin White

Adam Hochschild's acclaimed account of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold's Ghost, told the tale of one of most terrible abuses of human rights: the theft of a vast country and the killing of between five and eight million of its inhabitants. Now, in Bury the Chains, he brings us the story of the most successful episodes of human rights activism, relating how, in just a few years at the end of the 18th century, a small group of men (and one woman) took on the vested interests of state, church and big business - and won.

Two hundred years ago, three-quarters of the world's population were in bondage of one kind or another. Eighty thousand slaves were trafficked every year from Africa to the New World. Ship owners, slave traders, sugar exporters, chocolate makers and plantation owners were earning fortunes. Only one MP, William Wilberforce, was active in the abolitionists' cause. Yet with organisation, enthusiasm and imaginative campaigning, the abolitionists eventually forced parliament to hear the cries of the suffering slaves and bend to the will of the British people. "It was the first time in history," writes Hochschild, "that a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years over someone else's rights."

The problem facing the abolitionists can be summed up in one word: sugar. Sugar was like today's oil. Our British ancestors, unaware of its dangers to health, consumed huge quantities of the stuff and the economy would have ground to a halt without it. At the height of the slave trade, for instance, British imports from the tiny, sugar-producing West Indian island of Grenada, were eight times those from Canada.

The life of the slaves who cut and harvested the sugar was hellish and short: they died being captured, they died crossing the Atlantic, they died from beatings and they died from sheer hard work on the sugar plantations. During the period of the slave trade, more than two million were shipped to the Caribbean. At its close, there were fewer than 670,000. By contrast, the 400,000 shipped to the Americas (where sugar cane was not the only crop) had grown to four million.

Cutting sugar was back-breaking and dangerous. Slaves would often fall asleep and let their hands slip into the crushing mills. A machete was kept nearby to cut off an entire arm in order to save them. In contrast, the life of the plantation owners who exploited the slaves was sweet and extravagant. Here are the observations of the planters' eating and drinking habits from the diary of Lady Nugent, wife of the governor of Jamaica: "Such eating and drinking I have never seen before - a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, then Madeira; hot and cold meat, stews and fries and cold fish pickled, peppers, ginger, sweetmeats, acid fruits and sweet jellies." And that was just for breakfast.

Bury the Chains tells of the struggle to end slavery through the eyes of the few who plotted its downfall. Among them was John Newton, who worked on slave ships between West Africa and the Caribbean, where profits on a slave could be as much as 147%. He was a ruthless businessman and a dispassionate observer of the Africans he bought and sold: "I was brought a woman to buy, but being long breasted and ill made, I refused her."

Slave revolts on board ship were frequent and every captain had to be on the lookout. Newton mounted guns on deck and trained muskets on the captives' quarters to intimidate them. But still there were uprisings and Newton regularly had to lash them and "put them slightly in the thumbscrews" to keep them quiet. Newton turned to God, wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace" and, late in life, joined the anti-slavery cause.

There was Granville Sharp, a royal musician who rescued a slave, Jonathan Strong, who had been brought to London by his master and so badly beaten up that he nearly died. Sharp went to court and had the slave freed. There was James Steven, a philanderer whose law studies had been financed by an uncle who bought sick slaves, cheaply, and oiled and fattened them up for resale. There was Olaudah Equiano, an eloquent, freed Igbo slave, who gatecrashed London society and wrote bestselling books about his own experiences.

But above all there was the abolitionist's most tireless worker, Thomas Clarkson. He was a giant of a man, more than 6ft tall, with striking red hair. Clarkson sprang into prominence when he entered, and won, England's top Latin essay competition. His chosen subject was the slave trade and his tract became famous. For the rest of his life he rode and walked the length of Britain (and quite a lot of France, too) addressing meetings, writing pamphlets, collecting signatures on petitions, and compiling a wealth of evidence on the horrors of the slave trade.

With the help of the Quakers (the only religious group to campaign wholeheartedly against the trade) Clarkson founded the all-white anti-slavery committee in 1787 at 18 Old Jewry, in the heart of the City of London. Initially they had spectacular successes. Slavery became the cause of the day. Newspapers took it up. It was the most discussed subject in London's popular debating societies. Just about every town and city in the country organised petitions on scrolls. One hundred and three were sent to parliament with 60,000 signatures. One scroll stretched the entire length of the debating chamber.

But when it came to votes in parliament, even the tiny but eloquent Wilberforce couldn't win the day. The 18th century may have been the age of enlightenment but there was a limited franchise and MPs did not need to respond to the wishes of the masses. Those who benefited from the slave trade fought back, employing lobby groups, bribing politicians and journalists. Wilberforce lost the debate by 163 votes to 88. It was a humbling experience, because it was not even a vote to abolish slavery as a whole, just the trade in slaves. (The argument was that if the human traffic could be stopped, then slavery itself would eventually wither and die.)

Clarkson and his friends were not discouraged. There was a nationwide sugar boycott - sugar sales dropped by a third. William Pitt, the prime minister, was enlisted on their side, and he spoke on the abolitionists' behalf in the second parliamentary debate a year later. But vested interests and those who argued that if Britain banned the trade then France would cash in again triumphed.

Then followed the wilderness years. British minds turned to other matters: the madness of George III, revolution in France, the war against Napoleon. The conditions of slaves got worse rather than better - it is estimated that more than two million whiplashes were administered each year.

It was to take another two decades before slavery's coffin was finally nailed. By that time electoral reform was in the air, and women's voices were beginning to be heard. The loudest was that of Elizabeth Heyrick, a former teacher and convert to the Quakers. In 1824 she published a pamphlet entitled "Immediate Not Gradual Abolition". Not for her the banning of the slave trade - she wanted all slavery ended for ever. Meanwhile, British soldiers, sent to the Caribbean to suppress slave revolts, returned home with a true picture of the evils of slavery. Their voices added to the clamour. The tide was finally turned and the emancipation bill was passed in 1833. But the victory was a tarnished one: as part of the deal, parliament agreed to pay £20m in compensation, not to slaves but to the slave owners.

Hochschild concludes with a debate on who did most to end the sordid trade in human beings. Was it Wilberforce or Clarkson? He is in no doubt that it was Clarkson, the ginger-haired giant. He is scathing of the attempts by Wilberforce's family to write Clarkson out of history, and this major piece of research is an attempt to put the record straight. Clarkson lived to the grand age of 86, still writing, still campaigning for the downtrodden. His last pamphlet was about the appalling conditions of British seamen.

This is a wonderful book, full of richness and colour - a celebration of many people's achievements. It's a testimony to both evil and goodness: a story in which, for once, goodness wins.

Detailed allegations of ritual humiliation and sexual abuse of women soldiers at the army's most notorious training camp, the Deepcut barracks, are disclosed in confidential documents leaked yesterday.

The documents describe how one female private recalled "how she was made to run around the parade ground naked whilst wearing a belt with mess tins attached to it".

Another soldier said she was forced to get out of the shower "naked and wet" and made to go on parade with other soldiers in mid-January.

More than 100 allegations, which also include rape, indecent assault and degrading treatment, are listed in a report drawn up by Surrey police during their investigation into the deaths of four recruits at the training camp.

Deepcut has been at the centre of bitter controversy since a number of recruits were found dead, apparently as a result of suicide. Surrey police were brought in after families of the recruits demanded an independent review.

A Deepcut trainee told the police that a racist group at the barracks, called the Black Card Club, placed a card with a cross on it on the bed or locker of a recruit chosen for a beating.

One trainee alleged that an NCO rode over recruits on a pedal cycle on the parade ground. Sometimes, bullies would wear respirator masks to hide their identities, according to the claims. The report suggests that female recruits were often too scared to report attacks on them while some consented to sex in exchange for an easier life.

The allegations were made as Surrey police investigated the deaths of four recruits at Deepcut between 1995 and 2002. The four were Sean Benton, 20, Cheryl James, 18, Geoff Gray, 17, and James Collinson, 17.

Surrey police sent the report to the Commons defence committee which is conducting an inquiry into the Ministry of Defence's "duty of care". It will feature in the Channel 4 Dispatches programme, Barrack-Room Bullies, on Thursday at 9pm. Last month Leslie Skinner, a corporal at Deepcut, was jailed for 4 years for a catalogue of sado-masochistic sexual assaults.

In a report last March, Surrey police disclosed repeated examples of bullying and revealed 59 incidents of self-harm logged at Deepcut between 1996 and 2001, with 24 in 1999 alone.

Yesterday, the MoD said it rejected any suggestion that there was "a culture of violence or abuse" at Deepcut. It said the allegations in the new, leaked police report were uncorroborated. But if Surrey police gave it names and individual complainants did not mind being identified, it would treat the cases with urgency and inform the military police, a spokesman said.

Surrey police said the annexes to its main report - where the bulk of the allegations are contained - referred to allegations of incidents supplied to the Commons defence committee in confidence to assist it with its inquiry.

The annexe and other key passages have been seen by the Guardian. Surrey police said allegations contained in it "derived from interviews and investigations carried out as part of our inquiry into the deaths at the Deepcut barracks".

There were examples of criminal offences, it said in a statement yesterday. But it warned that many of the allegations were "drawn from untested and uncorroborated witness recollection, made in some cases by third parties". It added: "They should therefore be treated with the necessary and appropriate levels of caution."

Where appropriate, it said, offences would either be investigated by Surrey police or handed over to the army, who have been given a copy of the full report.

Geoff Gray, father of one of the recruits who died at Deepcut, described the claims as "mind-blowing".

The leaked report "tells me that the culture there was one of sexual abuse and physical abuse and that officers must have turned a blind eye and allowed it to happen", he said. "We need a public inquiry to bring everything out into the open so the public can see exactly what happened there."

On November 8, the American army launched its biggest ever assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, considered a stronghold for rebel fighters. The US said the raid had been a huge success, killing 1,200 insurgents. Most of the city's 300,000 residents, meanwhile, had fled for their lives. What really happened in the siege of Falluja? In a joint investigation for the Guardian and Channel 4 News, Iraqi doctor Ali Fadhil compiled the first independent reports from the devastated city, where he found scores of unburied corpses, rabid dogs - and a dangerously embittered population

It all started at my house in Baghdad. I packed my equipment, the camera and the tripod. Tariq, my friend, told me not to take it with us. "The fighters might search the car and think that we are spies." Tariq was frightened about our trip, even though he is from Falluja and we had permission from one group of fighters to enter under their protection. But Tariq, more than anyone, understands that the fighters are no longer just one group. He is quite a character, Tariq: 32 and an engineer with a masters degree in embryo implantation, he works now at a human rights institute called the Democratic Studies Institute for Human Rights and Democracy in Baghdad. He is also deeply into animal rights.

Foolishly, I took a pill to try to keep down the flu, which made me sleepy. It was 9am when we crossed the main southern gate out of Baghdad, taking care to stay well clear of American convoys. The southern gate is the scene of daily attacks on the Americans by the insurgents - either a car-bomb or an ambush with rocket-propelled grenades.

It took just 20 minutes from Baghdad to reach the area known as the "triangle of death", where the kidnapped British contractor Kenneth Bigley was held and finally beheaded in the town of Latifya. It is supposed to be a US military-controlled zone, but insurgents set up checkpoints here. As the road became more rural and more isolated, I got nervous that at any moment we would be stopped by carjackers and robbed of our expensive equipment. At a checkpoint a hooded face came to the window; he was carrying an old AK47 on his shoulder and looking for a donation towards the jihad. There were six fighters in total, all hooded. The driver and Tariq both made a donation; I was frightened he would search the car and find the camera, so I gave him my Iraqi doctor's ID card, hoping that would work. He apologised and asked that we excuse him.

Now, there was nothing ahead but the sky and the desert. It was 1.30pm and a bad time to use this road; we had been told that carjackers were particularly active at this time of day. Tariq pointed out four young men dressed in red, their two motorbikes parked by the side of the road. They were planting a small, improvised explosive device made out of a tin of cooking oil for the next American convoy to leave the base outside Falluja.

It was 3.30pm before we got to Habbanya, a tourist resort on a lake supplied with fresh water by the Euphrates, which was once controlled by Uday, Saddam's oldest son. It was here that Fallujans, who used to be wealthy as they supplied a lot of the top military for Saddam's army, came for holidays.

Now the place was freezing, and full of refugees. All the holiday houses were crammed with people, sometimes two families to a room. The first family we came across had been there since a month before the attack started. A man called Abu Rabe'e came up. He was 59 and used to be a builder; he said he had a message for our camera. "We're not looking for this sort of democracy, this attacking of the city and the people with planes and tanks and Humvees." He had also fled Falluja with his family. They were all living in a former mechanic's garage in Habbanya.

Most of the people we spoke to in Habbanya were poor and uneducated, and had fled Falluja in anticipation of the US attack. Some were in tents; others were sharing the old honeymoon suites where newlyweds used to come when this was a holiday resort. They squabbled among themselves to persuade me to film the conditions they were living in. There was still a fairground in Habbanya, but nothing was working. In the middle of the bumper cars an old lady had pitched a tent with bricks, where she was living with her son. I tried to talk to her but she told me to go away. There was no cooking gas in Habbanya, so the Fallujan refugees were cutting down trees to keep warm and cook food.

Then someone came up and said the resistance fighters had heard we were asking questions. We decided to put the camera away and go to a friendly village that our driver knew. It was also filled with refugees from Falluja.

One 50-year-old man, a major in the Iraqi Republican Guards under the former regime, took us in. There were four families squeezed into one apartment, all of them once wealthy. The major, like the others, was sacked after the liberation when the US disbanded the army and police. Now jobless, his house in Falluja was wrecked and he was a refugee with his five children and wife near the town where he used to spend his holidays. He was angry with the Americans, but also with the Iraqi rebels, whom he blamed, alongside the clerics in the mosques, for causing Falluja to be wrecked.

"The mujahideen and the clerics are responsible for the destruction that happened to our city; no one will forgive them for that," he said with bitterness.

"Why are you blaming them - why don't you blame the Americans and Allawi?" said Omar, the owner of the apartment.

"We told the mujahideen to leave it to us ordinary Fallujans, but those bloody bastards, the sheikhs and the clerics, are busy painting some bloody mad picture of heaven and martyrs and the victory of the mujahideen," said Ali, another refugee. "And, of course, the kids believe every word those clerics say. They're young and naive, and they forget that this is a war against the might of the machine of the American army. So they let those kids die like this and our city gets blown up with the wind."

I wanted to ask the tough old Republican guard why they had let these young muj have the run of the city, but I actually didn't have to. I remember being in Falluja just before the fighting started and seeing a crowd gathered around a sack that was leaking blood. A piece of white A4 paper was stuck on to the sack, which read: "Here is the body of the traitor. He has confessed to acting as a spotter for American planes and was paid $100 a day."

At the same time as we were standing looking at the sack, I knew I would be able to buy a CD of the man in this sack making his confession before he was beheaded in any CD shop in Falluja. These were the people who controlled Falluja now - not old majors from Saddam's army.

In the morning we went back towards Falluja and heard that there were queues of people waiting to try to get back into the city. The government had made an announcement saying that the people from some districts could start to go back home; they promised compensation. About midday we got a mile east of the city and saw that four queues had formed near the American base. They were mostly men, waiting for US military ID to allow them back home.

The men were angry: "This is a humiliation. I say no more than that. These IDs are to make us bow Fallujan heads in shame," one of them said.

I met Major Paul Hackett, a marine officer in the Falluja liaison base. He said that the US military was not trying to humiliate anyone, but that the IDs were necessary for security. "I mean, my understanding is that ultimately they can hang this ID card on a wall and keep it as a souvenir," he said.

They took prints of all my fingers, two pictures of my face in profile, and then photographed my iris. I was now eligible to go into Falluja, just like any other Fallujan.

But it was late by then, somewhere near 5pm (the curfew is at 6pm). After that anyone who moves inside the city will be shot on sight by the US military. Tomorrow, we would try again to get into the city.

At around 8am, Tariq and I drove towards Falluja. We didn't believe that we might actually get into the city.

The American soldiers at the checkpoint were nervous. The approach to the checkpoint was covered in pebbles so we had to drive very slowly. The soldiers spent 20 minutes searching my car, then they bodysearched Tariq and me. They gave me a yellow tape to put on to the windscreen of the car, showing I had been searched and was a contractor. If I didn't have this stripe of yellow, a US sniper would shoot me as an enemy car.

By 10am we were inside the city. It was completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn't see a single building that was functioning.

The Americans had put a white tape across the roads to stop people wandering into areas that they still weren't allowed to enter. I remembered the market from before the war, when you couldn't walk through it because of the crowds. Now all the shops were marked with a cross, meaning that they had been searched and secured by the US military. But the bodies, some of them civilians and some of them insurgents, were still rotting inside.

There were dead dogs everywhere in this area, lying in the middle of the streets. Reports of rabies in Falluja had reached Baghdad, but I needed to find a doctor.

Fallujans are suspicious of outsiders, so I found it surprising when Nihida Kadhim, a housewife, beckoned me into her home. She had just arrived back in the city to check out her house; the government had told the people three days earlier that they should start going home. She called me into her living room. On her mirror she pointed to a message that had been written in her lipstick. She couldn't read English. It said: "Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it!"

I left her and walked towards the cemetery. I noticed the dead dogs again. I had been told in Baghdad by a friend of mine, Dr Marwan Elawi, that the Baghdad Hospital for Infectious Diseases admits one case of rabies every week. The problem is that infected dogs are eating the corpses and spreading the disease.

As I was walking by the cemetery, I caught the smell of death coming from one of the houses. The door was open and the first thing I saw was a white car parked in the driveway and on top of it a launcher for an RPG.

I went inside, and the sound of the rain on the roof and the darkness inside made me very afraid. The door was open, all the windows were broken and there were bullet holes running down the hall to a bathroom at the end - as if the bullets were chasing something or somebody. The bathroom led on to a bedroom and I stepped inside and saw the body of a fighter.

The leg was missing, the hand was missing and the furniture in the house had been destroyed. I couldn't breathe with the smell. I realised that Tariq wasn't with me, and I panicked and ran. As I got out of the house I saw a white teddy bear lying in the rain, and a green boobytrap bomb.

Some of the worst fighting took place here in the centre of the city, but there was no sign of the 1,200 to 1,600 fighters the Americans said they had killed. I had heard that there was a graveyard for the fighters somewhere in the city but people said that most of them had withdrawn from the city after the first week of fighting. I needed to find one of the insurgents to tell me the real story of what had happened in the city. The Americans had said that there had been a big military victory, but I couldn't understand where all the fighters were buried.

After I saw the body I felt uncomfortable about sleeping in Falluja. The place was deserted and polluted with death and all kinds of weapons. Imagine sleeping in a place where any of the surrounding houses might have one, two or three bodies. I wanted out.

We went back to my friend the old Republican guard officer. I was so tired I could hardly take my clothes off to go to sleep but I couldn't sleep with the smell of death on my clothes.

In the morning, I went back to find the cemetery and look for evidence of the fighters who had been killed. It was about 4pm before I got inside the martyrs' cemetery; people kept waylaying me, wanting to show me their destroyed houses and asking why the journalists didn't come and show what the Americans had done to Falluja. They were also angry at the interim President Allawi for sending in the mainly Shia National Guard to help the Americans.

At the entrance to the fighters' graveyard a sign read: "This cemetery is being given by the people of Falluja to the heroic martyrs of the battle against the Americans and to the martyrs of the jihadi operations against the Americans, assigned and approved by the Mujahideen Shura council in Falluja."

As I went into the graveyard, the bodies of two young men were arriving. The faces were rotting. The ambulance driver lifted the bones of one of the hands; the skin had rotted away. "God is the greatest. What kind of times are we living through that we are holding the bones and hands of our brothers?"

Then he began cursing the National Guard, calling them even worse things than the Americans: "Those bastards, those sons of dogs." It wasn't the first time I had heard this. It was the National Guard the Americans used to search the houses; they were seen by the Fallujans as brutal stooges. Most of the volunteers for the National Guard are poor Shias from the south. They are jobless and desperate enough to volunteer for a job that makes them assassination targets. "National infidels", they were also called.

