Palestinian Police Chief `Tried to Save' Israelis

Col. Sheikh Describes Failed Effort to Quell A Bloodthirsty Mob

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Authority -- By the time the lynch mob climbed over the police-station gates, forced their way into the lobby, and broke through two doors into the second-story briefing room, all that stood between two Israelis and their brutal murder was the authority of police chief Col. Kamel Al Sheikh.

"I tried with all the power God gave me to save them," Col. Sheikh said in an interview. He said he thought the Palestinian mob "would respect me and my uniform. And I am ashamed to say they did not."

It was in Col. Sheikh's headquarters, and under his custody, that Israeli reservists Vadim Norzhich, 33 years old, and Yosef Avrahami, 38, last week were cornered by a crowd of several hundred vigilantes and killed, after the two had mistakenly entered this Palestinian city en route to their base. One of the bodies was mutilated by the mob and, according to local news reports, dragged through the streets.

The atrocity escalated the Middle East crisis to a new, grisly level. Video footage of the attack showed a bloodthirsty crowd dumping Mr. Norzhich's body head-first into the compound and descending on it with knifes and clubs, while one of the attackers stood in the police-station window and raised his bloodied hands in exaltation. Shocked Israelis demanded to know how police officers could allow such a thing to happen.

Speaking in his office adjacent to the half-demolished precinct house, which was attacked by Israeli helicopters hours after the murders, Col. Sheikh offered an intimate, chilling look at the pathology of mob violence and the fury that has caused nearly three weeks of fighting. "We were helpless," he said of himself and his officers, 16 of whom were treated at Ramallah Government Hospital for what director Musa Abu Hmeid said were "a variety of contusions, bruises and trauma to their chests, heads, and extremities." Col. Sheikh was treated for respiratory problems and a gash to the shin, according to hospital records.

Most Israelis are unimpressed, however, by Col. Sheikh's efforts. "It sounds like a fraud," said Maj. Yarden Vatikay, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force. Israel is conducting an inquiry into the incident, said Maj. Vatikay, but is limited in what it can do because there is little, if any, cooperation between the two sides.

Col. Sheikh, who was born in a village only a few miles from the police station, spent much of his life waging war on Israel. As a refugee from the 1967 Six-Day War, he abandoned his plans to become a teacher and joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. He led guerrilla operations against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon until 1982, when Israel drove Mr. Arafat out of the country and scattered his fighters across the Middle East. Col. Sheikh spent several years in Damascus, Syria, and then Amman, Jordan, before returning to his birthplace in 1994 after the creation of the Palestinian Authority.

Col. Sheikh said he is a supporter of the peace process, or what's left of it after 19 days of violence that has caused the deaths of more than 100 people, mostly Palestinians and Arab-Israelis. He said he has welcomed Israeli peace activists to his headquarters for briefings. Several times, he said, he has arrested Israelis who mistakenly found their way into Palestinian territory, each time offering them tea and cigarettes while they waited for the authorities to come pick them up. "We welcomed them as guests and then said goodbye," he said. "It was a very routine process."

Last Thursday was different. While attending a weekly meeting of municipal officials at about 10:20 a.m., Col. Sheikh received a call informing him of a disturbance at the station. By the time he and his three guards arrived by car, the station was surrounded by a frenzied crowd so dense that Col. Sheikh and the others had to park several yards away and approach by foot. He learned from a bystander that two Israeli undercover agents were being held in the station, after having been stopped by a group of Palestinians while driving through the area in a Ford Escort bearing Israeli license plates.

At least a dozen of the rioters, hungry for revenge on Israel after attending a nearby funeral for a victim of the previous day's violence, were toting guns. Only by climbing the gate could Col. Sheikh get into the station compound.

He raced upstairs to find one panicked Israeli reservist bleeding from the face and another with no shirt. Standing with them were a half-dozen of his officers, wounded in a scuffle to separate the reservists from the Palestinians who had captured them. The reservists apparently didn't speak Arabic and none of the policemen spoke Hebrew.

Col. Sheikh said he offered the two men cigarettes, which one accepted, and dispatched a deputy to see if the reservists could be spirited to safety through the back entrance. He then took off his shirt and offered it to them.

"We tried to make them understand through sign language that their lives were our lives, and we were going to try and smuggle them out," said Col. Mohammad Ishmael, one of the few policemen at the precinct when the violence erupted; the majority of the force was out on patrol.

By the time the deputy reached the back door, however, the crowd had stormed into the compound, opened the arms store and taken three automatic rifles. The officers were outnumbered. "Had any one of my officers opened fire," said Col. Sheikh, "there would have been a massacre of my men as well as the Israelis."

As the vigilantes broke through the station door, Col. Sheikh said he appealed for calm from the open window. "I screamed down to them that we are human beings and what they were doing was completely inhumane," he said. "They yelled back that I was a spy, a collaborator for protecting the Israelis, and that there were already 110 martyrs to avenge."

The policemen retreated to the corner of the briefing room as the mob broke through the door, the last barrier to their terrified prey. Col. Sheikh said he tried to protect one of the Israelis -- probably Mr. Avrahami -- by lying on top of him, but the mob threw him aside. An assailant picked up a metal chair and swung it down at Col. Sheikh's head, but officer Hamodeh Al Jundi deflected the blow with his arm. At that point, the police officers said, their efforts were futile. "They had knives and steel bars," Col. Ishmael said.

Immediately after the first murder, warnings of an Israeli air raid shuddered through the mob. They emptied out of the compound, leaving behind the bloodied officers and Col. Sheikh, who ordered the surviving Israeli to be taken in his car to a nearby Israel-Palestinian liaison office, where he could get protection and medical treatment. The reservist died en route.

Israel responded a few hours later with air strikes on the police station and on targets throughout the Palestinian Authority, including Mr. Arafat's personal compound in Gaza. The retaliation fanned tensions in the Middle East to the point where even Arab leaders began pushing for an emergency summit at the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm El-Sheikh; that summit ended yesterday with a cease-fire agreement, and a commitment to form a panel to investigate the recent violence.

The Palestinian Authority is conducting its own investigation into the murders of the two Israeli reservists. It has called on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to open an inquiry into how the reservists could have wandered into Ramallah, given that access routes are controlled by Israeli checkpoints and signs clearly identify the approaches in Hebrew and Arabic.

For his conduct during the lynchings, Col. Sheikh has earned the enmity of Israelis for not preventing the murders, and the contempt of his own people for trying to stop them. "People I don't know come up to me in the street and call me a traitor," he said. "But my conscience is clear."

He added: "As a soldier, I understand that what happened is a violation of the rules of war. As a Muslim, I know it is against the rules of God."

 

 

 

 

Sword Play: The Secret Weapon In Saddam's Arsenal May Drive an SUV --- And It Can Backfire

Tribes Of Iraq Are a Key Source Of Loyalty and Rebellion --- Washington's Wait-and-See

MOSUL, Iraq -- For a glimpse of one of Saddam Hussein's oldest weapons, look at a sign along the desolate highway that leads to this city: Territory of the Al Dulaimi Tribe -- Sword in the Hands of the Leader. Or look in a nearby suburb at a ranch house with an SUV out front, or across the border in Damascus, Syria, where plots are hatching against Saddam Hussein.

These are all modern manifestations of the tribes of Iraq. When loyal, they refer to themselves as the leader's sword and provide a guide to how Saddam Hussein clings to power. When rebellious, the tribes suggest that his grip is slipping. They also are one possible lever that Western officials have largely ignored in their long campaign to unseat the Iraqi dictator.

At least three-quarters of the Iraqi people are members of one of the nation's 150 tribes, which originated in the Arabian peninsula and moved north in search of water. They are bound more by family ties and a strict honor code than by ethnic background or religion. All of Iraq's rulers -- the Ottoman Turks, the British and then a British-backed monarchy -- had to win their cooperation.

But tribes grew weaker when nomads settled into towns and cities, and as the state took responsibility for schools, roads and power. By the 1960s, Iraq was a modern state, with an educated elite. Who cared about the sheiks now?

The answer was Saddam Hussein, who seized control of Iraq after a 1968 military coup. Most of his co-conspirators came from cities, but he grew up surrounded by tribes near his birthplace in the poor town of Tikrit. He identified the sheiks as good friends to have in a fight, and he later called on them to battle Iran.

Over the years, he has helped to restore a tribal identity that had been ebbing in Iraq for generations. Saddam Hussein regularly dons traditional Arab dress and makes televised visits to tribal elders, sipping thick coffee and negotiating what amount to power-sharing agreements with the sheiks.

The result is that the tribes have become his prime source of power outside Baghdad -- a combination of mercenary army, local government and loyalty club, paid and patronized for maintaining order and fealty. Favored tribes get better roads and schools, welcome bounty in a country withered by sanctions for the past decade. (The United Nations is debating a plan that would revive a weapons-inspection regime in Iraq and could pave the way for at least a partial lifting of sanctions over the next several months. But U.N. officials say there is little hope for a breakthrough soon.)

"The only way to get a job for many Iraqis today is by returning to the tribe," says Falath Abdul Jabar, a writer and sociologist in London. "Sanctions created a vacuum, and the tribes filled it."

Bassem Abed Al Shammari is a typical urban sheik, living in a comfortable ranch house in a Mosul suburb -- with about 30 members of his extended family. Cooperation with the Iraqi regime earns him perks that seem modest but go far under sanctions. He drives a 1999 GMC Suburban and receives $2,000 a month to distribute among the Shammar tribe's 500 families. The tribe recently got a new garbage truck from Baghdad. The 49-year-old Mr. Shammari also acts as mayor, judge and social worker for the tribe.

A year ago, for instance, farmer Abas Al Shammari killed his city-dwelling brother-in-law in a fistfight. His parents, fearing reprisals, asked the sheik to hold a fasal, or mediation. He sat members of the two families on opposite sides of the room, and the aggrieved family made its demand: about $1,000 in compensation, the return of Abas's wife, and the betrothal of Abas's sister to one of the murdered man's relatives. After two months of haggling, the two sides agreed on $250 and a wedding. Abas was able to keep his wife.

But the patronage system also can nourish a threat to Saddam Hussein. The greater the bounty from Baghdad -- much of which comes from the smuggling trade that has formed around the trade sanctions -- the more manpower the clans generate for their militia. The stronger the tribes become, the more the Iraqi leader has to worry that they will become a weapon for his enemies.

"Saddam knows it is the tribes who can destroy him," says Ghanim Jawad, a director at the London-based Al Khoei Foundation, an Islamic research institution. "The men who died fighting his wars were from the tribes."

