AT least 150 bodies have been recovered from wells following Muslim-Christian clashes in central Nigeria.
The estimated death toll from the clashes already stands at more than 300, a village head and volunteers say.
"So far we have picked 150 bodies from the wells. But 60 more people are still missing,'' Umar Baza, head of Kuru Karama village near the city of Jos, said today.
"We took an inventory of the displaced people from this village, sheltering in three camps, and we realise that 60 people can still not be accounted for,'' he added.
Head of the Muslim volunteer team in the village, Mohammed Shittu, said further searches would be carried out today.
"Now we have 150 bodies in all, taken from the wells as from Thursday. We are still going back there today to comb the bush around the village to search for more bodies,'' he also said.
"From the account of survivors, some people fleeing attacks were ambushed and killed in the bush. That is why we are going there to search for more bodies.
"We believe there are more bodies in the wells but the degree of their decomposition makes it difficult to continue the retrieval operation. We have therefore decided to sand-fill all the wells,'' Baza said.
The state government has given no official death toll for the violence, which broke out last Sunday in Jos, capital of Plateau State and later spread to nearby towns and villages.
Religious leaders and medical workers said they had counted about 300 bodies by Wednesday.
Global rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) today urged Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to order "an immediate criminal investigation into credible reports of a massacre of at least 150 Muslim residents of a town in central Nigeria''.
HRW said in a statement received in Lagos that witnesses said groups of armed men - believed to be Christians - attacked the largely Muslim population of Kuru Karama on Tuesday morning.
"After surrounding the town, they hunted down and attacked Muslim residents, some of whom had sought refuge in homes and a local mosque, killing many as they tried to flee and burning many others alive,'' the statement said.
A man has been sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for witchcraft because he makes predictions on television.
Ali Sibat is not even a Saudi national. The Lebanese citizen was only visiting Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage when he was arrested in Medina last year.
A court in the city condemned him as a witch on Nov. 9.
The only evidence presented in court was reportedly the claim he appeared regularly on Lebanese satellite issuing general advice on life and making predictions about the future.
The case is causing outrage among human rights campaigners but has made little news elsewhere despite the ludicrous nature of the charges and the extraordinary severity of Sibat's sentence.
"Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
"The crime of witchcraft is being used against all sorts of behavior, with the cruel threat of state sanctioned executions."
Ali Sibat's supporters say he was denied a lawyer at his trial and was tricked into making a confession.
He is not the only victim of Saudi Arabia's literal witch hunt. Human Rights Watch says two other people have been arrested on similar charges in the last month alone.
It claims a lower court in Jeddah started the trial of a Saudi this month who was arrested by the religious police and said to have smuggled a book of witchcraft into the kingdom.
In another case the religious police are said to have arrested for "sorcery" and "charlatanry" an Asian man accusing him of using supernatural powers to solve marital disputes and induce others to fall in love.
In 2006 a Jeddah court convicted an Eritrean national Muhammad Burhan for "charlatanry" because he possessed a phone book that contained writings in the Tigrinya alphabet used in Eritrea.
Israel received support from a most unlikely source Tuesday, with a harsh condemnation of the Human Rights Watch group by its own founder, Robert Bernstein.
Writing for The New York Times, he charged the group with “issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”
HRW was in the forefront of accusing Israel of war crimes in the three-week Operation Cast Lead counterterrorist campaign in Gaza, and has continually condemned Israeli retaliation for the thousands of Hamas rockets and other terrorist attacks on Israel.
Bernstein emphatically stated that “Hamas and Hezbollah…go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields,” a situation that was stated as largely unproven in the recent Goldstone report for the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Bernstein accused his own group’s leaders of knowing that “Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields.
They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve.”
Bernstein, who was chairman of the group until he stepped aside in 1998, pointed out that HRW has condemned Israel more than any other country.
Undermining the group's anti-Israeli stance, he stated that the Jewish State “is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties."
“Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent.” Bernstein echoed Israeli complaints that HRW has ignored “the plight of [Arab] citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide.”
“These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere,” he wrote. “This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
In what was a virtual repetition of Israeli government statements from the past several years, he noted that “There is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.
“In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers."
Three Jordanian men were charged on Tuesday with premeditated murder after allegedly stabbing to death their divorced sister as well as burning her body and house over her "bad reputation," police said.
"The three brothers all under 30, agreed to kill their 40-year-old sister on Sunday because she allegedly had a bad reputation," in Abu Alanda, in southeast Amman, a police spokesman told AFP.
"She was stabbed 15 times.
One of the three told police that the mother of five had a love affair with a man and that he found pictures of the woman sitting with her alleged lover."
The spokesperson said the suspects "burned the victim's body and set ablaze her house to cover the crime."
"They were arrested at hospital after being treated for burns. They confessed to the murder," he added.
Murder is punishable by the death penalty in Jordan but in the case of so-called "honour killings" a court usually commutes or reduces sentences, particularly if the victim's family urges leniency.
The US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged Jordan earlier this month to reform its penal code, which it says condones the murder of women as "honour crimes."
In the past, parliament has refused to institute harsher penalties.
Around 15-20 women are murdered each year in Jordan in the name of honour, despite government efforts to fight such crimes. So far this year, there have been 16 reported.
Two human rights groups say detainees held after disputed June 12 elections were sexually assaulted, tortured by Iranian interrogators
Human rights groups urged the UN General Assembly to appoint a special envoy to investigate abuses in Iran, alleging detainees held after disputed elections there have been raped and tortured.
Iran has called the allegations baseless.
Human Rights Watch and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran on Monday said about 400 prisoners remained in custody for their suspected involvement in election protests following the June 12 vote in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected.
The opposition says the poll was rigged.
As many as 72 Iranians have been killed by government forces since the election, and several have been tortured and sexually abused, the groups alleged in a news conference near United Nations headquarters.
"Member states of the United Nations should use (Ahmadinejad's) upcoming visit to the UN General Assembly to address Iran's Human rights crisis," the groups said in a statement.
Ahmadinejad was due to address the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, with several groups preparing to protest his presence at UN headquarters in New York.
Ebrahim Sharifi, a 24 year-old computer science student from Tehran, said he was among the prisoners questioned, beaten and raped by Iranian interrogators during a harrowing week of detention in late June.
"He tied my hands to a handcuff that was connected to the wall, tied my feet, and pulled down my underwear," Sharifi said of his interrogator, speaking to reporters by phone. "He then sexually assaulted me."
Sharifi spoke from from Turkey, where he fled last month after he said Iranian intelligence officials threatened to kill his family.
The alleged sexual abuse of detainees has become an incendiary subject in highly religious Iran. Defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karoubi is among opposition members who have raised allegations that political detainees are being abused.
Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani has received and dismissed at least 100 reports of sexual abuse carried out on political detainees, said Hadi Ghaemi, a coordinator for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
As U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill testifies before Congress today, Iraqi's security is far from assured. Militias now targetting the socially marginalized could soon take their killing spree mainstream.
When my colleague and I sat down last April with Hamid, an Iraqi man from Baghdad, his trauma-induced stutter said as much as the words he spoke.
Huddled inconspicuously in a dingy restaurant, Hamid recounted how militia members killed his partner along with three other men, two kidnapped from their Baghdad homes, two slaughtered in the streets. The next day, Hamid said, "they came for me. They came into my house and they saw my mother, and one of them said, 'Where's your faggot son?' My mother called me after they left, in tears. ... I can't go home."
As the world hails Iraq's supposed return to normality, the country's militias -- the same ones that spent years waging a sectarian civil war -- have found a new, less apparent target: men suspected of being gay.
The systematic killings, which began earlier this year, reveal the cracks behind Iraq's fragile calm. Iraq's leaders may talk of security and democracy from behind barbed wire in the Green Zone, but the surge of murders against gay men is a stark sign of how far Iraqi society still has to go.
