The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 23

23 The Observer 26 January 1997 US doctors gear up in new abortion war Martin Walker's America What's election of Bill Clinton and failed legal attempts to block terminations, are resorting again to terrorist action. Already 1997 has seen more violent incidents than the whole of 1996, with a bombing if Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as the Atlanta attack. A New Orleans doctor lost four pints of blood after being stabbed. This week Atlanta police described the two bombs which exploded on 16 January, injuring six people, as particularly nasty. 'The magnitude of the first explosion was designed to destroy the three-storey said Fulton County police chief Louis Graham.

'And the magnitude of the second was designed to kill The first explosion took out reinforced concrete. The second bomb, detonated an dicting a return to the dark years of 1993 and 1994, when doctors and clinic workers were killed in Florida' and Massachusetts, the pro-choice lobby is increasingly worried by signs of greater organisation among militant pro-lifers. A year ago a group broke off from Benham's Operation Rescue to form the American Coalition of Life Activists. The coalition has been linked to the Army of God, which has produced a handbook describing the best methods for fire-bombing clinics. 'These incidents are not the work of random says Vicki Saporta.

"They are linked and well-organised. 'You are always waiting for the next outbreak of says Beth Pezelt. 'You never kid yourself it is going to by Richard Thomas Washington A YOUNG woman walked into Beth Petzelt's Atlanta office a week ago, clutching a resignation letter. Petzelt understood her motives for quitting a job in her abortion clinic: another centre had been almost flattened by two huge explosions. "It ispretry frightening, Petzelt, director of the Atlanta Surgical Centre, told the Observer.

'Especially for the young ones, who might have been lulled into a false sense of security The veterans of the abortion war are bracing themselves for a renewed bout of violence after a year of relative calm. Pro-lifers, frustrated by the re between pals: tostov Upper a siaeow casts over But the combination of Clinton's return to the White House and last week's 24th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling legalising abortion has proved too much, reckons Petzelt. Clinton's veto last year of the controversial 'partial-birth' procedure Dictation and Extraction (DNX) also infuriated pro-life groups. In Washington this week, Republicans promised to have another go at getting the Bill through. But if Clinton is unpopular, then his feminist wife is the Antichrist in the eyes of groups like the Army of God and Operation Rescue.

'We are at the very gates of hell itself, where child sacrifice takes said Rescue's director, Flip Benham. Although no one is yet pre to warnings or rumours. One serial rapist currently held by Rostov police, known as 'the electrician' after his doorstep disguise, is accused of raping more than 40 women and girls. 'People become afraid when these things keep repeating said deputy school director Tatiana Niki-tinko. 'It's dark in winter, and parents come to meet their children.

We are all worried. If we know they are not being met, we don't let them While on remand, Mukhankin began to write feverishly in school jotters. He developed a passionate affection for Yandiyev, referring to him as 'father-investigator'; and made him a present of the jotters, containing a complex narrative of confession and. self-justification, written in the present tense. Alexander Luxemburg, a foreign literature professor at Rostov University who is 33 1m mm and a bombing victim, right Saporta said.

Ironically the Atlanta bombing happened as the federation issued data showing a drop in violence against clinics in the past two years, with 110 incidents in 1996, compared with 158 the previous year and 160 in 1994. Ten days ago it seemed the 'anti-choice' brigade was beginning to stick to placard waving. ence to spread throughout Chikatilo was questioned after his first murder, but released. Only in 1982 did investigators begin to treat the killings as the work of a single individual. In 1984 he was arrested, held on remand and released the next year to kill 22 new victims.

Revisiting the scene this week, almost 20 years on, Colonel Gennady Kravchuk of Shakhty CID, then a young detective, seemed curiously dismissive. 'We don't have any of these maniacs in town he said curtly. Yet it was in the same stream that Chikatilo's self-proclaimed successor, Mukhankin, dumped the bodies of some of his victims. In the nearby school, once attended by Chikatilo's daughter children receive special instructions on how to deal with strangers, and teachers are constantly alert James Meek in Rostov-on-Don on the man who claims to have cracked the criminal minds of serial killers Extreme issue: Pro-life, left, hour later, contained hundreds of three-inch nails. Vicki Saporta, head of the National Abortion Federation, has issued a stream of notices to clinics calling for tighter security.