Some of the swords that have fallen out with the leader have turned sharply against him. One example is Machann Al Jaburi. His father, a sheik, was killed by members of another tribe, and the son's older relatives were locked in a succession struggle.

Just 17 and the youngest member of the sheik's family, Mr. Jaburi was in a weak position. That, he believes, is exactly why Saddam Hussein summoned him to Baghdad. "He asked me what I needed, and I told him I wanted to be a sheik," Mr. Jaburi says in an interview. The Iraqi leader gave the young man a watch, $10,000, a car and a villa, and a high-paying job in Baghdad. His state-backed appointment as sheik quickly settled the tribal power struggle.

Payback time came in 1980, when war broke out between Iraq and Iran. "I went to my hometown with 50 buses, and came back with 50,000 men," Mr. Jaburi says. Whatever the real number was, the Al Jaburis were the country's most powerful clan by the time the war ended in 1989. Mr. Jaburi's territory was transformed with public-works projects.

But Saddam Hussein apparently concluded the tribe had become too powerful. He cut off their patronage, played down their contribution to the war effort, and excluded the tribe from his first postwar government. Forced to choose between the state and his increasingly resentful tribe, Mr. Jaburi chose the tribe. He and his family members plotted to assassinate the Iraqi leader and take over the government. The coup plan was discovered in early January 1990, when Mr. Jaburi was in Paris, and the other plotters were arrested and executed.

But the Al Jaburi problem didn't go away. Saddam Hussein purged the tribe from the military, prompting another coup attempt from them in 1993. Machann Al Jaburi moved to Damascus, and although he lost authority over his tribe, he kept his connections to other, increasingly restless clans. He says he has allied himself with clan leaders in the Kurdish north, and diplomats believe he also has formed ties with tribes in the Shia south, where many opposition groups are based under the protection of the allied Western forces' no-fly zones. His office is adorned with photos of him alongside tribal leaders in traditional garb.

"We are trying to make small incidents into large ones," says Mr. Jaburi. "But it won't happen overnight."

In April, the Arab-language Al Shark Al Awsat newspaper reported that security units arrested 40 Republican Guard officers who were allegedly planning a coup. A U.S. government official said one of the senior-most plotters was an Al Jaburi tribesman who escaped from the country through the Kurdish north. The incident also provided some confirmation of diplomats' belief that the loyalty of Republican Guard members, once Saddam Hussein's janizaries, can no longer be taken for granted.

Before that, in March, members of the Bani Hasan tribe clashed with regular troops in the marshes of southern Iraq, according to diplomats in Baghdad and dissidents abroad. The fighting, in which two dozen soldiers were killed and 14 tribesman executed, was over a government land-distribution and tax plan. Last year, according to the same sources, the regime had to put down a much larger challenge from forces related to the Al Dulaimi tribe, whose turf lies in northwestern Iraq.

While the drumbeat of opposition has been steady since the mid-1990s, diplomats in Baghdad say the incidents have grown more serious. Shia opposition groups say they can buy guns from the military, according to a U.S. official in the Middle East. Parts of Iraq, particularly in the impoverished south, are no longer safe for Iraqi troops to enter after dark.

With their standing militias, "the tribes can rise up overnight if the sheiks give the word," says Sami Alzara al Hajam, a sheik of the 8,000-strong Bani Hajam tribe and now a dissident living in London.

Mr. Hajam is still a tribal sheik, and says he keeps in touch with his fellow tribesman in southern Iraq. Three years ago, Saddam Hussein summoned young Hajam members to Baghdad, in a clear attempt to win loyalists the same way he wooed Mr. Jaburi. "We sent dozens, even men who weren't invited," Mr. Hajam says. "This way, Saddam doesn't know who he can manipulate."

He says he has frequent contact with British officials about the situation in Iraq, though not so much with Washington. "The British know us, because they understand how the tribes work," he says. "But not the Americans."

U.S. officials are starting to take notice of these outbreaks. Having failed to unseat the Iraqi leader by war and sanctions, Washington has occasionally tried to seed the clouds of opposition in the hope of a desert storm from within. Two years ago, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution that provides funding for opposition groups formed along religious and ethnic lines. They include Kurdish militia leaders, Shiite-Muslim Arabs with ties to Iran, and Sunni-Muslim Arab intellectuals. Now, some State Department officials are communicating with dissident tribal leaders in the hope of developing ties with clans on the ground.

The idea isn't an easy one to swallow, though. "Many in the U.S. establishment feel more comfortable dealing with their own type," says Sharif Ali, a cousin of Iraq's last king and an Iraqi dissident who meets regularly with U.S. officials. "When I talk about the tribes, they give me blank stares," he says. Mr. Ali, who heads an opposition group from exile in London, says he is in frequent contact with tribal leaders in Iraq. "They can take any town, but they can't hold it," he says. "For that, they need outside support."

A big problem with the U.S. approach, according to a senior diplomat in the region, is that it tends to focus on cultural, ethnic and religious differences -- instead of the family ties that bind tribes and offer the most fertile sources of opposition when they unravel. U.S. officials concede that their efforts haven't been fruitful. Now their strategy involves waiting to see whether opposition groups can work together and muster a substantial force worth backing.

Saddam Hussein reacts to trouble by drawing loyal tribes even closer -- and rehabilitating those that fall out of favor, as he has with the Al Jaburis. His meetings with the sheiks have become more frequent. State-controlled newspapers react to each crisis by listing, on the front page, tribesmen loyal to the leader. And the regime has hinted it will transfer some legal authority to the sheiks.

One man who makes the loyalty list is Rashid Abdula Salem Al Jaburi, an Al Jaburi leader responsible for about 20,000 people throughout Iraq who has stuck with the regime throughout its confrontation with his tribe. The government recently built a school in Al Jaburi territory, not far from the sheik's orange and date farm just outside Baghdad. Unlike most other schools, this one even has new textbooks.

"When we ask for help, the government doesn't hesitate to provide it," says Mr. Jaburi, 55, who greets two visitors -- including the minder sent along by the Iraqi government -- in a brown checked robe and carrying a bamboo walking stick.

Part of what the regime expects of Mr. Jaburi is to keep small problems from developing into big ones. From dawn to noon, he tends his orchards. After lunch, he leads a caravan of automobiles in his marine-blue Chevy Impala, to see to the needs of his people. In a few days, he must travel to Dialla, several hours away, to head off a blood feud after one of his tribesman murdered a member of the Bani Said.

"We'll sit down and talk it out," Mr. Jaburi says. "Though this may take mediation from a third-party tribe."

Mr. Jaburi is a popular sheik, praised by some Iraqis who privately complain about the government. When his father died last year, thousands of mourners attended the funeral, including a senior delegation sent by Saddam Hussein.

But the regime still keeps an eye on the clan's latest sheik, sometimes assigning an official to "coordinate" between tribe and state, as Mr. Jaburi puts it. He says he doesn't mind. "Our responsibilities are getting so big," he says, keeping one eye on the minder. "We can use the help."

No Planes or Flights: Is This Any Way To Run an Airline?

It Is If You're Iraqi Airways; Gulf War Ended Service But Not a Longing to Serve

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- On weekends, Fariz Ani tinkers with the diesel engines that drive Iraq's dilapidated locomotives. But on workdays, he attends to his real love, and his real job: He is chief engineer for Iraqi Airways.

While at the rundown Iraqi Air hangar, he sometimes runs into Capt. Akram Hasan, who continues, when he can, to hone his skills on the company's flight simulator. Sufa Khouri, a flight attendant, also attends airline-sponsored refresher courses on flight services and evacuation procedures.

Like Mr. Ani, Capt. Hasan and Ms. Khouri moonlight. In fact, much of the entire 800-member staff at Iraq's flag carrier hold down two or more jobs while trying to hold the airline together. That's because Iraqi Airways can't fly -- hasn't flown, in fact, for almost nine years.

Iraqi Airways has been a bird in a corroded cage ever since the U.S. and its allies ejected Saddam Hussein's troops from Kuwait and imposed a no-fly-zone on most of Iraq in early 1991. Its fleet is mothballed, its headquarters and hangars grow ramshackled, and its prospects for flying aren't much better than they were at the Gulf War's end. Yet the airline's staff largely hangs together, convinced it will be allowed aloft again one day.

"We've given these people incentives to get up in the morning," says the airline's chairman, Sami Ralih. "Any other airline would have folded by now."

Of course, flying again is dependent on a lifting of the trade embargo against Iraq by the United Nations. Though a resolution working its way through the U.N. would lift sanctions -- critics contend the embargo hurts ordinary Iraqis -- the U.S. government opposes ending sanctions until Saddam Hussein surrenders his weapons of mass destruction and his ability to produce them.

As this diplomatic dust-up drags on, nowhere is Iraqi pluck -- or, perhaps, wishful thinking -- more vividly displayed than at Iraqi Air headquarters at the far end of Saddam Hussein Airport. Here, Mr. Hussein's visage beams from huge portraits at an eerily vacant terminal complex. Exposed wires hang down from the headquarters' tile ceilings. The windows are crossed with masking tape to minimize injury in case of an air attack.

To get an idea of the kind of shadowboxing that keeps Iraqi Airways in shape, just sit in on one of Mr. Ani's training courses. The hangar where the trainees work is nearly empty except for the decayed remnants of the personal airplane of King Faisal II, the last Iraqi monarch, who was assassinated in a 1958 coup. Birds flit among the rafters high above. A tangle of war-damaged metal scaffolding used to service jumbo jets rests forlornly in the corner, awaiting repair.

Class is held in a small addition to the main hangar under fluorescent light that flickers over a Pratt & Whitney J93D-7 jet engine, suspended from a hoist. Today's lesson: removing, disassembling and cleaning the gear box. Mr. Ani's class of five engineers consults a dog-eared manual that is a generation out of date; the manufacturer won't supply an update.

No matter. The manual is now a bit superfluous; this particular engine was due to be shipped to Dublin for a complete overhaul when the war intervened. Now, it is probably the only commercial jet engine left in the entire country. So it has been stripped and reassembled hundreds of times since the war.

Mr. Ani, a studious man given to gray cardigans and those pocket protectors worn by engineers, waxes enthusiastic despite the repetition. "There's nothing like stripping down a Pratt," he says.

There is no plane to go with the Pratt; state-owned Iraqi Airways' fleet was scrambled to safety just before the Gulf War began, and most planes ended up in nearby Jordan. Twice a year, half a dozen maintenance men drive there to do light repairs on the Boeing fleet.

