National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 10

A10 WORLD NATIONAL POST, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2004 Iraq to sell off 1,497 Russian motorcycles ordered by Saddam's militia Feeling unsafe driving a car in occupied Iraq? Then try one of 1,497 Russian 650-cc Ural motorcycles on sale now and easily adapted for urban warfare at the local 1 welder. The once-feared Saddam Fedayeen militia and the Jerusalem Army paramilitary force ordered the Urals just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. By the timet the -equipped motorcycles Genocide's 'bad guy' is in doubt Hutus killed by Tutsis may account for half of victims STEVEN EDWARDS in New York research by U.S. acadeNoses is challenging the conventional understanding of the Rwandan genocide, which erupted 10 years ago today.

The study questions the commonly held view that most of the million or so victims were minority Tutsis targeted by extremists from the Hutu majority. Rather, it says as many Hutus may have died as Tutsis. By this analysis, as the rule of law broke down, many Rwandans felt free to engage in an orgy of political assassinations and settling of scores that accompanied and perhaps exceeded the genocidal rampages against Tutsis. Knowing who was slaughtered and why is important if similar tragedies are to be averted in future and if this week's memorial declarations of "never again" are to be taken at all seriously. The research will be welcomed by Hutus, who have been demonized by the perception they were the oppressors, rarely the victims.

But it has been angrily rejected by today's Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government, which has based many of its calls for huge reparations from the international community on claims the genocide is analogous to the Nazi slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust. "The current regime has a definite interest in classifying the slaughter as a genocide," says Christian Davenport, a political science professor at the University of Maryland and lead author of the study. "We are suggesting that there was much more to the tragedy. There was ethnic targeting, but there was also political and personal targeting, which doesn't have much of a platform for discussion when everyone i is calling the killings a genocide." Simple math raises doubts about conventional accounts, add Davenport and the study's co-author, Allan Stam, professor of government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. In 1994, Rwanda had 650,000 Tutsis, or of the population.

Most estimates say about 150,000 of them survived the three months of slaughter triggered by the assassination of the Hutu president, Habyarimana. If the frequently used figure of 800,000 is taken as approximating the total number of dead, about 300,000 Hutus and the tiny minority Twa would have been among the victims, the U.S. researchers say. Because the government of Paul Kagame frequently says at least one million died, the number of URBAN WARFARE Shite Muslim Baghdad slum area where U.S. troops have fought deadly clashes arrived, say officials at the state-owned General Vehicle Saddam Hus- with Iraqis.

"Weld on extra plates and a sein had been overthrown and they are in the process of being sold machine gun mount like the Fedayeen' reckon we'll see demand from Sadr City," said a salesman, referring to a used to and it's ready." Reuters Hutu and Twa deaths would have equalled or exceeded the number of Tutsi deaths. The researchers say the math is supported by their analysis of thousands of pages of survivors' accounts, along with testimony at the UN's war crimes court for Rwanda and Rwanda's traditional gacaca courts. Records show there were Tutsis who passed themselves off as Hutus, some even joining the marauding killers or manning roadblocks to search for Tutsi victims. They also show that in many areas, death squads arriving in search of victims were often directed to people Hutu or Tutsi against whom one official or another had a personal grievance. "People were fleeing the mass violence and sometimes getting caught up in it," Davenport says.

"The testimony reveals there was a tremendous amount of confusion where people had no idea who was coming to their house or what they would ask. "All this complexity and nuance is exactly what we've been trying to address. It directly challenges the very simplistic understanding that one particular group went after another particular group and eliminated them." The researchers say the lessons learned from the Rwandan slaughter are skewed if it is exclusively labelled a genocide despite the large part played by other factors. "If just ethnicity is involved, you would deploy peacekeeping forces according to ethnic distributions," Davenport explains. "But if political killings or squabbles over who owns what are behind a significant part of the violence, deployments have to take those factors into account as well and have to be made to political hot spots or areas of economic underdevelopment." The mass slaughter ended when Tutsi rebels led by Mr.

