MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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United Nations

When David is the Goliath

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Israel Has Killed 3 Times As Many Civilians As They Have Hamas Fighters

Gaza Children Found With Mothers’ Corpses By ALAN COWELL

PARIS — The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday it had discovered “shocking” scenes — including small children next to their mothers’ corpses — when its representatives gained access for the first time to parts of Gaza battered by Israeli shelling. It accused Israel of failing to meet obligations to care for the wounded in areas of combat.

(Photo by Hatem Moussa/Associated Press) Palestinians gathered to receive flour at a United Nations food distribution center in Gaza City on Thursday.

(Photo by Hatem Moussa/Associated Press) Palestinians gathered to receive flour at a United Nations food distribution center in Gaza City on Thursday.

In response, the Israeli military did not comment directly on the allegation. In a statement, it accused Hamas, its foe in Gaza, of deliberately using “Palestinian civilians as human shields” and said the Israeli Army “works in close cooperation with international aid organizations during the fighting so that civilians can be provided with assistance.”

The Israeli military “in no way intentionally targets civilians and has demonstrated its willingness to abort operations to save civilian lives and to risk injury in order to assist innocent civilians,” the statement said, promising that “any serious allegation” would “need to be investigated properly, once such a complaint is received formally, within the constraints of the current military operation.”

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A Hero of the Cuban Revolution

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By the end of a Monday, I felt it was Friday ... Benicio Del Toro in Che

'By the end of a Monday, I felt it was Friday' ... Benicio Del Toro in Che

Che – Part 1

(Cert 15)

Philip French by Philip French , The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009

This month is the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and his replacement by Fidel Castro, who, sadly enough, was also to become a dictator. Shortly after the revolution, however, there emerged a more attractive and charismatic figure, his Argentinian lieutenant Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who became one of the great heroes of the 1960s counterculture and was murdered by the Bolivian army in association with the CIA in 1967. There was much talk at the time of a movie about Che’s life. Tony Richardson was going to make one from a screenplay by Alan Sillitoe and one of the greatest political film-makers, Italian Marxist Francesco Rosi, sent posters all over Europe announcing his search for an unknown Che lookalike.

In the event, Hollywood got in first with Richard Fleischer’s Che! (1969), co-scripted by the formerly black-listed Michael Wilson, co-author of Lawrence of Arabia, with Omar Sharif as a glamorous Che and Jack Palance as a villainous drunken Fidel. Told in flashback from Che’s death, it was a compromised work in almost every way that pleased neither his friends nor his enemies.

Now, partly, one supposes, as a reaction against the policies of the Bush administration, there has been a renewed interest in Che and he’s jumped off the T-shirts and back into the cinema, starting with The Motorcycle Diaries, produced by Robert Redford and directed by Brazilian Walter Salles. In that attractive film, the young Che (handsome Gael García Bernal), newly graduated from medical school in Buenos Aires, makes a lengthy journey around South America with a chum in the early 1950s and is politicised by the experience.

Steven Soderbergh‘s two-part film picks up from there. The first part opens with Che (Benicio Del Toro) meeting Fidel in Mexico City in 1955 (both clean shaven at the time) and joining the small invasion party that established a base in the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. It ends in January 1959 when the 30-year-old Che, cautioning against triumphalism and forbidding his men to indulge in looting, heads towards Havana to begin what he considers the really important part of the revolution, creating a new kind of society.

It’s an intelligent, fast-moving, well-researched film, based in part on Che’s posthumously published Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, offering both a convincing account of the bitter, hard-fought struggle and a portrait of a great and complex revolutionary. He was first valued for his medical skills, but soon became such an essential adviser that Fidel tried to keep him out of harm’s way.

Che stands alongside his fellow communist Leon Trotsky as a model of the intellectual as man of action. Like him, he was a writer, thinker, strategist and tactician. Ruthless men of honour, they made up in courage and willpower what they lacked in physique (Che suffered throughout his life from chronic asthma) and died violently in exile. All this comes out vividly in the course of an exciting, adventurous narrative with Guevara figuring in virtually every scene.

The war is shot in colour, into which Soderbergh, who also photographed the film, cuts black-and-white, newsreel-style footage of Che’s subsequent appearances in New York following the revolution. In these flash-forwards, he defends Cuban policy in private discussion and publicly before the United Nations, challenging a hostile America, represented by Adlai Stevenson, and representatives of right-wing Latin American countries. Del Toro shows Che growing through the challenges and privations of the struggle, and one looks forward to Che – Part 2 which opens towards the end of February.

