A new face of jihad vows attacks on U.S.

The men belong to a new militant Islamic organization called Fatah al Islam, whose leader, a fugitive Palestinian named Shakir al-Abssi, has set up operations in a refugee camp here where he trains fighters and spreads the ideology of Al Qaeda.

He has solid terrorist credentials. A former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia who was killed last summer, Abssi was sentenced to death in absentia along with Zarqawi in the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan, Laurence Foley. Just four months after arriving here from Syria, Abssi has a militia that intelligence officials estimate at 150 men and an arsenal of explosives, rockets and even an antiaircraft gun.

Abssi's organization is the image of what intelligence officials have warned is the re-emergence of Al Qaeda. Shattered after 2001, the organization founded by Osama bin Laden is now reforming as an alliance of small groups around the world that share a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam but have developed their own independent terror capabilities, these officials have said. If Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has acknowledged directing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a string of other terror plots, represents the previous generation of Qaeda leaders, Abssi and others like him represent the new.

American and Middle Eastern intelligence officials say he is viewed as a dangerous militant who can assemble small teams of operatives with acute military skill.

"Guys like Abssi have the capability on the ground that Al Qaeda has lost and is looking to tap into," said an American intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Abssi has shown himself to be a canny operator. Despite being on terrorism watch lists around the world, he has set himself up in a Palestinian refugee camp where, because of Lebanese politics, he is largely shielded from the government. The camp also gives him ready access to a pool of recruits, young Palestinians whose militant vision has evolved from the struggle against Israel to a larger Islamic cause.

Intelligence officials here say that he has also exploited another source of manpower: they estimate he has 50 militants from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries fresh from fighting with the insurgency in Iraq.

The officials say they fear that he is seeking to establish himself as a terror leader on the order of Zarqawi. "He is trying to fill a void and do so in a high-profile manner that will attract the attention of supporters," the American intelligence official said.

Abssi has recently taken on a communications adviser, Abu al-Hassan, 24, a journalism student who dropped out of college to join Fatah al Islam. His current project: a newsmagazine aimed at attracting recruits.

Inside the Palestinian camp, Abssi seems to be building his operation with little interference.

Major General Achraf Rifi, general director of Lebanon's Internal Security Forces, says the government does not have authority to enter a Palestinian camp ― even though Abssi is now wanted in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria on terrorism charges.

To enter the camps, he said, "We would need an agreement from other Arab countries." He said that instead the government was tightening its cordon around the camp to make it harder for Abssi or his men to slip in and out.

Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have long been fertile ground for militancy, particularly focused on the fight against Israel. But militants in those camps now have a broader vision. In Ain el Hilwe camp, an hour's drive south of Beirut, another radical Sunni group, Asbat al Ansar, has been sending fighters to Iraq since the start of the war, its leaders acknowledged in interviews.

U.S. giving Iraq more time to meet goals

The four most significant objectives identified by the administration in January were: approval of an oil law that would set guidelines for nationwide distribution of oil revenues and foreign investment in the immense oil industry; reversal of the de-Baathification laws that are widely blamed for alienating Sunnis by driving them out of government ministries; the holding of local elections; and reform of Iraq's Constitution.

Part of the problem is that some administration officials are wary of a backlash from Iraq's ruling Shiites if the Americans push too hard. For instance, at the same time that U.S. forces have begun a security plan that cracks down on Shiite militias, the administration is pushing Iraqi Shiites to bring more Sunnis into the government as part of the political reconciliation process.

Bush officials said they had been forced to ease up on parts of the timetable. Administration officials had initially hoped that the Iraqi government under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al- Maliki would quickly agree to make room for more former Baathists in the military and elsewhere in government, reversing the so-called de-Baathification laws that took effect in 2003, which are now widely blamed for alienating Iraqi Sunnis by driving them out of government ministries.

There has been some progress on the political timetable. On Feb. 26, the Iraqi cabinet, after almost a year of bickering among the country's ethnic and sectarian political blocs, approved a draft of the oil law. The law approved by the cabinet would allow the central government to distribute oil revenues to the provinces or regions based on population, which could reduce the economic concerns of the rebellious Sunni Arabs, who fear being cut out of Iraq's vast potential oil wealth by the dominant Shiites and Kurds. Most of Iraq's crude oil reserves lie in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north.