Kagame swept the Hutu extremists from the capital, Kigali, in July, 1994. One of Mr. Kagame's aides described the report as an "insult to survivors," but admitted the government had not yet read it. The standard portrayal of the Rwandan killings as purely a genocide has helped fuel criticism of the international community for not acting to prevent the slaughter by reinforcing the UN peacekeeping mission, as requested by its commander, Brigadier-General Dallaire of Canada. But Stam says it was far from being a matter of picking the "good guy." "If there are two bad guys that are both behaving bestially, then there is not one side that you can prop up," he says.

"That means the UN had to have been prepared to run the country after an intervention, and nobody was prepared for that." The United States, France and Belgium were the countries under most pressure to help. "If the killing was a case where you have two groups of people killing each other in enormous numbers because of a mixture of ethnic hatred, civil war, an ongoing political crisis, and where neighbours were simply killing each other to settle long-time scores, then it becomes much more difficult to look at the actions of the international community in such a reprehensible light." National Post del to Al 9 1 ATEF HASSAN REUTERS Iraqis surround a burned-out Land Rover near the southern city of Amara, where 15 Iraqis died in clashes with British troops overnight. We're not going to cut and run' WAR Continued from Page Al Surrounded by hundreds of his black-clad militiamen, Mr. alSadr issued a veiled call for more violence and said he was prepared to die in his drive to oust the U.S.led occupation. "America has shown its evil intentions and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it.

They must defend their rights by any means they see fit," Mr. al-Sadr said in a statement released by his office. "I'm prepared to have my own blood shed for what is holy to me." Though his militiamen have shown themselves to be capable fighters, staging an elaborate ambush in Baghdad on Sunday in which eight U.S. soldiers died, the depth of support for Mr. al-Sadr is a matter of debate.

The U.S. threat to arrest him has sparked the first major armed confrontation between the Americans and Shiites since the occupation began, but he is viewed by many Shiites as a renegade, too young and headstrong to lead wisely. Though another cleric in Iraq has referred to the Shiite violence as an "intifada" a term charged with emotion in the Muslim world U.S. officials appear to be betting most Shiites will continue to shun Mr. al-Sadr, averting the nightmare scenario of a wider Shiite uprising.

Speaking in Arkansas yesterday, George W. Bush, the U.S. President, suggested leaders of the Iraqi i insurgency have lived under oppression for so long they do not know how to live in freedom. "There's a lot of brave people there that want to be free, but they've been tortured and terrorized and traumatized by a tyrant and it's going to take a while for them to understand what freedom is all about," Mr. Bush said.

"We're not going to cut and run from the people who long for freedom." With the United States now battling resistance on two fronts in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld promised military commanders will get more troops if they ask for them. "They will decide what they need and they will get what they need," he said following a meeting with Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, the NATO Secretary-General. The United States has about 135,000 troops in Iraq and had planned to reduce the numbers to around 100,000 after the Bush administration hands over power to a transitional Iraqi government on June 30. Both Mr.

Rumsfeld and Mr. Scheffer played down the possibility NATO might take a formal military role in Iraq following the transition. "I would be delighted to see NATO take a larger role. I think realistically the queue would be for NATO to take a larger role in Afghanistan as we move forward, prior to taking a larger role in Iraq," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Mr. Scheffer said: "Afghanistan is NATO's number one priority." Mr. Bush has vowed to hand over power in Iraq as scheduled, but Democratie presidential rival John Kerry yesterday accused the President of making the decision for political reasons. "I have always said consistently that it is a mistake to set an arbitrary date and I hope that the date has nothing to do with the election here in the United States," Mr. Kerry said during a campaign stop in Cincinnati.

