Hamas police killed six people in Gaza City on Monday as hundreds of thousands gathered to commemorate the death of Yasser Arafat in the biggest Fatah party rally since it was ousted by the Islamists.
   Another 130 people were wounded when the Hamas-run police force opened fire as crowds threw rocks and chanted ‘Shia, Shia’ – accusing them of being a proxy for Shia Iran and its ally Syria, witnesses and medics said.
   Palestinian television showed groups of protesters and armed men running through the streets and the police beating a Fatah supporter with wooden batons.
   The deaths smeared salt in the wounds of the already bitter divisions among Palestinians, with the head of the secular Fatah party’s parliamentary bloc saying there would be no talks with the Islamists.
   ‘There will be no dialogue and no discussions with the killers and coup-makers of Hamas, no dialogue with those who do not believe in dialogue but only understand the language of blood and murder,’ Azzam Ahmed said.
   ‘I am convinced that the Palestinian people will purge them from their ranks and that the blood of today’s martyrs will be fuel for the resistance against them,’ he added, in a statement from his office.
   In a statement issued by Hamas the movement claimed that Fatah gunmen fired at the demonstrators, but an AFP correspondent at the scene and several witnesses said the Hamas-run police opened fire on the crowd.
   Hours earlier the city centre had been filled with a sea of the yellow flags of the party founded by Arafat and currently led by president Mahmud Abbas, whose forces were driven from the Gaza Strip in a bloody takeover in mid-June.
   The crowds waved Palestinian flags and held portraits of the iconic leader in his trademark black-and-white chequered keffiyeh as Fatah party officials called for unity over loudspeakers.
   ‘We say to Hamas and these armed militias, stop your crimes. These crimes will not shake our determination,’ said Zakaria Al-Agha, chief of Fatah in Gaza, reading a statement from Abbas.
   ‘We call on Hamas which made a putsch to reverse course, and to end these criminal activities on the ground.’
   The event, which began at 1000 GMT, drew as many as half a million people, senior Fatah official said. The Islamist Hamas that has controlled the Gaza Strip since the takeover five months ago broke up several smaller Fatah demonstrations on Sunday, the third anniversary of Arafat’s death, arresting a number of Fatah supporters.
   The Hamas-run Executive Force, a paramilitary group that has policed Gaza since the movement took power, was out in force on the edges of the rally after earlier confiscating tens of thousands of portraits of Arafat and Abbas.

Two NATO soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed in a roadside bomb blast Monday, as officials said 22 other people including three civilians were killed in separate attacks.
   The violence was the latest in an upsurge blamed on the Islamist Taliban, which has intensified its insurgency against foreign and government forces since being ousted from power in late 2001.
   The blast that killed the NATO troops in eastern Afghanistan close to the Pakistani border brought to 11 the number of international soldiers slain in Afghanistan in the past week.
   ‘Two ISAF soldiers were killed in an improvised explosive device attack. One soldier was wounded,’ International Security Assistance Force spokeswoman major Christine Nelson-Chung said.
   She refused to give further details, including the nationality of the casualties or the location of the blast.
   But the deputy provincial police chief of the province of Paktika, Farooq Sangari, said the blast struck a NATO vehicle in Bermal district and that an Afghan interpreter was also killed.
   The attack came three days after six NATO troops and two Afghan soldiers were slain in an ambush in northeastern Afghanistan.