I counted the graves: there were 74. The two young men made it 76. The names on the headstones were written in chalk and some had been washed away. One read: "Here lies the heroic Tunisian martyr who died", but I didn't see any other evidence of the hundreds of foreign fighters that the US had said were using Falluja as their headquarters. People told me there were some Yemenis and Saudis, some volunteers from Tunisia and Egypt, but most of the fighters were Fallujan. The US military say they have hundreds of bodies frozen in a potato chip factory 5km south of the city, but nobody has been allowed to go there in the past two months, including the Red Crescent.

Salman Hashim was crying beside the grave of his son, who had been a fighter in Falluja.

"He is 18 years old. He wanted to be a doctor or engineer after this year; it was his last year in high school." At the same grave, the boy's mother was crying and remembering her dead son, who was called Ahmed. "I blame Ayad Allawi. If I could I would cut his throat into pieces." Then, to the mound of earth covering her son's body, she said: "I told you those fighters would get you killed." The boy's father told her to be quiet in front of the camera.

On the next grave was written the name of a woman called Harbyah. She had refused to leave the city for the camps with her family. One of her relatives was standing by her grave. He said that he found her dead in her bed with at least 20 bullets in her body.

I saw other rotting bodies that showed no signs of being fighters. In one house in the market there were four bodies inside the guest room. One of the bodies had its chest and part of its stomach opened, as if the dogs had been eating it. The wrists were missing, the flesh of the arm was missing, and parts of the legs.

I tried to figure out who these four men were. It was obvious which houses the fighters were in: they were totally destroyed. But in this house there were no bullets in the walls, just four dead men lying curled up beside each other, with bullet holes in the mosquito nets that covered the windows. It seemed to me as if they had been asleep and were shot through the windows. It is the young men of the family who are usually given the job of staying behind to guard the house. This is the way in Iraq - we never leave the house empty. The four men were sleeping the way we sleep when we have guests - we roll out the best carpet in the guest room and the men lie down beside each other.

"Its Abu Faris's house. I think that the fat dead body belongs to his son, Faris," said Abu Salah, whose chip shop was also destroyed in the bombing.

It was getting dark and it was time to go, but I needed some overview shots of the city. There was a half-built tower, so I climbed it and looked around. I couldn't see a single building that hadn't been hit.

After a few minutes I got the sense that this wasn't a good place for me to be hanging around, but I had to pee urgently. I found a place on the roof of the building. While I was doing that a warning shot passed so close to my head that I ducked and didn't even wait to pull up my zip, but ran to the half-destroyed stairs to climb down the building. I felt as if the American sniper was playing with me; he had had plenty of time to kill me if he wanted to.

For the rest of the day people were pulling on me to come and see their houses. Again, they asked where all the journalists were. Why were they not coming to report on what has happened in Falluja? But I have worked with journalists for 18 months and I knew it would be too dangerous for them to come to the city, that they are seen as spies and could end up in a sack. So since I was the only one there with a camera, everyone wanted to show me what happened to their house. It took hours.

Back in Baghdad that night, I changed my clothes and decided to send them to the public laundry. I was worried about contaminating my family with Falluja. I was thinking that nobody was going to be able to live there for months. Then, I took a very long bath.

I woke up at home in Baghdad around 9am. I had had enough of Falluja, but I still felt that I didn't understand what had happened. The city was completely devastated - but where were the bodies of all the dead fighters the Americans had killed?

I wanted to ask Dr Adnan Chaichan about the wounded. I found him at the main hospital in Falluja at midday. He told me that all the doctors and medical staff were locked into the hospital at the beginning of the attack and not allowed out to treat anyone. The Iraqi National Guard, acting under US orders, had tied him and all the other doctors up inside the main hospital. The US had surrounded the hospital, while the National Guard had seized all their mobile phones and satellite phones, and left them with no way of communicating with the outside world. Chaichan seemed angrier with the National Guards than with anyone else.

He said that the phone lines inside the town were working, so wounded people in Falluja were calling the hospital and crying, and he was trying to give instructions over the phone to the local clinics and the mosques on how to treat the wounds. But nobody could get to the main hospital where all the supplies were and people were bleeding to death in the city.

It was late afternoon when I drove out of Falluja and back to Baghdad, feeling that I had just scratched the surface of what really happened there. But it is clear that by completely destroying this Sunni city, with the help of a mostly Shia National Guard, the US military has fanned the seeds of a civil war that is definitely coming. If there are elections now and the Shia win, that war is certain. The people I spoke to had no plans to vote. No one I met in those five days had a ballot paper.

A week after I arrived in London to make the film for Channel 4 News, the tape of the final interview arrived by Federal Express. It was the interview with Alzaim Abu, who had led the fighters in the Shuhada district of Falluja and fought the Americans in the early battles in the city centre. We had been been trying to track him down for nearly three weeks. Then Tariq had got a call from him the night I had left for London saying that he would talk.

There was a lot of bullshit in the interview; lots of bravado about how many Americans they had killed and about never surrendering and how Fallujans would win. He said that there were a few foreign fighters in the city, but none in his units; mostly, they were Fallujans.

But one thing stood out for me that explained the empty graveyard and the lack of bodies. He said that most of the fighters had been given orders to abandon the city by November 17, nine days after the assault began. "The withdrawal of the fighters was carried out following an order by our senior leadership. We did not pull out because we did not want to fight. We needed to regroup; it was a tactical move. The fighters decided to redeploy to Amiriya and some went to Abu Ghraib," he said.

The US military destroyed Falluja, but simply spread the fighters out around the country. They also increased the chance of civil war in Iraq by using their new national guard of Shias to suppress Sunnis. Once, when a foreign journalist, an Irish guy, asked me whether I was Shia or Sunni - the way the Irish do because they have that thing about the IRA - I said I was Sushi. My father is Sunni and my mother is Shia. I never cared about these things. Now, after Falluja, it matters.

FORT HOOD Witness testimony Monday in the court-martial of Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. left no doubt that the first Abu Ghraib prison trial is about more than just pictures.

Tales of physical and sexual transgressions by U.S. soldiers in the Baghdad prison during the fall of 2003 were abundant in the trial of the first of several Army Reserve members of 372nd Military Police Company.

Graner, 36, of Uniontown, Pa., a prison guard in civilian life, faces a maximum of 17 1/2 years in prison for charges of conspiracy and maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners. The world has seen photographs of the alleged abuse, including those that showed Graner and Pvt. Lynndie England. Army officials say Graner is the father of a baby with England from an extramarital affair.

Defense attorneys maintain the alleged abuse was just a matter of Graner doing his duty.

"Throughout all of this, Spc. Graner was following orders," said Guy Womack, the Houston civilian attorney representing Graner.

Testimony from Pvt. Ivan L. Frederick II, also a former civilian prison guard, bolstered that claim in part. Frederick a former sergeant who had previously pleaded guilty in a court-martial on the Abu Ghraib abuse said military intelligence officers had told Graner and Frederick to inflict pain on a prisoner.

But Frederick noted questionable practices upon arriving for duty at the prison, including an incident in which Graner was escorting a hooded detainee.

"I saw (Graner) come around," said Frederick, who was sentenced after his plea to eight years in prison and given a dishonorable discharge. "I told him to watch out for a pole and he walked (the detainee) into the pole."

A grainy video not shown to the public was introduced in the trial showing Iraqi prisoners who had been forced to masturbate before the camera.

Spc. Matthew Wisdom, 21, told the military jury of what he described as sickening abuse upon entering the prison section where Graner worked. He alleged that abuse by Sgt. Javal Davis was particularly disturbing.

"I distinctly remember Sgt. Davis walking around a pile of prisoners and stomping on their toes," said Wisdom, who added that he thought the guard could have easily broken the prisoner's toes.

Davis faces court-martial on Feb. 2, on charges related to the Abu Ghraib abuse.

Photographs in evidence included the infamous picture of Iraqi prisoners in a human pyramid. This particular pyramid contained the bodies of naked Iraqi prisoners. But Womack said such actions were a legitimate means of controlling prisoners.

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year?" Womack asked. "Is that torture?"

Womack told reporters after the end of the first day of testimony that he thought the defense went well.

Terri R.Z. Jacobs, a Houston attorney specializing in military law who is not affiliated with this case, said the defense of obeying an order is dependent on whether that order is a lawful one.

"You have a duty to obey a lawful order. You don't have a duty to obey an unlawful order," said Jacobs.

Capt. Chuck Neill, a spokesman for the staff judge advocate of Fort Hood, told the media after testimony had concluded that military judge Col. James L. Pohl will make a determination on whether orders given Graner were lawful and will reflect his ruling in instructions to the Army jury.

An Army panel a military jury that has the ability to ask questions of the witnesses that was picked Friday asked no questions during the first day of testimony. The jury is composed of six senior enlisted men and four senior officers.

Jacobs said military jurors tend to be more meticulous and conscientious than civilian juries.

"They are used to following orders," she said. "When judges tell them to do something they absolutely do it."

Like Orwell and so many other rebellious sons of the establishment, Foot's hatred of the powerful was beaten into him. Even by the standards of England's public schools, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, his housemaster at Shrewsbury, was a flagellomaniac. Foot recalled: 'He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn't. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant's trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt.'

Naturally, Chenevix-Trench was promoted and became a headmaster, first of Eton and then of Fettes. Exposing him in Private Eye was one of Foot's happiest days in journalism. He received hundreds of congratulatory letters from the child abuser's old pupils, many of whom were now prominent in British life.

Benozzo Gozzoli, San Gimigniano Augustinian Monastery, St Augustine's Schooling
___________

As the fifth anniversary of the bombing nears, Tim Adams visits a town where counselling is the only growth industry: a town split between those who are desperate to forget and others determined to remember

I'd never been to Omagh, but I knew the high street. It's like walking into a photograph. You remember the one. A bright summer's day, and a little girl sitting on her daddy's shoulders smiling for the camera; shoppers coming and going behind them buying lunch at a place called The Salad Bowl; mothers and daughters picking out uniforms in the town's two school outfitters, ready for the new term. And in the middle of them all a red car, parked at the kerb. A car that, minutes after that most normal, and chilling, of snapshots was taken, unleashed the 300lb of plastic explosives it contained, ensuring that life for the people in the picture, for those that survived and for the families of those that died would always subsequently be told in a series of befores and afters.

Walking down that street nearly five years on, there is not much formally to remind you of the most lethal and indiscriminate atrocity of the Troubles. There are no plaques or memorials at the site. The shops on the corner of Market Street and Dublin Road have been rebuilt and replaced. Nicholls and Shiel, the home furnishings store from which drapes were taken to cover the dead and bandage the bleeding, has had a smart refit and is advertising a sale. The Salad Bowl is doing brisk business.

Even so, you could convince yourself that there is a chill in the air at this end of town. It is hard to look back along the street and not imagine how people were herded here by police, following the 40-minute warning that wrongly suggested the bomb was outside the courthouse up the hill, a few hundred yards away.

For those who were there that Saturday afternoon of August 15 1998, this is a sense that will never go away. Marion Radford, who lost her 16-year-old son Alan in the blast, can't walk through here without being overcome with the feeling she is disturbing the dead. Father Kevin Mullan, who gave helpless blessings over the bodies where they lay, has, he tells me, developed a practice of saying a little prayer every time he goes by, 'because it's a sacred spot'. Several others I speak to, although they still live in strolling distance from the town's only real shopping street, have never since come near the place.

Beyond the high street, you see evidence of a new Omagh that has grown out of the anguish and destruction of five years ago. On the outskirts of town there are pristine business units and retail parks. Hoardings advertise development opportunities. And, as if to contain some of the aftershocks of the blast, there are community centres and job starts and enterprise zones everywhere you turn.

In this respect Omagh feels like a town determined, even desperate, to mend and move on. But for all those who want to forget there are plenty who believe it's more necessary than ever to remember; not least because there is a great deal of unfinished business still to deal with.

Most prominent among those is Michael Gallagher. Gallagher's only son Adrian, then 21, was in town that afternoon to buy some jeans; he was among the 29 - 31 if you count, as everyone here does, Avril Monaghan's unborn twins - who died in the blast. The Gallaghers ran a garage business together; Adrian doing the bodywork, Michael fixing engines. 'Adrian was,' Michael says, 'just at that point where he was maturing into a true adult. He was becoming much more an equal, a friend to me, than a child.' Michael has not been able to return to the garage; he tried a couple of times, but it just made things worse.

I meet him at the town's only hotel, a place where he has had emotional and angry encounters with politicians of almost every persuasion. 'Shortly after the bomb,' he recalls, 'we had a period when everything just went flat, people went their separate ways and we were left to cope with what happened. This was the way of things; you were expected to bury your dead and get on.'

Michael Gallagher had experience of this, too: his younger brother was shot dead by the IRA in 1984, as part of the Provisionals' policy of murdering Catholics who joined the Army (he had served in the Ulster Defence Regiment).

In October 1998, though, Michael Gallagher suggested holding a public meeting to see if there was any interest among the bereaved and injured in forming a group. He was surprised at the number who came along. Gallagher, who had never before been a member of anything larger than a family, was elected chairman.

Initially, the aims of the group were unfocused; it was a place to meet and share stories and cry with those who understood. Politicians, including Tony Blair and President Clinton, had made promises that the victims of the bomb would not be forgotten, that compensation claims would encounter no red tape, and that everything would be done to bring the members of the Real IRA who claimed responsibility for the bomb to justice. There seemed no reason not to believe them.

Those promises, Gallagher believes, now look more hollow than ever. His and the other bereaved families have not received a enny of compensation from the Government (they were made a take-it-or-leave-it offer of £7,500, which they rejected as insulting), and have got nowhere with their pursuit of criminal convictions.

'We have engaged nearly every government department. We've engaged the American government and the Irish government with a view to pursuing justice. And sadly not one single person has been charged with murder at Omagh... You have to ask yourself a question,' he says, of the failures of the investigation. 'Is Omagh now to be the benchmark here? You allow 31 innocent people to die, and you just move on?'

In the light of Northern Ireland police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan's report into the investigation, which roundly condemned its leadership, and the failure of the security forces to act on a specific warning given 11 days before the bomb, the members of the Omagh group decided to take matters into their own hands. They issued civil suits against five alleged members of the Real IRA in connection with the bombing; and a further murder charge against the organisation itself.

The obstacles only got larger, however. 'Both the British and Irish governments have refused to come behind the families,' Gallagher says. 'The police forces and intelligence services have refused to co-operate in any way. We think this beggars belief, given that Mr Blair wants us to believe in a new world order, in which there is no place for terrorism.'

Gallagher believes there are a number of reasons for this reticence. 'One suggestion is that they don't want us succeeding where they have failed. Another is that the Government doesn't want to provoke terrorists, because that could undermine the Good Friday Agreement. From where we are standing, it is a pretty weak agreement if we have to give in to murderers to make it work.'

The two accused who have submitted defences against the families' action - Liam Campbell and Michael McKevitt (currently on trial in Dublin for membership of a terrorist organisation) - have been granted legal aid of up to €1 million in the Irish Republic, and more by the Northern Ireland Office.This despite the fact that the Real IRA was said by the Government to have an annual income of over £5 million.

'You might say that's fair enough,' Gallagher says, 'but we also applied for special status legal aid in December 2002, and we are still waiting on an answer. Campbell and McKevitt applied and were granted it in three weeks. Can anybody blame us for believing the governments are conspiring against the families?'

Gallagher says he draws strength from the example of people such as Jim Swire, who fought for so long to get near the truth of Lockerbie. He also takes inspiration from the solidarity of the group itself, which is a model of post-sectarian co-operation.

'The Omagh bomb did not discriminate between young or old, Protestant or Catholic,' he says. 'When we started, people were welcomed to the meetings and we did not ask them to leave any part of themselves outside the door, but we also decided it was best to concentrate on the things that unite us rather than the things that divide us. I think it at least says something that we have managed to stick together.'

One of those who stood beside the group when it announced its civil action was Father Kevin Mullan. He was among the first on the scene after the bomb, and subsequently, along with all the other church leaders in the community, helped to organise a vigil for the victims. Forty thousand people came and Mullan opened his address, a week after the bomb, with the words: 'It is Saturday once more... ' When I go to see him at his new parish a little way out of Omagh, he is deliberating the tone of the message he will offer at the service to mark the fifth anniversary.

'It would be good to begin to think,' he says, tentatively, over tea, 'that we can learn from tragedy. But it is hard to catch the tone, because a lot of people don't want to remember and a lot of people want to go on remembering in a very intense way.'

I wonder if he feels forgiveness is a possibility. 'It has,' he says, 'to be faced some time. I do hope we can touch on it this year. But at the same time as you begin to forgive, you would like to feel that those you are forgiving regret what happened. At times even now, it is looking like we are approaching a rerun, you know, there are people pledging to bomb, kill, hunger-strike, die. They are still in their tribal areas. It's pathetic really, but it's still the reality that we have to face.'

Mullan has seen some things. In his first parish in Derry he witnessed the shooting begin on Bloody Sunday and took cover behind an ambulance. He relives the bomb in Omagh as if it were yesterday. 'I remember walking across the street and falling into the arms of a man from here, Kevin Skelton, all bloody, and him saying his wife was dead, and his daughter was missing, and just crying. And then I said some prayers where people were lying covered. I didn't look to see if my sister was there or my niece. I never thought to look, or didn't want to.'

'Exactly that,' he says. 'Immediately after the explosion you could still feel the heat and the sound of the bomb, and in an alleyway so many bodies and body parts were piled up. But with that you also have to hold on to the image of the great care of the ambulancemen and police and nurses and others. It was a blessed place in that respect.'

In the aftermath he found more doors open to him. 'I came close to some of the Sinn Fein people I would not have seen before... I remember Gerry Adams coming to the leisure centre [where the families went waiting for news] to express sympathy, and the atmosphere was very charged, you know, and there were bodyguards everywhere. They were back for the service the following week, and some people said they should not have been there, but they came.'

A part of Mullan finds it impossible not to sympathise with the campaign of the Omagh relatives: 'To have lost a son or a daughter and to have police forces saying they can't find who did it, that's very hard. It's a lonely furrow for them, but they owe it to their dead to do that.' Before I go, however, he expresses, too, a sentiment that seems the polar opposite of this, a sentiment which seems somewhere near the heart of the peace process itself. 'I don't know but if the whole thing ended in peace, and certain people got away in the smoke, I wonder if you could almost half accept it.'

In my bag, as I travelled around Omagh, talking to those who have lived with consequences of the bomb, were two books. The first was called Petals of Hope. It contained reproductions of the delicate artworks made by a group of local people from some of the floral tributes sent to the town from across the world. The book was intended as a symbol of a new beginning and a reminder that, because of its timing just after the Good Friday Agreement, Omagh was not just a horrific tragedy but also, to some, a test case for the possibility of renewal.

[Some of the leaves used in Petals of Hope, distributed by the Omagh City Council came from the same village of Montebeni, picked there by the school children as well as by monks, as do these olive leaves in the Kenyan bowl carbed in olive wood given to us after Nairobi. I had flown to Ireland with them for Omagh following upon their use in Nairobi.]

One of the more concrete symbols of that process is the new Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation, which opened in May in a mock-Georgian villa on the edge of town. The centre grew out of the ad hoc clinic set up to counsel those psychologically injured by the bomb. Part of the funding for the project came from a grant approved by the then 'Victims Minister', Des Browne, at the Northern Ireland Office; the rest, £1 million - a source of great anger to the victims I spoke to - came from the Omagh Fund, the money donated by the public in the days and weeks after the bomb to ease the lives of those
affected.

David Bolton, the centre's director, formerly an executive in the local health trust, is quick to smooth over the decision to use the fund to help to finance his project.