Across the country doctors are again donning bullet-proof jackets. 'We have asked law enforcement agencies to increase their surveillance of whether a suspect has committed a crime somewhere else in the 14 former Soviet republics. There is chronic rivalry between the police and investigators from the prosecutor's department which blights difficult cases to this day the two sides bicker about who really tracked down Chikatilo. But in Rostov both work with psychiatrists, and carry' out basic procedures like house-to-house questioning. In other regions, 'they just go through the said Yandiyev.

Tt was very fortunate for Russia that this unique system was set up in said Prof Bukhanovsky. 'Formally, we are separate from CID and the prosecutor's department, but informally we understand each other, we see each other, and we learn a lot from each other. We have all begun to think the same way. But it will take years for Rostov's experi "'i 1 Roman Burtsev, who was sent to trial in Rostov last week, and one of the six children he la accused of killing. using the jotters to write a bopk with Yandiyev, said there was still a reluctance in Russia to believe that violent sexual crime is a universal human problem.

'Even in the days of Stalin, we had serial killers; though we did not know about them because the idea of social stability precluded publication of such he said, 'Our investigators, and ordinary people, are still not very well informed. It used, tp be something exotic for Russian readers: they thought such things happened in the West but were absoiuteiy impossible here. VV: 'Nowadays, there is another problem rPeople are convinced that these things are connected to dmemtisatioh, that it's the democrats' mult that people started killing and dismembering women. They want a hew Stalin to come arid make order It's IS A funny kind of confrontation and a fishy kind of settlement when both the bailiff and the defaulting debtor shake frauds and smile with all goodwill, but no money changes hands. The atmosphere for what felt almost like a state visit from the new United Nations Secretary-General was so determinedly cordial that you almost had to pinch yourself to remember what was at stake.

ft began as soon as Kofi Annan and Ms Swedish wife, Nane, arrived on Wednesday evening, with a reception at Blair House hosted by Al Gore. The main centre for presidential entertainment Blair House is just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House and the party for Annan became a celebration for the new Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright Annan owes Ms job to -Albright's determination to get rid of Boutros Boutros-Ghali or, as she puts it to remind the Secretary-General 'of Ms solemn undertaking to serve no more than one term'. Gore waxed suitably gushy to Annan about, how 'we respect you for the person you are and the leader you have become you are among friends'. Then Annan went off to a very special dinner, and those There are times when the UN should defy vhat the Americans want userui scantnnavrans came same not for the first time to the rescue of the UN. The new Secretary-General is married to Nans Lagregren, a former legal adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

She just happens to be a Wallenberg, which in Sweden is like being simultaneously a Satnsbury and a Cecil Her mother was half-sister to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who managed to save about 100,000 of Hungary's Jews from Hitler's death camps before lie disappeared into Stalin's gulag. One of the Jews Wallenberg saved was a 16-year-old in the anti-Hitler underground called Tom Lantos. Wallenberg got him a Schutz-pass, a Swedish protection passport and into one of several 'Swedish houses' Wallenberg established in Budapest with a dangerously thtn claim that they were diplomatic premises. Lantos came to the US, and was in 1980 elected Congressman for San Mateo county, the peninsula connecting San Francisco to the rest of California, and about as liberal as a US constituency gets. So Annan's United Nations has one particularly dedicated Mend in the US Congress, thanks to the Wallenberg connection.

Then Annan was given the White House treatment with one of BiH Clinton's special double-grip handshakes that are meant to accord blood-brother status. Later, Annan went up to Capitol Hill to see the Republican leaders, Senator Trent Lott and Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is not in the least chastened by Ms reprimand and fine for 'reckless and repeated' violations of the House etMcs rules. This was Newt's week for giving history lessons. Did you know who Senator Van-denberg was? An old Republican isolationist who made common cause with the Democrat Dean Aeheson after 1945 to build Nato and the Marshall Plan in a joint effort to stop the Commies. Aeheson? Legendary Secretary of State.

Visionary and internationalist figure, whose reward after a weekend dreaming up the Truman Doctrine (wMch saved the West) was to mix himself a pitcher of martinis. 1 intend to be the Senator Vandenberg to Madeleine Albright's Dean said Gingrich, revealing yet again the largest ego not in captivity. Annan has been overwhelmed by courtesy and goodwill and the seductive intimacies of the great wMch are just as useful a diplomatic tooLas gunships and missiles when you know how to use these charms as well as Cmiton. As Annan left Washington on Friday afternoon, after what he is convinced was a successful visit to a government wMch owes the UN $1.4 billion, his parting words were: 'Some may say I'm naive because I haven't got the cheque yet But I'm certain it "win The money will come, sure enough, in dribs and grudging drabs, so long as the UN does what the US Congress wants. But the United Nations belongs to aD six billion of us on the planet It should not just be a useful diplomatic figleaf for the self-indulgent 250 million whose vast and stupendously endowed land expects overmuch for the privilege of playing host to the only world body we have.