Residents fled the Somali capital Mogadishu on Monday, adding to a growing humanitarian crisis as government forces backed by Ethiopian tanks stepped up efforts to crush Islamist-led insurgents.
   Hawa Amed, a 40-year-old mother of eight, said she had wanted to stay in her house deep in the sprawling Bakara Market, where allied Somali-Ethiopian troops have been hunting for the guerrillas and their hidden arms caches over the weekend.
   ‘But after two policemen were killed outside on Sunday, we had to run,’ she said as she left the city on foot, her youngest child strapped to her back. ‘We are now heading to Madina District ... we don’t know how we will survive.’
   At least 70 people have been killed in more than a week of fighting that has driven tens of thousands of Somalis from their homes, residents and aid workers say.
   Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the capital so far this year to escape several rounds of battles between the insurgents and interim government.
   The latest fighting claimed the lives of nine out of ten members of one family on Monday. Only a nine-year-old girl survived when an artillery shell hit them as they tried to flee the rubble-strewn city.
   Abdulahi Alas, an investigation officer with the local Ismail Jimale Human Rights Organisation, told Reuters it appeared the shell was fired by an Ethiopian unit.
   Government security forces and Ethiopian soldiers are hunting for rebel weapons in and around Bakara Market, and on Monday the city’s major Mohamed Dheere called on traders to return there and reopen their shops so they could be searched.
   ‘We believe that a lot of wounded insurgents are hiding in Bakara and the surrounding areas,’ said one senior security officer who asked not to be named.
   Ethiopian and Somali government troops have been battling insurgents in the Horn of Africa nation since Addis Ababa helped the interim administration rout a group of hardline Islamists from Mogadishu in January following a two-week war.
   More than 200 people have been wounded in the latest fighting, residents, local media and human rights group say, mostly by stray bullets and shrapnel.
   Also on Monday, the interim government ordered an independent local broadcaster, Shabelle Radio, off the air and briefly detained two of its senior staff.
   Earlier this year, the authorities accused Shabelle and other Somali news organisations of supporting the rebels.

Pakistan’s state of emergency and new laws allowing army courts to try civilians mean promised elections are likely to be neither free nor fair, analysts and rights activists said Monday.
   President Pervez Musharraf vowed on Sunday that the parliamentary polls would be held on schedule by mid-January, but indicated they would still take place under the state of emergency he imposed nine days ago.
   Rights groups are also concerned by a weekend announcement that Musharraf had amended the Pakistan Army Act of 1952, which critics say will give military courts sweeping powers to try civilians for treason and sedition.
   Musharraf defended the law at a press conference Sunday, saying its purpose was to give the army the authority to catch terrorists. A surge in Islamic militancy was one of his main justifications for the state of emergency.
   Analysts and opposition parties disagree, fearing the law could be abused to curb dissent in tandem with a broader crackdown brought about by emergency rule.
   Newspaper editorials warned Monday that the state of emergency had already adversely affected the normal preconditions for fair elections – a free media, the freedom to hold political rallies and campaigns.
   ‘Any person now can be held under the Army Act because it is too vague and ambiguous,’ political analyst and retired army general Talat Masood said.
   ‘Free and fair polls were already impossible because of emergency and suspension of constitution and changes in the judiciary,’ he said.
   ‘This combination gives rise to fears that opposition and dissent will be curbed. Given recent circumstances, there is no guarantee that it will not be abused.’
   More than 3,000 people have been arrested since the start of emergency rule – almost all of them opposition workers, rights activists and lawyers.
   Asma Jahangir, chairwoman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who is currently under house arrest in Lahore, said in a statement that the Army Act changes were ‘alarming’.
   ‘These amendments give wide powers to military courts,’ said Jahangir, who is also special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
   ‘Civilians can be tried for a number of offences including for expressing views... by military courts,’ she said.
   Islamabad-based lawyer Anees Jillani said the Army Act changes were mainly meant to regularise detentions without trial by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, but added that the law could easily be misused.
   ‘Anyone can be held, even for making public statements, writing articles or letters to the editor, and this aspect is dangerous,’ Jillani said.
   Former premier Benazir Bhutto has also expressed concerns that the act would hit the election campaign of opposition parties, as has the Pakistan Muslim League party of Nawaz Sharif, the man Musharraf overthrew in 1999.

A strike to protest the killings of villagers opposed to West Bengal’s communist-ruled government shut down schools, offices and businesses on Monday in a challenge to the ruling coalition’s main ally.
   At least 20 people were injured in clashes between police and strikers in the state capital, Kolkata. Strikers set two buses on fire and ransacked a hospital and a railway station, the police said.
   The strike was sparked by the killings in the last week of at least six villagers in Nandigram, a few hours drive southwest of Kolkata, as they battled communist supporters. Dozens of villagers were injured in the clashes.
   Nandigram won national recognition by successfully opposing communist government plans to set up industry on farming land. But hostilities have not abated as the state’s communist supporters tried to win back control of the village cluster.
   ‘The communists are killing innocent villagers in Nandigram and have not even spared women and children,’ said Mamata Banerjee, chief of the Trinamul Congress, the state’s main opposition party which called the strike.
   The violence in Nandigram has been a political embarrassment for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which has its stronghold in West Bengal. The party shores up the Congress-led coalition along with three minor left groups.
   The conflict has resonated nationally. Prime minister Manmohan Singh’s government said it would send federal police to Nandigram, and the main national opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has voiced support for the strike.
   Communist party leaders and the police have blamed the recent violence on Maoist rebels who have set up base in Nandigram and were helping Trinamul activists with arms and training.