During a 10-day Human Rights Watch research trip to Iraq in April, we heard harrowing stories of torture, abductions, kidnappings, extortion, and murder. We listened to dozens of men who had faced violence at the hands of armed militias, attacked by youths with guns for violating the unwritten codes of Iraqi masculinity.
A number of signs might implicate one as being not "manly" enough, from neighborhood gossip that a man is gay to looking somehow effeminate or foreign in the wrong people's eyes: wearing one's hair too long or one's jeans too tight, for example. There is no count available for the number of deaths since the killings began earlier this year, but one U.N. worker told us that the victims could number in the hundreds.
Maybe it was the fact the latest revelation that the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division, Joe Stork, had praised the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that finally forced some introspection at the organization, but two members of the Human Rights Watch board have now broken ranks with their own organization to criticize the obvious bias in its handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Allison Hoffman buries the lede in her article for Tablet, but it doesn't matter -- she's got the goods:
At a time when Jews are anxious about how Israel will fare in negotiations with the Obama administration over a peace deal with the Palestinians, the Stork and Whitson affairs present an unfamiliar problem to HRW: how to reassure liberal Jews, including HRW’s founder and one of its current board members, worried that the organization is playing into the hands of anti-Israel activists from New York to Riyadh. Whether or not its staff actively seek out ways to target Israel, as Netanyahu’s office claims, by appearing to focus so many of its resources on Israel—five reports have been issued already since the Gaza War, three of them criticizing the IDF’s conduct, and another report about Israel’s “wanton destruction” is forthcoming—and by hiring people like Stork and Whitson, HRW, under executive director Ken Roth, leaves those doubts unanswered. “Ken feels their facts are right, and the critics are wrong, next case,” said Sid Sheinberg, the former Hollywood mogul and vice-chair of HRW’s board. “I don’t believe that’s the way the Israelis should be treated.”...
“They frequently say, ‘We’re trying to be evenhanded,’” said Robert Bernstein, the founder of Helsinki Watch and now a board member emeritus at HRW. “I don’t understand trying to be evenhanded, because to me Israel is interested and a believer in human rights and it stands out in the Middle East as practicing it in their country.” Read more here ...
Civilians ducking for cover at the sound of a siren
Human Rights Watch publishes new report on Islamist group's attacks on Israel since November '08; says Hamas violated international law by targeting civilian population in south, unnecessarily risking Palestinian civilians in Strip
A new Humans Right Watch report determined Thursday that Hamas rocket fire on Israel's south constitutes a war crime.
The 25-page report documents rocket fire from the Gaza Strip towards Israel starting November 2008 – a period when three Israelis were killed and dozens of others injured as a result of projectiles.
The report states that the rocket fire caused extensive damage and forced people out of their homes.
Contrary to international law, the fire was aimed at civilian population within a 25-mile radius, endangering some 800,000 Israelis.
During the same time period, several rockets fired at Israel landed on the Palestinian side of the security fence, killing two girls and injuring numerous other Palestinians.
Moreover, said the report, armed militants firing rockets from densely populated areas in the Strip were putting Palestinian civilians in harms way by risking Israeli counter-strikes, thus grossly breaching the rules of war.
The report further states that Hamas rocket fire on Israeli civilians is illegal, unjustified and constitutes a war crime.
As the ruling authority in the Gaza Strip, it added, Hamas must publicly renounce rocket fire on populated Israeli areas, and punish those responsible for it, including members of Hamas' own military wings.
According to internationally accepted Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), anyone who sanctions and/or initiates indiscriminate or direct attacks on civilian population is guilty of war crimes.
The report focuses on events which occurred from November 2008 and on, which is when the Palestinian militant groups renewed their fire on southern Israel.
Home damaged by Grad rocket
Human Rights Watch based its report on eyewitness reports, field reports and various media reports.