'We made the argument that Omagh experienced enormous generosity after the bomb and there was strong feeling that when Omagh got back on its feet it would try to repay this. The second driver was not wanting to lose the therapeutic skills we had learnt: Omagh gave us unique insight into post-traumatic stress. And the third thing was that the Omagh Fund had tried to find a way to make direct payments to those who were traumatised by the bomb, but that proved enormously difficult, not least because those affected by trauma are often reluctant to come forward.'

When I arrive at the centre its car park is filled with community leaders from Israel and the Occupied Territories who have been attending a one-day seminar. Palestinian Christians are arguing with Muslim clerics who are in a stand-off with Orthodox Jews as they pile on to a minibus; there is no sign of a road map. One of the aims of Bolton's work seems, in the spirit of the times, to be to export an understanding of resolution conflict based on ideas of therapy. The therapeutic model was itself based on work with the trauma patients of Omagh.

'Our approach,' says Bolton, simplifying, 'is first to work on memory, which is often full of blocks or aberrations, and then to challenge negative appraisals - "I can't recall so I must be going mad" - and negative judgments - "I'll never be the same". We try to deal with all those things in a cognitive way.'

'It's difficult to answer that,' he says, 'because people even within families will feel differently. But I think there is a kind of community mood. For some people, prosecution, justice, is a very important thing. But for others there are alternative responses: these people may believe the bombers will have to face God in the fullness of time. Others feel that "whether or not people come to court will not make a difference to me".

'For people who are suffering from high levels of trauma, however,' he says, presumably referring in part to Michael Gallagher's group, 'the justice issue can become highly focused and even highly skewed. What we have found is that when people have undertaken therapy they reach a place where they can make much more objective decisions about these matters. A much more reflective perspective.'

He welcomes the idea of this work being viewed as part of a peace process and he is positive, evangelical even, about how the ideas behind the treating of trauma could be applied on a bigger scale. 'There is,' he says with considerable understatement, 'an issue here about dealing with the past. One is to brush it under the carpet. Another is to attempt to deal with it in forensic detail. And a third way' - this is not the only time Bolton sounds Blairite - 'is to find an approach that is "good enough". First here, we have to agree on the outcomes... '

When I ask if, on this basis, his centre will treat the perpetrators of the violence as well as their victims, he is a little evasive.

'We will,' he says, 'respond to people on the basis of need. We are not in the business of making judgments as to why people are traumatised. Rather than looking at trauma as an unseemly leftover from the peace process, let's be positive about it and look at it as a public health issue.'

In answering a question about the faltering hopes for a peace process in the absence of justice, he turns to a PowerPoint presentation on his computer, which fails to boot up. Instead he draws me a quick graph on his white board in which 'hurting' and 'not hurting' are on one axis and 'recognition' and 'lack of recognition' on the other.

'What you have in Omagh is a matrix,' he says. 'If people are hurting and not recognised, they are down here in the lower left quadrant, and their need for justice is negative and pain-driven.We want people up here in the top right where they have transformation and recognition. To get there takes the therapeutic process and political progress. And we think that therapy needs to be a crucial part of the political process.'

He hopes his centre will treat 800 people from across Northern Ireland over the next three years and he points to the graphs of success in scientific publications. How often, I wonder, does he feel he is banging his head against a brick wall? 'Let's put it this way,' David Bolton says, 'it's better to light candles than to shout at the dark.'

The other book I carried around Omagh was Lost Lives, the extraordinarily moving, 1,700-page, brief life-and-death account of everyone who has been killed in the Troubles. It devotes more than 20 pages to the dead of Omagh and, as you read, it becomes ever more difficult to imagine that the path from David Bolton's bottom-left quadrant to his top-right one will ever be straightforward. It is a book that reminds you of the importance of shouting at the dark.

One of the entries toward the end of the Omagh section details the death of Lorraine Wilson, who was 15 and working as a volunteer in an Oxfam shop with her best friend, Samantha McFarland, when the bomb went off. Both took the full force of the blast head on. Godfrey and Ann Wilson, who live in a neat house on an estate where the paving stones are painted red, white and blue and every other wall carries a Union flag or the red hand of Ulster, relive every line of that entry every day.

Godfrey Wilson sits on his sofa, crying as he recalls identifying his bright-eyed daughter's body, her face full of shrapnel, her clothes wringing wet from a burst water main, and remembers his experience of trauma counselling.

'I asked what experience the man had to deal with bereavement and, at the time, he said none at all. Odd that after 30 years of killing in Northern Ireland there was nobody to help with bereavement. He was a specialist in alcoholics. I went four times, and I suppose if I'm to open up my heart I want someone to respond a bit, tell me what the next step is. I cried my heart out and he just sat there looking at me. So the next time, the same thing happened and I just sat looking out the window. After about 15 minutes of this, he said, "Godfrey what are you thinking about?" I said, "To tell you the truth I'm thinking about going home." He said "Why?" I said, "I'm pissed off sitting here when there's no help being offered." He said, "Godfrey I'm sorry you feel like that", and that was that, I left.'

Wilson, along with many of the other people I speak to, contrasts the money spent on the trauma centre with the tiny portable building in a car park in which the Omagh victims conduct their campaign and from which they are fighting eviction. When I ask what he thinks of the idea of killers of his daughter being able to escape in the smoke of peace, he suggests the kind of therapy that would work best for him. 'I would say I want justice, and peace, in that order. I want people convicted for murder.'

Kevin Skelton, who lost his wife in the bomb and whose youngest daughter was facially disfigured, later points out some more of the ironies of the situation. 'The main industry that has been created in this town after the bomb is a trauma industry,' he says. 'There has never been as much job creation. The funniest thing, if you can call it that, is that if I went to my GP and complained that I had depression, or whatever, the likelihood is that he would send me to the local hospital for treatment, and do you know who the first person I'd be likely to meet there would be? Francis Mackey, who is a psychiatric nurse.' (Mackey, a former Sinn Fein councillor in Omagh, is also the head of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, which security forces describe as the political wing of the Real IRA.) 'You can't,' Skelton says, 'just ignore these things.'

The part of their lives that seems to keep most of the bereaved victims of Omagh sane is their involvement with the group. In London, their legal campaign is supported by the likes of Bob Geldof and Barry McGuigan and Peter Mandelson (the one politician, Michael Gallagher says, whom they trust). The solicitor acting for them is Jason McCue. He believes working with victims on restorative justice schemes has to be a central plank of peace. Without justice, there is no way you can move on. 'Otherwise, the resentment and anger becomes a generational thing, as we have seen so often.'

The fundraising campaign for the legal case, which requires upwards of £700,000, has been supported both by celebrity donors (the Formula One driver Eddie Irvine gave £100,000) and 'little old ladies in Knock who send a fiver and say a prayer'. It has the effect, McCue suggests 'both of constantly reminding the Real IRA of the horrific shame of Omagh and perhaps giving them some nightmares; and of reminding the authorities that the bomb cannot simply be swept away in history'. Beyond that, he believes it gives a sense of purpose and future to the victims. 'It has,' he says, 'to use the popular term, enabled them.'

When I drive out of Omagh on my way back to Belfast the weekend is just beginning. It is a bright August morning. I stop off at the tiny roadside memorial garden, in which the victims 'fought tooth and nail' to get flowers planted. The annuals are running to seed, the only wreath is from the Liverpool ladies' football club. Tied to a tree is a school photograph of Lorraine Wilson in a plastic wrapper.

Around the corner, Omagh is opening for business. At The Salad Bowl they are stacking veg; the shutters are coming up at Nicholls and Shiel. I am reminded of Father Mullan's suggestion that this fifth anniversary will be the last to be marked with a service, and of the urgency of Michael Gallagher's fight against forgetting. Jason McCue believes that with luck next year the victims' civil action will come to court. You only hope that for them, as for the rest of Omagh, maybe it can then really begin to be Saturday once more.

Students read the Koran at a Madrassa
Some clerics demanded an apology from Mr Hussain
A Pakistani minister has revealed hundreds of cases of alleged child sex abuse at Islamic schools, or madrassas.

There were 500 complaints this year of abuse allegedly committed by clerics, Aamer Liaquat Hussain, a minister in the religious affairs department, said.

That compares with 2,000 last year, but as yet there have been no successful prosecutions, Mr Hussain told the BBC.

The minister's revelations have sparked death threats and infuriated some religious political leaders.

Mr Hussain said he had received death threats from clerics, but that he had done his job and his conscience was clear.

The time had come for his country to face the bitter truth - the sickness of child abuse, he said.

The allegations involving Pakistan's Sunni majority and Shia minority referred to a tiny proportion of the country's 10,000 or so madrassas, he said.

He added that the body responsible for them, the Federation of Madrassas, was willing to co-operate with investigations because some clerics were bringing a bad name to Islam.

However, the revelations have angered some Islamic leaders. At a parliamentary meeting this week, some demanded he apologise.

Mr Hussain refused, saying he had personal experience of attempted abuse in a seminary when he was eight.

The abuse revelations were made during a week in which the Pakistani government has been meeting religious leaders to build awareness of the spread of HIV/Aids.

Pakistan is stepping up its anti-Aids campaign, and the idea is to utilise the clerics' unique reach into communities to increase HIV/Aids awareness and to preach prevention.

Twelve years ago, Ed Vulliamy first revealed the horrors of Omarska, a Serbian concentration camp in Bosnia, to a stunned world. This summer the survivors returned to the place where they were tortured and raped, their friends and families murdered. He joined them

They walk in slow procession across a field of summer flowers, through the scent of mint into the nightmare of their memories. They arrive this time as survivors, not prisoners. Or else they come to pay homage to dead relatives at this accursed place: the now disused iron ore mine at Omarska, in northwest Bosnia. In 1992 it was a concentration camp, the location of an orgy of killing, mutilation, beating and rape, prior to enforced deportation for those lucky enough to survive. The victims were Bosnian Muslims and some Croats; the perpetrators their Serbian neighbours.

They move, tentatively, on this day of commemoration among desolate, rust-coloured industrial buildings, haunted by what happened within them. Nusreta Sivac places a flower on each space of floor where her dead friends once slept in the quarters for women who "served food and cleaned the walls of the torture rooms, covered with blood" - quarters just across a hallway from the now empty office where she was, like them, serially raped, night after night. And she passes the window from which she watched the slaughter of men on the tarmac below, day in, day out.

Satko Mujagic knows that tarmac well: his two-year-old daughter now plays with a ball on the very spot where he had been too weak to line up for bread because of dysentery, and had to be supported by his father. Later, the child picks a daisy.

"You do this where your father lay bleeding," says one of the party. "Being here gives me the feeling of understanding nothing," says Satko. "The violence here was nothing to do with anything, not even war. It is unfathomable."

Young Sehiba Jakupovic, her face contorted with grief, stares around the rooms in a building called the White House from which hardly anyone emerged alive; her husband Alem was among those who perished. "I have a 12-year-old now," she says quietly, "just a baby at the time."

Nusreta tells the story of a family typical of Omarska and its legacy; one family among the thousands. "It was the night of one of their saints, St Peter," she recalls. "The guards were drunk and set tyres on fire, singing their songs and screaming as they took prisoners out to jump on them and beat them to death. One man, Becir Medunjanin, was being jumped upon, while his wife Sadeta watched from our quarters. She cried out, 'What are they doing to him?' and I tried to calm her lest she lost control and was taken out too. Sadeta was later killed as well. They had two sons; one had already been killed when they shelled the village - Sadeta always said that if she survived Omarska she would find his body to give it a proper burial. The other, Anes, survived Omarska, the only member of the family to live. He came with me just recently to identify Sadeta's body and gave his DNA. 'That is my mother,' he said."

The date of this commemoration of the camp's closure - August 6 - is branded into these people's minds. And I have a stake in all this: for the closure of Omarska followed the day after the putrid afternoon of August 5 1992, on which it had been my accursed honour to find a way into this place, along with a crew from ITN.

We saw little that day, but enough: terrified men emerging from a hangar, in various states of decay - some skeletal, heads shaven - and drilled across a tarmac yard, under the watchful eye of a machine-gun post, into a canteen where they wolfed down watery bean stew like famished dogs, skin folded like parchment over their bones. "I do not want to tell any lies," said one prisoner, "but I cannot tell the truth." And it is strange - traumatic, indeed - to stand again in that now empty canteen; strange to walk that tarmac killing ground.

It is disturbing to wander these dread buildings - where inmates were held and beaten, and whence they were called to their death; buildings forbidden to us that day in 1992, our paths blocked by armed guards and the camp commander, Zjelko Meakic, now awaiting trial in the Hague. Disturbing also to see the so-called Red House, where prisoners' throats were cut.

The feeling is all the more strange when I recognise a man I had met that day, in that same canteen: Sefer Haskic, who is now a joiner in Bolton, revisits the room into which he was crammed. "I was trying to remember the people they killed," he says. "All my friends. They would call out the names, and men would get up, leave us, and never come back. You could hear the screaming, the killing, you could smell burning tyres and dead bodies. Next morning, there would usually be about 30 of them: the yellow truck would arrive so that other prisoners could load them up and go to dig graves. The truck would always come back, but the men who loaded it usually not. I was forever waiting my turn, but it never came - I still can't believe I'm alive." Sefer remembers in particular a night of frenzied ferocity, during which some 150 men were killed, "and the walls were covered with blood".

However, these people have not returned to Omarska only for remembrance; it is also a gesture of defiance. It was intended by the Bosnian Serbs - as has been affirmed at The Hague - that no Muslims (or rather Bosniaks - the secular ethnic term by which they are properly known) should remain on this territory alive; that they should all be deported or killed. But all around us now are the sights and sounds of a once unthinkable return by thousands of Bosniaks to the homes from which they were brutally expelled. They come back under the shadow and insignia of their persecutors, with whom they live cheek by jowl - for this is the so-called "Republika Srpska" granted to the Bosnian Serbs at Dayton in 1995. But they do so all the same.

They return also to the village of Kozarac, the site of a savage attack on May 24 1992. It was emptied of all 25,000 Bosniak inhabitants. Every Muslim house was marked in paint for incineration; the surviving Muslims herded in droves over the mountains at gunpoint. But the place is now home to more than 6,000 Bosniak "returnees", who outnumber the Serbs as they did before, with an additional 15,000 visiting from the scattered diaspora for summer. Once again, minarets - blown apart by the Serbs - nestle, rebuilt, against the hillside.

With much greater difficulty, people return also to the local seat of authority, Prijedor, where the persecutions were planned and whence orders for establishment of the camps, for the killing and mass deportation were given. In Prijedor returnees live under the cold stare of their erstwhile persecutors; but Kozarac is an effervescent, if peculiar, place. As families sit out to enjoy pizza and beer in the warm evening, so they recognise one another: a survivor of Omarska here, of another camp there, a bereaved father here, a widowed mother there. The entire community is a concentration camp survivors' reunion. Everyone here is damaged, but resilient. No life is unaffected by the maelstrom of violence.

If there is a driving force behind the return to Kozarac, it is the quietly composed figure of Sabaduhin Garibovic, who runs the Concentration Camp Survivors' Association. "We are doing this," he says, "to show the Serbs who evicted us that they did not entirely succeed. That we can come back. They never thought they would see it. They cannot fathom what we are doing."

Sabahudin's father survived Omarska, but his brother Armin was among the first to die there, his name called from among 156 men packed into the "garage", a space just five metres by six. There was no water: the men had to drink urine to live. It was so hot that the prisoners smashed an upper window to let in air, for which Armin and another man were murdered. Sabahudin himself is a survivor of Trnopolje, another camp we entered that day in 1992: "I remember them taking out the girls to do what they would with them - six or so each night, including my niece." Trnopolje was the location for the enduring image of the war: the skeletal Fikret Alic and other prisoners behind barbed wire.

"Almost every day I see the people who did this to us," says Sabahudin. "We live separate lives - there is nothing that unifies us with the Serbs. We rely on ourselves and each other to survive." Just before our meeting, a jubilant wedding motorcade passed through town, hooting and waving the old Bosnian wartime flag. In overwhelmingly Serbian Prijedor, it was pelted with bottles and rocks. Two weeks before, a bomb had been thrown at a Bosniak-owned bar in Kozarac; a Serbian former camp guard living near Omarska was beaten up by Bosniaks.

There are countless such incidents. "International foundations organise round tables to discuss living together," says Sabahudin, "but it is empty talk, and the reasons are simple: we cannot forgive or forget what happened, and they either deny it happened or say they had to do it - they were obeying orders."

Kozarac's economy depends almost entirely on the diaspora - on Omarska survivors such as Edin Kararic, who now works as a tanker driver based in Watford. Edin has managed to put some money into buying a cafe called Mustang on Kozarac's main drag, managed for him by a fellow survivor. "They drove us out," says Edin, "and we are buying it back. This cafe is my finger stuck up to the Serbs who did not want us here. In fact, that is what those minarets are, on the mosques that no one goes to: fingers stuck up at the Serbs. That is why we must come back to this place - why else would any of us want to, given what happened here?

"Mind you," he adds, pensively, "it's difficult to enjoy yourself in a place where 7,000 people are missing from a population of 25,000."

Emsuda Mujagic was among the first to come back to Kozarac, having been a refugee in Croatia. "I wanted to see in the new millennium at home," she says, "and so I came back on December 31 1999. Our house was one of the first to be destroyed in the shelling, but we rebuilt it slowly. There was literally nothing here. No birds, just snakes and a few Chetniks [slang for Serbs]. I have to stand up to their plan, which was to destroy not just a community but a whole people. That is the wish that has kept me going."

Emsuda is a survivor of Trnopolje, and on the 12th anniversary of our discovery of the camp, she takes me back to what is now a school again, closed for summer. There, sitting on the steps, Esmuda recalls how each night "the guards would just walk by and shoot or beat people while we slept in the open. Or else they would come into the women's and children's quarters with torches and read the names of young girls from a list, some as young as 10, 12 or 13. They would take them to a house where Serbian soldiers from the front would have their way with them. Some of the girls would come back, scarred and tortured - others would not, and we understood they had been tortured to death. One woman was breastfeeding her baby when they took her - she gave the child for safekeeping and came back horribly scarred."

Nusreta, who struggled to come to terms with her ordeal in Omarska, steeled herself to return to Prijedor in July 2002. By way of welcome, she found the word "Omarska" scrawled across her doorway by her new neighbours. "At first I thought I wouldn't be able to bear it," she says. "I used to stay indoors, peeping through the curtains."

There was always a macabre intimacy to Bosnia's war - people knew their torturers and murderers - and the intimacy remains. "A lot of the Omarska guards live in my neighbourhood," says Nusreta. "I see them almost every day. One of them, called Vokic, has his entrance in the next block of flats and we share a bedroom wall. I see the interrogators and even the man who ordered that I be put in Omarska - he's a bank manager and drives a Mercedes. I try to catch his eye, but he turns away. Another has been let out from prison in The Hague - called Kvocka. Last time I looked him in the eye was when he was inthe dock and I was a witness. But I often see him on the street, even on the day we went to buy flowers for the burials of five women from Omarska whose bodies had been exhumed. There he was, in the florist buying flowers for his wife. I said to my friend: 'Look, Kvocka is standing behind you. On the day the dead are buried, and thousands more are dead, he walks free.'"

Nusreta, a former judge, returned not to her own apartment but to her brother's. Why? When she emerged alive from Omarska, she explains, she found a former typist from the bench called Ankica living in her flat, and was invited in for coffee. "There I was, like someone gone mad," recalls Nusreta, "straight from Omarska and a guest in my own flat. I sat down on my sofa. Ankica, wearing my clothes, made me coffee in my pot, served in the china my mother left me, and asked me: 'Why are you acting so strange?' She said the apartment suited her, she had always wanted one like this."

Years later, Nusreta returned - as was her right under the Dayton peace plan - to be promised by Ankica that everything be left in order. "But when I finally evicted her," says Nusreta, "it had all gone. Even the built-in wardrobe. Everything I had inherited from my mother. Even my photographs. It was pure spite, to wipe out my past." Thankfully, Nusreta has a few good friends in Prijedor, notably the only Bosniak doctor in town, Azra, whose elderly father and stepmother had their throats cut when they returned home after surviving Omarska in 1992.