Not far from the hangar, in the simulator room, the silver-haired, 44-year-old Capt. Hasan is taking a refresher course to maintain his pilot's certification, along with Iraqi Airways' 120 other pilots. The airline is down to one functioning simulator; the other two have been cannibalized for parts.

Capt. Hasan, who studied aviation in Britain and the U.S., soloed in 1976 in a Piper Cherokee and is certified to fly every aircraft in Iraqi Airways' fleet. Before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Capt. Hasan earned the equivalent of $4,500 a month, well above the pay for most white-collar professionals. Immigration officials everywhere would wave him through as he flashed his Iraqi Airways identification card, and hotels would give him generous discounts. "Wherever we flew, we were treated like elite citizens," he says.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait, however, things changed. Arriving in Vietnam, he and his crew were refused hotel rooms. Before departing on Jan. 16, 1991 -- his last flight -- he scrawled in his diary, "Everyone is dark. They don't know where their future lies." In the air, by radio, he got the news that the Desert Storm attack on Iraq had begun.

Now, Capt. Hasan earns the same salary in dinars as before, but inflation has eroded its value to about $2.50 a month. (Some Iraqi Air employees are on pensions; others get paid for training, though the airline declined to say how many still draw some form of pay.) Besides his day job, Capt. Hasan sells used machinery from a narrow, dimly lighted stall in downtown Baghdad and builds computers at home. Still, he thinks, once sanctions are lifted and the Iraqi Airways fleet is upgraded, he can be flying within a month.

"I'm still at the best age to be a pilot," he says. "I hear the technology has changed, but it's nothing I can't master."

Capt. Saad A.A. Majeed just completed his refresher course. Like many Iraqi Airways pilots, the 45-year old had a hard time transferring his skills to the ground. He tried investing in a bus but lost his money. He opened a laundromat, but that failed, too. Now, he helps run a tattered amusement park and teaches his son the fundamentals of flying. "I only know what I know -- flying," he says.

Capt. Kamil A. Al-Messhedani, assistant director general of flight operations, divides his time between headquarters and the main ticketing office in Baghdad, where the airline keeps ticket agents busy arranging occasional bus tours and sells telephone and fax services to visiting businessmen. He helps the airline's catering arm line up work at banquets and weddings, and keeps his pilots in touch with the world outside by asking visiting friends to smuggle in trade magazines.

"We're good to go," says Capt. Al-Messhedani, lighting up a Marlboro Light. His daughters won't let him smoke at home, he says. "They keep saying: `Remember, Daddy, you'll fly again.'"

Sufa Khouri, a 44-year-old flight attendant, also works at the ticketing office and, like other flight attendants without an airline, contents herself with ground duty. Recently, she and 29 other attendants greeted visitors at a national festival. Like her colleagues, she keeps her uniform cleaned and pressed, waiting for the day sanctions are lifted. "I've had to sell just about everything else," she says.

The long wait is occasionally punctuated by ripples of excitement. Last month, for example, Mr. Ani's engineering group was electrified when it received a fax from Boeing Co. in Seattle. "It was our first contact with the outside world since the embargo," says Mr. Ani, who took it as an overture by the aircraft giant to re-establish contact with Iraqi Airways.

Boeing explains the fax differently -- as standard notification to clients about the availability and price of updated documents. The offer applies only to clients in good standing, a Boeing spokesman says: "In accordance with existing restrictions, Boeing would not supply Iraqi Airways such updates without specific U.S. government approvals."

 

 

 

 

Ayatollah Hopefuls: They're Counting On Your Support

Democracy Meets Theocracy; Clerics Take a Truth Test, Then Go Press the Flesh

TEHRAN, Iran -- Mahmood Reza Akbari is working the phones in the ramshackle campaign headquarters for a stable of candidates he manages. One of his clients, a cleric, is scheduled to give a 15-minute interview at the state-run television studio. Mr. Akbari is worried.

"The problem is getting them from the mosque to the studio," says Mr. Akbari, his brow furrowing as he considers Tehran's snarled midday traffic. "This is a big city, and they have to travel a lot, but air time is crucial."

From ayatollahs on down to junior clerics, Tehran's religious elite is hard on the campaign trail. Tomorrow, voters will choose among candidates vying for seats on the country's 86-member Assembly of Experts. The assembly then chooses, oversees (and can remove) Iran's supreme leader, an entity who has final say on all state matters and outranks the country's elected president.

Mr. Akbari is Iran's version of a tough-talking political operative, using the universal tools of electioneering to sell a moderate platform to the Iranian public.

The mere fact that Mr. Akbari's services are in hot demand shows how muddy the line between theocracy and democracy is growing here. Iran is shifting slowly from rigid fundamentalism to a limited yet freer, and rowdier, brand of popular sovereignty. Since the election last year of a relative progressive, Mohammad Khatami, as president, Iran's press has become openly critical of the government, calling for greater participation by lay persons and women. On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators rallied in a Tehran park to protest against the shortage of moderate candidates in the race. The election is a popular vote, with 38 million eligible voters in Iran.

Compare this to the last Experts election, eight years ago, a plebiscite that passed almost unnoticed. "You had no debate," says a Western ambassador in Tehran, before noting how things have changed. "This is all part of an ongoing secular trend."

But don't expect any landslides. The religious conservatives aren't going anywhere, and they are clear favorites to dominate the Experts election.

For one thing, Iran is run by a parliamentary system grafted onto, and largely overshadowed by, a medieval caliphate that regards itself as God's agent on Earth. Even "moderate" clerics don't advocate full-blown, Western-style democracy. Censorship is still common. Late last month, the government shut down Iran's most liberal daily newspaper.

Beyond that, the conservatives have grading power. To run for Expert, hopefuls have to first take a test on difficult points of Islamic law. The tests are then graded by the country's conservative Council of Guardians, 12 clerics appointed by the supreme leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the end, to contest the 86 Experts slots up for grabs, the Guardians gave passing grades to 186 candidates, about 130 of whom are considered conservative, according to one moderate candidate.

The aspiring Experts, several hundred in all, were tested simultaneously in a huge lecture hall last month at the national seminary in Qom, not far from Tehran. The test was in Arabic, the sacred language of Islam. Proctors spaced the clerics a few feet apart, as proctors do at colleges around the world to keep the students honest.

One typical question: "If you detain a tailor without reason, then let him go, does he have the right to demand compensation?" There is no right answer, according to several candidates who took the test, only artful Socratic dialogue. "I would write such questions as, `Was the tailor held during working hours?' or `Did he work during his detention?"' says Mossum Gharavian, who proudly says he aced the exam. "It was a test of our understanding of Islamic jurisprudence."

Not that this nominating process absolves a candidate from answering the question that once stumped Ted Kennedy: Why are you running? The conservative Mr. Gharavian, a 39-year-old Qom professor, says he decided to run for Expert after twice consulting the Koran, which produced a positive response both times. Next question.

The 42-year-old Mr. Akbari -- who manages a slate of about a dozen moderates who survived the exam -- holds a more Western view. Though he is not, himself, a candidate, he got into politics to "represent the will of the people." Each morning, he huddles with his candidates and staff to sketch out a daily itinerary. Last-minute changes are common, depending on Tehran's horrid traffic. If one candidate is gridlocked in the morning, for example, another candidate from the moderate slate may sub for him in the afternoon.

"Our candidates tend to deliver the same message," Mr. Akbari says with the candor of a hardened political pro. "It makes it easier when rotating one in for the other."

The war room Mr. Akbari commands is covered with cheap Persian rugs and littered with empty tuna cans and plastic-foam dishes containing remnants of baghala polo, a traditional rice dish. Exposed light bulbs dangle from the ceiling. The few appliances that clutter the kitchen, including a Philco refrigerator, are older than most of the volunteers Mr. Akbari, a university researcher, recruited from local colleges.

Here, like everywhere, politics draws the earnest and oh-so-young. Ali Reza Ershadin, a 23-year-old industrial engineering major, says he and his fellow staff members put in 12- to 15-hour days running errands, taking phone messages and putting up posters. "This is a struggle for the soul of Iran, between the progressives and conservatives," he says fervently.

Candidate appearances are usually held at neighborhood mosques, which double as civic centers and each night guarantee a wholesale crowd of several hundred potential voters. But booking a mosque isn't quite like reserving the local American Legion hall. Groups jockey for space, and scheduling is tight. The conservative Expert candidate, Mr. Ghavarian, was to speak at a mosque recently in the conservative stronghold of downtown Tehran -- a choice booking -- but was bumped by another group: the neighborhood militia.

For some scheduling muscle, Mr. Akbari relies on Seyed Alireza Hashemi Sanij, his 35-year-old advance man. The burly Mr. Sanij spends most of his time networking with the imams who run mosques to reserve half-hour speaking slots for Mr. Akbari's slate of candidates.

"I have friends in high places," says Mr. Sanij, a veteran of several parliamentary elections who last year worked as a bodyguard for Mr. Khatami during the presidential campaign. "I can make things happen."

And they do happen on a recent Sunday night, when candidate and cleric Majid Ansari -- one of Mr. Akbari's key candidates -- addresses about 500 people at the Arque Square mosque near Tehran's huge bazaar. "The power vested in the leader of this country," Mr. Ansari declares, echoing the populist line of President Khatami, "is equal to the power that the people give him with their votes."

Afterward, back at the war room, Mr. Ansari relaxes with his campaign staff over tiny glasses of tea. A visitor asks him how he reconciles the apparent contradiction between theocratic Iran and its increasingly populist electorate. On this point of Iranian civics, the moderate Mr. Ansari threads the needle.

"We do not separate religion and politics," he says. "Therefore, there is no contradiction."

 

 

 

 

Making Fine Wine In Ashikaga, Japan, Is an Uphill Battle

But a Surprising Young Crew, With Down Syndrome And Autism, Is a Big Help

ASHIKAGA, Japan -- When an American named Bruce Gutlove started work 10 years ago at Coco Farm & Winery here, he met cultural barriers as deeply rooted as the vines he was hired to fortify.

The small winery, 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, was run by managers who spoke little or no English. His 60 workers were chosen from a nearby school for the mentally disabled and have conditions ranging from autism to Down syndrome.

Then there was the vineyard itself. The vines grew on a hill in a canopy style imported from China 900 years ago, rather than in the more familiar hedgerow style. The slope was too steep for mechanical harvesting, and the grapes -- a tart, uninspiring variety called the Koshu -- had to be wrapped in little bags as they grew, to protect them from the damp climate.

"They asked me how to improve the yield, and I suggested a chain saw," says Mr. Gutlove, who holds a master's degree in oenology from the University of California, Davis. "But it's not easy for a 32-year-old to tell people they should drop a system that's been in place for 900 years."