Watching catastrophe

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Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times

The United Nations warned today of “humanitarian black holes” in the North Kivu region of Congo as continued fighting has forced aid agencies to halt operations in some areas. At a camp for internally displaced people, a girl huddled near a fire in Kibati, just north of the provincial capital of Goma.

I trudged through Goma in late summer 1994. I was chronicling another human catastrophe, the outbreak of cholera and other disease in the wake of the Rwandan genocide that claimed over a million lives. You would think that lesson would be enough for the world to never let it happen again.

It is happening. Again. As the world watches.

Refugees Are Dying Too Fast to be Buried

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 by GENE MUSTAIN in New York and MICHAEL O. ALLEN in Goma, Zaire, Daily News Staff Writers | Wednesday July 27, 1994

Aid workers battling death, famine and pestilence of the Rwanda refugee crisis faced a new problem yesterday–a shortage of graves.

The raging cholera epidemic in the squalid camps near the border backwater town of Goma, Zaire, continued to claim lives faster than mass graves could be dynamited out of the volcanic rock blanketing the area.

As planeloads of international relief supplies began arriving, burial teams — including a Zairian boy scout troop — collected 2,000 bodies. And aid workers feared that 20,000 may have died since 1.2 million Rwandans fled to Zaire a week ago.

But gravesites were full, and hundreds of rotting bodies were left in foul-smelling piles along the roads. Aid workers held back on announced plans to burn corpes because cremation runs counter to African traditions.

“The burning issue, as it were, is a last resort,” said Ray Wilkinson, a United Nations spokesman. “One problem, as you may guess, is that it’s hard to find anyone willing to undertake the grisly task.”

About 75 American soldiers and a number of civilian experts began operating water purification equipment yesterday, but relief workers fear that thousands more refugees will die before enough equipment is on hand.

“Our top priority is clean water, because without it more people are going to die in droves,” Brig. Gen. Jack Nix said after landing at Goma’s airport.

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WEST HIT ON RWANDA: Relief Big Calls Response Weak

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null by MICHAEL O. ALLEN in Nairobi and RICHARD SISK in Washington, Daily News Staff Writers | Friday, July 29, 1994

United Nations relief officials lashed out yesterday at what they viewed as the timid, pinch-penny response of the U.S. and its allies to the desperate plight of Rwanda’s refugees.

All member states of the UN must share the blame, but among the Western allies, “many are worried about their budgets. They think it costs too much,” said Peter Hansen, the UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs.

“Some are worried about being dragged into something where they might get hurt, there might be trouble and, “Gee, what if another soldier gets shot?’ ” Hansen said in a reference to U.S. reluctance to become involved after suffering casualties in Somalia.”

Hansen, who spoke in Nairobi after returning from a fact-finding mission to Rwanda and Zaire with international aid groups, described scenes of suffering and macabre indifference.

The human tragedy brought on by the flight of more than a million Rwandan refugees to the border town of Goma, Zaire, also has triggered resentment among local Zairians, who have demonstrated in recent days to protest the burden on their scarce resources.

“You have heard of different ways people set up roadblocks? In Goma, they made roadblocks with corpses. That was what was most easily available to the people in Goma,” Hansen said.

However, in Washington, Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the U.S. was doing all that was possible to fight the cholera epidemic killing nearly 2,000 dialy in the refugee camps.

He said the best way to wind down the crisis was to encourage the refugees to return home in safety.

“Time is of the essence. The greatest hope they have is to leave those camps,” Shalikashvili said, but “we don’t want to get into a situation where we are forcing them to go home.”

The general said the U.S. was considering targeted relief airdrops along routes back to Rwanda to give the refugees sustenance for the journey.

He would not say exactly how many U.S. troops might be involved in the humanitarian campaign–which is expected to be up to 4,000–because it still is “at a concept plan stage.”

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Alleged Drunken Diplo Given ok to Walk By DON SINGLETON and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers

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nullSunday, April 27, 1997

Diplomatic immunity got a dignitary who allegedly drove drunk off the hook while fellow United Nations envoys found themselves under renewed attack yesterday by Mayor Giuliani.

Chae Hyun Shin, 32, the second secretary to the South Korea’s UN Mission, was briefly detained with an accompanying diplomat by cops after his 1995 Ford rear-ended another car on First Ave., police said.