The brief details many cases in which Israelis and Palestinians were killed or injured as a result of Hamas fire, but nevertheless, it states that it found no deliberate pattern by Hamas, to use civilians as human shields.
Still, HRW did find that the Palestinian groups systematically breached the LOAC code by failing to take every possible precaution to avoid putting Gazans at risk.
Hamas' military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has claimed the attacks which resulted in three Israeli deaths.
The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades and Islamic Jihad's al-Quds Brigades claim they fired 820 rockets on Israel during Operation Cast Lead in early 2009.
The incessant, years-long rocket fire on Israel's south, concluded the report, has taken a serious psychological toll on the area's residents.
The rules of war prohibit launching attacks aimed solely at terrorizing civilian population.
A grave injustice is being committed against the Palestinian people -- perhaps among the greatest in their history. Thousands are being systematically robbed of their citizenship, made stateless once more by a hard-hearted government that pays lip service to peace and the two-state solution, but which seems determined to undermine both.
Israel? No -- the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the monarchy that occupied the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 and which has long had an uneasy relationship with its Palestinian majority. Now, cynically claiming that it has the Palestinians' best interests at heart, the regime of King Abdullah II has begun removing the citizenship of Palestinians with roots in the West Bank.
Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads:
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
The Jordanian policy is a clear violation of these fundamental rights. Thus far, it has been met with protest in Amman and mild complaint from the Jordanian media. Yet the rest of the world has been silent.
That includes the world's leading human rights organizations. As of this writing, the front page of Amnesty International's website features an appeal for Israel to cooperate with the UN's "independent" fact-finding mission on Gaza, but nothing on Jordan. Human Rights Watch, which recently bashed Israel for the benefit of donors in Saudi Arabia, has yet to react.
The official explanation given for the decision to revoke the citizenship of Jordanians of Palestinian origin is that Jordan wants to send a signal to the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu: Jordan will not allow Israel to "resettle" Palestinians in Jordan. Never mind that the people who are losing their citizenship were "resettled" in Jordan decades ago.
It seems probable that the real motive of the Jordanian decision is to entrench the control of the Hashemite monarchy to stave off demands for democratic reform. The rise of democracy in Iraq and the recent protests in the streets of Tehran have created new expectations that the region's autocrats are desperate to subdue.
So, too, with Jordan. Though it is among the more liberal Arab states and enjoys both peace with Israel and free trade with the U.S., the monarchy is fragile. Its decision to strip Palestinians of their citizenship puts the peace process at risk by creating the false expectation that Israel will absorb millions of Palestinians currently outside its borders. Yet that is a risk the monarchy seems prepared to take to protect itself.
The Kingdom's decision may be also regarded as a response to President Barack Obama's new Middle East policy. Emboldened by Obama's harsh approach to Israel and his meek support for democratic movements in the region, Jordan has taken the opportunity to restore "stability," using Palestinians once again as the political pawns of the Arab world.
Neither Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- voluble in recent days on the need for Israeli concessions and "self-reflection" -- has criticized Jordan, though the U.S. has a great deal of leverage there. The Palestinian diaspora, so quick to protest when Israel defends itself against Hamas terror, is nowhere to be seen.
When Netanyahu appointed Avigdor Lieberman as his foreign minister, there was global alarm. Lieberman was already notorious for his radical and reprehensible suggestion in 2004 that Israel might one day strip its Arab citizens of their citizenship. Yet now Jordan has begun to do exactly that, and the world has encouraged it through stark indifference.
The issue ought to be an urgent priority for the UN Human Rights Council. Ironically, Jordan was re-elected to a seat on the council in May -- the same election that saw the U.S. join the council as well. If U.S. membership is to mean anything more than a legitimization of the council's anti-Israel bias, it must raise the issue of Palestinians in Jordan before the council's next session opens in September.