A decade later, Coco Farm's annual yield has increased from 12,000 to 200,000 bottles, and the winery is producing a growing variety of more-sophisticated wines, including a dry sparkling wine. But like the hill on which the Coco Farm vineyard grows, it was a tough climb.

Mr. Gutlove was recruited by Noboru Kawada, the teacher who owned the winery and craved a foreigner's advice on how to make better wines. "It was to be a six-month assignment," says Mr. Gutlove, who was born in New York and now speaks Japanese.

The first step was to win the respect of his workers, many of whom are now adults, having arrived at the school as teenagers when it first opened in 1969. Mr. Gutlove spent the first few years living at the school, which was founded by Mr. Kawada on the principle that vigorous work is better than medication and confinement, the fate of many mentally disabled people in Japan.

In a way, the Italian American fit right in. "There's not a big difference between being a foreigner in Japan and being mentally disabled," says Mr. Gutlove. For their part, the students were eager to make the school's only foreign resident feel at home. During their monthly shopping day in town, they would stop at the local McDonald's, buy dozens of hamburgers to go, and pile them up on Mr. Gutlove's doorstep. "They assumed that because I'm an American, I eat hamburgers all the time," he says.

The monthly hamburger run was suspended at Mr. Gutlove's request. But students continued to fuss over him. An autistic student who sat next to him at meals, for example, would often rearrange Mr. Gutlove's chopsticks and wooden bowls so they conformed to Japanese dining etiquette.

Such attention to detail is a characteristic of autism and a requirement for some Coco Farm tasks, such as applying labels to bottles. Some students have mastered the winery's bottling line, which requires a worker to add empty bottles to a fast-moving mechanical line and remove filled ones at precise intervals. The first time that student Hideki Shimizu worked on the line, says Mr. Gutlove, he would focus on a single bottle on the machine -- until it and a dozen others cascaded onto the floor. Mr. Shimizu, who has Down syndrome, now does well operating the machine on his own.

At harvest time, 30 students per shift take on the vineyard. They pluck bunches of grapes from the vines and put them in yellow containers, pretty much ignoring the severe pitch of the hill and the stunning view it affords of the winery below them and the hills that rim the Ashikaga plain. The pace is steady, and there is little banter among the students as they fill the containers and carry them to a nearby truck. Occasionally, however, the student known as "Shatcho" -- which means manager in Japanese -- will bellow instructions to his counterparts.

"It's in his blood," says Bill Campbell, a Tokyo wine importer and a regular Coco Farm visitor. "His father is a famous stage director."

Turning the students into a reliable work force was one thing; overhauling Coco Farm's antiquated production techniques was quite another. Only after a painstakingly subtle campaign has Mr. Gutlove, who has worked for such California wineries as Robert Mondavi and Cakebread Cellars, persuaded Coco Farm's managers to introduce new production methods and make sophisticated wines typical of California and Bordeaux, instead of the sweet wines that dominate Japan's wine industry.

"This is something we never would have tried without Bruce," says Machiko Ochi, the vineyard manager and Mr. Kawada's daughter. "In Japan, people are afraid to discuss new things because it may hurt someone's feelings," she says, "but since Bruce arrived, I've learned to change my opinions."

Problem No. 1, according to Mr. Gutlove, was those little bags around the grapes. Ms. Ochi and her father said the covers prevented the grapes from rotting. Mr. Gutlove dissented: "I want to see the grapes when I look at the vines so I know whether we should spray or not." The dispute was resolved in a very Japanese way: through compromise. The bags were replaced with tiny umbrellas.

The real showdown, however, was over the very soul of the Coco Farm collection. Mr. Gutlove wanted to produce dry wines, and to bolster his cause, organized a tour of California's Napa and Sonoma valleys in 1995 for 300 people, including most of his student workers and their families. It wasn't easy to arrange. Most of the students didn't have passports. The group needed to be exempted from certain U.S. immigration procedures -- filling out visa forms, for example, and sitting for interviews.

Mr. Gutlove recalls only one minor crisis during the trip. While he was checking the group in at the hotel, a few of the students started taking off their clothes in the lobby. (Public nudity is common at the school, so some students are more comfortable out of clothes than in them.)

"Aside from that," says Mr. Gutlove, "everything went smoothly."

The visit to Napa's sun-drenched, gentle hills and elegant hedgerow vines had the desired effect on Mr. Kawada and his daughter, and the Coco Farm collection now boasts a chardonnay and a chenin blanc-like table white, in addition to the sparkling wine. Domestic critics are taking notice. Coco's table white, according to a local wine guide, "goes well with shrimp balls."

Mr. Gutlove says he has no plans to return to California. Making a truly excellent wine, he says, can't compete with the satisfaction of watching his charges develop pride in their work. A few years ago, for example, the parents of Mr. Shimizu, who had just been promoted to the bottling line, arrived unannounced to ask their son to spend the weekend with his family at a nearby hot springs. But Mr. Shimizu refused: The winery needed him to help fill a large run.

Mr. Shimizu's father was moved. "I never thought this could happen," he told Mr. Gutlove later while sipping wine at the tasting room. "My son is too busy for me."

 

 

 

 

New Arms Race

Fearing China’s Plans and a U.S. Departure, Asians Rebuild Forces

 

MANILA, Philippines – The U.S. says its forces are in Asia to stay.  But Asian leaders aren’t convinced and, worried about the GIs leaving and about China’s intentions, have launched major arms buildups.

A look at the Philippine navy, whose headquarters sit between a yacht club and a beer stall, shows another reason leaders here want the fleet overhauled.  Many of the ships, anchored 25 miles from the compound, predate the Korean War; some were in World War II.  The navy’s spartan offices are paneled in plywood, with exposed wires and ancient plumbing.

 Such dilapidation, officials here say, is a legacy of dependence on the U.S.: The Philippines was left seriously exposed when the relationship ended abruptly six years ago.  So Manila is slowly modernizing its military.  And the rest of Asia, after watching the U.S. security arrangement with Manila dissolve, is latching onto some sophisticated weaponry that could reset the regional balance of power. 

Military Outlays Surging

 Although Pentagon officials say the huge number of U.S. troops in Asia – about 100,000, mostly in Japan and South Korea – makes such a buildup unnecessary, it is well under way.  Military spending by China and other East Asian countries totaled $165 billion last year, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency says.  That is nearly double 1990 spending and equal to 20% of global defense outlays.  Moreover, a dollar goes a long way in the developing world, at least for local spending.  Last year, Asians accounted for 48% of world-wide purchases of large conventional weapons, such as warplanes, submarines and tanks, up from 28% in 1990, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

With this rapid rearmament, Asia, which is scarred by ancient rivalries and territorial disputes and lacks a multilateral group such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to deal with them, is likely to become a much more dangerous place.  The U.S. is expected to remain the most powerful player, but the proliferation of weapons may make Washington hesitate to flash its military might in Asia.

 The biggest fear driving the buildup is the ascendancy of China.  The Chinese are expanding their military budget by about 20% a year and making provocative territorial claims in areas that local leaders believe are too remote or dangerous to compete with a Bosnia or a Haiti for Washington’s attention.  Asians say they must rearm because China’s military modernization could not only cow Asia but also force the U.S. Navy to back down from a challenge.

Comment and No Comment

Washington insists its troops will do whatever is necessary to fulfill their Asian peacekeeping role, even if China doesn’t agree.  At their recent joint White House news conference, the presidents of China and the U.S. were asked what they think about that role.

“I believe our presence in the Pacific … is a stabilizing factor (leading) to greater partnerships in meeting common security threats in the years ahead,” President Clinton responded.  Jiang Zemin declined to say anything.

Although more than 190,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors have died in combat in Asia during this century, a growing number of Asians think the trauma of the Vietnam War and the specter of a more powerful China could erode American willingness to plunge into another Asian war.

“When all is said and done,” says a Philippine security official, “Americans will not allow their sons’ lives to be lost defending brown people on the other side of the globe.”

Manila’s self-sufficiency drive springs partly from its experience as onetime host to 8,000 U.S. troops and two huge bases.  After an acrid dispute over how much the U.S should pay for the air and sea bases, the Philippine government ordered them closed.  On their way out, the embittered Americans took nearly everything, even traffic lights and a bowling alley.

Left to Themselves

“The Americans always told us they would take care of our external threats,” says Sen. Orlando S. Mercado, who heads the Senate Defense Committee.  “Now, they are no longer here, and we have to defend ourselves.”

 So Manila plans to buy new warships and is shopping for long-range fighter jets, from either the U.S. or Russia, to replace its aging F-5s.  Other Asian nations also began several years ago to upgrade their forces.  Malaysia is buying Russian MiG-29 fighters.  Indonesia recently announced it would buy Russian Su-30 fighters and helicopters.

Thailand is expanding its naval reach from coastal defense to sea-lane patrol with six frigates and an aircraft carrier – smaller then the huge ones deployed by the U.S. but capable of accommodating jump-jets – bought from Spain.  It also will soon take delivery of 28 Russian fighters, six U.S. attack helicopters and F-18 Hornets to upgrade an air force that now consists largely of F-5s and old-model F-16s.  And the Thais are being wooed with cheap tanks and artillery by China, which is trying to buy support for its territorial claims in Southeast Asian waters.

In Northeast Asia, the focus is as much on Japan as on China.  South Korea, which last year deployed three destroyers to contest Tokyo’s claims on a chain of islands in the Sea of Japan, is developing a deep-water navy; its obsolete fleet now is primarily limited to coastal defense.  South Korea also wants to replace its F-4 Phantoms with long range jet fighters.  Despite its alliance with the U.S., which the State Department estimates costs U.S. taxpayers $20 billion a year, Seoul is stockpiling weaponry that would be more useful in a war against Japan, its ancient enemy, than against North Korea.

“They know what they’re doing, says the regional director for a major U.S. defense contractor.  “Sooner or later, the U.S. will have to withdraw, and there are a lot of contentious issues for these countries to resolve until then.”

To be sure, many of the procurement programs appear wasteful, and the weapons may never be deployed.  South Korea, for example, has been trying for six years to mass-produce an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft.  The Ministry of National Defense and the private contractor have together invested more than $20 million in the project, a source says, and the contractor wants an additional $35.3 million.  But two years after the scheduled delivery date of a working model, production hasn’t begun; the prototype plunged into the sea during a test and hasn’t been recovered.  A defense-ministry spokesman says a working prototype will be available “sooner or later.”

