WORLD REPORT

Burst of Rage
Northern Ireland: Violence threatens peace process.

FLAMING PASSIONS: An Irish Catholic gives vent to his anger by torching the British flag 		For nearly two years, the Northern Ireland peace effort has been an incredible balancing act. Now it has become even more trickier, thanks to the most widespread street disturbances in 20 years in Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods in the province.
The violence shows how little the underlying sectarian attitudes have changed despite 22 months of headlines about ceasefires and peace proposals. Fundamentally, the 9.5 lakh Protestants are unswerving in their insistence
on remaining British and increasingly anxious that concessions to Catholic nationalists will lead to union with Ireland and the end of their traditional way of life.
Conversely, many among the 6.5 lakh Catholics, some of whom yearn to join the Catholic-dominated Irish Republic to the south, are frustrated at the lack of change despite all the talk of peace and feel they can expect little in the way of fair treatment from the Protestant-dominated police, the political establishment or London.
The violence began on July 7 when the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, refused to allow the powerful Protestant fraternal organisation, the Orange Order, to undertake its traditional march through a Catholic area. The stand-off ignited five days of protests by Protestants in which they blocked roads all across the province, burned vehicles and attacked the police.
Four days later the police reversed their decision and allowed the march, setting off two nights of violence by Catholics. Traditionally, the "marching season" of the Orangemen, who dress up in suits, sashes and bowler hats to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, in which William of Orange, a Protestant, defeated King James II, a Catholic, drives a cleaver between the two communities. The Catholics regard the marches as an emblem of Protestant "triumphalism", and it rankles as the ranks of drums and pipes pass by.
Protestant Orangemen take on the police who tried initially to thwart their annual march to mark a 17th century battle
The Protestants see them as a cultural tradition and perhaps on some level as an affirmation of their Britishness and their ability to face an uncertain future as a cohesive majority.
Television coverage of the violence has led some Catholics to conclude that the police treated Catholic demonstrators more harshly than Protestant demonstrators. "The TV shows Catholic protesters being manhandled and Orangemen standing at roadblocks and police not doing anything," said David McKittrick, a journalist and author. The disparity, if it exists, fuels Catholic fears that the Royal Ulster Constabulary, roughly 92 percent Protestant, cannot be evenhanded. It increases pressure on the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which has already broken the ceasefire by planting bombs in England, to strike again at home, stepping into its traditional role as the self-proclaimed "protector" of Catholic neighbourhoods.
The pressure is strong because a dozen-odd Catholic families have been chased from their homes in north Belfast, and ugly graffiti has been scrawled on Catholic doors. IRA men wearing their customary black masks appeared in west Belfast, a sign that they are ready to resume violent activities. And Londonderry, the province’s second city and a Catholic stronghold, was awash in violence and rumour after a night in which the police fired thousands of plastic bullets, more than 1,000 gasoline bombs were thrown and a Catholic demonstrator was killed.
Most analysts predict that the latest events will strengthen the hands of the militants within the IRA and Sinn Fein, its political wing. For one thing, they lift a bit the cloud of opprobrium that descended on the IRA for planting bombs in London and Manchester. With the blame for the unraveling of peace partly shifting to the loyalists, as the die-hard Protestant unionists are called, the IRA militants can more easily dig in their heels and refuse to make a public declaration of a renewed ceasefire that could get them to the negotiating table.
The hardliners within the IRA are even less likely to make any concessions on handing over arms, since their rationale all along has been that weapons are necessary to protect Catholic communities. The violence has also touched off recriminations between the Irish and British governments and driven the deepest wedge between them since the peace initiative began three years ago. Prime Minister John Bruton of Ireland blamed the British government for the rioting, saying it should not have yielded to threats from the unionist side. The British government, insisting it had nothing to do with the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s volte-face, hit back with personal attacks on Bruton. Irish analysts also noted that David Trimble, leader of the most powerful Protestant party, the Ulster Unionist Party, had been active in the whole drama over the march, taking on an activist role in the streets much like the unionist leaders of the 1920s. While this may strengthen his position among Protestants, it could make it harder for Catholics to sit and talk with him at the negotiations table.