Until then, this episode serves as a reminder not only of the casual disregard of Palestinian human rights in the Arab world, and the anti-Israel bias of much of the human rights community, but also of the risks of subjecting American prerogatives to the judgment of international institutions run by countries that violate at home what they try to enforce abroad.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, prevents the government from depriving any American of his or her citizenship. Theoretically, Jordanian citizens enjoy constitutional rights of their own, but the Jordanian constitution begins its section on rights with a disclaimer: "Jordanian Nationality shall be defined by law."
For the Palestinians of Jordan, their country's leadership in the UN Human Rights Council and subscription to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are of little use or comfort against the arbitrary powers of their government and the passivity of the international community. As the U.S. takes its seat on the council, theirs is a sobering example, and a warning worth remembering.
Joel B. Pollak is a recent Harvard Law graduate and the author of Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter: How Rhetoric Won the 2008 Presidential Election.
A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?
No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel.
An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations." (Was Ms. Whitson required to wear a burkha, or are exceptions made for visiting anti-Israel "human rights" activists"? Driving a car, no doubt, was out of the question.)
Apparently, Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record. But never fear, HRW "recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers.
There is nothing wrong with a human rights organization worrying about maltreatment of domestic workers. But there is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country.
In fact, it's a virtual certainty that everyone in Whitson's audience employs domestic servants, giving her a perfect, untaken opportunity to boast about HRW's work in improving the servants' status. But Whitson wasn't raising money for human rights, she was raising money for HRW's propaganda campaign against Israel.
Someone who claims to have worked for HRW wrote to me, "I can tell you that the people on the research and policy side of the organization have little, if any, contacts with people on the donor side." If that's true, apparently this is yet another exception HRW makes for Israel: Ms. Whitson, who gave the presentation to potential Saudi donors, is director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division.
Also, as a Nathan Wagner comments at Opinio Juris: "Surely there is a moral difference between raising funds in free nations through appeals to ideals of universal human rights and raising money in repressive nations through appeals highlighting pressure brought against their enemies. [Moreover], the former type of fundraising does not imperil the organization's mission, but fundraising Bernstein highlights does, since any significant reliance on such funds will necessarily mute criticism of the repressive government."
Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel.
The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."
Mr. Bernstein is a professor of law at George Mason University and the author of "You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Anti-Discrimination Laws." This article first appeared on the Volokh Conspiracy web site.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles invited select members of the Iranian American opposition to petition the United Nations Security Council to expeditiously intervene on human rights in Iran.
A panel of prominent professors, activists, spiritual and political leaders spoke out against the United States’ calculated hesitation and for fervent support of the protestors. These community members came together to discuss, analyze and propose an accurate solution to engage the international community and to diminish the world’s silence toward Iran.
“The Iranian people have already taken their fate into their own hands. All they need is moral support,” said Hamid Arabzadeh, a professor from the University of California Irvine.
“Twitter, the blogs, are the virtual ships that stopped on these shores 60 years ago and were turned away. What we are asking is not to turn the ships of the Iranian people away,” he said pointing around at the walls of the venue, the Museum of Tolerance, a museum commemorating the Holocaust. Arabzadeh was referring to events that took place during World War II. Read more ...
An Iranian woman holds up a picture of the latest crackdown by Iranian police on reformist protesters in Tehran
June 17
FRENCH President Nicolas Sarkozy has branded Iran's election result a fraud as the international outcry over the security forces' crackdown on the opposition in Tehran intensifies.
Governments from Asia to Europe and the Americas voiced concern about the violence that erupted on Monday during rallies protesting the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election with US President Barack Obama saying he had “deep concerns” but did not want to meddle in Iran's affairs.
Australia's Foreign Minister Stephen Smith expressed his disquiet over “images of serious human rights abuses that we've seen on camera and in photos”.
In Japan, Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone said his country was “extremely concerned” about the situation.
Sarkozy said the unrest was a direct result of Ahmadinejad's failings in his first term.
“The extent of the fraud is proportional to the violent reaction,” the French leader today.
“It is a tragedy, but it is not negative to have a real opinion movement that tries to break its chains,” Sarkozy said.