Other Impediments

 Asia’s financial turmoil also could temporarily hobble the buildup.  Already the Thai government has deferred a decision to buy an armored vehicle from France, largely because of the economic problems stemming from the collapse of the baht. 

 Many programs that are expected to survive are driven more by concern about prestige than genuine national security.  “We’ve got a supermarket mentality,” a South Korean defense official recently told a delegation from a major U.S. defense contractor, according to a member of the group.  “Our requirements are often set by somebody picking up a copy of Jane’s Defense Weekly.”

Some deals are propelled by far baser motives:  Many Asian defense purchases are laced with kickbacks equal to 30% to 40% of the transaction, according to a recent study by the Institute for International Policy Studies in Tokyo.

 But the trend is clear.  For the Philippines, the need for military modernization became brutally obvious in February 1995, when the Chinese navy planted its flag on Mischief Reef in the Spratlys Islands, a small but strategically located and resource-rich archipelago claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and China as well as the Philippines.  Mischief Reef lies only 150 miles from Philippine waters but more than 700 miles from China.

 A month later, the Philippine navy ferried reporters to the reef to underscore the seriousness of Manila’s claim.  Along the way, the ship full of reporters broke down; it was towed back to Manila with a frayed rope tied to a Philippine patrol boat.  The .50-caliber machine guns perched on the bow of the lame vessel, recalls one reporter, were useless, ossified by years of neglect, and its decks were crawling with rats.  Shortly before the media trip, two gunboats ran out of fuel while chasing Chinese pirates from local waters.

Modernization Plans

Reacting to such debacles, the Philippine government approved a $5 billion naval-modernization program.  Over 15 years, the navy plans to acquire six missile-quipped corvettes and three frigates and to bolster its mine-sweeping-and-laying and submarine-detection capabilities.  “The Americans took all that with them,” says Commodore Domingo P. Salipsip, the recently retired director of the program.  “We have sailors who have been in the navy for 15 years who don’t know the first thing about mines or sub chasing.”

 Philippine government officials say the buildup isn’t designed to sweep the Chinese navy, which is pushing its own muscular expansion, from the South China Sea.  Instead, the Philippine security official says, “We want to be able to inflict some pain – shoot down a few planes and sink a ship, that sort of thing.  We would state our claim and show we’re serious.”

 A senior U.S. military officer says the U.S. has a plan to occupy the Spratlys, if China takes a provocative step there, and to police the area until the issue is resolved.  Philippine officials say they know nothing of such a plan and aren’t counting on political support for one in the U.S.

  At a meeting with U.S. military officials in June, Philippine army Chief of Staff Arnulfo G. Acedera says, he suggested “in jest” that the U.S. consider occupying the Spratlys in a crisis.  “They did not commit to anything that would be tantamount to wanted to do so,” Gen. Acedera says.  “That’s the reason for the modernization: We need to back up our own position.”

Another reason Asian nations can’t afford to rely on the U.S. in regional disputes, military analysts say: The age of gunboat diplomacy may be ending, with the proliferation of cheap but deadly guided missiles that threaten to render ineffective the aircraft carrier, the spine of America’s naval presence in the Pacific.  Pentagon and State Department officials say Beijing is expected to purchase Russian-made SS-N-22 antiship missiles, known as Sunburns, which can be fired from a warship and cruise at 2.5 times the speed of sound.  In August, Russia unveiled another, more powerful, supersonic missile, the Yakhont, that it hopes to sell in the Mideast and Asia.

Either missile could pose a serious threat to carrier battle groups operating in coastal areas such as the Spratlys and Taiwan, despite the sophisticated antimissile systems on U.S. ships.  “at Mach 2.5, in littoral-warfare conditions, the reaction time from launch to detection is cut to seconds,” says George Friedman, chairman of Strategic Forecasting of Austin, Texas, an intelligence software and consulting company.  “What China is doing is reducing the willingness of the U.S. to deploy its carriers by increasing the probability of damage to them.”

Mr. Friedman says he expects China to take delivery of the missiles by year end.  Spokesmen for China’s foreign-affairs and defense ministries decline to comment.

The balance has already shifted in China’s favor, at least in computer war games.  In a Pentagon simulation dated 2015, China was able to neutralize a U.S. carrier fleet with a saturated attack by antiship missiles.

Yet, China is buying much of the technology it needs to develop and deploy such a deterrent from U.S. companies.  During the Bush administration, Cray Research Inc. (now a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc.) sold to the Chinese government a weather-forecasting computer that military analysts say can also be used to enhance missile guidance, attack planning and target selection.  The transaction was opposed by people such as Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington.

 Mr. Sokolski suspects that Beijing would convert the system for military use.  He recalls how a group of Chinese delegates, meeting with Pentagon officials late in the Bush administration, tried to allay U.S. concerns.  “They told us they wanted the system to save lives from typhoons,” says Mr. Sokolski, who was then deputy for nonproliferation at the Defense Department.  When Mr. Sokolski noted that China could get weather-forecasting data from the Internet, among other sources, they nodded sheepishly.

“They don’t need (the Cray computer) for weather forecasting.” He says.  “They want it for battle management.”  Washington approved the sale in early 1993.

In the past year, the Chinese military has been caught using a supercomputer and a sophisticated machine tool that were purchased from the U.S. on condition they be employed only for civilian purposes.

South Korean Satellite

 China isn’t the only major weaponry buyer that bridles at U.S. export restrictions.  South Korea, America’s closest ally in the Far East and the world’s fourth-largest buyer of foreign arms, is developing a satellite that would free it from dependence on the U.S. for spy photos.  That capability, some U.S. officials worry, could provide Seoul with battle-management technology that Washington couldn’t control.  Seoul also is negotiating with Boeing Co. for Awacs early warning aircraft and is mulling a long-range-missile program despite quiet U.S. protests.

 Pentagon officials from Defense Secretary William Cohen on down are urging the South Koreans to build a theater-missile defense system, based on U.S. gear such as Raytheon Co.’s Patriot, to defend against North Korean Scud missiles.  If South Korea deploys U.S. weaponry, the department says, the American and South Korean forces will be more cohesive.

 But Seoul is taking its time, and some South Korean military officials lean toward the Israeli-developed Arrow network, which they say can be adapted for both antimissile and antiaircraft operations more easily that the Patriot.

 “We’re considering the Arrow for our long-term threats,” says a senior fellow at Seoul’s Korean Institute for Defense Analysis.  “When the U.S. withdraws, we want to play a balancing role between China and Japan.”

 

Sea Change: How Beijing Officials Outnegotiated AT&T On Marine Cable Plans

They Reduced the U.S. Giant To a Supporting Role In Trans-Pacific Project --- Unlikely New Player: SBC

BEIJING -- For much of this century, a tight fraternity of telecommunications giants led by AT&T Corp. set the rules for running undersea cable systems -- until they tried to sell two Chinese bureaucrats on a billion-dollar project.

Rather than design and set the terms for what could become the world's most important communications line, AT&T and its brethren endured a four-year lesson in humility. China's feisty negotiators, wielding the leverage created by rocketing economic growth, a billion potential customers and the likelihood of major changes in the U.S. telecommunications market, dictated how and where the cable would be built.

Susan Fleming, a spokeswoman at AT&T, says it got what it wanted out of the project. She notes "a lot of competition out there," adding: "And we welcome it."

In fact, the Chinese confined AT&T to a role far less influential than its usual strategic position in such projects. AT&T and cable giants such as Japan's Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. (KDD) and Britain's Cable & Wireless PLC (C&W) were relegated to supporting roles as Beijing's bureaucrats brought in new players, including AT&T's Baby Bell rival, SBC Communications Inc. The San Antonio company, which recently abandoned merger talks with AT&T, gave the Chinese a powerful bargaining tool and in return got a foothold in what could become the main cable project in AT&T's most critical overseas market.

The companies that competed in a mad scramble for a piece of the action were deftly played off against each other by two hard-nosed Chinese officials who cobbled together exactly the deal China wanted. "We gave them a pedestal to stand on," a C&W official laments, "and that's exactly what they did."

In the early 1990s, the job of choosing which companies would build the new link between China and the U.S. fell to Li Ping, the 42-year-old deputy director of China's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, and Wang Hongjian, its 52-year-old director. Mr. Li is an elite official who had worked for a year at Nynex Corp., another Baby Bell, and Mr. Wang had spent the early 1970s toiling in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Both men speak fluent English and lead the internationalist cadre of the telecommunications ministry. They also embody China's fierce desire for economic self-reliance.

At a dinner in late 1994 in Beijing, Mr. Wang once described for visitors from Canada's Teleglobe Inc. how his servitude under the Red Guards shaped his vision for China's future. "He talked about how important it was for China's youth to think globally and assume control over a strong, modern China, safe from foreign intervention," one executive at the dinner says.

Indeed, China never liked the current telecommunications arrangement. For one thing, it is costly. Worse yet, it gives Japan, China's erstwhile enemy, control over important infrastructure. Most phone calls dialed from China to the U.S. now travel along a cable that dips into the sea, surfaces in Japan, and then plunges back under the Pacific to North America. Many of these networks are controlled by AT&T and Japan's KDD. So, as China's phone traffic surged along with its economic growth, its policy makers pushed for a new system.

From the start, AT&T was the obvious candidate to lead the project. Until recently, it didn't have to worry about competition in Asia. Much of the region is tied to the U.S. by marine cables, with AT&T a major owner and operator. The U.S. had always limited the number of companies that can offer such service, and none had AT&T's experience.

Over the next three years, however, deregulation in the U.S. unleashed a horde of competitors hungry for a role in the China-U.S. project, which may well be the last of its kind for years. By the time the cable consortium was assembled by the Chinese officials, Asia had evolved from a fief controlled by AT&T and its partners into a newly competitive arena in which AT&T is just another player.

Throughout the negotiations, China made it clear that it would have an equal share in the project and not be subordinated to a foreign carrier. "Our general policy," Mr. Li says, "is to not engage in projects that exclude other parties. We want to engage as many companies as possible on an equal basis."

AT&T may not have listened to Beijing until it was too late, people close to the bidding say, because of its past dominance of the cable business. Ever since engineers learned how to bundle telephone wire (and later, optical fibers) into polyethylene, copper and steel jackets and lay them on the ocean floor, AT&T has been the leviathan of trans-Pacific cable. Through various partnerships, AT&T and KDD combined own nearly 40% of all cable capacity in Asia, according to KDD officials. (AT&T says it doesn't comment on its cable ownership by region.) On most of these big cables, AT&T had great influence over which companies could subscribe and how the lines were routed.