"Sometimes I get a crisis in the night," says Nusreta, "that someone may knock at the door or throw a brick through my window. But I will become happier in accordance with how many of our people come back. My only wish is that by us coming home, the Serbs do not get what they wanted." However, she says by way of conclusion, "I can never again be happy."

One hallmark of the aftermath of Bosnia's war is an almost complete lack of reckoning on the part of the Bosnian Serbs. Only one defendant - the former Bosnian Serb joint-president herself, Biljana Plavsic - has pleaded guilty at The Hague to what happened, and appealed for reconciliation. But around Omarska, the returnees' narrative falls down a black hole in the perpetrators' memory. "There was no camp here," security guards at the entrance to Omarska mine told us. "It was all lies, Muslim lies, and forgery by the journalists."

"There is no remorse," says Nusreta. "No one has apologised or even admitted what happened. They say they know nothing about the camps. There are 145 mass graves and hundreds of individual graves in this region, and we invite the local authorities to our commemorations, but they never come." "Even now," says the Bosniak political leader in Prijedor, Muharem Murselovic, "the Serbs will not accept that anything happened. I am always in a dilemma - are they crazy, or are they pretending to be crazy? I think it is because they were all so deeply involved in what was happening that they cannot come forward and admit it."

"Every time I see a Serb who is extremist," says Sabahudin, "I remind him of what happened in front of their eyes. In such a way as I hope might change his viewpoint. He has to understand that if this country is to survive, they have to change their mind. Any future together is conditional upon them admitting what they did, and apologising for it."

The security guards from the all-Serbian village of Omarska signal that it is time for the commemorative procession to leave the camp. But as we leave, there remains one urgent question, one burning uncertainty.

Crucial to the reckoning of which Sabahudin speaks is the matter of the future of the site of camp Omarska. There is nothing to mark what happened here - the horrors are officially buried, hidden, denied. The Serbian local authorities are enthusiastically pursuing a plan to sell off the mine to overseas investors, which could result in the concealment of a mass grave, a monument to barbarity and suffering. The killing ground could become a car park. The physical memory of this evil but sacred ground could be obliterated.

Bosniak expectations are modest, and quite possibly doomed. "We would be pleased," says Sabahudin, "if there could just be some kind of memorial, maybe that the White House might be fenced off. We just want something to ensure that the memory is preserved, and in the smallest way to awaken the conscience of the Serbs. That is the really important thing. Because if we don't awaken that conscience, we might as well forget everything. And that would be the saddest thing of all - to forget what happened and what could happen again tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow."

On the 30th anniversary of the overthrow of Pol Pot, Aki Ra describes a life of brutalisation as a child soldier, and his work clearing the landmines that are the Khmer Rouge's legacy

I am not sure of my exact birth date but an old teacher told me I was born in about 1973 in Siem Reap province, northwest Cambodia. My parents were separated soon after, living in villages three miles apart. I grew up with about 10 other children, working long hours in the fields pulling ploughs as the Khmer Rouge did not allow machinery. We ate mainly rice soup and quickly became undernourished.

My father, who used to be a teacher, was given a job building roads under Pol Pot's regime. Underfed and overworked, he soon became ill. He was admitted to hospital and given "medicine"; tablets made of rabbit droppings and IV serum which was just root-stained water. Consequently, he was still sick and starving 10 days later. He was finally given a bowl of nutritious soup which he ate quickly. But after finishing it, he was accused of lying about being ill, taken away and killed as punishment.

From then on, whenever I was ill, I was scared to tell anyone as I knew what would happen.

My mother collected sewage from houses, which was used as fertiliser. If a house did not have any sewage, the people would be tortured as punishment so my mother told them to make fake sewage from mud and water. She was promoted to tailor and rice rationer and the only time I saw my mother was when she brought me food. Guards always accompanied her but when they were not looking she would sneak people more rice. In return, they would give her small animals to take to sick people. It was a simple system of helping each other to survive.

One day my mother was caught calling out to an old man who was about to trip over. The Khmer Rouge took her away and said they were sending her to "school". Education was severely frowned upon by the regime and if you went to school, you never came back. Consequently, as a child, I was terrified of "school".

Everybody lived in a state of virtual starvation. Sometimes my friends and I would sneak out at night to eat small animals and insects. One day, my friend went to the pig trough and ate some scraps. The next morning when the Khmer Rouge did their faeces check, they noticed one lot was different and asked whose it was. My friend said it was the pigs' but his footprints gave him away, he was accused of lying and killed.

One man who stole a banana from a tree was disembowelled in front of his family, who were made to cheer and clap. Crying was considered a crime of weakness. Celebration was also demanded at the weekly village meeting where those who had been bad, and so regarded as the enemy, would have their throats slit slowly with palm fronds.

One night, when I was peeing in the long grass at the side of the road, I saw about 150 people being marched to the killing fields at Ta Yet, 25 miles north of Siem Reap. They were teachers, doctors, artists, musicians and students, all considered as the enemy. After my parents were killed, when I was five, I was brought up by the Khmer Rouge. They controlled the minds of many orphaned children through fear and the only formal education I received was being taught one letter of the Khmer alphabet each week. I thought the whole world existed as we did and the brutality, hardship, starvation and guns became my normal world.

At the age of 10, I was given my first gun. The AK-47 was about the same size as me so I struggled to carry it over my shoulder. I learned to shoot by aiming at fruit, small animals and fish. There was a huge stock of guns to choose from and I could also use rocket launchers, mortars and bazookas. These weapons were like toys to us children and we often played games with them. One friend shot himself in the head accidentally because he did not understand how the gun worked.

The Vietnamese army came to Cambodia in 1979 but did not reach Siem Reap until 1983, when I was learning how to set and detonate mines. We applied all sorts of tactics to fight them. Once we made a pot of soup laced with poison from a tree. As the enemy approached, we ran away and the Vietnamese, happy with their easy victory, ate the soup to celebrate. As they began to fall ill from the poison, we returned to camp and killed them.

However, after a few days of intense fighting, the Vietnamese sent in tanks. The Khmer Rouge attacked with machine guns, rocket launchers and mortars and when the tanks stopped, the soldiers approached, thinking they had been immobilised. But the tanks moved again, opening fire and killing everyone. Fortunately, I had run into the jungle to hide. But Vietnamese soldiers hidden there captured me at gunpoint and took me away to join many other child conscripts at a camp near Angkor Wat.

The Vietnamese treated us well and on the advice of my village elders, I slowly began to work with their army to fight against the Khmer Rouge. However, we still had little to eat and would be constantly looking for food. I ate many bizarre things, including an elephant trunk and rice cooked in urine when we had no water.

Once I was shooting across a field at the enemy when through my gun sight I saw my uncle. I lowered my weapon, but my uncle, who didn't recognise me, continued to shoot at me from 50 metres away. I had to shoot back, so I just shot over his head until he ran away. Only last year, I told my uncle what had happened and we laughed together.

The Vietnamese were responsible for destroying many precious statues around Angkor Wat as they used to shoot at them when they were bored. They looted ancient artefacts from temples which have never been found, killed animals and birds, and took vast amounts of wood to send back to Vietnam to sell.

Between 1984 and 1990 many people were killed or injured by landmines, with no hospitals near the jungle and few people knowing first aid. Soldiers injured by mines were evicted from the army and left to find badly-paid jobs; many still beg today. Hundreds of people are still killed or injured every year by landmines and weapons left behind by the army.

In 1989, after the Vietnamese pulled out of Cambodia, I was conscripted into the Cambodian army to fight the remaining Khmer Rouge factions.

I had many lucky escapes during my time with the different armies. Once, a Cambodian army general was visiting the village of Samrong. A check was made to ensure the road was free of mines. None were found but villagers told the Khmer Rouge of the general's visit and they were given money to lay anti-tank mines on the road. The general and others inside his tank were killed by the blast but I, sitting on top the of the tank as a lookout, was catapulted off to land safely in paddy fields.

After my time with the Cambodian army, a peacekeeping force was sent into Siem Reap by the United Nations and recruited Cambodians, including myself, to clear landmines.

When I first entered Siem Reap, I was amazed at what I saw after only knowing jungle life without electricity, toilets and roads. I thought the paved roads were a mountain that started in the town and found myself touching the walls of concrete houses, having only ever seen huts before. When the UN showed a movie, people ran away as they thought the vehicles were going to come off the screen into the audience. Many ethnic groups came with the UN - African, Bangladeshi, Pakistani - who we had never seen before and for a while I thought I was dreaming or had been transported to another planet.

Given the chance to study, I learned English, which gave me work as an interpreter, as well as French and Japanese. The UN trained me and others to use metal detectors and other equipment to find landmines and make them safe. We spent long hours clearing mines around Angkor Wat, which is now relatively safe, and taught villagers about mines and how to treat mine injuries. I worked with the UN for three years until they left Cambodia. I decided to continue clearing mines but, without specialist equipment, I had to make do with more simple tools.

One day, an oxcart carrying a couple and their baby triggered an anti-tank mine, killing the parents instantly. The mother, embracing the child at the moment of the explosion, saved his life. But they were thrown into a landmine field where villagers could not reach the screaming child. It took three days for them to find me and take me to back to clear the minefield. Incredibly, the baby had survived by suckling on his dead mother's breast. During mine clearing, I found many war relics and started collecting them. Eventually I bought some land and built my home but then thought of starting a museum where I could display the relics, including many types of guns, rocket launchers, mortars, grenades, gas masks, CS gas canisters, bombs and uniforms.

I still go regularly into rural areas to defuse landmines but rely heavily on volunteers, including foreigners, and on donations to cover costs and pay local helpers.

We live daily with the legacy of the landmine and unexploded bombs: we have 27,000 landmine victims in Siem Reap province alone and that figure rises daily. For us, the horror is not yet over. We still need help to deal with this problem and I feel the world is not fully aware of the scale of the situation. It may take another 50-100 years to find and clear every mine. After so many years of bad times, my life is now good. I am married with a son called Amatak, which means forever. Ten landmine victims live with us, children who have lost their arms and legs, and we help them to prepare for life as independent adults. We also help children around the area and send them to school.

We must all do what we can to educate our children and make Cambodia safe again so that Amatak and all children can really live forever.

· This is an extract from a longer article by Aki Ra, first published on the Cambodian Landmine Museum website

Police are examining a possible link between those involved in Thursday's attacks and a whitewater rafting trip.

Two of the 7 July bombers rode the rapids at Canolfan Tryweryn, the National Whitewater Centre, in Bala, north Wales weeks before the attack.

Officers believe several people with links to addresses being investigated in relation to the 21 July attack may have also been on the trip.

Earlier in the week it emerged that Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, who both carried out bombings in London on 7 July, attended a whitewater rafting trip on 4 June at Canolfan Tryweryn.

Photographs showed Khan, who carried out the Edgware Road bombing, raising a two-fingered peace sign, and Tanweer, who bombed Aldgate East, leaning forward and appearing to laugh.

New intelligence received by detectives has suggested a possible link between the trip and those responsible for the attempted London bomb attack on 21 July, which targeted three London underground trains and one bus.

Officers believe the trip was attended by several people with links to addresses that are "of interest" in relation to the bombing.

John Jayes, the owner of a canoe centre in Llangollen, north wales, said passed on details of a group of four Asian men who took part in a rafting trip in May to police. He said at least one of the men was from the Beeston area of Leeds, where Khan and Tanweer came from.

It is believed the pair organised outdoor adventure trips for young Muslims from Leeds.

Earlier in the week, a spokesman for Canolfan Tryweryn said: "Following liaison with the police, we are now able to confirm that customers with the names Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer took part in a whitewater rafting trip on June 4."

On December 14 2001, the day after the attack on parliament, the Special Cell (anti-terrorist squad) of the Delhi police claimed it had tracked down several people suspected of being involved in the conspiracy. The next day, it announced that it had "cracked the case": the attack, the police said, was a joint operation carried out by two Pakistan-based terrorist groups, Lashkar- e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Three Kashmiri men, Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani, Shaukat Hussain Guru and Mohammad Afzal, and Shaukat's wife, Afsan Guru, were arrested.

In the tense days that followed, parliament was adjourned. The Indian government declared that Pakistan - America's closest ally in the "war on terror" - was a terrorist state. On December 21, India recalled its high commissioner from Pakistan, suspended air, rail and bus communications and banned air traffic with Pakistan. It put into motion a massive mobilisation of its war machinery, and moved more than half a million troops to the Pakistan border. Foreign embassies evacuated their staff and citizens, and tourists travelling to India were issued cautionary travel advisories. The world watched with bated breath as the subcontinent was taken to the brink of nuclear war. All this cost India an estimated pounds 1.1bn of public money. About 800 soldiers died in the panicky process of mobilisation alone.

The police charge sheet was filed in a special fast-track trial court designated for cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Some three years later, the trial court sentenced Geelani, Shaukat and Afzal to death. Afsan Guru was sentenced to five years of "rigorous imprisonment". On appeal, the high court subsequently acquitted Geelani and Afsan, but upheld Shaukat's and Afzal's death sentence. Eventually, the supreme court upheld the acquittals and reduced Shaukat's punishment to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. However, it not just confirmed, but enhanced Mohammad Afzal's sentence. He was given three life sentences and a double death sentence.

In its judgment on August 5 2005, the supreme court admitted that the evidence against Afzal was only circumstantial, and that there was no evidence that he belonged to any terrorist group or organisation. But it went on to endorse what can only be described as lynch law. "The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation," it said, "and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender."

Spelling out the reasons for giving Afzal the death penalty, the judgment went on: "The appellant, who is a surrendered militant and who was bent upon repeating the acts of treason against the nation, is a menace to the society and his life should become extinct." This implies a dangerous ignorance of what it means to be a "surrendered militant" in Kashmir today.

So, should Afzal's life be extinguished? His story is fascinating because it is inextricably entwined with the story of the Kashmir Valley. It is a story that stretches far beyond the confines of courtrooms and the limited imagination of people who live in the secure heart of a self-declared "superpower". Afzal's story has its origins in a war zone whose laws are beyond the pale of the fine arguments and delicate sensibilities of normal jurisprudence.

For all these reasons it is critical that we consider carefully the strange, sad and utterly sinister story of the December 13 attack. It tells us a great deal about the way the world's largest "democracy" really works. It connects the biggest things to the smallest. It traces the pathways that connect what happens in the shadowy grottoes of our police stations to what goes on in the snowy streets of Paradise Valley, and from there to the malign furies that bring nations to the brink of nuclear war. It raises specific questions that deserve specific, and not ideological or rhetorical, answers. What hangs in the balance is far more than the fate of one man.

For the most part, the December 13 attack was an astonishingly incompetent "terrorist" strike. But consummate competence appeared to be the hallmark of everything that followed: the gathering of evidence, the speed of the investigation by the Special Cell, the arrest and charging of the accused and the three-and-a-half-year-long judicial process that began with the fast-track trial court.

The operative phrase in all of this is "appeared to be". If you follow the story carefully, you will encounter two sets of masks. First, the mask of consummate competence (accused arrested, "case cracked" in two days flat), and then, when things began to come undone, the benign mask of shambling incompetence (shoddy evidence, procedural flaws, material contradictions). But underneath all of this - as several lawyers, academics and journalists who have studied the case in detail have shown - is something more sinister, more worrying. Over the past few years the worries have grown into a mountain of misgivings, impossible to ignore.

The doubts set in as early as the day after the parliament attack, when the police arrested Geelani, a young lecturer at Delhi University. His outraged colleagues and friends, certain that he had been framed, contacted the well-known lawyer Nandita Haksar and asked her to take on his case. This marked the beginning of a campaign for the fair trial of Geelani. It flew in the face of mass hysteria and corrosive propaganda that was enthusiastically disseminated by the mass media. But despite this, the campaign was successful, and Geelani was eventually acquitted, along with Afsan Guru.

Geelani's acquittal blew a gaping hole in the prosecution's version of the parliament attack. The linchpin of its conspiracy theory suddenly tuned out to be innocent. But in some odd way, in the public mind, the acquittal of two of the accused only confirmed the guilt of the other two. There was bloodlust that had to be satiated. When the government announced that Afzal, Accused No 1 in the case, would be hanged on October 20 2006, it seemed that most people welcomed the news not just with approval, but with morbid excitement. But then, once again, the questions resurfaced.

To see through the prosecution's case against Geelani was relatively easy. He was plucked out of thin air and transplanted into the centre of the "conspiracy" as its kingpin. Afzal was different. He had been extruded through the sewage system of the hell that Kashmir has become. He surfaced through a manhole, covered in shit (and when he emerged, policemen in the Special Cell pissed on him. Literally.) The first thing they made him do was a "media confession" in which he implicated himself completely in the attack. The speed with which this happened made many of us believe that he was indeed guilty as charged. It was only much later that the circumstances under which this "confession" was made were revealed, and even the supreme court was to set it aside, saying that the police had violated legal safeguards.

From the very beginning there was nothing pristine or simple about Afzal's case. His story gives us a glimpse into what life is really like in the Kashmir Valley. It is only in the Noddy Book version we read about in our newspapers that security forces battle militants and innocent Kashmiris are caught in the crossfire. In the adult version, Kashmir is a valley awash with militants, renegades, security forces, double-crossers, informers, spooks, blackmailers, blackmailees, extortionists, spies, both Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies, human rights activists, NGOs and unimaginable amounts of unaccounted-for money and weapons. There are not always clear lines that demarcate the boundaries between all these things and people; it is not easy to tell who is working for whom.

Truth, in Kashmir, is probably more dangerous than anything else. The deeper you dig, the worse it gets. At the bottom of the pit are the Special Operations Group and Special Task Force (STF), the most ruthless, indisciplined and dreaded elements of the Indian security apparatus in Kashmir, which play a central role in the Afzal story. Unlike the more formal forces, they operate in a twilight zone where policemen, surrendered militants, renegades and common criminals do business. They prey upon the local population, particularly in rural Kashmir. Their primary victims are the thousands of young Kashmiri men who rose up in revolt in the anarchic uprising of the early 1990s and have since surrendered and are trying to live normal lives.

In 1989, when Afzal crossed the border to be trained as a militant, he was only 20. He returned with no training, disillusioned with his experience. He put down his gun and enrolled himself in Delhi University. In 1993, without ever having been a practising militant, he voluntarily surrendered to the Border Security Force. Illogically enough, it was at this point that his nightmares began. His surrender was treated as a crime and his life became hell. Afzal's story has enraged Kashmiris because what has happened to him could have happened, is happening and has happened to thousands of young Kashmiri men and their families. The only difference is that their stories are played out in the dingy bowels of interrogation centres, army camps and police stations where they have been burned, beaten, electrocuted, blackmailed and killed, their bodies thrown out of the backs of trucks for passers-by to find. Whereas Afzal's story is being performed like a piece of medieval theatre on the national stage, in the clear light of day, with the legal sanction of a "fair trial", the hollow benefits of a "free press" and the all pomp and ceremony of a so-called democracy.

In documents submitted to the court, Afzal describes how, in the months before the attack on parliament, he was tortured in the camps of the STF - with electrodes on his genitals and chillies and petrol in his anus. He talks of how he was a constant victim of extortion. He mentions the name of Deputy Superintendent of Police Devinder Singh, who said he needed him to do a "small job" for him in Delhi. (Singh has subsequently admitted on record to having tortured Afzal in exactly the ways Afzal has described.) Afzal has also said that from the time he was arrested up to the time he was charged (a few months), his younger brother Hilal was held in illegal confinement in a police camp in Kashmir. As ransom.

Even today, Afzal does not claim complete innocence. It is the nature of his involvement that is being contested. For instance, was he coerced, tortured and blackmailed into playing even the peripheral part he played? In a gross violation of his constitutional rights, from the time he was arrested and right through the crucial phase of the trial when the real work of building up a case is done, Afzal did not have a lawyer. He had nobody to put out his version of the story, or help him or anyone else sift through the tangle of lies and fabrications and propaganda put out by the police. Various individuals worked it out for themselves. Today, five years later, a group of lawyers, academics, journalists and writers has published a reader (December 13th: The Strange Case of the Parliament Attack, published by Penguin India). It is this body of work that has fractured what, only recently, appeared to be a national consensus interwoven with mass hysteria.