“If Ahmadinejad has really made progress since the last election and if he really represents two thirds of the electorate ... why has this violence erupted?”
At least seven people were killed on Monday in street battles between the security forces and supporters of Iran's former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi who claim that their man was cheated of victory in Friday's poll.
Protesters took to the streets in capitals across Europe, including in London where hundreds outside the Iranian embassy demanded Tehran authorities “give our vote back” and “stop shooting people in Iran”.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said questions about the validity of the vote's outcome needed to be answered and that the violent scenes threatened Iran's standing.
“The regime must address the serious questions which have been asked about the conduct of the Iranian elections,” said Brown.
“The way the regime responds to legitimate protests will have implications for Iran's relationships with the rest of the world in the future.”
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said there “must be an end to the violence carried out by the security forces on demonstrators” while his Dutch counterpart Maxime Verhagen summoned the Iranian charge d'affaires.
“It cannot be that peaceful demonstrations are broken up violently,” a statement issued by his office said.
Rights groups also denounced the bloody crackdown with the New York-based Human Rights Watch saying the Ahmadinejad government “has a responsibility to stop the use of unlawful force against protesters”.
Despite the welter of criticism, Iran remained defiant and diplomats from Britain and the Czech Republic - the current holders of the EU presidency - were summoned in protest.
“Neither the European Union nor other countries are in a position to have the right to make rude and interfering remarks against Iran, especially about our glorious election,” Czech charge d'affaires Josef Havlas was told.
Obama meanwhile said he would not meddle in internal Iranian politics - reflecting a more widespread reluctance of governments to be sucked into the maelstrom.
“I have said before that I have deep concerns about the election. I think that the world has deep concerns about the election,” Obama said.
“It is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling - the US president meddling in Iranian elections.”
The government in Russia - Iran's key ally - said it was not up to outsiders to judge what was going on in Iran.
“The issue of the elections in Iran is an internal affair of the Iranian people,” Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, where Ahmadinejad was attending a summit.
In defiant comments there, Ahmadinejad sent a message to the West: “The international capitalist order is retreating ... It is absolutely obvious that the age of empires has ended and its revival will not take place.”
EU states are split on whether to follow a US-Australian boycott of a controversial UN conference on racism in Geneva, where Iran's president is expected to launch a verbal onslaught on Israel.
Germany became the latest country to announce it would not be attending the five-day Durban Review Conference, joining Australia, Canada, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands and the US.
But it did hold out the possibility of joining the event later in the week.
France, on the other hand, will attend, said a source close to President Nicolas Sarkozy's office.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Geneva Sunday, one of the few heads of state attending.
Mr Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and questioned the Holocaust as a “myth”, is to address the gathering later today.
Earlier yesterday, Mr Ahmadinejad, who is seeking re-election in June, was quoted by Iran's state broadcaster as saying “the Zionist ideology and regime are the flag bearers of racism”.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yossi Levy denounced the event as a “tragic farce.”
The Geneva meeting is meant to take stock of progress in fighting racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance since the controversial World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, eight years ago.
But Mr Levy said: “Officially it is aimed at denouncing racism, but it has invited a Holocaust denier who has called for the destruction of Israel.”
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said they could not be sure the conference would be used “as a platform to air offensive views, including anti-Semitic views.”
US President Barack Obama said anti-Israeli language that was “oftentimes completely hypocritical and counterproductive” in the draft final communique had been the red line for his administration.
European Union governments were divided over whether or not to attend.
Belgium called for countries to attend after the Netherlands vowed to stay away because it feared the event would be abused “for political ends and attacks on the West.”
Britain, while expressing reservations, said it still intended to attend.
And a source close to Mr Sarkozy's office said: “France will go to Geneva... in order to articulate its standpoint on human rights issues.”
But Italy has confirmed its withdrawal.