AT&T rivals say the company mobilized that clout when it first sensed that some competitors, Teleglobe and a partnership of Nynex and Cable & Wireless, had offered to link China directly with North America. AT&T responded, people involved in the negotiations say, by announcing it would accommodate China's growing traffic by increasing capacity on an existing cable and thereby avoid the need for a new line. As it turned out, technical limitations permitted only minimal expansion, and some telecommunications executives wondered whether AT&T's announcement was a tactical maneuver designed to scare away rivals. An AT&T spokesman denies any such ploy.

But competitors say the AT&T announcement did undermine rival proposals. It "opened so many potentialities that it effectively killed our plan," says Steve Bayliss, a Teleglobe official.

The only people who didn't react to the AT&T proposal were the Chinese, who continued to talk to various companies about ways to install new capacity that would link China directly to the U.S. "We decided to adopt a wait-and-see attitude," Mr. Wang says.

AT&T also offered to connect China to the U.S. on an existing cable via a switching station in Guam, Mr. Li says. That, too, got a cool response; a Guam landing would have helped AT&T, which has a commitment to Manila to tie in the Philippines to U.S.-bound capacity via the tiny U.S. territory, but there was little in it for Beijing.

"We didn't give [those plans] much detailed consideration," Mr. Li says. "After all, there isn't much traffic between China and Guam." Even KDD, AT&T's partner, wasn't enthusiastic. "From our viewpoint, Guam wasn't that attractive," a KDD official says. "But AT&T persistently pushed it, and AT&T is our intimate friend." (Ultimately, a Guam connection was included in the plan, but only after all the consortium's members approved it.)

Nor did AT&T endear itself to the Chinese with what Mr. Li saw as its aggressive promotion of Submarine Systems Inc., a cable-manufacturing unit that it recently sold to Tyco International Ltd., of Exeter, N.H. At a meeting in Beijing late last year, Mr. Li says, an AT&T-SSI team urged that the unit get the supply contract for the network. According to a memo circulated among SBC officials after the meeting, the Chinese saw that maneuver as "a clear attempt to create a configuration that would allow AT&T/KDD to dominate the project management as well as . . . operation of the system."

The Chinese were having none of it, according to Mr. Li, who describes AT&T's promotion of SSI as "a major dispute in the negotiations." An AT&T spokesman denies its support of SSI was intended to help it control the network and says it backed down when China made its position clear.

Mr. Li says the Chinese were inconvenienced by AT&T's decision to cancel an October meeting between AT&T Chairman Robert Allen and China's communications minister, Wu Jichuan, at a time when Mr. Allen was preoccupied with the hunt for his successor. Although AT&T says it gave Beijing ample six weeks' advance notice, the cancellation sent a signal that its rivals were quick to exploit. "Everybody was telling the Chinese that AT&T was floundering," an SBC representative says. Mr. Allen declines to comment.

Mr. Li won't say what impact the cancellation had on the ministry's ultimate decision on the deal, but he comments, "It delayed talks with other companies, and it put off progress on the entire project."

Even then, China might have had to accept AT&T's terms -- especially, the Guam landing and SSI role -- except for the emergence of SBC. At the time, SBC was preparing to enter the marine-cable fray in anticipation of the 1996 U.S. Telecom Reform Act, which allowed regional Bell companies to own and operate long-distance systems, including international cable networks. Its entry would add SBC as a major new player that the Chinese could use against AT&T.

By mid-1996, SBC Senior Vice President James S. Kahan had assembled a team to explore the cable business. The group approached Teleglobe, already a cable operator, about jointly proposing a China-U.S. cable. SBC also was mapping out a merger plan with Pacific Telesis Group, another Baby Bell, and hoped to use Pactel's California network as the main U.S. link to Asia.

Mr. Kahan then arranged corporate retreats at which SBC, Pactel and Teleglobe executives listened to engineers and bankers explain every aspect of the cable business: design, financing, deployment, repair -- subjects mastered long ago by AT&T and KDD. At the Camelback Inn in Phoenix last August, for example, about a dozen executives watched a slide show illustrating how a 10-gigabyte cable can be repaired in mid-ocean.

"We wanted this project because it would give us control over our own long-distance destiny," Mr. Kahan says.

Meanwhile, KDD says, the AT&T-KDD team was still trying to sell Beijing on a cable going through Japan and Guamand still ignoring Beijing's desire for a direct connection. SBC, in contrast, proposed a direct link to the U.S.

So heated were the negotiations by late 1996 that meetings were being held almost on top of each other. In late November, Messrs. Li and Wang summoned the AT&T/KDD, C&W/Nynex and SBC teams for separate two-day meetings over a two-week period. Some participants say the Chinese used a series of leaks to manipulate the three groups into adapting their proposals to Beijing's desires. An SBC official recalls that soon after Beijing confidentially endorsed its proposed route, competitors suddenly adopted the exact same concept.

C&W and Nynex decided to throw in with SBC late last year. People close to the negotiations say the British cable giant and its U.S. partner had by then fallen out of favor, particularly after C&W Chairman Richard Brown hailed a memorandum of understanding signed with Beijing in November as a mandate to pursue new projects in China, including "proposals for a direct fiber-optic submarine cable between China and North America." Peter Eustace, C&W's media-relations manager, says Mr. Brown had chosen his words carefully. But an SBC representative says the statement struck the Chinese as presumptuous.

Nynex's position was even shakier. As a Baby Bell in the U.S. Northeast, it had little to offer Beijing, which viewed the West Coast as its main market.

However, the alliance between SBC and the C&W/Nynex team gave Beijing crucial leverage over AT&T. "The Chinese could now say: `This will be the structure of the group,'" an SBC representative says. "And you can take it or leave it."

Mr. Wang issued such an ultimatum in January. He called representatives from each competing group and told them that AT&T and KDD would be invited to participate in the project, but only as equal partners. He and Mr. Li also invited in MCI Communications Corp., Sprint Corp., SBC and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japan's giant national phone company, which recently was allowed to compete with KDD for trans-Pacific cable business. The Chinese did this to offset the influence of AT&T and KDD, say people close to the bidding. All these companies joined the consortium.

A few days later, the Chinese invited a slew of other companies; the consortium, now totaling 14 members, also includes China Telecom Ltd., Korea Telecom Authority, Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., Hongkong Telecommunications Ltd., Chung Hwa Telecommunications Corp. of Taiwan, Telekom Malaysia Bhd, PT Indonesian Satellite Corp. and IDC Japan Ltd.

An AT&T news release on the March signing ceremony for the project hailed it as "yet another milestone in AT&T's growing relationship with China."

But industry experts perceive something different. "Things are much more complicated with deregulation," says Jun Byung Sup, managing director of Korea Telecom. "Like AT&T, we used to be the dominant carrier in our country. But now there's more competition, and people are always comparing us with someone else. It's good for the customer, but it's a headache for us. And I think AT&T feels the same way."

AT&T fared better than C&W, which will be represented in the consortium only indirectly by Hongkong Telecom, its affiliate in the former British colony. Only three months later, C&W agreed to sell to Beijing enough of its controlling shares in Hongkong Telecom to leave the two parties with equal 29% stakes. The transaction, the first phase of which was negotiated at a 25% discount to Hongkong Telecom's then-market price, was viewed as inevitable in the runup to Britain's return of Hong Kong to China a few weeks ago.

And Nynex, which swallowed its pride when it agreed to combine forces with archrival SBC, was shut out altogether.

 

 

In Vogue in Japan: All the Trappings Of Church Weddings

Consultant Masatoshi Kurosaki Puts Up Anglican Chapels; Will Christianity Follow?

TOKYO -- It's a perfect day for an old-fashioned wedding at St. Mary's Church, and the Wedding March is rising from the 19th-century pipe organ.

The assembled rise as the bride, Aya Tamaki, is escorted by her father to the 150-year-old lectern and to her groom, Takeshi Tsuru. Luke Villeneuve, the minister, officiates in gold-and-white vestments that shimmer in sunlight filtered through the old, two-story stained-glass window depicting the life of Christ. A robed choir wearing crucifixes sings "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."

It is a pretty standard Anglican wedding service. It looks authentic. Masatoshi Kurosaki saw to that, though the chapel, antique as it appears, is just one day old, and there isn't an Anglican in the house.

Staging church weddings is Mr. Kurosaki's business. Like a film director standing off camera, he is quietly conducting the Tsuru-Tamaki nuptials through nods and gestures from behind one of the columns that support St. Mary's vaulted ceiling. He choreographed the service, trained the staff, designed the uniforms, procured the foreign pastor and auditioned the choir.

He also had the church shipped in from England.

Not the building -- an English church wouldn't meet Japan's rigid building code -- but the appointments. Mr. Kurosaki, a "Japan Bridal Church Consultant," bought just about everything in St. Mary's -- doors, lectern, pews, pipe organ, Bible stand, stained glass -- from the 150-year-old church of the same name in Bristol, England, paying about $620,000 for the lot. He transported it to Tokyo on a container ship and resurrected it in this new building, which is a replica of St. Mary's.

About the only thing missing is Christians. This is, after all, largely Buddhist and Shinto Japan, and the Tsuru-Tamaki ceremony is more a pop-culture fashion statement than a spiritual celebration. Japanese brides, many of whom long ago forsook wedding kimonos for gowns, are no longer satisfied with the Western-style ceremonies commonly available in luxury hotels. They want to exchange vows in something resembling a real church.

St. Mary's is the 17th Anglican chapel Mr. Kurosaki has reproduced in Japan. And he would like to see couples do more than pay lip service to religion. "Many Japanese have Christian-style weddings without understanding what Christianity is," Mr. Kurosaki says.

Mr. Kurosaki insists his motivations are more spiritual than pecuniary. He considers himself a modern-day Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan priest who studded the California coast with missions. But while Father Serra traveled by burro, Mr. Kurosaki gets around in a Mercedes-Benz 500SE, a saloon car the size of a small ark. Wedding consultants and brokers pay him to design his churches, oversee their construction and furnish them with artifacts from Britain. Last year, he earned a profit of about $890,000.

The 54-year-old Mr. Kurosaki had his epiphany during his daughter's Western-style wedding in the late 1980s, which he says was a crass copy of a Christian service. He ditched his previous enterprise -- importing sheep to Japan from New Zealand and Australia -- and since 1986 has been making pilgrimages to Britain in search of Victorian-era Christian iconography. It isn't hard to find. Every year, nearly 200 Anglican churches auction off centuries-old items, usually to raise money for renovations.