Through the fissures, those who have come under scrutiny - shadowy individuals, counter-intelligence and security agencies, political parties - are beginning to surface. They wave flags, hurl abuse, issue hot denials and cover their tracks with more and more untruths. Thus they reveal themselves.

The essays in the Penguin book raise questions about how Afzal, who never had proper legal representation, can be sentenced to death without having had an opportunity to be heard, without a fair trial. They raise questions about fabricated arrest memos, falsified seizure and recovery memos, procedural flaws, vital evidence that has been tampered with, false telephone records, false testimonies, legal lacunae, material contradictions in the testimonies of police and prosecution witnesses, and the outright lies that were presented in court and published in newspapers. They show how there is hardly a single piece of evidence that stands up to scrutiny.

And then there are even more disturbing questions that have been raised, which range beyond the fate of Afzal. Some of these are critical for a country that is claiming to be a responsible nuclear power. Here are 13 questions for December 13:

Question 1: For months before the attack on parliament, both the government and the police had been saying that parliament could be attacked. On December 12 2001, the then prime minister, AB Vajpayee, warned of an imminent attack. On December 13 it happened. Given that there was an "improved security drill", how did a car bomb packed with explosives enter the parliament complex?

Question 2: Within days of the attack, the Special Cell of the Delhi police said it was a meticulously planned joint operation of Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba. They said the attack was led by a man called "Mohammad" who was also involved in the hijacking of flight IC-814 in 1998. (This was later refuted by the Central Bureau of Investigation.) None of this was ever proved in court. What evidence did the Special Cell have for its claim?

Question 3: The entire attack was recorded live on CCTV. Two Congress party MPs, Kapil Sibal and Najma Heptullah, demanded in parliament that the CCTV recording be shown to the members. They said that there was confusion about the details of the event. The chief whip of the Congress party, Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, said, "I counted six men getting out of the car. But only five were killed. The closed circuit TV camera recording clearly showed the six men." If Dasmunshi was right, why did the police say that there were only five people in the car? Who was the sixth person? Where is he now? Why was the CCTV recording not produced by the prosecution as evidence in the trial? Why was it not released for public viewing?

Question 4: Why was parliament adjourned after some of these questions were raised?

Question 5: A few days after December 13, the government declared that it had "incontrovertible evidence" of Pakistan's involvement in the attack, and announced a massive mobilisation of almost half a million soldiers to the Indo-Pakistan border. The subcontinent was pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Apart from Afzal's "confession", extracted under torture (and later set aside by the supreme court), what was the "incontrovertible evidence"?

Question 6: Is it true that the military mobilisation to the Pakistan border had begun long before the December 13 attack?

Question 7: How much did this military standoff, which lasted for nearly a year, cost? How many soldiers died in the process? How many soldiers and civilians died because of mishandled landmines, and how many peasants lost their homes and land because trucks and tanks were rolling through their villages and landmines were being planted in their fields?

Question 8: In a criminal investigation, it is vital for the police to show how the evidence gathered at the scene of the attack led them to the accused. The police have not managed to show how they connected Geelani to the attack. And how did the police reach Afzal? The Special Cell says Geelani led them to Afzal. But the message to look out for Afzal was actually flashed to the Srinagar police before Geelani was arrested. So how did the Special Cell connect Afzal to the December 13 attack?

Question 9: The courts acknowledge that Afzal was a surrendered militant who was in regular contact with the security forces, particularly the STF of Jammu and Kashmir police. How do the security forces explain the fact that a person under their surveillance was able to conspire in a major militant operation?

Question 10: Is it plausible that organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammad would rely on a person who had been in and out of STF torture chambers, and was under constant police surveillance, as the principal link for a major operation?

Question 11: In his statement before the court, Afzal says that he was introduced to "Mohammed" and instructed to take him to Delhi by a man called Tariq, who was working with the STF. Tariq was named in the police charge sheet. Who is Tariq and where is he now?

Question 12: On December 19 2001, six days after the parliament attack, police commissioner SM Shangari identified one of the attackers who was killed as Mohammad Yasin Fateh Mohammed (alias Abu Hamza) of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who had been arrested in Mumbai in November 2000 and immediately handed over to the Jammu and Kashmir police. He gave detailed descriptions to support his statement. If police commissioner Shangari was right, how did Yasin, a man in the custody of the Jammu and Kashmir police, end up participating in the parliament attack? If he was wrong, where is Yasin now?

Question 13: Why is it that we still do not know who the five "terrorists" killed in the parliament attack are?

These questions, examined cumulatively, point to something far more serious than incompetence. The words that come to mind are complicity, collusion, involvement. There is no need for us to feign shock or shrink from thinking these thoughts and saying them out loud. Governments and their intelligence agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies such as this to further their own ends. (Look up the burning of the Reichstag and the rise of Nazi power in Germany in 1933; or Operation Gladio, in which European intelligence agencies created acts of terrorism, especially in Italy, in order to discredit militant groups such as the Red Brigades.)

The official response to all of these questions has been dead silence. As things stand, Afzal's execution has been postponed while the president considers his clemency petition. Meanwhile, the Bhartiya Janata party (now in the opposition) announced that it would turn "Hang Afzal" into a national campaign. But it does not seem to have taken off. Now other avenues are being explored. The main strategy seems to be to create confusion and polarise the debate on communal lines. In the business of spreading confusion, the media, particularly television journalists, can be counted on to be perfect collaborators. On discussions, chat shows and "special reports", we have television anchors playing around with crucial facts, like young children in a sandpit. Torturers, estranged brothers, senior police officers and politicians are emerging from the woodwork and talking. The more they talk, the more interesting it all becomes.

One character who is rapidly emerging from the shadowy periphery and wading on to centre-stage is deputy superintendent Devinder Singh. He was showcased on the national news (CNN-IBN), in what was presented as a "sting" operation with a hidden camera. It all seemed a bit unnecessary, however, because Singh has been talking a lot these days. He has done recorded interviews, on the phone as well as face to face, saying exactly the same shocking things. Weeks before the sting operation, in a recorded interview with Parvaiz Bukhari, a freelance journalist, he said, "I did interrogate and torture him [Afzal] at my camp for several days. And we never recorded his arrest in the books anywhere. His description of torture at my camp is true. That was the procedure those days and we did pour petrol in his ass and gave him electric shocks. But I could not break him. He did not reveal anything to me despite our hardest possible interrogation ... He looked like a 'bhondu' [fool] those days, what you call a 'chootya' [idiot] type. And I had a reputation for torture, interrogation and breaking suspects. If anybody came out of my interrogation clean, nobody would ever touch him again. He would be considered clean for good by the whole department."

This is not an empty boast. Singh has a formidable reputation for torture in the Kashmir Valley. On TV, his boasting spiralled into policy-making. "Torture is the only deterrent for terrorism," he said. "I do it for the nation." He did not bother to explain why or how the "bhondu" that he tortured and subsequently released allegedly went on to become the diabolical mastermind of the parliament attack. Singh then said that Afzal was a Jaish militant. If this is true, why was the evidence not placed before the courts? And why on earth was Afzal released? Why was he not watched? There is a definite attempt to try to dismiss this as incompetence. But given everything we know now, it would take all of Singh's delicate professional skills to make some of us believe that.

The official version of the story of the parliament attack is very quickly coming apart at the seams. Even the supreme court judgment, with all its flaws of logic and leaps of faith, does not accuse Afzal of being the mastermind of the attack. So who was the mastermind? If Afzal is hanged, we may never know. But LK Advani, the leader of the opposition, wants him hanged at once. Even a day's delay, he says, is against the national interest. Why? What is the hurry? The man is locked up in a high-security cell on death row. He is not allowed out of his cell for even five minutes a day. What harm can he do? Talk? Write, perhaps? Surely, even in Advani's own narrow interpretation of the term, it is in the national interest not to hang Afzal? At least not until there is an inquiry that reveals what the real story is and who actually attacked parliament?

A genuine inquiry would have to mean far more than just a political witch-hunt. It would have to look into the part played by intelligence, counter-insurgency and security agencies as well. Offences such as the fabrication of evidence and the blatant violation of procedural norms have already become established in the courts, but they look very much like just the tip of the iceberg. We now have a police officer admitting - boasting - on record that he was involved in the illegal detention and torture of a fellow citizen. Is all of this acceptable to the people, the government and the courts of India?

Given the track record of Indian governments (past and present, right, left and centre) it is naive - perhaps utopian is a better word - to hope that today's politicians will ever have the courage to institute an inquiry that will, once and for all, uncover the real story. A maintenance dose of pusillanimity is probably encrypted in all governments. But hope has little to do with reason.

He believed his love for his country would save him

Murdered editor Hrant Dink did more than most dared hope to bring Turkey - and his two peoples - towards peace

The last time I met Hrant Dink he joked that he was "not dead yet". The next time I saw him was on television last Friday, murdered outside the newspaper he founded in Istanbul. Even with all the death threats, he believed his clear love of his country would save him. "They don't shoot pigeons here." Dink was an orphan. He was given up by his parents when he was still a small boy. To be an orphan in Turkey, a country where family is all, is a heavy burden. To be an Armenian orphan in Turkey is to simultaneously carry the genocide and the troubled consciences of all you walk among.

Dink spent his life trying to create a new family that could accommodate people like him and the millions more who do not fit into the officially prescribed straitjacket of what it means to be a Turk. He tried to rid his country, and his two peoples of the nightmare of the death and the denial dividing them.

It is all the more painfully tragic that in his own death he has been accepted into the Turkish family in a way that he never quite achieved during his lifetime.

Dink's murder has shamed Turkey, just as his prosecution under the preposterous article 301 of the new penal code, which created the offence of insulting Turkishness, shamed it. All the more so that the judges - heroes in their own heads no doubt of Turkey's cherished secular order - had to horribly distort an article he wrote berating the Armenian diaspora, somehow claiming that his words poisoned the blood of Armenians with hatred of Turks, in order to somehow convict him.

What rankled most with him to the end was that he had been held by the state to have insulted Turks. "I wish he could hear the thousands of people lining up all the way from Osmanbey to Harbiye shouting, 'We are all Hrant, we are all Armenian!'" a friend of his told me on the night of the killing.

Only those who know Turkey can possibly imagine the emotional charge released by those last four words. Just as they will have winced at what the boy who shot him in the back of the head shouted as he ran away: "I have killed the gavur [the infidel, the foreigner]." Ogun Samast, the 16-year-old who has apparently now confessed to killing Dink, comes from Trabzon, where last spring, after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, a boy of 15 walked into a church and shot an Italian priest in the back of the head.

Trabzon and the whole Black Sea coast was one of the last places in Turkey where Islam took hold. But, like eastern Anatolia, it was also a place where many thousands died in the chaos of the Ottoman empire's collapse, mainly Greek-speaking Pontian Christians massacred for aiding the Russian invaders.

Later, faced with flight to Georgia or forced migration to Greece, many apparently converted to Islam to remain. Even in Turkey, a place often unhappy in its own skin, there is a particular unease about the past on the Black Sea. Many of its inhabitants are acutely aware that a few generations ago they may have been neither Turkish nor Muslim - like the ancestors of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister.

This often shows itself in self-consciously insistent nationalism or religious observance, two seemingly irreconcilable credos that have found common cause as Europe has shown ugly signs of Islamophobia and Turcophobia and, in the past few months, Turkey's EU accession process has stalled.

No one would be angrier than Dink if his death were to give succour to Austrian or French politicians determined to keep Turkey out of Europe. He never saw acceptance of the Armenian genocide as a prerequisite for entry into Europe any more than it was for the Austrians, French, Poles, Lithuanians or Hungarians to face up to their part in the Holocaust.

When the French parliament made denial of the Armenian genocide a crime last year, he even offered go to Paris to be the first to defy the new law for the sake of free speech. For him it was not just a matter for Turkey's conscience, or about rebuilding relations with its neighbour, Armenia, although all of this was important; most of all it was for the mental health of Turks. It was Turkey - and not the gavurs or the Armenian diaspora, who kept bringing it up - that was really suffering.

Turkey has a long way to go to be at peace with itself, but a process has begun. And it has already gone further than anyone might have dared to dream a decade ago, thanks in good part to Hrant Dink. He did not just preach generosity, bravery and forgiveness, he lived it.

Which is why he walked out of his office on Friday rather than hide away as if he had anything to be ashamed of. His newspaper is called Agos, after the Armenian word for opening a furrow for planting. It is for others now to stand at his plough.

The human cost of cheap high street clothes

'All my family know is I have come to Delhi to work. They were paid a fee for me and I was brought by road from Patna with 40 other children. If they knew I had ended up here they wouldn't have let me go. But now I can't telephone them - they live in a small village. I am going to work off the fee the owner paid for me so I can go home but I am working for free. The supervisor has told me because I am learning I don't get paid. It's been like this for four months. I've had only two days off. And that was only because the factory was flooded.'

Prakesh, who is also on 'probation' and working for free, claims to be 13 but his colleagues jokingly claim he is closer to nine. He bares fresh wounds on the backs of his legs but while his supervisor looks on, denies he has been beaten.

'I want to work here. I have somewhere to sleep at night,' he says looking furtively behind him. 'The work is hard and my back hurts from crouching over the material but I am learning. I often hear other children playing in the street outside but it is my job to work. My parents needed the money for the other members of my family and they sold me. It is my duty to stay here. Another boy ran away. The supervisor told me he is in prison. I don't want to go to prison.'

Select, one of the fastest growing retailers in Britain, told The Observer it was appalled to learn some of its clothing was being finished off by child labourers. 'The whole idea of child trafficking is utterly unacceptable and the thought that we could be involved has very much upset us all,' said John Sunderland, a director. 'We had visited the factory and we were totally confident that everything was absolutely straight.'

It appears Majgenta, the Indian company contracted to make the Select dresses had sub-contracted sewing some sequins on the almost-finished garments to another firm. Majgenta has pledged a full inquiry in the wake of The Observer revelations and point out that fewer than two per cent of the garments it exports to the UK require the application of sequins.

In a statement given to this newspaper, Select said: 'The supplier concerned has denied all the allegations. They have suggested that the photographs we have been shown depict surplus or faulty stock that our supplier had disposed of, and not stock supplied to Select. We have sought further explanation from them in this regard.'

Majgenta says it uses only approved sub-contractors which are obliged to meet strict ethical and moral standards. It has threatened to fire its subcontractors if its investigation finds evidence of wrongdoing.

But tracing the trail to the sweatshops is not easy. Akesh, the supervisor of the sweatshop, said his orders were contracted by word of mouth only, leaving no incriminating paper trail.

'The workers here are well treated,' he said. 'We feed them and they sleep here, it is comfortable, more comfortable than many of the other units around here. We have water tanks here. These children are not slaves; they are working for their families in the north.'

But his comments have drawn an angry response from child protection groups. 'The uncovering of this sweatshop is obviously a major blow for a leading British firm but the reality is most high street firms in Britain are playing exactly the same game, cutting costs and not considering the consequences,' said Bhuwan Ribhu, a New Delhi lawyer and activist for the campaign group Global March Against Child Labour.

'They know what outsourcing to India means. The cheapness and accessibility of these garments has created a life of servitude, a living nightmare, for hundreds of thousands of children who are forced to sew them.'

In another sweatshop, The Observer found more children completing a major sub-contracted order fora British firm, the Birmingham-based fashion label Roman Originals, whose upmarket garments are popular purchases in English market towns.

'We were horrified to see these pictures and immediately launched an investigation into our suppliers,' Roman Originals said in a statement, adding it had cancelled its contract immediately.

'We had visited the suppliers and were presented with an adult-only workforce and practices that satisfied our standards. It appears that our supplier sub-contracted a portion of the business and this is where the problem occurred."

In the past few months Delhi police and Indian Labour Department officials have made a series of raids on garment factories in the Indian capital and rescued hundreds of minors working in embroidery units

Most campaigners, however, remain sceptical, claiming the raids are simply 'PR stunts' designed to show something is being done about the problem. According to Global March, the fight against child labour is becoming increasingly dangerous.

'The police have to rely on rare tip-offs because it is difficult to track down child workers, with employers setting up small units in crammed back alleys, where the children are hidden from public eye,' Ribhu said.

'But even before the search parties get to the factories the owners are tipped off and many of the children are cleared out. We have lost a number of activists, murdered in the course of their duties, others have been dragged in chains behind cars and had threats made against their families.'

Professor Sheotaj Singh, the co-founder of the Dayanand Shilpa Vidyalaya, a Delhi-based rehabilitation centre for rescued child workers, believes that as long as cut-priced embroidered goods are sold in catalogues and stores across Europe, major retailers will continue to inundate India's main export firms with lucrative contracts.

'The facts are straightforward for the consumer,' Singh said. 'Cut-price stores in the West can cut prices only by ordering in bulk, huge numbers of garments, and somewhere along the chain of suffering and exploitation enslaved children are inevitably going to be involved.

'Everything is sub-contracted in this country. These consumers should not only be demanding answers from retailers but looking to themselves and how they spend their money.'

Hallucinating, vomiting and unable to stand, but guides refused water to dying trekker

Instead, the trek through the mountains and desert of Utah in the mid-western US left David Buschow, a fit 29-year-old US air force veteran and security guard from New York dehydrated and hallucinating, his eyes bulging and tongue swollen. Less than 10 hours after setting off from the group's overnight camp on the second day, Buschow collapsed and died.

According to the coroner's report, he died from "dehydration and electrolyte imbalance due to hiking in hot environmental temperatures with inadequate water and electrolyte replacement".

But, an inquiry has found, the three wilderness camp instructors accompanying the group did have water. They chose not to offer it to Buschow, preferring that he attempt to complete the day's task. Buschow died knowing he was just 100 yards from the spot where water had already been found.

On Friday the family of the dead man sued the school running the course and its guides, including Shawn O'Neal, who was with Buschow when he died. "He paid to experience wilderness. Instead of learning how to survive on his own, he was made to die," S Brook Millard, a lawyer for the family, told Associated Press.

Buschow's death highlights the lack of regulation covering wilderness camps in Utah and other areas of the US. His trek was run by the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, whose courses are licensed by the US Forestry Service. The service owns the land and grants the school a permit to operate there. But there appears to be little if any state or federal oversight of courses for adults.

The participants on the 28-day course, which cost $3,175 (£1,600) per person, set off at 10am on July 17 last year with three instructors. Their task for the day was to hike through the oppressive heat only drinking where they found water. But the group was unable to find water until 7pm. By that time, Buschow and another member of the group were suffering from the effects of advanced dehydration.

"It's hard to imagine how they could justify not giving this fellow water if they had it," said Paul Auerbach, a leading authority on wilderness medicine. "Who cares whether he finishes the course or not? The participants may want to push themselves, but there's a point at which it becomes foolish."

The school has denied responsibility, saying that Buschow signed a waiver and was aware that water would not be carried on the first three days of the trek. Its owner, Josh Bernstein, who also presents an archaeological history programme on the Discovery channel, told Associated Press: "The group appeared to be within the normal parameters we've seen on the trail over the years. Many were, understandably, tired, but morale was high and the participants were determined to continue ... [Buschow] seemed capable of completing the hike to camp that evening."

The record of the day, reconstructed from witness statements and interviews carried out by law enforcement and the Forest Service, tells the story of the participants being led into hostile terrain in the most gruelling conditions.

The group, which included some Britons, set off for the six-mile trek mid-morning, having spent the previous night sleeping in the open. As temperatures rose above 35C (95F) some found it increasingly difficult to cope with the heat, the lack of water, the exercise and the high altitude of Utah's Dixie National Forest.

Buschow had brought a water bottle with him but was told to carry it empty. As the day progressed and he became increasingly tired, his pack was divided between the rest of the group to carry.