Eighteen years after the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Germans are battling to preserve the last remnants of a barrier that still haunts the country.
   ‘At first, everybody was overjoyed that the wall fell. Then a lot of people became irritated that it could disappear without trace,’ said Johannes Cramer, an expert in the history of architecture at Berlin’s Technical University.
   Of the 155 kilometres of grey concrete that surrounded West Berlin for 28 years, only three kilometres in total is still standing.
   Just five empty watchtowers look out over the city, compared to 302 manned by guards with their finger on the trigger in 1989.
   ‘It is too late to change the fact that things disappeared in the years that followed the fall of the wall,’ said Stefan Jacobs, a journalist at the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.
   ‘But we absolutely have to preserve what is still standing to be able to tell the history of Berlin.’
   This is not as simple as it sounds, as the uncertain fate of Berlin’s famed East Side Gallery shows.
   The gallery, a 1.3-kilometre-long reinforcement that was built directly behind the wall, is covered with paintings by 118 artists from around the world documenting the tumultuous emotions that marked the end of Germany’s division.
   One of the most famous works captures Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the long-time leader of East Germany’s communist regime Eric Honecker sharing a passionate kiss.
   But the concrete slabs running along the Spree river, which are a national monument and a tourist magnet, are crumbling under the onslaught of climate, pollution, graffiti artists and plain neglect.
   It was partly restored in 2000, but the damage is now so far advanced that the section of the wall will have to be rebuilt from scratch.
   Most of the artists whose paintings grace the wall have agreed to help, but the project has been postponed until 2008 for lack of funding.
   The city’s authorities have earmarked 1.3 million euros (1.8 million dollars) but the project will cost another two million euros.
   Some commentators put this down to a lamentable lack of will to save the remains of the wall, while funding pours in for a project to rebuild the city’s Hohenzollern Castle, the one-time residence of Prussian kings and German kaisers that was blown up by the communists in 1950.
   So far some 480 million euros have been raised to build a replica of the 17th century baroque castle in the heart of Berlin.
   ‘If one can collect hundreds of millions of euros to rebuild a palace which nobody remembers, one can find a few million to save paintings that people around the world know well and come to Berlin to see,’ Jacobs said.
   A few kilometres from the East Side Gallery, near the Nordbahnhof station, a section of the wall has been torn down to make space for a volleyball court.
   ‘This is how it goes with the Berlin Wall. Even those sections that have been declared national monuments are not respected,’ Jacobs said.

Pakistan must be hit with phased sanctions targeting its military if president Pervez Musharraf does not end his state of emergency and restore full democracy, a global think-tank urged Monday.
   The Brussels-based Internatio-nal Crisis Group said sanctions should start with an immediate suspension of military cooperation talks and a review of aid for the armed forces.
   It outlined further steps, including suspension by Thursday of military aid that is not meant for counter-terrorism measures if Musharraf does not resign as army chief and take other steps to restore democratic rule.
   If there are no results within 30 days, it warned in a statement received here, the military’s foreign assets should be frozen and senior officials and officers denied travel visas.
   At the same time, aid for education, health care, relief work and poverty reduction should be stepped up via non-religious organisations.

Iran’s hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday threatened to expose ‘traitors’ who he said were pressuring the government over its nuclear ambitions, the state news agency IRNA reported.
   ‘If the internal elements do not stop pressures over the nuclear issue they will be exposed to the Iranian people,’ Ahmadinejad said at Tehran’s Elm-o-Sanat (Science and Industry) university.
   ‘These are traitors and, in accordance with the vows we have taken to the nation, we will not back down and be onlookers,’ he told students.
   Moderates inside Iran have attacked Ahmadinejad for his handling of Iran’s nuclear programme, with former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami warning against the ‘serious threats’ facing the country. According to the Fars news agency, Ahmadinejad said his government was under pressure from people ‘who met with foreigners every week and told the enemies why they were backing down and postponing (UN) resolutions.’