New York Times
The Bush administration is considering blocking $34 million allotted by Congress to the United Nations Population Fund because of allegations that the fund has supported forced abortions and sterilizations in China. The money should be released. The allegations are baseless, and the work of the U.N. fund in crucial areas of women's health around the globe deserves full American support.
Family planning aid overseas has long been a source of domestic political controversy. President Reagan and the first President Bush barred American government support for organizations abroad that counseled women regarding abortions. President Clinton overturned that policy; George W. Bush reinstated it but said he remained committed to financing family planning.
The U.N. Population Fund, known by the acronym Unfpa, is the world's biggest agency focused on women's reproductive health. Throughout the third world it fights AIDS, provides sterile delivery kits in rural areas, offers guidance on birth control and helps nations develop policies promoting the equality and well-being of girls and women.
In his own foreign aid budget, President Bush asked for $25 million for Unfpa. Congress increased the sum to $34 million. That amounts to some 12 or 13 percent of the fund's annual budget and would go a long way to helping pay for services for women in, among other places, Afghanistan.
But Representative Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican who is fiercely opposed to abortion, and a number of conservative groups have urged the White House to withhold the money. They say that in China, where forced abortions and sterilizations continue, the agency effectively supports those practices through its cooperation with Chinese officials.
Officials of the Population Fund acknowledge that abuses in China go on despite a Chinese effort to end coercive practices but say they have been successfully helping local and national Chinese authorities move toward voluntary policies. A new Chinese law includes language protecting women's rights and forbidding coercion.
Mr. Smith says he has heard such assurances from the Unfpa for 20 years and cannot take them seriously. But even if more needs to be done to end coercion in China, taking money away from the U.N. fund is not the way to make that happen. Senators from both parties and State Department officials have all told this to the White House. It is up to President Bush to show that he will not deprive women around the world of necessary aid because of politics at home.
Washington Post
The Bush administration has been forced to spend the past several days fending off a wave of international outrage and diplomatic protests about its treatment of al Qaida and Taliban prisoners at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba. America-bashers in the European press and human rights community, whose objections to the Afghan military campaign were cut short by the swift U.S. victory, have had a field day trumpeting allegations of "torture," even as their governments summon U.S. ambassadors to deliver lectures about respect for the Geneva Convention. An indignant Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spent an hour on television refuting "the questions, allegations and breathless reports," which he attributed to "people who are either uninformed, misinformed or poorly informed." That may be true; there is no evidence that the Guantanamo prisoners have been treated inhumanely. But if Guantanamo has been a public relations -- as opposed to human rights -- debacle, then the Bush administration has only itself to blame.
Mr. Rumsfeld has been toasted around Washington for his public reports on the war, but his handling of the prisoner issue has done much to ignite the international controversy. The globally broadcast misinformation about which he complains stems largely from his own policy of strictly limiting media access to Guantanamo while offering accounts of U.S. handling of the prisoners that have been by turns vague, flippant or simply wrong. ...
The administration has now suspended the transfer of additional groups of prisoners to Guantanamo, saying it wants to interview the ones it has. That seems a wise course; meanwhile, construction of more sturdy and permanent housing for detainees should be speeded, and more outside observers given a closer look at the facilities that now exist. Most important, the administration should make clear that it will fully respect the Geneva Convention in its handling of all detainees. Doing so would not hamper its ability to prosecute al Qaeda and Taliban members for the crimes they have committed, and might not require any significant change in the treatment of the prisoners. It will, however, make clear that the United States upholds international human rights law -- and it would at least weaken the unnecessary international tempest that has raged over Guantanamo this week.
Seattle Times
What will befall the long-suffering Congolese next? The former Belgian colony has always been rich in potential, but fatefully short on good fortune.
The city of Goma, home to 300,000 people, has been cut in half by a river of lava from Mount Nyiragongo. The molten rock that forced a panicked evacuation has cooled to a solid mass several feet thick and hundreds of feet across.
Lava even polluted the town's water supply, Lake Kivu, and released noxious gases.
Goma's economy, such as it was, has been destroyed. Food is scarce, but the lack of water most frightens and drives international relief efforts.
Cholera is endemic in the region around Goma, and the scarcity of water for drinking and sanitation is fueling fears of another catastrophe reminiscent of 1994.
Goma sits on the border with Rwanda, and the town was overrun seven years ago with refugees fleeing the ethnic slaughter in that country. Cholera claimed nearly 25,000 lives in the town and makeshift refugee camps.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered its own ethnic massacres, an ongoing civil war, and a remoteness that complicates relief efforts. International aid agencies, the United Nations and many countries, including the United States, have responded -- but it's slow going.
The initial expectation was that refugees fleeing the lava would be helped in Rwanda, and that is where help was aimed. No one anticipated the powerful urge to return home that had Goma residents scampering across steaming lava flows to familiar ground.
Back in Goma, lava flows have separated relief agencies from their supplies and the areas of town they were assigned to help.
Among the Northwest relief organizations collecting donations is World Vision (worldvision.org). The agency is on the ground in Goma.
The Congo cannot buy a break, so it needs others willing to give it a break.
Boston Globe
To Americans who remember the origins of the U.S. war in Vietnam, there is something unnerving about the news that the Pentagon is sending 660 military advisers to help Philippine armed forces overcome the radical Islamic group known as Abu Sayyaf.
Abu Sayyaf has had links to Osama bin Laden's network and to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. But the isolated guerrilla group in the southern Philippines comprises not more than 2,000 members, including 200 core fighters.
Abu Sayyaf has degenerated into little more than a kidnapping gang. Indeed, one of the avowed objectives of the U.S. military trainers and the 5,000 Philippine soldiers arrayed against Abu Sayyaf is to free an American couple from Kansas and a Filipina nurse being held hostage by the guerrilla group. Because Philippine troops have lacked the transportation and communication equipment needed to eradicate the Abu Sayyaf gang, American assistance may be a welcome boon in the service of a worthy cause.
But freeing three hostages can hardly justify a military mission that could, if it became too muscular or too prolonged, provoke anti-American resentment in a country that was once a U.S. colony and that forced the Pentagon to abandon two major military bases 11 years ago. Not even the goal of disabling the fanatical Abu Sayyaf group can justify a U.S. combat role in the Philippines -- a role that would violate the Philippine Constitution. ...
Already the deployment of U.S. troops in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan under the banner of antiterrorism has begun to worry Russian and Chinese officials. If President Bush has no intention of reviving the far-flung commitments of the Cold War era under cover of a global antiterrorist war, he should make that clear to America's allies, clients, and rivals. And he should back up his assurances by withdrawing U.S. military advisers from the Philippines by next fall and assigning the next phase of the war against terrorism where it belongs: to intelligence and law enforcement professionals around the world.
(Compiled by United Press International.)