Most of the participants were aware that Buschow was having problems. One remembered Buschow saying that he was not a wuss but that "something was not right". His breathing was laboured, he was vomiting, falling and hallucinating and he consistently complained of cramping pains in his legs. The instructors advised him to eat pine needles.

After taking the entire day to hike the six miles to Cottonwood Canyon, the group eventually reached water. But 100 yards short, Buschow once again "plopped down" on the ground, with an instructor at his side.

A Forest Service summary of that instructor's statement is chilling. "They were within 100 yards of the next water source," it reads. "Buschow dropped down again on the trail. Buschow was repeatedly encouraged to get up and continue to finish the walk - Buschow said he could not go on. He was encouraged again, telling him people can go further than what they think they can. Buschow requested that [the instructor] get water for him. [Instructor] said he would not leave him and that they would rest awhile. Buschow was laying down at this time on his stomach.

"Then, [the instructor] 'had a bad feeling and saw no sign of Buschow breathing, no chest movement'. Buschow did not respond to his name or shaking, he was turned over and his eyes were glassy."

The instructor yelled out three "hoots", the agreed distress signal, and the other instructors - one of whom was a trainee - ran to help. Two of them, together with two students trained in first aid, tried for half an hour to resuscitate him, while the third climbed a ridge to phone for help. When a rescue helicopter arrived an hour and a half later, Buschow was dead.

It has since emerged that two of the group members were offered and accepted water from instructors on the trek. Buschow was not given the option.

The school said that by signing a waiver, "Mr Buschow expressly assumed the risk of serious injury or death prior to participating."

The local county attorney's office and the Utah attorney general's office declined to bring a case against the school or Mr Bernstein, saying that there was insufficient evidence.

Scars and stripes

Presumably it was the same when he sang in Seattle, and will be so when he hits Atlanta. But in Salt Lake City there is a second, singular pain - not one inflicted on this community of 8,000 refugees dumped as though on another planet, but by one of their number against their host city. A pain that comes not from bullets they fled back home, but fired by one of their number. Across the world, the Bosnian diaspora works hard, walks the high wire between integration and identity, shuts up and suffers either in silence or with each other. And for that they are almost universally respected, wherever they are scattered. Here in Utah, however, one of them changed all that one terrible day, and his name was Sulejmen Talovic.

In the early evening of 12 February, the Trolley Square shopping centre at 700 East, 500 South, was its usual uneventful self, save for the rush on Valentine's cards. Sulejmen Talovic, aged 18, from a tiny hillside hamlet called Talovici in eastern Bosnia, parked his green Mazda 626 and, wearing a bandolier of bullets around his waist and carrying a backpack full of ammunition, headed towards the mall. He carried a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-calibre handgun.

Almost immediately, Talovic encountered Jeffrey Walker, aged 53, with his teenage son, 'AJ', and opened fire. AJ was hit in the head and ankle. His father took a bullet in the back and died. Moving on into the shopping centre, Talovic fired again, wounding Shawn Munns, 34, and once inside the mall killed Vanessa Quinn, 29, as she emerged from the Bath and Body Works shop. Talovic then advanced into the Cabin Fever gift store, full of amorous card-buyers, and killed Teresa Ellis, 29, her boyfriend Brad Frantz, 24, and Kirsten Hinckley, 15. The teenage girl's mother, Carolyn Tuft, was wounded, but managed to crawl over to her daughter, to be at her side as she died. Also in the store, Stacy Hanson, 53, was wounded.

The shooting spree was three minutes old when an off-duty police officer, Ken Hammond, planning to enjoy dinner with his wife at the Rodizio Brazilian grill, pulled his weapon and engaged Talovic from the mall's second floor. Talovic took cover in the Pottery Barn children's shop, as a posse of armed police arrived after a torrent of emergency calls from terrified shoppers, cowering behind doors and store counters. Three officers challenged Talovic from behind, telling him to drop his weapons, whereupon he spun round and, after a brief exchange of fire, was killed. 'Fuck you!', Talovic is said to have shouted as the lethal bullet ended his life. Six dead and four wounded, out of nowhere, in seven minutes, in sleepy Utah. 'It was a barrage of gunshots,' recalls Barrett Dodds, owner of the mall's antique shop, but, 'he seemed very calm, almost proud of himself'.

According to Salt Lake City police chief Chris Burbank, 'There is no question, given what happened in the first three minutes, that he would have continued ... he gave no indication that he would have stopped.' Although the police say Talovic showed no great skill with his weapons, he was still carrying 90 bullets when shot. The FBI was drafted in, and traced the shotgun to a legal purchase at a local hunting shop some weeks before the carnage, and the handgun to a series of illegal sales originating outside Utah.

For days, Salt Lake was a city in shock and mourning, of candlelit vigils and tolling bells, with some funerals held locally and others elsewhere in America. The appalled public mind reached immediately for precedents, especially the school massacres at Jonesboro, in Arkansas, and Columbine, Colorado - slaughter by home-grown American youths. Only when it emerged that the killer was from Bosnia did the tone change: that this could be terrorism, the hand of militant Islam. Talovic's valedictory 'Fuck you' became 'Allah akhbar' on internet sites plotting the family history and recounting Talovic's father's record in what the sites called 'mujahideen' (he had served in the Bosnian army). Mayor Rocky Anderson appealed for tolerance towards the otherwise peaceable Bosnian community, whose leaders he met, and Bosnia's ambassador to the US, Bisera Turkovic, flew from Washington to express 'sadness and shame', saying that Talovic was 'not of our country'. Reactions were divided in the wave of grief over the dead between sympathy and antipathy towards the Bosnians. While bile piled up on the web, so did flowers laid by strangers on the Talovic family's doorstep. Letters fired this way and that in the local press, as it emerged that Talovic had twice been sanctioned by juvenile courts for threatening behaviour towards other children and stealing fireworks.

The police have endeavoured to 'profile' the killer and establish his motive, only to draw an estimably honest blank. 'Something in his make-up, his experience, everything else, caused him to think that this was a way to deal with his problems and emotions,' says Burbank. 'My fear is that we are not going to be able to point to any one thing and say: "This is what caused him to do it."' It could have been, he says, and as the American police say, 'suicide by cop.' The FBI concurs. Official statements discount any connection to the bloggers' suppositions about religious zeal or terrorism, or to newspaper reports about Talovic boasting a gang connection. They note as 'possible factors' that Talovic was 'a loner', 'trying to fit into a new culture' and had suffered 'a childhood in war-torn Bosnia' - but then so had countless others living in the city. Still, this was not quite Columbine or Jonesboro, or the subsequent murders at Virginia Tech. This was different, and from this baffled flyleaf in the police notebook begins the narrative of Sulejmen Talovic's long road from remote Talovici to Trolley Square.

During the spring of 1992, Bosnian Serb militias and authorities unleashed a hurricane of violence against Bosnian Muslim civilians, and in few places more viciously than eastern Bosnia, where Sulejmen Talovic was born. The extent of the crimes in the area - which culminated in the infamous Srebrenica massacre three years later - is still being excavated from the ground and investigated at successive war crimes cases in The Hague and Sarajevo. War crimes like those allegedly committed in Visegrad, near Sulejmen's birthplace, by Milan Lukic, who is accused of locking hundreds of families - the old, children and babies - into houses and incinerating them alive. Entire towns were emptied of Muslims, village after village razed.

But four 'pockets' in eastern Bosnia remained in Muslim hands, defended by what were initially makeshift partisan units loyal to the Muslim-led Bosnian government in Sarajevo. The names of three are well known: Gorazde, Zepa and Srebrenica. But the fourth, what was called the 'Cerska pocket', is where Talovici lies, and it provided shelter for thousands of refugees from other parts of eastern Bosnia. In March 1993, though, after a year of murderous bombardment, the Serbs overran the Cerska pocket and drove the Muslims out, laying waste to every home and building.

Sulejmen's parents - Suljo and his wife Sabira, then 24 years old and pregnant - fled Talovici with their then four-year-old son, for the supposed respite of a UN-declared 'Safe Area' once famous for its silver mine, called Srebrenica. They travelled with Suljo's sister, Ajka Omerovic, her nine-month-old baby Safer and the father of Suljo and Ajka, Neho Talovic. The full story of that journey will unfold later in this narrative, as we trace it back in Bosnia. Suffice to say that the road of flight from Cerska to Srebrenica was bloody and terrifying, and the deportees arrived at a place described in a book by one of the few men to survive Srebrenica, Emir Suljagic, as 'one big concentration camp'. In Srebrenica, Sulejmen's grandfather, Neho, was killed in front of the family. Sabira Talovic gave birth to a daughter, Medina, now 14, and was thereby allowed aboard a convoy out of the besieged enclave, to be billeted alongside tens of thousands of other refugees in Tuzla, in government-controlled territory, while Sulejmen's father served in the Bosnian army. In 1998, after the war had ended and Talovic had become part of the 'Republika Srpska' statelet - the half of Bosnia under Serb control, under the Dayton treaty of December 1995 - the family elected to move first as refugees to Croatia, and then join Aunt Ajka, who had moved to Salt Lake City.

Sulejmen's parents have now left the house they occupied when their son went on his killing spree, and gone to ground. But before they did, one journalist in the media melee that besieged them won Suljo's confidence, and that of the Bosnian community - Joe Baumann of the Deseret Morning News. And it was to Baumann that Suljo Talovic spoke of his shame and bewilderment: 'No, I no have anything,' he told Baumann. 'I am very sorry for everybody who has died. I apologise for everybody. I'm so sorry. I have no heartbeat. I cry for everybody.'

Talovic's aunt - Suljo's sister, Ajka Omerovic - lives on the raised ground floor of a modest house in South Salt Lake. She is a catering manager at the Delta Center, home of the Utah Jazz basketball team. 'I arrange food for the fans,' she says, 'food for the teams and for corporate events.' Ajka discovered that Mrs Tuft, who crawled to her dying daughter's side in Trolley Square, also worked at the Delta Center. 'I asked my manager to tell her who I was, that she worked in the same place as the aunt of the boy who killed her daughter, and that I would like to meet and say sorry. She didn't want to, and I don't blame her. After all we went through in Bosnia, I know how she felt.'

Ajka talks about the family's escape from Talovici, after the village had been shelled for nearly a year, every house and barn in the region burnt to the ground by Serbs. 'As we tried to get through the woods to Srebrenica - my brother and his wife with little Sulejmen - all around us people were trapped and being killed,' she says. 'They were killing people along the way - in the forests, in the town of Konjevic Polje which we passed... one of my neighbours from Talovici was killed there. And when we finally got to Srebrenica, it was hell - shelling every day, and finally the massacre.' Ajka was there when the Serbs separated the women from the men, to kill all of the latter. 'But Sulejmen was in Srebrenica about three weeks, I think. Long enough, though, to see his grandfather - my father - killed while he played cards at a table outside a house. Sulejmen was lucky: they were taking some people who had just given birth and Sabira had a daughter, and for that they took her and her children on a convoy to Tuzla, in the free territory.' But the convoys themselves were a voyage through hell. Ajka says that according to Sulejmen's mother, Sabira, the Serbs would 'take or stop any truck and kill or rape whoever they wanted' - a version of events ratified by witness after witness back in Bosnia.

Aunt Ajka had lost contact with her brother and nephew, but linked up later in Salt Lake, when Sulejmen was nine years old. 'He was a strange boy,' she recalls. 'At school, he tried to be part of American life, but it never worked. The schools here are not like they were in Yugoslavia. Here, they don't teach respect or responsibility - you are left to look to yourself, and Sulejmen couldn't do that.' Reports show Talovic attending various schools, doing badly, playing truant and, according to Aunt Ajka, being bullied, especially after 9/11, for being a Muslim. His parents removed him from Horizonte High School in November 2004; according to his father, he was once threatened with knives. One teacher, Virginia Lee, who taught Talovic in maths and special English classes, recalls that Talovic 'wanted to belong, tried to belong' but 'often seemed far away when he was in class. Preoccupied. Haunted.'

At the time of the shooting, Talovic was employed by the Aramark uniform-making firm, whose general manager Trent Thorn says, 'he pretty much kept himself to himself' on his 8am to 5pm shift, which he worked on the day of the shootings.

'He wanted friends,' says Aunt Ajka, 'he tried to make friends, but I don't think he ever had one, even when he was 18. He was always nervous around people, would shake with anxiety. He watched films - always this violence. He played games with people shooting each other. Like the other children here, watching all this shooting, which is the last thing we from Bosnia want to see. I think Sulejmen did what he did because he thought it would make him a big American, like in the films and games. He thought, "I can be famous, I can be on TV."'

'I thought he was a stupid boy', chimes in Radik, Ajka's husband, his leg still painful after being wounded in Srebrenica, leaving him unable to work and dependent on his wife's earnings - not the way Balkan men like to look into the mirror of their self-regard. 'He was 18, but seemed retarded. I don't see you can blame the war - I went through Srebrenica, my three brothers were killed, and I don't go shooting Americans. There was something wrong with his brain, and he watched too much of the TV they have here, shooting, shooting, shooting. I think this thing about guns in America is important to what happened.' Was it that, or was it trauma during the war? 'A bit of both, perhaps.'

But 'the American way is easier than Bosnia', Radik continues, perusing the deserted street, and the Hopper-esque shadows cast by the harsh sunlight. 'Only here, they think we're from Somalia or Africa. A man gave me a cob of corn and started telling me how to eat it, after I'd been surrounded by corn all my life. After the shooting, they said, "Sulejmen's father was fighting in the mujahideen and that what he did was jihad." What a lot of shit, all this "jihad".'

'At first, we couldn't believe it,' continues Ajka. 'We asked to see camera footage, and his clothing, to be sure, but they wouldn't give it. Then there was finding someone to keep the body. No one would take the body. Only eventually did we arrange for it to be flown back to Bosnia.' A tear fills her eye, for many reasons, no doubt. 'I know he was a killer, but I still miss him. I can still see his eyes when he was a baby back home. Yet part of us hates him for what he did. I cannot sleep because of what he did to those poor people. And to our family and our people.'

Ajka's first husband, Nasir Omerovic, who went to work in Texas, fled the Cerska pocket along with the rest of the family, but does not want to talk about his war, except to say of Srebrenica: 'I too went through that hell, but have harmed no one.' This leads him to what he does want to talk about, his nephew: 'My opinion is that he was mentally ill, always causing trouble, but unaware of the damage he did. He once stuffed pieces of broken glass into a snowball and threw it at my son's head. I think he got it into his head that he could be one of those American hero kids who kill a lot of people, like in that school, and get himself all over the TV, in his own movie. He certainly didn't think about what this would do for the families of the people he killed, or the Bosnian people who've had enough killing, and came here to start a new life and live in peace with the Americans.'

Monika - she will not allow her family name to be revealed - might have known Sulejmen better than most. She is a Bosnian refugee living in Texas, who worked, until a few weeks ago, at a burger restaurant. Sulejmen had been 'introduced' to Monika through an indirect family connection, and for two weeks before his killing spree he would call the 17-year-old on the phone and talk for hours. The couple planned to marry, even though they had never met, although Talovic could have driven to Texas in not much more time than they spent on calls. Afraid to meet the girl he said he loved, Talovic seemed afraid of life itself.

Monika speaks reticently, and only because Joe Baumann vouches for The Observer's interest. She says by phone, from somewhere in Texas, that Talovic told her he had 'one or two friends' he only met at the mosque. He seemed, she says, 'a happy guy', who 'never talked about guns', although 'he said he had seen a lot in the war, like bodies around holes in the ground, and seeing a soldier shooting a woman and her child, shooting her in the head and shooting the child while they were going through the forests'. He also 'talked about walking through forests with nothing to eat, looking for mushrooms', and 'said he had lost a brother in the war [he did not], and a little sister [which is true]'. But, Monika adds, 'he said this was why he was glad to be in America, because it was not like back there.' Monika herself lost four relatives in the war.

On the night of 11 February, Talovic told Monika, 'tomorrow is going to be a happy day', and she feared that it 'might be that he was going to have a baby with another girl'. When she asked, 'What will it be?' he replied only that 'It will be about everyone except you,' and urged, 'You should be happy tomorrow, too.' On 13 February, having not heard from Talovic for a day, Monika called her fiance's mobile phone. It was answered by an FBI agent.

To venture into the world of Bosnian Salt Lake City is, for me, to flip into my own past in Bosnia, but surreally transported into the desert. In Salt Lake, it is illegal to buy or sell alcohol unless in a private club - not a policy most Bosnians, apart from the religiously devout, would voluntarily live by. Accordingly, the Cafe Boss has opened on State Street, members only, where - as so often in America - one crosses a threshold from the US into some other corner of the world. And through this portal there is Bosnian music, the Bosnian language. Sitting at the bar is Sefer, a survivor of the Kereterm concentration camp, one of a gulag I discovered with ITN back in August 1992. And there is a man whose mother knew a doctor in the town of Prijedor, Milan Kovacevic, a middle-manager of the Omarska concentration camp ITN and I revealed to the world in 1992, who confessed his crimes to me in 1996, and against whom I testified at The Hague.

Behind the bar is manager Dzenan Kasumovic, from Prozor in central Bosnia, the first town to be 'ethnically cleansed' of Muslims, overnight, by Bosnian Croats in the now often forgotten 'sideshow' war as Croats and Serbs tried to partition Bosnia between them, squeezing the Muslims out, or into some enclave statelet. Dzenan and the organiser of social events for the Bosnians in Salt Lake, Janet Komic, reflect over Bosnian spinach pie on the aftermath of carnage in Trolley Square. 'We couldn't say we were Bosnians after that,' says Janet. 'We pretend to be from Croatia, or Germany. Partly out of shame, partly because of the reaction. I've been here 10 years, and if someone asks me, "Where are you from?" I can't say "Bosnia" any more. It wasn't everyone - some Americans, normal people, were very understanding. But others, on the internet, on local television, rednecks... it was awful.'

'Not since the war,' says Dzenan, 'has it been so important to separate ourselves from Arab Muslims. With all this talk of Talovic in the jihad, we had to literally split from them in the mosques. We produced special leaflets about how we were nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism. We tried to explain that to be in the Bosnian army was nothing to do with Islam, just defending our towns and villages - not many would accept that, and thought this crazy Talovic was the proof.'

There is no sign to Talovici on the main road that runs like a spine through the east of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb 'entity' that makes up half of Bosnia. It's a road along which the name of every town is like a scar to anyone on the Muslim side who knows the recent history here, and a place planned by the Serbs in 1992 to be entirely devoid of its majority Muslim population, whether by death or deportation. And yet many Muslims have come back, to rebuild their incinerated homes, whether out of desperation or defiance - or simply because it is home, even though the Muslim returnees live under the flag of Republika Srpska, with its four crossed Cs, the emblem in the name of which the persecution and genocide were perpetrated.

But there is a sign to Talovici on a side road to the little town of Cerska, pointing up a precipitous, two-mile gravel track, which finally reaches the perched hamlet in which Sulejmen Talovic was born and raised. Most of the houses are in ruins, shrubs and even trees growing through what is left of the brickwork. But some six others have been rebuilt, and people emerge as a strange car navigates the track into the village. The first is the Talovic family of Enes - cousin to Sulejmen - his wife Admira, mother Sehrija and an aunt, Zemina Talovic. There is a bewildered welcome, then wholesome coffee. It is hard to start at the beginning, but we do.

'We were 16 families in the village, about 120 people,' says Enes, 26, with sharp blue eyes, oozing adrenaline. The men, he remembers, worked away in construction for part of the year, like Sulejmen's father Suljo, to bring back money for a community which otherwise lived off subsistence farming or jobs in the town of Cerska, to which the village is attached. 'I was 11 then, Sulejmen four, just a kid. Of course I remember him, like any other kid, playing around.' 'We were poor, but not unhappy,' says his mother Sehrija. 'Life was simple, but perfect in its way. We had our sheep and cows, crops to sell, and men brought money from abroad. It had not changed for many lifetimes, and we never thought it would.'