There are times when the UN should defy what the Americans want as the world should have defied Clinton's fit of the post-Somalia vapours and sent peacekeepers to Rwanda as soon as the UN observers began sending back reports of genocide: And the really good news is that the UN appears to be getting a rapid reaction force of its own. Under a Danish-Dutch-Canadian initiative, the headquarters company and staff of aMultinational UN Stand-by-Forces High Readiness Brigade will be in business by the end of March. Norway and Sweden and Poland and Austria have agreed to join in. By the end of next year, some 5,000 trained and equipped troops with light armour and helicopters and field hospitals and special engineering facilities should be available to be deployed anywhere within 14 days of the Security Council giving the mandate. Denmark's thoughtful Defence Minister, Hans Hak-kerup (who has a son with the Danish peacekeepers in Bosnia), tells me that the brigade was midwifed by Annan when he ran the UN peacekeeping operation.

To have such a brigade on hand would for the first time give UN blue helmets the prospect of fast and effective intervention so long as the Americans and Russians provide the strategic airlift they alone'possess. Annan is not nearly so naive, nor so much its man, as Washington seems to think. The UN is developing a tool wMch may not be utterly dependent on the US, even as Annan is using the American menace to force the internal reforms that many in the UN bureaucracy have been dreaming of for years. book for THE YOUNG man was anonymity personified, the kind whose face merges into a blur in the memories of witnesses, neither blond nor dark, neither short nor tall, in a cheap khaki anorak and scarf. He stood awkwardly in the doorway of Professor Alexander Bukhanovsky's waiting room, his head a little bowed, like a mm on some errand other than his own.

This is how the killers in embryp come to Prof Bukhan-ovsky, like murderers to a priestly confession, except that those who consult Russia's most famous expert on the criminal mind tend to be tormented more by what they might do rather than what they have already done. He has a sadistic feeling towards said Prof Bukh-anovsky of the latest visitor. 'This is a future serial killer. I don't know his name or anything about him I've made an appointment for him at 4.30pm. Well cure Prof Bukhanovsky, who achieved world renown after producing a startlingly accurate profile of the world's worst mass murderer, Andrei Chikatilo, the Ttostov says his reputation for confidentiality draws in his shadowy pilgrims and, he believes, saves lives.

'A priest must not betray a confessor to the forces of law and order, and I believe psychiatrists should have the same It seems the times have found the man. For in the Rostov region, some 600 miles south of Moscow between the north Caucasus and Ukraine, the killings continue. Chikatilo, a former teacher and state supply agent, was executed by firing squad in February 1994 after President Boris Yeltsin refused a final appeal The 58-year-old had been convicted of killing 35 children and 17 women over a 12-year period, mutilating and sexually abusing them and in some cases eating parts of their bodies. Even while the trial was going on police were hunting if mm another serial killer in the port of Taganrog. Yuri Tsu-man, the 'black tights murderer', was caught and convicted of raping and murdering five women.

He has been sitting in Rostov's death row for four years. He has just been joined by Vladimir Muihankm, who in under three months took eight lives. He told investigators he mod-elled himself on Chikatilo. This week, prosecutors handed over for trial the case of 25-year-old Roman Burtsev, accused of sexually abusing and murdering six young children between 1993 and 1996. Even before the Russian Revolution, Rostov and Odessa, the great southern ports and railway junctions, had a reputation as 'criminal' towns: in countless popular songs they were known as Rostov-Papa and Odessa-Mama, romanticised of banditry and prostitution.

There was never much truth in it. And Rostov's unhappy reputation today as a breeding ground for psychopathic murderers emerges from a very different background the sprawling, claustrophobic mining towns to the north of the region, bleak and introverted enough in Soviet times and now abandoned to their own devices by the outside world. These opaque communities, in thrall to a single industry, at once overcrowded and lifeless, exist all across Russia. And this leads Rostov's crime experts to a frightening conclusion: it is not that Rpstov has a special problem, it is simply that, thanks to experience gained in the Chikatilo case, Rostov identifies its mass murderers. Other regions will never find theirs and they will go on killing.

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