In short, the performers are beginning to list and lean, and people are beginning to wonder how long the balancing act can remain aloft.
--JOHN DARNTON in London
Megawati Sukarnoputri
In quest of a legacy
All along, everything went by consensus in Indonesia. That may soon change. President Suharto has a serious contender for the post which has been his for the past thirty years. The person who is staking the claim may have a right of sorts. She is Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno, the founder-leader of Indonesia.
The spotlight on her has been turned on unwittingly by the very person she opposes. Even as her political ambitions began to assume coherent shape, Suharto had her ousted from the leadership of the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI). Megawati’s immediate reaction was to take to the streets, leading a thousand-strong protest rally and now she has a sizeable section of Indonesians on her side.
The PDI has 56 members in parliament in which President Suharto’s Golkar party has a strength of 282, with 100 more nominated from the armed forces loyal to the president. The constitution guarantees the armed forces not only responsibility for security matters, but also powers for "shaping the basic order of the state". This provision and dissension in the PDI ranks worked to Suharto’s advantage. The military requested the government to call a convention of the PDI to elect a new leader.
At the July 20 convention, Megawati’s place was taken by Suryadi, who himself had been removed from the leadership of the party in 1993. Megawati and her party have a long way to go before she makes it to the presidency which is her undeclared aim.
First she has to regain her status as the legal leader of the PDI. Then she must be able to secure a substantial mandate from the people in the 1997 general elections to become a serious contender for the presidency. And finally, she has to command a majority in the Peoples Consultative Assembly which chooses the president.
One option open to Megawati is to approach the courts questioning the legality of Suryadi’s election. But it may be difficult for her to get a favourable judgement. Against this background the president’s health problems--he has just returned from a medical check-up in Germany--gives rise to the pressing question: "What comes after Suharto?’’ After the general’s long rule the idea causes considerable disquiet. Up till now Indonesia has justifiably been regarded a stable country. Indonesia was Suharto, especially for as long as economic success kept the population satisfied. In the past 28 years, the Gross Domestic Product has risen by an average 6.9 per cent a year.
Yet, increasingly, the economy is being held back by corruption and nepotism. Religious conflicts are also on the increase in the largest Islamic state in the world.
Should Megawati succeed in winning back her position as PDI party chairperson and bringing her father’s illustrious name into play as a bonus, she could inflict bitter losses on the party of government in the elections.
Master stroke
Rosy picture for art forgers
The public, if not the art world, has always harboured a secret fascination for the true masters of art forgery, men like Eric Hebborn, whose drawings attributed to others passed through Sotheby’s and Christie’s on their way to American and European museums. But most art fraud is far less glamorous. Rather than aiming for great coups, today’s forgers shy away from reproducing the works of old masters because too many art historians have the necessary expertise to identify fakes.
Now an extraordinary new scam has come to light that illustrates the growing sophistication of art forgers. Accomplices of forgers were found to have doctored the archives at the Tate Gallery in London so that when consulted by a prospective buyer of a painting or sculpture, the record shows that the fake is authentic!
The fraud, which was exposed when a watercolour attributed to the British artist Ben Nicholson was found to have been forged after being sold for $28,000, apparently involved three stages: a work of art was forged; an accomplice altered the artist’s file in the Tate or elsewhere to include the new work, and a ‘dealer’ offered the work for sale, indicating to the potential buyer how its provenance could be checked.
The case has stunned the art world because, for the moment, it is impossible to know how many "authenticated" forged works of art have entered the market and how many artists’ files in reputable libraries now contain false information.