In April 1992, the Serbian bombardment started, and lasted almost a year. 'They say about 1,000 shells a day fell on Cerska and Talovic,' says Enes. 'Night became day, day became night. All day [we hid] in shelters we made, and at night picking food to eat, taking the wounded to Cerska and burying the dead. There was no hospital, only a medical technician in Cerska - he's in America now. If someone was wounded there was no hope for them, but some would be taken to him and he would do his best. They used bits of torn sheets for bandages and he did amputations with a saw, without anaesthetic. We could not bury the dead by day, because they would shoot at us. So we buried most of them by night, beneath a certain tree perhaps, and when we came back in 2001, we knew where each person was, and put them in the cemetery.'

In another rebuilt house in Talovici, that of Sevko Talovic, he and his wife Mina produce jam and yogurt, and recall their nephew Sulejmen and his parents well. 'Suljo was a hard-working man, and Sulejmen like a little puppet,' says Mina. And their sons Mujo, 30, and Vahidin, 25, recount the year before the fall of Cerska. 'The first victim was my uncle,' says Mujo, 'he was a fighter, and was considered for the Golden Lily, the highest medal. The second victim was my horse, Vranac, killed by a shell.' Mujo has a gentle manner, an introspective stare. 'I remember those amputations with saws, using a swig of Rakija for anaesthetic - women, children, everyone.' 'Yes,' says Ibrahim Talovic, another cousin who joins us later, 'we took the wounded all the way down the track on planks or ladders for stretchers, by night, of course. Then along the tarmac to Cerska, where the medical technician did his best.' 'There was no medicine,' adds Mujo, 'and Sulejmen Talovic's baby sister died. Nothing to do with the shelling - she fell ill and there was no medicine.'

'The Chetniks reached the ridge,' says Sevko, using the term Serbian nationalists gave themselves in World War Two, 'and we now know that if they had come in it would have been the same as what happened in Srebrenica. They would punish those who put up resistance. They had us in the palm of their hand.'

In the military scheme of things, the Muslim-led Bosnian government army was trying to forge a corridor from Tuzla, in territory it controlled, to the enclave of Srebrenica. Quite apart from the political goal of ridding Republika Srpska of all Muslims, the Serbs knew Cerska was the government's military stepping-stone to Srebrenica, and by overrunning Cerska, the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, currently wanted for genocide, knew that Srebrenica was hopelessly isolated and his for the taking. Once Cerska was gone, the rest of eastern Bosnia could be easily 'cleansed' of Muslims. For that reason, Mladic paid personal attention as the Serbs turned the screws on Cerska in March 1993. It lies only a stone's throw from his bunker headquarters at Han Pijesak.

'The shelling got fiercer,' says Sehrija, Enes's mother. 'They appeared up there on 11 March, on that ridge. The Chetniks were shouting down megaphones: "BALIJA!" [a Serb term of abuse for Bosnian Muslims, something beneath 'gypsy scum']. They shouted, "We're coming to kill your men and rape your women," and burnt dresses from the last village they had taken. When we saw them, the elder, Osman Talovic, said we would have to say goodbye to our homes and try to escape to Srebrenica.'

In another house, after delicious homemade cheese pie, Redzo Talovic, who fought to defend Cerska, explains: 'We had nothing to defend but our houses and families, and we did quite well, considering. We had hunting rifles, molotov cocktails and knives, but we did ambush them. A little ammunition got through from Tuzla, but 90 per cent of what we had we captured from them. But it was hopeless, they had three divisions, tanks and artillery.' Redzo was an expert in bridge-building, and had worked in Iraq, building bridges across the Euphrates and Tigris. When Cerska fell, he found a way through the mountains to Tuzla, but was wounded by a mine, and shows his damaged leg. 'Of the 300 of us who tried to make that trip, 200 never made it.'

Meanwhile, 11-year-old Enes joined the terrifying flight (which Sulejmen Talovic would also have undertaken) from Talovic to Srebrenica. 'We walked with our animals through the town of Konjevic Polje, where the Chetniks attacked us, and many died,' recounts Enes. 'We stayed there 15 days, then up through the forests. I remember being so tired I was holding on to a cow's tail to be pulled along.' Sulejmen and his mother were in that convoy, 'but I don't remember being with them', says Enes, 'I was too sad about my own father, Salim, who was killed in the forests.' Mujo Talovic also fled to Srebrenica. 'I was 15,' he says, 'trying to keep track of my family. There was shooting everywhere, people trapped, many of them killed.'

The story of Srebrenica has been told many times. Three years of siege, the final advance of Serbian death squads into the UN-designated 'Safe Area'; the impotent capitulation of Dutch troops tasked to protect the 'Safe Area' but who watched while the Serbs, under the direction of General Mladic, separated the men from women and children, and took some 8,000 men and boys for systematic mass execution over five days - the 12th anniversary falls in July. But Srebrenica was the murder of 8,000 after the prolonged and ignored killing of hundreds of thousands of others all over Bosnia, in places like Cerska.

Mujo's mother Mina remained in Srebrenica until 1995, and was with her youngest son Vahidin when the fearsome 'selection' happened, the Serbs sending the women and children to Tuzla and taking the men for execution. 'I was 13,' says Vahidin Talovic, 'and there was this long time while they argued over whether I was a man or a boy who could go with his mother, whether I would die or live. In the end, they said I could go with Mother.' His older brother Mujo, meanwhile, joined a large group of men in Srebrenica who elected not to risk the selection and seek ways through the forests to safety. Most embarked on what has become known as the epic 'march of death', along which hundreds were killed. Mujo was injured during a Serbian ambush at Glogova, later scene of a mass grave. 'Both my legs were hit, so I had to crawl back to Srebrenica and then for 17 days through the forests, pulling myself by my arms.' He would reach another UN Safe Area, Zepa, which fell soon after, but without a wholesale massacre.

Once in Tuzla, 'we were all scattered,' says Enes, 'most stayed, some went to Switzerland, Croatia, America, Germany. My family stayed in Tuzla, uncle Redzo was still there, and he and my mother wanted to go home.'

'I don't know why I came back,' says his mother, Sehrija, 'but I always wanted to. It is my home, where I was born. They could give me the biggest apartment in Sarajevo or Salt Lake City, and I would still want to come back to live on my land, in my house. Wherever we have been, it was always as refugees, but I want to die on my land.'

We talk about living under the flag of the crossed Cs, spelling out 'Only Unity Can Save the Serbs', badge of the Serbian nationalist movement beneath which the atrocities were committed, now stamped on every document the returnees need. 'Of course it troubles me,' says Enes. 'We know what it meant when they painted that sign on the walls: that we should leave or die.' Mujo disagrees: 'I live in the Republika Srpska of shame and hatred,' he says. 'But it is still part of Bosnia, and in my heart Bosnia goes from the Sana river to the sea. What matters is in my heart, not on their flag.' 'If they must have their flag,' says Redzo, 'keep it in your houses, I say, don't fly it in our faces. This is Bosnia, not Serbia.'

And what of the still unanswered question, about Sulejmen and Utah? 'We didn't believe it until the coffin came back,' says Mujo. 'When we first heard the news it was a Bosnian, it was a terrible shame on us. But they spelt his name wrong, so we didn't think it was Sulejmen. Even when they said where he came from, it didn't seem true - until the coffin came.' Could it be the war? 'How can I say? Look what happened to us, and look at who we are now... we're not killing anyone. Sulejmen should be here, playing football with us now.'

Most evenings, in summer, the Talovic cousins go down to Cerska to play on a tarmac pitch in the shadow of a burned-out school gym. 'We call it Highbury,' says Mujo, 'and it's the only one left after they knocked down the other one in London.' Other lads from the town arrive for the kickabout, including a handsome youth in an FK Sarajevo shirt, who turns out to be the local hodza (the imam). Ismir Ibric is one of the three holy men who buried Sulejmen Talovic. 'My calling,' he says, 'includes burying the sick and elderly. I never expected to bury and pray forgiveness for a boy of that age who did something like that, so far away. No one could believe it.' He also talks about the frustration of the men in his charge: 'Of course there is work for them, in the bauxite mines and forestry. But the Serbs would never let a Muslim work in their factories, that's how it is.'

Another player, Azmir Sejmenovic, invites us to his home next morning to drink coffee, meet his 10-day-old son Adin and talk about the 10 relatives he lost when their home was hit in 1992. But Azmir has another story to tell: about the day when the school next to the football pitch took a direct hit and around 70 refugees were killed, having fled to Cerska to seek shelter after the notoriously savage ethnic cleansing of their town, Vlasenica, up the road. Most of them women and children. 'When we went to clean the school, there was blood everywhere,' says Azmir. He also talks about Sulejmen Talovic. 'Someone has to say it,' he insists. 'Sulejmen kills five people in America, and it's all over the television for weeks. But I don't hear anyone talk about the 770 people who were killed in a little town called Cerska, plus all the others from here, after they had escaped.'

There is something heart-stopping and defiant about the muezzin call to Friday prayers from the minaret of the rebuilt mosque on a mountainside above Cerska, echoing across the verdant valley. The entire Talovic family, apart from Enes, is here to pray.

In August 1992, the mosque was full of refugees from yet more savagery in the town of Kamenica, nearby. Another direct hit killed 75, mostly women and children. 'It was just before dusk,' recalls Lutvo Ahmedovic, 'and I will never forget the children who were killed. All night, we buried the dead into the mountain.' 'We dug and dug,' recalls Safet Kurtic. 'We dug by night and hid from the guns by day.' One gets this strong feeling, yet again, that the massacre at Srebrenica is but the tip of an iceberg, culmination of a three-year narrative of mass murder in places the world has never heard of. Of flight from nightmare into supposed shelter which in turn twisted into nightmare and further flight. 'The people killed inside that mosque,' says Kurtic, 'were there because there was nowhere else for them to go. Had they survived, they would only have come with us to Srebrenica.'

One man, Hasan Celebic, has a flame burning in his eyes that sets him apart from the reflective stare in most others. 'How can we live like this in 21st-century Europe?' he fumes. 'I try to get jobs for these young men, but no one listens, not even our own Muslim party. I try to count the dead in Cerska during that year, 1992 to 1993, and so far I have reached 776, not counting the hundreds more who died on the way to Tuzla or Srebrenica, or in the massacres - but no one cares.'

When the Talovic cousins say there is 'nothing' for them in Talovici now, they mean nothing. The bauxite mine is open in the now bustling Bosnian Serb town of Milici on the main road, 'but they will not employ any Muslims', says Enes. 'We are surviving here,' says Mujo, 'but we don't really live,' and he relates how the cousins found an old tractor recently, dismantled it and took the scrap iron to Sarajevo for sale. Sevko goes to the hills to gather mushrooms to sell. They have a few cows and sheep, and that's it. 'It's an embarrassment,' says Mujo. These are men in their 20s, with strong bodies, but 'of course there are no girls here. And if any come, they are family, so what can we do about that?'

It becomes clear that Sulejmen Talovic's cousins came back for their parents' sake. Like Sehrija Talovic who says: 'I'm happy to be back. It's the best place for me to live and to die. I was born here, the air is clean, the milk, cheese and fruit are good to eat. But what the young men will do, I don't know'. 'There's no cafe in Cerska,' says Vahidin, 'nothing to do. We asked for a club, but nothing happened. I'm 26 years old, but have never worked a day in my life. I would like to find some place to work, and then return to Cerska.'

Like so many of their kind, each household refuses money for their food and hospitality. But we have talked quite a lot about football, and I mention the possibility that someone might be going to the Euro 2008 qualifying match between Bosnia and Turkey. A stupid question, they reply, how could any of them afford a ticket? So here is a chance for payment in kind and, come Saturday night, four of Sulejmen's cousins and one of his nephews head for the game.

We sip coffee in the old centre as Sarajevo prepares for its Saturday night out, the girls on heels and the Talovic boys' eyes on stalks. They do not conceal their amazement. 'In Sarajevo, they have a carnival every day,' says Mujo. 'In Cerska we have one a year. And there are no girls in Cerska.' We walk, past the backless frocks and the wartime cemeteries of Sarajevo, to the game. The boys unfurl their banner - 'Cerska' - and affix it to the railings, alongside others from all over Bosnia. Turkey open the scoring, fans pelt the pitch with flares, but Bosnia equalise. Turkey take a second lead, but right on half-time, Edin Dzeko scores again. And just after Turkey look like settling for a draw, Bosnia win a corner, converted into a thrilling 89th-minute winning goal. Flares fly, the crowd erupts, and the Talovic cousins embrace and dance on their seats - before vanishing back whence they came.

In Talovici, we climb a steep path to the cemetery atop the village, ringed by a new green fence crowned with silver Bosnian lilies. Enes jumps to collect cherries from a tree, and offers them round. 'See how well we eat?' he says, half-seriously. There is the long grave of 'Fatiha' Talovic, who founded the village in the early 19th century. 'You can see what a big, fine man he must have been,' says Mujo. And in the corner is a freshly dug mound of earth, and a grave made of green wood, with the star and crescent of Islam at its top, beneath which is written: 'Talovic Sulejmen. 1988-2007'. A woman gathers potatoes from a meadow next to the graveyard. The birds sing mellifluously, the flowers are bright - violet, white and yellow. At the edge of one field, daisies decorate the overgrown garden of yet another burned-out house. The afternoon sun's rays are warm and the greenery of the valley recedes into a pastel blue hue which wraps the mountaintops. Wild strawberries grow among the tombs, and taste good. All the way from here to Salt Lake City, and back in a coffin - that was Sulejmen Talovic's journey. To another world, and yet another lost life, plus those of five Americans who went shopping 5,000 miles away.

3 Executives Spared Prison in OxyContin Case

By BARRY MEIER

Published: July 21, 2007

ABINGDON, Va., July 20 — After hearing wrenching testimony from parents of young adults who died from overdoses involving the painkiller OxyContin, a federal judge Friday sentenced three top executives of the company that makes the narcotic to three years’ probation and 400 hours each of community service in drug treatment programs.

Big Part of OxyContin Profit Was Consumed by Penalties (June 19, 2007) Narcotic Maker Guilty of Deceit Over Marketing (May 11, 2007)

In announcing the unorthodox sentence, Judge James P. Jones of United States District Court indicated that he was troubled by his inability to send the executives to prison. But he noted that federal prosecutors had not produced evidence as part of recent plea deals to show that the officials were aware of wrongdoing at the drug’s maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn.

The sentences announced by Judge Jones came at the end of a lengthy and highly emotional hearing at small brick courthouse in this small town in far western Virginia. Parents of teenagers and young adults who died from overdoses while trying to get high from OxyContin arrived here from as far away as Florida, Massachusetts and California.

Given the opportunity to speak, they both memorialized their lost children and lambasted Purdue Pharma and its executives, saying they bore a responsibility for those deaths. They also urged Judge Jones to throw out the plea agreements, which included $34.5 million in fines, and send the executives to jail.

“Our children were not drug addicts, they were typical teenagers,” said Teresa Ashcraft, who said that her son Robert died of an overdose at age 19. “We have been given a life sentence due to their lies and greed.”

Another women held up a jar that she said contained the ashes of the dead son.

OxyContin, which is a long-acting, time-release form of the narcotic oxycodone, is used to treat serious pain. Several reports have suggested that Purdue Purdue may have helped fuel widespread abuse of the drug by aggressively promoting it to general practitioners not skilled in either pain treatment or in recognizing drug abuse. The company has insisted such a connection does not exist.

This bucolic small town is not far away from the spine of the Appalachian Mountains and communities in Virginia as well as nearby Kentucky and Tennessee, where abuse of OxyContin exploded in early 2000, just a few years after it was first sold. Both addicts and young experimenters quickly discovered that a pill needed only to be chewed or crushed before ingesting to release large doses of oxycodone, which produced a heroinlike high.

In May, a holding company affiliated with Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to a felony charge that it had fraudulently claimed to doctors and patients that OxyContin would cause less abuse and addiction than competing short-acting narcotics like Percocet and Vicodin. The Food and Drug Administration had allowed the company only to claim it “believed” the drug, because it was long-acting, might be less prone to abuse.

To settle that charge, Purdue Frederick, a holding company, agreed to pay $600 million in fines and other payments. In accepting that deal, Judge Jones put the company on five years’ probation.

In a statement issued today, Purdue Pharma said that “Judge Jones’s acceptance of the settlement concludes this matter and we welcome its resolution.”

That ruling, however, does not mean the end of legal problems for Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the Sackler family, known for its contributions to museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A number of insurers had lawsuits against it seeking what they claims were unnecessary prescriptions for OxyContin, a very expensive drug, based on the company’s false marketing claims.

For their part, defense lawyers for the three executives involved — Michael Friedman, the company’s president until recently; Howard R. Udell, its top lawyer; and Dr. Paul D. Goldenheim, its former medical director — all urged Judge Jones not to put their clients on probation.

The executives had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of misbranding, a crime that does not require prosecutors to show that they knew about wrongdoing or intended to defraud anyone. And defense lawyers said they only “crime,” as it were, was heading Purdue Pharma at time when others were committing crimes.

Also, they painted their clients in glowing terms. For example, Mary Jo White, a former United States attorney in New York who represented Mr. Udell, described the lawyer as the “moral compass” of Purdue Pharma. Had he known about wrongdoing, Ms. White said, he “would have done everything in his power to stop it.”

Judge Jones appeared unmoved by such arguments. And while he said a lack of jail time was the “most difficult” part of accepting the plea agreements, he added his hands were legally tied because prosecutors had not provided him with evidence on which to act.

Still, he appeared to be sending out a message by placing the executives on three years of probation and ordering them to perform 400 hours of service in a drug abuse or drug treatment program.

“As we have heard today, prescription drug abuse is rampant in all parts of this country,” Judge Jones said.

Clutching a mug of tea, Bruce Trevorrow is sitting on a picnic bench in the beautiful national park of The Coorong, a place of wetlands, saltpans and vast skies. He is talking about his parents, Joe and Thora, both dead, and his childhood. It is not a happy tale but one of prejudice, cruelty and loss. He was born near here, a member of the Ngarrindjeri people, but did not grow up here. His childhood and his identity as an Aborigine were snatched from him as one of Australia's so-called Stolen Generation.

This week Mr Trevorrow, 50, won a landmark compensation claim in the South Australian supreme court, the first payment of its kind. A judge awarded him A$525,000 (£220,000), acknowledging that he had been "falsely imprisoned by the state", that the authorities had failed in their duty of care towards him and that such conduct had ruptured the bond between him and his natural family, leading to lifelong depression.

The judgment, delivered in a courtroom where you could have heard a pin drop, was significant, according to one of Mr Trevorrow's legal team, Joanna Richardson, because it acknowledged in legal terms the suffering Mr Trevorrow went through after his removal from his family. It could also establish a precedent for future cases. "It's been fairly emotional," said Mr Trevorrow. He added that it had given him "peace of mind and a feeling of closure".

In 1957, he was 13 months old when he became ill with gastroenteritis. His father was looking after him and his three elder siblings while their mother was visiting relatives and, concerned about his son, asked a neighbour who had a car to take him to Adelaide children's hospital.

The family, who knew about the policy of forced removal in which Aboriginal children were perceived to be better off being raised in white society, wanted to ensure he came back to them. With no telephone or car, they relied on the local police to give them news and repeatedly asked about the boy. A letter, dated five months after he was taken away, was one of several written by his mother to the Aboriginal Protection Board and was produced in court. "I am writing to ask if you will let me know how baby Bruce is and how long before I can have him home as I have not forgot I have a baby in there and I would like something defanat [sic] about him this time trust you will let me know as soon as possible," she wrote.

The board wrote back saying her son was "making good progress" and falsely claimed that the doctors needed to keep him in for further treatment. In fact, Bruce had already been fostered to a white family. Although they cared for him at first, he grew up confused about the difference between him and the other children. He was taunted at school and became emotionally disturbed.

When he was 10, his foster mother handed him back to the state and he was returned to his real family. His father had long died and his mother remarried.

Mr Trevorrow's half-sister Rita, then 16, was the last member of the family to see her brother as he was driven to hospital. "He was poorly but not seriously sick," she said. "He was wrapped in one of those grey government blankets. He was half asleep but he looked at me and gave me a smile. When I saw him next he was 10 years old and such a big boy. He was so shy."