"The test ought to be the stability of Iraq and not an arbitrary date." In Falluja, Marines supported by Apache attack helicopters and an AC-130 gunship fought guerrillas, their faces covered by head scarves, as the sound of exploding artillery shells reverberated through the city. After throwing a cordon around the city and cutting the AmmanBaghdad highway, troops of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were immediately engaged in house-to-house fighting. The objective was to crush the strongholds of Sunni Muslim insurgents held responsible for the ambush of the four Americans last Wednesday that produced some of the most grisly images of the war: mob violence in which the bodies of the Americans were mutilated before two burned corpses were hanged from a bridge over the Euphrates River. "These people are specially tar- Radical cleric's arrest may inflame Shiites, experts warn WASHINGTON U.S. efforts to arrest Shiite cleric Mogtada alSadr could spark a wider Shiite uprising and undermine Washington's control of Iraq, analysts at two military schools warned.

Experts at the U.S. Army War College and the Naval Postgraduate School said Mr. al-Sadr appeared to be using his supporters' opposition to the U.S.-led occupation to stir a potentially explosive nationalist debate within Iraq's majority Shiite community. Stainless Avenue Lanes Aluminum Six architecturally distinctive townhomes ONLY FOUR LEFT! where Yorkville meets the Annex. Glass Starting from $799,000 Stone Ceramic Cherry Brick Laura Colligan 416 5d0.2080 John Fortney 416.816 4949 Slate David Harland 416.528.4149 on Quartz avenuetanes.com 11 geted to be captured or killed," Lieutenant Eric Knapp said.

Falluja has become the focus for guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces in the so-called "Sunni triangle" of central Iraq, and U.S. officers believe "pacifying" the city of 250,000 people is the key to restoring security over a swath of the country. In Nasiriya, 15 Iraqis were killed and 35 wounded in clashes between militiamen and Italian troops, coalition spokeswoman Paola Della Casa told an Italian news agency, Apcom. Eleven Italian soldiers were slightly wounded, a spokesman told The Associated Press.

Ms. Della Casa said the Iraqi attackers used civilians as human shields during the attack. She said a woman and two children were among the dead. Fighting overnight in Amara between Mr. al-Sadr's followers and British troops killed 15 Iraqis and wounded eight, coalition spokesman Wun Hornbyckle said.

Two Polish and three Bulgarian soldiers were wounded in a shootout near Karbala, a Polish military spokesman said. In Kut, militiamen attacked an armoured personnel carrier carrying Ukrainian soldiers, killing one and wounding five, the Defence Ministry said. Two militiamen were killed in the fight. In Baghdad, an American soldier was reported to have been killed in a rocket grenade attack in a Shiite neighbourhood. To date, 626 U.S.

soldiers have died in Iraq. The Daily Telegraph, CanWest News Service "To the extent he can mould BY DAVID MORGAN "Already, the idea of a young man, a cleric, standing up for justice against an overwhelming military machine has a lot of Shiite symbolism. It reminds me of the Iranian revolution," said Vali Nasr, professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. "The U.S. has to be very watchful.

Going into a Muslim shrine, going into Najaf, it can do what the Indian army's entry into Amritsar did," he said. He was referring to the storming of the Sikh Golden Temple by Indian troops in 1984, which led to the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Mr. al-Sadr, a radical cleric with tens of thousands of followers, was holed up in his office in the holy city of Najaf with armed supporters yesterday. U.S.

officials have vowed to arrest him on a warrant for the killing of a rival Shite cleric last year. Mr. al-Sadr's group has denied involvement. But experts said an arrest could help bolster his image as the Shiite community's leading nationalist figure and press more moderate clerics such as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to take tougher positions against the U.S. occupation.

into the propaganda that 'I'm the one who's really fighting for Iraqi nationalism while everyone else is it's going to make his standing within Iraqi politics much more formidable," said Andrew Terrill, national security research professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. Mr. al-Sadr represents an activist approach of the type that led to the 1979 overthrow of Iran's U.S.backed Shah. Ayatollah al-Sistani, his main Iraqi rival, reflects a lower-profile tradition in which clerics refrain from political action unless they perceive a threat. Reuters.