For people in England like Mark Groes, the president of Surrey-based Pew Corner, which restores church furniture, Mr. Kurosaki is a godsend. "No one buys a whole church at a time the way Mr. Kurosaki does," Mr. Groes says. A typical haul includes a pulpit, which can run as much as $1,700, a lectern for about $1,100, pipe organ for between $4,200 and $8,400, and main doors for anywhere between $1,300 and $3,400.

Mr. Kurosaki won't buy just any lectern or stained-glass window. Only articles from the Anglican church, the oldest of the English Protestant sects, will do. "He always has very specific requirements," says Robert Mills of Robert Mills Ltd., which specializes in stained-glass restoration. "He doesn't want pastiche."

Not every former congregant of an exported chapel is happy to see its antique trappings sold to a foreigner. (Mr. Kurosaki's British agents often don't volunteer where the stuff is destined to go.) "I didn't know about the Japan angle until now," says Rod Smith, a supervisor at St. Nicholas Church in Kent, who recently sold out to Pew Corner.

"Christianity spreads more from personal contacts than putting church furniture in a building," says the Rev. Bill Nash after he is told that the pews from his St. Phillips Church in Wolverhampton will be installed in a wedding hall in Japan. "How do you put a Christian message into a secular service?"

Subtly. Mr. Kurosaki hires only legitimate pastors to preside over legally sanctioned weddings and requires couples to sit for an hour-long briefing on Christianity before they wed. During the Tsuru-Tamaki ceremony, Mr. Villeneuve, a Canadian nondenominational Protestant minister, delivers the benediction, hands the newlyweds a Bible and encourages them to read it together at home. He presides over three other services at St. Mary's before calling it a day.

This all means real soul-saving opportunities in a country where just 1% of the population is Christian. "In pre-evangelism 101, you learn that what you want to do is address as many people as possible," says Kenny Joseph, a missionary in Japan since 1946 who is as busy marrying couples as a Las Vegas wedding chapel.

Every weekend, Mr. Joseph presides over at least a half-dozen 30-minute services at wedding halls and gets paid about $200 for each of them. Mr. Joseph gets a premium for appearing at a Kurosaki church, where the weddings usually run from 40 minutes to an hour -- more time, he says, to slip in some of God's word. "Mr. Kurosaki's services," he says "provide you with a captive audience of 80 people every hour."

Foreign pastors are generally careful not to thump the Bible too hard lest they antagonize those Japanese who believe Christian-style weddings should be for Christians. "Japanese have a gaijin complex," says the Rev. Masahiro Hiratsuka, using the word for foreigner. "They think their status is heightened if they get married by a gaijin."

Just how many of Mr. Kurosaki's clients end up becoming Christians is hard to gauge. Miho Takanashi who says she got married in one of Mr. Kurosaki's churches last year because she was "very impressed with the stained glass," has no plans to start going to church. Mr. Tsuru, now posing for photographers with his new wife outside the chapel, says the ceremony left him with "an appreciation of Christian beliefs."

But Mr. Kurosaki himself has yet to make a final leap of faith. "I'm not a Christian," he says, beaming with pride at the newlyweds. "Eventually I would like to become one and set up my own small church."

 

 

 

 

Time Is Running Out For Elderly Koreans Stranded in Russia

Forced to Work for Japanese During World War II, They Want to Go Home

YUZHNO SAKHALINSK, Russia -- On the outskirts of this city on the remote island of Sakhalin, lies a cemetery reserved for ethnic Koreans. Headstone portraits face east toward the sunrise, the traditional Korean symbol of rebirth and a tribute to the motherland.

It is the closest to home people like 72-year-old Kwon Joon Dal expect they will ever get.

During World War II, when Korea was a Japanese colony and Sakhalin a Japanese conquest, Tokyo pressed Mr. Kwon and some 60,000 other Koreans into work at the island's factories and coal mines. When the war ended, Japan left the Koreans behind. Russia prohibited them from leaving until 1988.

Now, many of the 1,200 first-generation Koreans who remain in Sakhalin want the Japanese government to finance their return to Korea so they can die on their native soil. They note that the Asian women forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese army during World War II were at least allowed to return home. But the Sakhalin Koreans fear time -- and the bureaucracies of Japan, Russia and South Korea -- are working against them.

"The Japanese are just waiting for us to die away so they won't have to pay us," says Mr. Kwon, whose gnarled hands and weathered face reflect a youth spent in slave labor.

Life on this island off the eastern coast of Russia isn't easy. Leather jackets and fox-fur caps help ward off the cold wind that swirls down from the Sea of Okhotsk. Most of the aging Koreans live in clapboard cabins -- known as "Khrushchevs" after the man who had them built -- that are weather-beaten and drafty, with corrugated-steel roofs and cellophane stretched across missing window panes.

Some Sakhalin Koreans, particularly those with wealthy relatives, have returned home. But most, having spent their lives hawking fish in the market that straddles Sakhalin's Japanese-built railroad, or coaxing potatoes and cabbage from the island's stingy soil, are too poor to go home. So they are spending their last years begging for Japan's help.

Ri Chi Kuk, who belongs to a group here that lobbies Tokyo for compensation, was 19 years old when Japanese soldiers snatched him from Korea in 1943 and forced him to work in the coal mines that fed the war machine.

Mr. Ri remembers waking at dawn, marching to the mines with his compatriots, and crouching into tiny carts for the five-mile descent. They chipped at coal with hammers 12 hours a day, six days a week, and gathered the filings by hand. Meals consisted of fish heads, bean paste or leaves, along with a bit of rice.

Many Koreans say they were brought here on "contracts" for a maximum of two years of work and a swift return home. But the Japanese extended many of the contracts. About one in five Koreans died from overwork or disease.

When the war ended, Moscow detained the Koreans to help run Sakhalin's labor-intensive economy. Some remember watching the last boat-load of Japanese depart, leaving hundreds of Koreans on the pier.

Stalin, ever-fearful of ethnic populations as potential pockets of subversion, took no chances in Sakhalin. Soviet police shuttered Korean schools, burned Korean books and banned the Korean language.

In the 1960s, the Sakhalin Koreans say, some accepted an invitation from North Korea to study there. Pyongyang promised their return to Sakhalin after two years. Two years went by and no one was allowed back; many who tried to escape were returned to Pyongyang by Russian border guards, sent to Siberia, or shot.

Things changed after perestroika. Taking advantage of economic reform, many of Sakhalin's second- and third-generation Koreans run successful small businesses. Mixed marriages, once unheard of, are now common.

But such integration deepens the divide between first-generation Koreans and the motherland. Marina Cho, who is in the trading business, says the price of returning her 69-year-old father to Korea is too high. "I'm 50 years old and I have a business to run," she says, kneeling beside her father on his cabin's wooden floor.

Her father, Cho Ki Yeru, nods. He has visited his relatives via one of the free flights to South Korea arranged periodically through the Red Cross. He would like to move back, but relatives there can't afford the burden.

The Sakhalin Koreans say Tokyo should at least pay for their wartime toil. Chae Chong Soo, 75, says he was brought to Sakhalin in 1944 on a contract guaranteeing five yen a day. He was paid only five yen a month, which at the time wouldn't buy dinner for two, he says.

"I want what I was told I'd be paid," he says, producing a hand-written ledger. By Mr. Bok's reckoning, Tokyo owes him 182,000 yen, or about $1,680, after taking inflation into account.

Tokyo still has the Koreans' back pay on deposit and encourages them to collect, provided they can produce the savings book they were issued upon their arrival in Sakhalin. Few Koreans kept them, however. Japan says only two Koreans have collected, a total of about $285 at today's exchange rates. That leaves $1.8 million unclaimed.

Japan last year allocated funds to build a retirement complex in South Korea for 500 Sakhalin Koreans. "We have been sympathetic to their plight," an official at Japan's Foreign Ministry says. But the facility might take years to build, a delay that Kenichi Takagi, a Japanese lawyer representing the Sakhalin Koreans, attributes to foot-dragging by Seoul.

An official at South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the government hasn't found a community to accommodate such a large complex.

Meanwhile, the Korean cemetery continues to fill. At funerals, surviving exiles whisper a decades-old poem expressing hope that those back home remember the abducted:

Why don't you write? Have you forgotten the language?

Why don't you come back? Have you forgotten the way?

Standing on the ground of Sakhalin, looking at the moon of native ground.

Why don't you come back, my brothers and sisters?

 

 

 

 

Seoul Searching: U.S. Officials Question South Korea Readiness To Fight Off the North

Defense Ministry Fears Japan More Than Pyongyang As Long-Term Threat --- Morale and Ammo Both Low

SEOUL, South Korea -- Military planners in South Korea first started whispering about the "360-degree defense" about four years ago. It has since become the worst-kept secret within South Korea's usually tight-lipped defense community, and a source of growing concern and annoyance in Washington.

"They won't come out and say it, but it means defense against threats outside the peninsula, and that means Japan," says the Seoul representative of a U.S. defense manufacturer. "Everyone understands it, and you have to keep it in mind if you want to do business here."

Still scarred viscerally by a series of invasions and occupations from Japan over the past 500 years, South Korea is building a sophisticated arsenal designed to ward off its ancient rival after the divided peninsula eventually reunifies and the U.S. withdraws its troops from the region.

"History shows that the relationship between countries can change any time," says Yoo Chan Yul, a fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis. "Relations between South Korea and Japan are OK now, but we have to do our best to protect ourselves" in the future.

But a number of U.S. and South Korean officials, junior-level Korean troops and recently discharged conscripts say there is a problem with Seoul's preoccupation with Japan: the neglect of the more-immediate ground threat from the north. That attitude is rooted in the Seoul defense establishment's belief that the U.S. military presence is an airtight psychological deterrent against war.

Increasingly, U.S. defense officials in Seoul and Washington are expressing frustration with South Korea's resistance to buying basic weapons systems. They also would like the defense ministry to spend more on building a corps of quality noncommissioned officers -- the layer between conscripts and officers -- to bolster its readiness against Pyongyang's million-man army. Owing in part to a lack of funding, morale in the South Korean army has plummeted; a rash of insubordination and mutiny has mortified the Ministry of National Defense, prompting the resignation of two ministers in as many years.

"In case of an attack {from North Korea} it would be chaos," says Cpl. Cho, a clerk to a company commander, who asks that his first name not be used. Cpl. Cho maintains that, in his company, soldiers are showing decreasing respect for commanding officers. He thinks that "our officers would not be able to control their men."

Kim Dong Gil, a legislator and former dissident who left his hometown in North Korea for Seoul in 1946, has similar misgivings. "A retired brigadier general came to see me recently and said the military isn't prepared and the men are not willing to fight," he says. "Some say an attack from North Korea is unthinkable because the U.S. is here, but there is a limit to what the Americans can do."