The emotional damage had been done and Bruce failed to settle with his family. He was made a ward of state and eventually taken into care. His adulthood was troubled and he kept in sporadic contact with his siblings. He has been an alcoholic, has spent time in jail and cannot hold down a steady job. In 1998, he walked into a lawyer's office and set in motion his claim for compensation, saying he had suffered depression as a result of being taken from his family.

Justice Gray noted that Mr Trevorrow had struggled with depression while his siblings had been able to "achieve their full potential". Clearly a damaged man, he is tongue-tied and awkward while his siblings and half-siblings are eloquent and confident. The contrast is painfully stark.

His brother Tom said: "It's not the money, it's the acknowledgment of what he suffered. Bruce is the youngest of us but he looks the oldest. We grew up with our mum and dad and our aunties and uncles and cousins and friends. We learned about our history and our culture ... Bruce never had that - his identity and all the love that he should have had from his family were taken away at an absolutely crucial age and he's never recovered."

The siblings are also pleased that the ruling has cleared their parents. It had been recorded down that Bruce was malnourished and neglected and that his father had been a drunkard and that the couple, who were not married, were incapable of looking after their family. In fact, a police report had noted that the family home, a shack made of flattened steel sheets, was clean and tidy.

Prime minister John Howard's government has refused to apologise for the Stolen Generation and resisted calls to set up a compensation fund.

Mr Trevorrow, married with four children, says he wants to write a book about his life. "I think my kids will see me now as a better person," he said. "They understand now what I went through and why I mucked up my life so much."

Danes say sorry for Viking raids on Ireland

More than 1,200 years ago hordes of bloodthirsty Viking raiders descended on Ireland, pillaging monasteries and massacring the inhabitants. Yesterday, one of their more mild-mannered descendants stepped ashore to apologise.

The Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelson, who was in Dublin to participate in celebrations marking the arrival of a replica Norse longboat, apologised for the invasion and destruction inflicted. "In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship, but we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings," Mr Mikkelson declared in his welcoming speech delivered on the dockside at the river Liffey. "But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven."

The Havhingsten (Sea Stallion) sailed more than 1,000 miles across the North Sea this summer with a crew of 65 men and women in what was described as a "living archaeological experiment".

The reconstructed longboat was based on a ship found at the bottom of the Roskilde Fjord, south of Copenhagen. The original vessel was believed to have been built in Dublin - then a Viking city - in 1042 and to have sunk 30 years later.

The wreck was discovered in 1962 and tests on the timbers enabled archaeologists to trace the wood to trees from Glendalough, County Wicklow.

The first Viking raiding parties arrived in Ireland in 795, targeting wealthy monasteries on outlying islands such as Rathlin, County Antrim and Inishmurray, County Sligo. By 841, Vikings were over-wintering in fortified settlements such as Dublin, Wexford and Waterford and over the next two centuries these cities were gradually absorbed into local Irish kingdoms.

The replica ship - built using tools of the era - is 30 metres long and the largest reconstructed longboat ever built.

Guile rather than brute strength was needed to ensure that the Sea Stallion completed its voyage from Roskilde to Dublin in time for the celebrations. The Vikings relied upon sail and rowing power. When the winds failed this summer, the longboat was towed for 345 miles. However, archaeologists advising the project insisted that the experiment had proved the seaworthiness of Viking vessels.

Diarmuid Murphy, 34, from Bantry, Co Cork, one of the sailors on the ship, admitted he almost gave up at the outset.

"About 18 hours into it I was just so cold and wet and I said there's no way I'll do this," he said. The crew survived on a diet of dried food and had to sleep in the exposed and cramped conditions of an open boat for six weeks - with occasional respite on a support vessel.

"There was cold, lashing rain on some days from the morning until the following morning," the ship's project manager, Prieben Rather Sorensen, said. "We did not have the time that the Vikings had as we had to be here today. That was one of the challenges." The longboat is due to make the return voyage next summer.

Archbishop Trevor Huddleston C.R. New Oxford DNB

Huddleston, (Ernest Urban) Trevor (1913-1998), archbishop of the Indian Ocean and member of the Community of the Resurrection, was born on 15 June 1913 in Golders Green, Middlesex, the younger child and only son of Captain Sir Ernest Whiteside Huddleston (1874-1959), naval officer with the Royal Indian Marine, and his first wife, Elsie (d. 1931), daughter of John Barlow-Smith, of Buenos Aires. Huddleston's mother was from a prominent Anglo-Argentinian family; his father was at the time of his birth commander of Bombay dockyard, later rising to become deputy director and officiating director of the Royal Indian Marine, before retiring in 1925. He was later an adviser to the government of India on naval and shipping matters, for which he received his knighthood in 1939. His enforced absence in India during and after the First World War meant that Huddleston did not meet his father until he was nearly seven years old; his mother was also frequently absent in India, so he and his sister, Elsie Barbara (b. 1910), were largely brought up by their maternal aunt Charlotte Dawson Robinson in Golders Green.

Education and vocation

Huddleston was a true child of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England. He attended St Michael's, Golders Green, as server from the age of four. At seven he went to Tenterden Hall preparatory school in Hendon, where he was confirmed in 1925. After four years at Lancing College, he went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1931. There his tutors included Keith Feiling, Patrick Gordon Walker, and J. C. Masterman. He graduated with a second-class degree in modern history in 1934.

Huddleston appears never to have deviated from his total commitment to the high Anglicanism in which he was brought up, but unlike some other Oxford-educated high-church clerics he learned that you cannot love the invisible God unless you find Him in 'the brother whom you have seen' (Denniston, 6). After Christ Church he went to Wells Theological College where he was gradually drawn to the monastic life-specifically the Community of the Resurrection, based at Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire. A senior colleague there directed Huddleston to the parish of St Mark's, Swindon, a powerhouse of Anglo-Catholicism and a great training ground for its young priests. In 1936 he was ordained deacon and in 1937 he was made a priest. Two years later he was at Mirfield as a novice, and in 1941 he was professed as a full member of the Community of the Resurrection, taking the threefold vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Huddleston felt no call towards pacifism and hoped to be called on to serve as an army chaplain, as had several of his Mirfield contemporaries. But what turned out to be a greater challenge to his faith and courage as well as to his vows was the decision of his superior, Father Raymond Raynes [see Raynes, Richard Elliott], to appoint him in November 1943 as priest-in-charge of the Sophiatown and Orlando Anglican missions, in the diocese of Johannesburg. Raynes, who had been provincial in South Africa prior to his return to Mirfield as superior, was looking for someone who would eventually succeed him in overseeing the community's many commitments, educational as well as pastoral and ecclesiastical, in southern Africa. In Huddleston he identified the man.

South Africa

During the years before the nationalists came to power in South Africa in 1948 the Community of the Resurrection's stance on human rights for all and for racial justice there was unequivocal but localized. Huddleston's own early encounters with the African, Indian, and coloured families of Sophiatown and Orlando brought out in him the saeva indignatio at the sufferings and indignities of his parishioners which was to inspire and determine the course of the rest of his life. He was soon caught up in official and unofficial protests against discriminatory government legislation. His unique contribution to these was fuelled by a personal passion to oppose evil and fight for dignity and fairness for the non-whites among whom he ministered. Nelson Mandela said in 1998 that 'Father Huddleston walked alone at all hours of the night where few of us were prepared to go. His fearlessness won him the support of everyone. No-one, not the gangster, tsotsi, or pickpocket would touch him' (Mandela, message to memorial service, 29 July 1998).

Huddleston had come to realize by 1948 that institutionalized racism-which after 1948 was to find its full expression in the nationalists' policy of apartheid-was incompatible with the gospel. His calling was pastoral, his commitment was to care for the souls and lives of his people. In addition to his responsibilities as a priest he was expected to trace husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters and other family members who were arrested because of a violation of the pass laws or some other infringement of discriminatory legislation. Many of his parishioners were already caught up in a vortex of petty crime, gangsterism, and alcoholism. His mission was to rescue them, knowing that each individual was a child of God, filled with enduring vitality and great gifts. He was awakened to the plight of the urban black people of South Africa who lived every hour with danger. He identified apartheid as an intolerable evil, a crime against humanity, a demonic power that violated the image of God in people. His Sophiatown years taught what it meant to love and hate, passionately.

Huddleston was made provincial of the Community of the Resurrection in South Africa in 1949. Nevertheless the fact that the institutional Anglican church was reluctant to provide him with the kind of support he hoped for elicited his despair and led to open clashes with other clergy, not least Geoffrey Clayton, archbishop of Cape Town from 1949 to 1957, who regarded Huddleston's views and actions, especially in relation to the Bantu Education Act, as excessive. Huddleston was convinced that this act was the most iniquitous of all apartheid laws, systematically destroying the potential and therefore the image of God in innocent children. One of his worst moments was when Oliver Tambo, then a graduate of St Peter's College, Rosettenville, and a regular worshipper at the church of Christ the King in Sophiatown, was served with a banning order under the Suppression of Communism Act.

On 24 October 1955 it was announced that Huddleston was to be recalled to Mirfield. Oliver Tambo wept at the news. But Huddleston by then had completed a book on his African experiences, Naught for your Comfort, published in London and New York in May the next year. He had written it out, chapter by chapter, in longhand, with virtually no crossings out, and it, or a typed version, was smuggled out of the country just a day before the police raided his home and took away some of his papers. In his book Huddleston concentrated on those still growing aspects of apartheid legislation and practice which robbed the urban black people he served of any rights-whether to education, health, employment, or self-respect. He blamed himself bitterly for having achieved so little while in South Africa, so entrenched were Pretoria's policies with the white electorate and so slow were Europeans, Americans, and the Soviet Union to oppose them actively until as late as 1976. Nevertheless the sharply focused power and even beauty of his writing communicated strongly to a wide, mainly young readership in Europe, the Commonwealth, and the USA. The little he felt he had achieved was greatly supplemented by the effect of his book on many readers; some later became influential in politics and world affairs.

Huddleston's actual achievement by 1956 was more complicated. Indeed, that year might have marked the end of his most creative time. He had become a prohibited immigrant from the land he loved. Albeit a famous and easily identifiable author, a global celebrity, he had no ascertainable future. Speculation about the reasons for his recall mounted, but no conclusive answer was forthcoming from the words and actions of his superior-to whom he gave unquestioning but reluctant obedience.

Mirfield and Masasi

After a hectic publicity tour of the USA Huddleston attempted to settle down as novice guardian at Mirfield. There he was besieged by requests to recount his African experiences. He longed to be allowed to speak, not about himself or South Africa, but about the gospel. His frequent absences rendered him a poor pastor to the novices. In 1958 a new superior transferred him to the London priory as prior, to help his new public persona and perhaps to help create a personal pastoral role for some of those who sought him out. But Africa called him incessantly and in 1960 he returned there to serve as bishop of Masasi, in the south-west of Tanganyika. Before he left London, on 26 June 1959, together with his close friend Julius Nyerere, soon to become first prime minister and then first president of Tanganyika, he addressed the founding meeting of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, convened in response to an international appeal by the president of the African National Congress, Chief Albert Luthuli, for a boycott of South African goods.

Tanganyika became independent in 1961, a republic in 1962, and was merged with Zanzibar to form Tanzania in 1964. Huddleston's years there proved a total contrast to the decade that preceded them. Though sometimes profoundly depressed, he discovered a role within the infant democracy of his adopted country to aid Nyerere's programme of Arusha (self-reliance). He also raised money for hospitals, enhanced the role and standing of local clergy, learned Swahili, encouraged the development of education away from traditional missionary values towards preparation for a secular life, albeit with little opportunity for bright pupils to build career opportunities in the poor developing world-and ended close to despair. He thought of applying for Tanzanian citizenship but was gently dissuaded by Nyerere. Though again he felt he had failed, his achievement in Masasi was subsequently recognized as creative and valuable, and the legacy he left was not forgotten.

Stepney and the Indian Ocean

In 1968 Huddleston returned to England to serve as suffragan bishop of Stepney in the East End of London. Here he again responded strongly to new challenges, and found a new cause in opposing a rising tide of racism in many parts of the country. He loved East Enders of all races and ages, and exercised episcopal oversight over a remarkable body of clergy and lay people, including social workers, local politicians, and community leaders. His personal life was enhanced by seeing friends both old and new.

Africa still lingered in Huddleston's heart and he was persuaded not to give up his Stepney job only by Nyerere, who told him he must stay in England as the British voice of the 'third world'. Nevertheless, after nearly a decade and under circumstances which remain unclear, he again left England in 1978, when elected bishop of Mauritius and (shortly afterwards) archbishop of the Indian Ocean.

By this time Huddleston was famous, controversial, forthright, intolerant of opposition, sometimes dictatorial. At sixty-five, having been insulin dependent for many years, he showed signs of deteriorating health, which, it was said, ruled him out for a top position (mooted by some in 1974) within the Church of England. It was while in Mauritius that he was elected president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, a move which gave more meaning and purpose to his remaining years than would any upward movement within the Church of England's hierarchy.

The province of the Indian Ocean comprised the Seychelles and Madagascar as well as Mauritius. It had little cultural or political cohesion, and within its area Christians were a small minority. Undaunted, Huddleston carried out his new duties with vigour and panache. He learned to preach in French and Creole, though he could not master Malagasy. He also promoted inter-faith understanding and co-operation throughout the region and beyond. Early in 1980 he developed serious eye problems, requiring emergency treatment in London. But he was soon back in Mauritius, making new friendships and new connections. His retirement from Mauritius in 1983 followed shortly after a magnificent inter-faith convention there, at the end of which delegates dedicated themselves to the cause of inter-faith understanding that he espoused.

The Anti-Apartheid Movement

Since 1976, the year of the Soweto uprisings against the forcible introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in non-white schools, Huddleston had worked closely with the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and related groups throughout the world. He was elected president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement while still archbishop of the Indian Ocean, in 1981, in succession to Bishop Ambrose Reeves. (He had been a vice-president since 1969.) To this movement he dedicated the rest of his life. He also served as chairman of the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa from 1983.

The struggle against apartheid was a long-drawn-out process, and Huddleston and his colleagues became increasingly disillusioned by the British government's prevarications. 'Apartheid is a challenge to the conscience of the whole world, and it is a challenge which the West consistently refuses to meet', he told a Cambridge congregation in 1988. Nevertheless, under Huddleston's leadership, the Anti-Apartheid Movement made an enormous impact on British public opinion. In June 1984 the movement organized a massive protest against the visit of President P. W. Botha to Britain on the eve of which Huddleston led a delegation in a tense meeting with the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. In November 1985 the Anti-Apartheid Movement protested against the government's anti-sanctions stance at the Nassau conference summit. In June 1986 Huddleston shared with Thabo Mbeki the platform for an Anti-Apartheid Movement march and festival attended by 250,000 to demand Nelson Mandela's release. The Nelson Mandela 'Freedom at 70' campaign in 1988 was initiated by Huddleston and included a seven-hour pop concert in Wembley stadium, broadcast to an audience of one billion worldwide, followed by a rally in Hyde Park of over 200,000. The movement also organized numerous, smaller-scale and often local, protests, meetings, and vigils. Huddleston led delegations to meet successive British foreign secretaries and other government ministers on a range of issues relating to southern Africa, but his greatest contribution to the success of the Anti-Apartheid Movement was probably addressing many hundreds of meetings throughout Britain. He also travelled extensively, addressing the United Nations general assembly in 1982, and touring the 'frontline states' (Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe) in 1984. In the same year he delivered a worldwide petition to the United Nations calling for the unconditional release of Mandela, and also visited India, New Zealand, and Australia, meeting their respective prime ministers. In subsequent years he addressed meetings in numerous countries. He also found time to serve as president of the National Peace Council and provost of Selly Oak colleges, both from 1983 until his death.

The part played by Huddleston's increasing ill health in the 1990s is difficult to judge. While he delighted in the victory over apartheid for which he, and many thousands of others, had struggled for over forty years, he felt frustrated by the politicking of Pretoria's transitional regime, the doublespeak of British diplomats and government ministers, and even the conditional forgiveness offered to some of the perpetrators of apartheid by its leading surviving victims. Apartheid was not dead, he claimed in 1994, and he said what he felt to be true. But his increasingly intemperate language may have affected his credibility, and this may have been partly due to his worsening diabetic condition. To this his eye problems, his falls, his pain, and stress all contributed-not helped by his rigorous determination to drive himself hard when his presence was required. Only his undeviating attention to his daily routines of intercessory prayer and worship kept him sane and kept his demons at bay.

Huddleston's South African citizenship was restored to him in 1994, enabling him to vote, in South Africa House, London, in the general elections on 26 April. He then returned to Johannesburg in a highly charged, but ultimately successful, visit, which included participation in Mandela's inauguration as president at Pretoria on 10 May. At his friend Abdul Minty's suggestion Huddleston wrote a short book about this visit. He intended to return permanently to South Africa, but left again after only a few months.

Huddleston's final years were marked by worsening health and by a number of falls involving broken limbs. He was also becoming short-tempered and irascible, and found settling down at Mirfield, or indeed anywhere else, difficult. Honours were bestowed-including ten honorary doctorates, and in 1995 the Indira Gandhi memorial prize. He was gazetted KCMG in the new year's honours list in 1998, and was invested at Buckingham Palace on 24 March 1998. He died less than a month later, on 20 April 1998, at Mirfield. A packed Westminster Abbey was the scene of an electrifying memorial service on 29 July 1998, the high point of which was a trumpet solo lament from the pulpit by Hugh Masekela, the famous musician whose career Huddleston had launched in 1955 by giving him a trumpet. On 30 January 2000, at the direction of President Mandela, his ashes were interred at the east end of the church of Christ the King, in Sophiatown, South Africa.

No account of Huddleston's life and work would be complete without reference to his remarkable gift for giving and receiving loving friendship. By way of contrast to the rigours of his spiritual and public life, his friends-male and female, old and young, white, coloured, and black, pious and otherwise-formed a rich web of comfort and delight, bringing a measure of completion to his complex personality. His friendships once made never faded, and extended to the spouses and children and grandchildren of those on whom his light shone.

Robin Denniston

Sources T. Huddleston, Naught for your comfort (1956) + D. D. Honore, ed., Trevor Huddleston: essays on his life and work (1988) + From protest to challenge: a documentary history of African politics in South Africa, 1882-1964, 3, ed. T. Karis and G. M. Gerhart (1977) + A. Sampson, Drum: a venture into the new Africa (1956) + C. Villa-Vincencio, Trapped in apartheid: a socio-theological history of the English-speaking churches (1988) + C. Villa-Vincencio, 'Father Trevor Huddleston: a tribute', Journal of Theology for Southern Africa (1998) + R. Denniston, Trevor Huddleston: a life (1999) + D. Mattera, Memory is the weapon (1987) + N. Mosley, The life of Raymond Raynes (1961) + A. Wilkinson, The Community of the Resurrection: a centenary history (1992) + The Times (21 April 1998) + The Independent (21 April 1998) + Daily Telegraph (21 April 1998) + The Guardian (21 April 1998) + WWW + personal knowledge (2004) + private information (2004)

Archives Bodl. RH, corresp. relating to Africa Bureau + Bodl. RH, corresp. and papers | Borth. Inst., corresp. with Patrick Durcan + U. Durham L., letters to Lord Howick of Glendale

Likenesses group photograph, 1960 (with Orthodox Russian churchmen), Hult. Arch. · G. Argent, photograph, 1969, NPG [see illus.] · portrait, 1992 · S. Eason, photograph, 1993, Hult. Arch. · N. Sharp, portrait, NPG · photograph, repro. in The Times · photograph, repro. in The Independent · photograph, repro. in Daily Telegraph · photograph, repro. in The Guardian · photographs, Bodl. RH, Huddleston papers · photographs, repro. in Denniston, Trevor Huddleston

Wealth at death £100: probate, 27 Aug 1998, CGPLA Eng. & Wales