What seems clear is that the art forgery business is flourishing. As governments have tried to clamp down on the traffic in stolen antiques, for example, the market in fake African and Asian art has boomed. Hongkong, in particular, is said to be a major center for forging ancient Chinese porcelain.
Forgers of modern works tend to focus on prolific artists whose legacy includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings and lithographs.
One such artist is the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali. Experts said the value of his less well known works has been undercut in recent years by the flood of fake Dalis. Another attraction of modern art is that the forger need not worry about having to find, say, a 17th-century canvas or original paint that could pass X-ray and chemical tests. To add to the credibility of their counterfeits, some forgers study an artist’s career and date their fakes in periods in which the artist was seemingly less productive.
--ALAN RIDING
Close watch
Turkey: New govt eyed with apprehension

On trial: Necmettin Erbakan 		Will the new government move away from secular foundations? That was the question many Turks and observers outside the country have been asking. Last week, the question came to the test as Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, the 70-year-old leader of the Islamic Welfare Party, and his new coalition partner, former premier Tansu Ciller, narrowly won a confidence vote in parliament.
The new government has embarked on a populist course, raising salaries and lifting the harsh security regime in prisons, a gesture designed to appease human rights activists.
Very little of the Welfare Party platform is contained in the programme adopted jointly by Erbakan and Ciller, now the foreign minister. None of the religious issues--allowing professional women to wear head scarves on the job or allowing time off for Friday prayers--is on the immediate agenda, and Turkey’s links to the west seem to have survived Erbakan’s earlier blistering attacks.
A key test of Erbakan’s policy towards the west will come when parliament votes on whether to extend a programme allowing western air patrols over Iraq to operate out of Turkey. The Welfare Party has consistently voted against extending the facility, but many doubt Erbakan will be willing to risk good relations with Washington.
--CELESTINE BOHLEN in Ankara
WORLD WIDE
PLANNING HIS FUTURE: Mandela with Queen Elizabeth
SOUTH AFRICA--Grooming heir: President Nelson Mandela has ended speculation about his departure from the political stage and his possible successor. In three years’ time, he will, on no account, be running for reelection. At 81, the time would have come to look after his grandchildren, Mandela says. The rules in South Africa do not permit Mandela to name his own successor.
But if his party, the African National Congress, were to win again and the parliamentary party were to endorse Vice-President Thabo Mbeki for head of state, it would be, he said, the right decision.
RUSSIA--Health scare:
As US Vice-President Al Gore was preparing to go to the Kremlin for a much ballyhooed meeting with President Boris Yeltsin, one of his aides received an astonishing phone call from the Kremlin. It said that the President would not be meeting him. With no warning and apparently little care for the adverse publicity that was certain to follow, Yeltsin had gone on an unscheduled vacation at the Barvikha sanitarium outside Moscow, the same place where he had recovered from his two earlier heart attacks.
United Nations--America isolated:
Nearly a month after deciding to block a second five-year term for Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Clinton administration has received no pledges of support for its position from any of the other 14 Security Council members. On the other hand, China, the Arab nations, and African leaders have endorsed the candidacy of Boutros-Ghali, whose first term ends on December 31.
AFGHANISTAN--Ban on movies:
The six cinema theatres that survived in war-torn Kabul were closed down by the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar government. Hekmatyar ordered their closure till such time as they can show "films in keeping with "Isalmic norms"rather than the Indian films traditionally shown.
BOSNIA--Arrest warrant issued:
The UN war crimes tribunal has issued international arrest warrants for the Bosnian Serbs’ political leader, Radovan Karadzic, and their military chief, Gen Ratko Mladic, who are charged with genocide and other crimes in the four-year Bosnian war. The fighting has taken tens of thousands of lives, uprooted millions of people, and added "ethnic cleansing" to the world’s vocabulary.
OVERHEARD
I always hoped that Imran Khan, having been educated at Oxford and having had so much exposure to the world, would have more liberal ideas.
--Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto accusing her political rival of being backed mainly by militants and conservatives.
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