Both were released after an investigation confirmed their diplomatic status and determined that no one had been injured.

“The driver was intoxicated when he ran the car into the rear of another vehicle, but no summons was issued because of diplomatic immunity,” said Carmen Melendez, a Police Department spokeswoman. “They were escorted to the 19th Precinct, and the mission was called.” A representative of the South Korean mission went to the stationhouse after the 11:20 p.m. accident and escorted the two officials back to the mission headquarters on Fifth Ave., police said. Officials from the South Korean mission could not be reached for comment.

Hours after the incident, Mayor Giuliani continued his New York vs. the World war of words against UN diplomats.

Giuliani came to the defense of cops who ticketed the cars of Russian and Swiss diplomats — while the envoys were attending a tea party hosted by the city’s UN liaison.

“Follow the rule that, by and large, police officers in this city act lawfully,” Giuliani said. “Police officers as a group are much more responsible, much more willing to follow the rules and the laws, than diplomats of the Russian Federation.”

Officials confirmed that diplomats from the Russian Federation and Switzerland complained about the tickets issued during Thursday night’s gathering at the upper East Side home of city UN liaison Livia Silva. The party was held in honor of Nane Annan, the wife of new UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan of Ghana.

“Don’t take one side of the story,” Giuliani said. “You know, these are New York City police officers who put their lives at risk for us. We could give them the benefit of the doubt rather than what some diplomats are saying.”

The mayor singled out Russian Federation diplomats for his harshest criticism, saying they racked up 134,000 parking tickets last year.

New Loss For Diplos By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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Sunday, April 20, 1997

Mayor Giuliani yesterday said he would take back 20 more parking spaces newly set aside for foreign envoys as he stepped up his attack on federal officials for modifying a crackdown on scofflaw diplomats.
Giuliani announced the action as he accused the State Department of caving in to “moaning” United Nations diplomats angry at the parking brouhaha.

“What happens is that they are very strong and assertive when they meet with us,” Giuliani said of the State Department, “then when they go back and somebody at the UN yells at them, they change their mind.”

State Department officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Giuliani vowed to step up the pressure by yanking the 20 parking spaces. On Friday, he took back 30 other spaces, out of 110 the city promised to set aside for UN missions under the original plan to make the diplomats follow parking regulations — and pay their tickets.

“I’m not going to give them the same 110 spots if they’ve cut the deal in half,” Giuliani said. “If they’ve taken away the enforcement mechanisms, there’s no way they are getting those spots.”

State Department officials said on Friday that the city action could complicate efforts to solve the parking dispute.

The city and State Department agreed to the initial crackdown in an effort to stop illegal parking by UN dignitaries and their staffs and force scofflaw diplomats to pay millions of dollars in unpaid summonses. The plan would have authorized the city to confiscate the license plates of any diplomat who failed to pay parking tickets for a year or more.

Original Story Date: 042097

RUDY DISSES STATE DEPT: Curbs Diplo Parking Plan By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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Sunday, April 13, 1997

Mayor Giuliani opened a new front in the New York City vs. the Rest of the World battle over diplomatic scofflaws, threatening to withhold scores of extra parking spaces promised to foreign envoys.

The mayor announced the get-tough plan in retaliation for the U.S. State Department’s revision of the terms of a crackdown on diplomats, many of them United Nations envoys, who rack up scores of unpaid parking tickets.

Giuliani said the original plan called for the city to designate 310 additional curbside spaces for diplomatic parking. In exchange, the city was authorized to tow and yank the license plates of diploscoffs who build up unpaid tickets for more than a year.

But after the State Department modified that plan Friday, Giuliani said the city wouldn’t come through with the extra parking.

“We’re certainly not going to go forward with all of those parking spaces,” he said.

What’s more, the mayor warned, the city may take back some of the 110 new spots that have already been designated for diplomats.

“This is an old rule I have. When I make a deal, I keep it. If you make a deal, you have to keep it — and they haven’t,” Giuliani said of the State Department.

“We haven’t decided yet exactly how many we are not going to go forward with, but we are definitely going to refuse to go forward with some percentage of them because the State Department has not gone forward with their part of the deal.”

Neither State Department officials nor UN representatives could be reached for comment yesterday.

However, the new skirmish may escalate international pressure for action at a UN General Assembly session on the dispute that was authorized last week.

Foreign diplomats voted for the session because, they say, the original crackdown plan violated principles of diplomatic immunity.

Original Story Date: 041397