The Paris-based European Jewish Congress kept up the pressure, calling on all EU states to boycott the event. Mr Ahmadinejad's presence meant the United Nations had “put the fox in charge of the hen house,” said EJC president Moshe Kantor.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an international Jewish human rights group, specifically called on Germany to pull out.
Germany will be staying away _ at least at first.
Their concern was that the conference would be “hijacked for other interests, as was the case with the previous one in 2001,” said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Germany would be “a very attentive observer” when the conference got under way, he said, and he did not rule out their “returning to active participation a little later.”
Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz met Mr Ahmadinejad in Geneva late yesterday, his office said and raised the issue of jailed US-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi.
Switzerland has been representing US consular interests in Iran since Tehran and Washington broke off diplomatic relations in 1980.
Ms Saberi was sentenced by an Iranian revolutionary court to eight years in jail on charges of spying for the US during a closed-door trial, in a verdict unveiled at the weekend.
The meeting took place despite Israel's attempts to talk Mr Merz out of it.
Monday, as well as being the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, also marks the start of Holocaust commemoration events, including a ceremony in Geneva attended by leading Jewish figures including Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said she was “shocked and deeply disappointed” by Washington's decision to stay away.
Campaigners Human Rights Watch said the boycotting states were “turning their backs” on victims of racism.
SIXTEEN policemen in China's Muslim-majority north-west were killed today in a suspected terrorist attack, raising security fears four days before the Beijing Olympics. In one of the deadliest reported attacks in China in years, two men drove a truck up to the police station in Kashgar city aiming for a group of officers carriying out morning fitness exercises, Xinhua news agency said.
The two got off the vehicle and threw two grenades at the station, moving in to hack at police officers with knives, it said.
Fourteen officers died on the spot, and two others lost their lives on the way to hospital, it said.
Both attackers were arrested, one of them with a leg injury sustained during the raid, according to Xinhua.
“The raid ... was suspected as a terrorist attack,” the agency said, citing local police.
The incident threw a shadow over the Olympic countdown, after repeated warnings in recent months from the Chinese government that militants from the restive Xinjiang region were planning to stage attacks to wreck the Games.
The Beijing Olympic organisers said they did not know yet if there was a direct connection to the showpiece sporting event, which begins on Friday.
“We have to check,” spokesman Sun Weide said when asked if there was any link to the Olympics.
International Olympic Committee spokeswoman Giselle Davies said the IOC had no immediate comment on the incident but expressed confidence authorities were doing all they could to provide a safe and secure Games.
In line with the flow of information in China surrounding security issues, reports were released only through official channels, while local authorities denied any knowledge of the event.
“We don't have any information about it. We have not heard of this matter,” a police spokesman in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi said when contacted about the initial report. He declined to give his name.
“Everything has returned to normal,” an official with the Kashgar People's Armed Police said by telephone. He declined any other comment.
China has warned repeatedly of a major terrorist threat emanating from Xinjiang.
“The Beijing Olympics is facing a terrorist threat unsurpassed in Olympic history,” the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, said in an editorial last month.
China's state media carry only sporadic reports about violence in Xinjiang, making it difficult to determine the extent of the threat in the region.
Rights groups and members of the ethnic Muslim Uighur population in Xinjiang have accused the government of exaggerating the threat as a cover to crack down on all forms of dissent.
However, observers said they believed this could be the deadliest incident of its kind yet.
“If 16 people died, I would think that this is the highest casualty ever reported for an incident,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher with Human Rights Watch and an expert on Xinjiang.
Xinjiang, a vast area that borders Central Asia, has about 8.3 million Uighurs, and many are unhappy with what they say has been six decades of repressive Chinese rule.
China has deployed more than 100,000 security personnel to provide security for the Games, which run from August 8-24.
A senior official said last week the main Olympic threats were from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in Xinjiang, forces seeking Tibetan independence, the banned Falun Gong spiritual group and overseas pro-democracy forces.
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AT least 150 bodies have been recovered from wells following Muslim-Christian clashes in central Nigeria. 
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