The state of South Korea's combat readiness is the subject of a lengthy report compiled two months ago by the U.S. General Accounting Office at the request of Congress. U.S. diplomats and defense officials in Washington and Seoul say the report, due for release in the next few weeks, describes a demoralized South Korean army and a ground force compromised by an errant procurement policy.

"The Koreans spell deterrence against North Korea U-S-A," says a former U.S. defense official based in Washington who recently served as a senior officer in Seoul and is familiar with the GAO report. "Our presence is allowing South Korea to build up an arsenal that could potentially destabilize the region, and that is working against our interests."

South Korea is investing in submarines, spy planes and satellites, and a fleet of new home-built destroyers. Such a force, analysts note, is of better use against regional threats in the next century than against North Korea today. "We must be prepared for the worst . . . after reunification," says Ahn Chung Si, a professor of political science at Seoul National University.

South Korea's preparedness has come under growing scrutiny since the dispute over North Korea's suspected nuclear-weapons program erupted in early 1992 and a delicate and murky transfer of power began last August with the death of the Stalinist patriarch Kim Il Sung. North Korea has one of the largest armies in the world, most of which is deployed in an offensive posture along the peninsula's highly fortified demilitarized zone.

Repeated requests for interviews of senior South Korean military and defense officials for this article were rejected. Officials at South Korea's national security agency also declined to be interviewed.

A spokesman for the U.S. forces in Seoul says that there is room for improvement in South Korea's front-line defenses, but that the U.S. command is generally satisfied with its ally's focus. "They would never put at risk U.S. forces as a result of their procurement strategy," he says.

Weaknesses in South Korea's ground forces were described in a report three years ago by the U.S. commander in Korea at the time, Gen. Robert RisCassi. The report, submitted to the defense ministry, lists a number of weapons systems the Pentagon believes Seoul should have to deter an invasion from Pyongyang.

The list includes long-range counter-artillery radar to help neutralize North Korea's huge howitzer force, night-vision gear for helicopter units and an electronic information-gathering system. Defense specialists estimate the cost of such hardware at about $100 million.

Following a visit to South Korea last March by Secretary of Defense William Perry, the South Korean defense ministry pledged it would purchase most of the weaponry described in the report. Since then, however, the systems have come under criticism by some defense-ministry officials as ineffective or unnecessary, and none have been purchased. (The ministry has given an oral commitment to buy the night-vision equipment.) Some South Korean government and defense officials bridle at what they say is a crude attempt by the Pentagon to boost weapons sales on behalf of U.S. arms manufacturers.

Nor has the South Korean military addressed what U.S. officials and some junior Korean soldiers say is the South Korean army's acute shortage of ammunition and spare parts. Last June, when the dispute over Pyongyang's nuclearweapons program edged precariously close to war, the commanding officers of South Korea's four military services gathered for an emergency meeting to plot logistics. They concluded that their troops lacked $375 million worth of equipment and ammunition needed to sustain them through 45 days worth of fighting, the minimum anticipated in most attack scenarios, according to a senior U.S. defense official in Seoul.

The U.S., still South Korea's major arms source, has refused to share the core technology behind its more sophisticated weapons, for fear it will lose control over how they are used. In response, the defense ministry is purchasing a growing share of its arsenal from countries less queasy about technology transfer.

That has caused a rift between Seoul and Washington over the compatibility of the two forces' arsenals. Last year Seoul purchased the Mistral, a French-made antiaircraft missile launcher, over the U.S.-made Stinger, largely because the Pentagon wouldn't release the Stingers' missile-guidance technology, Korean defense officials say.

U.S. forces in South Korea use the Stinger, which has a mechanism that allows the gunner to identify allied or hostile aircraft. But the South Korean Mistrals lack such a system, and U.S. defense officials say this raises the risk of death by friendly fire in the event of war.

Increasingly, Seoul is choosing to develop its own sophisticated weapons as part of a strategy to localize defense industries. It recently announced plans to build jet trainers rather than buy aircraft from foreign sources, despite emergency requests from the air force for new models and despite the underdeveloped state of the country's aerospace industry.

Meanwhile, according to a retired senior official of the South Korean air force, existing trainers are so outdated and overworked that the air force has been forced to cut back on sorties. The subsequent decline in flying time is taking its toll on 20 British-made Hawk jets Seoul purchased in 1993 for advanced training; cadets have crashed three of them in the past six months.

Korean military planners say that their procurement policy is sound and that the U.S. is overstating concerns to pressure them into buying American weaponry. In an interview last year, a defense-ministry official said Korea would continue pursuing an independent procurement policy. "We have many priorities in arms purchases: pricing, combat effectiveness and technology transfer," he said. "Sometimes, one overrides the others."

Yet Seoul is beginning to share U.S. concerns over the decline in morale among its army's 650,000 conscripts. Since the election two years ago of South Korea's first civilian president, popular resentment has mushroomed against an army that spawned a string of military dictatorships. The army offers scant career prospects for South Korea's increasingly affluent, well-educated young men, most of whom regard their 36-month mandatory service as an inconvenience on their way to white-collar jobs.

Reports of insubordination are rife. In October, three lieutenants deserted to protest a series of allegedly mutinous acts. An ensuing crackdown by authorities led to the arrest of 29 soldiers; a month later, a conscript at a firing exercise shot two officers dead and wounded a third before killing himself; early this month, a top-ranked graduate of the army's officer-training school was arrested for a botched attempt to rob a bank with an unloaded rifle and bayonet.

Such incidents have inspired a 56% increase in the 1995 defense budget for training, education and equipment management. Cpl. Cho, who complains of shortages of ammunition and equipment, says troops in his company are often allotted as little as three rounds during target practice and are issued gas masks designed to protect against tear gas, not the lethal chemical weapons in North Korea's huge, toxic arsenal. "The good masks are in storage," Mr. Cho says. "And often there are not enough. A surprise attack would wipe us out."

For a measure of how far discipline has eroded, newly discharged Koreans say, consider one of the army's mandatory four-day refresher courses. Instead of training, reservists sit through a series of lectures and outdated training films. After each lunch break, hapless corporals are obliged to prod and cajole many reservists back into the lecture halls.

Says a 32-year-old merchant banker who participated in one course: "I wouldn't mind attending these things if they were rigorous, because I believe we have to be prepared against North Korea. But the way it is now, it's a joke."

 

 

 

What Kind of Man Drinks Hennessy? Excellent Question

North Korea Analysts Ponder Kim Jong Il's Huge Tab For 50-Year-Old Cognac

SEOUL, South Korea -- Geopolitical analysts trying to divine the aspirations of Kim Jong Il are at odds over the significance of a clue: The North Korean heir apparent is the world's biggest single buyer of Hennessy's top-of-the-line cognac.

"This is something to watch closely and to take into account for the future," says Ahn Chung Si, professor of political science at Seoul National University. Cognac, says Mr. Ahn, "is clearly a necessary item for him to ensure his power."

Mr. Kim has been the biggest buyer of the cognac, called Paradis, for the past two years, Hennessy confirms. Although the distiller is tight-lipped about the exact value of its exports to Pyongyang, diplomatic and shipping sources estimate Mr. Kim's annual account at $650,000 to $800,000 since 1992. That is between 626 and 770 times the average North Korean's yearly income of $1,038, according to the latest estimates released by the South Korean government.

Apparently no longer content with Hennessy's Very Special Old Pale, which retails for about $40 a bottle in Seoul, Mr. Kim sticks to Paradis, a 50-year-old brandy that sells for about $630 a bottle in Seoul. Shipping sources estimate that Hennessy exports a thousand bottles of Paradis, one of the world's oldest commercially available cognacs, to North Korea each year.

"Given that no one else in North Korea has access to such a precious commodity but Kim Jong Il," says Mr. Ahn, "it's likely he's distributing it. We give liquor to friends to buy influence; he is trying to influence a whole country."

Although the 52-year-old Mr. Kim has apparently established his authority, he has yet to be formally ordained by the Communist Party. That has prompted suspicion that he is being challenged either by military men or by senior members of the Party.

If the leap in Paradis sales is any indication, some observers point out, the cost of coalition-building in North Korea has risen dramatically. Notes a liquor-industry official based in Seoul: "Often with shaky regimes, sales of Hennessy tend to go up."

Paradis, which is a blend of Hennessy's best cognacs, made its debut in North Korea as the official spirit at Kim Il Sung's 80th birthday celebration in 1992. "We'd been doing business with the North Koreans for a long time," says an official of Moet Hennessy SA, the wines and spirits unit of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA in Paris. "But before the birthday, the quantity was always quite modest."

An intelligence analyst who studies Kim Jong Il's tastes says: "I think he's fallen in love with the stuff."

That isn't surprising to officials in Seoul; what surprises them is the size of his tab. Mr. Kim's cognac is ordered through North Korea's trade office and de facto consulate in Paris, then flown to Pyongyang via Prague or Berlin, shippers say. Also known to be circulating in North Korea are about a dozen bottles of Hennessy No. 1, which can be had only through private bidding and is served at the world's most exclusive restaurants.

Despite increasingly dour assessments of North Korea's economy, which analysts say can no longer generate adequate amounts of basic foodstuffs, energy, and raw materials, its elite has never been short of luxury goods. Under Kim Il Sung, making gifts of expensive items was a common way to seal loyalty and shore up alliances. The elder Mr. Kim was famous for handing out gold Rolex watches to trusted functionaries and cadres. Many had his name engraved on the casings.

If it worked for the elder Kim, say some analysts, why not for his son? Trading up to Paradis from V.S.O.P., they argue, has enhanced his relative gifting power and will ultimately tilt the balance of any leadership struggle in his favor.

"Just because he's upgraded the method of bribing does not mean he is losing support," says Kil Jeong Woo, a senior fellow at the Research Institute for National Unification, a think tank run by the South Korean government. "Presumably, the people being bribed will think twice before moving against him and jeopardizing such perks."

Perhaps, some analysts speculate, Mr. Kim feels secure in his position and is simply revving up his reputedly indulgent lifestyle. They recall how South Korean autocrat Park Chung Hee, at the peak of his popularity in the 1960s, developed a public fondness for Chivas Regal that established the Scotch whisky as the nation's alcoholic beverage of choice.

"Let's say Kim Jong Il and his friends really do have these all-night parties," says Nicholas Eberstadt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and co-author of a book on North Korean demographics. "How many bottles would it take to keep them going? If you do the arithmetic, it seems quite possible that there's never really much left to give away."