But the Iraqi Parliament has yet to approve the oil law; administration officials said they hoped to see parliamentary approval in the next few weeks.

The de-Baathification reversal will undoubtedly take much longer, administration officials say. Right now there are four competing de-Baathification reversal proposals floating around Baghdad from various political groups, including one from an Iraqi presidential commission that includes President Jalal Talabani, which U.S. officials say is the most promising. But Talabani has been ill for weeks, slowing progress on the de-Baathification reversal.

"This is a very tough one," the senior administration official said. "Its particularly tough for the Shia, who see themselves as victims of the Baathists. When does it need to move? I can only say as soon as possible."

On local elections, the official said that "Iraqis are working toward the end of the year, and I think that's a very reasonable goal."

As for constitutional reform, administration officials say they have no timetable.

Israeli war probe expected to cast dark shadow

JERUSALEM: A government-appointed committee examining Israel's failures during last summer's war in Lebanon is to publish an interim report in the second half of April apportioning personal responsibility to top officials, heightening uncertainty about the political future of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government.

The committee, headed by Eliyahu Winograd, a retired judge, announced Tuesday that its report would include "individual conclusions pertaining to the personal responsibility of the prime minister, the defense minister and the army chief of staff." That was enough to set off a debate in Israel about the government's possible early demise. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the wartime chief of staff, resigned in January.

The Winograd committee does not have the same legal standing as a full state commission of inquiry; it will not assess the legal liability of individuals under scrutiny or demand their removal from office. But the committee is widely expected to be critical of the performance of the top political and military echelons during the 34-day conflict, and has a similar weight to that of a state commission.

The interim report is likely to focus on the army's preparedness for the war, and the government decision-making process that led to it. Questions have also been raised in Israel about whether clear goals were set for the war, and what, if at all, was achieved.

The Winograd findings will not deal at this stage with the government's go- ahead to expand the ground campaign in southern Lebanon two days before a UN-brokered cease-fire came into effect on Aug. 14, a decision that proved costly in lives. By the end of the conflict, there were over 1,000 Lebanese fatalities, believed to be mostly civilians, and 160 Israeli deaths, of which 119 were soldiers, with 41 civilians killed by rocket fire.

According to Israeli media reports, Olmert testified to the Winograd panel that the decision to respond to a Hezbollah kidnapping with a broad military campaign had been made four months earlier, in March 2006. That account has been challenged by political and military figures who denied knowledge of any early plans. The two kidnapped soldiers are still in captivity.

West Bank settlements on private land, data shows

JERUSALEM: An up-to-date Israeli government register shows that 32.4 percent of the property held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is private, according to the advocacy group that sued the government to obtain the data.

The group, Peace Now, prepared an earlier report in November, also provided to The New York Times, based on a 2004 version of the Israeli government database that had been provided by an official who wanted the information published. Those figures showed that 38.8 percent of the land on which Israeli settlements were built was listed as private Palestinian land.

The data shows a pattern of illegal seizure of private land that the Israeli government has been reluctant to acknowledge or to prosecute, according to the Peace Now report. Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and takes land there only legally or, for security reasons, temporarily. That large sections of those settlements are now confirmed by official data to be privately held land is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace.

The new data, updated to the end of 2006, was provided officially by the Israeli government's Civil Administration, which governs civilian activities in the territories, in response to a lawsuit brought by Peace Now and the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel in 2005. When the courts refused the request, the groups filed an appeal, and the earlier data was leaked to Peace Now. In January, the court ordered the Civil Administration to provide the data, in the form of digitized map information.

Some differences between the new data and the old data complicate the picture. The old data distinguished between private Jewish land, private Palestinian land, state land and so-called survey land, which is considered of unclear ownership.

The new data, provided by the government, makes a distinction only between private land and other land. But in the earlier data, the amount of private Jewish land was small, only 1.26 percent of the area of the settlements.

The second major difference involves the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, which looks like a suburb of Jerusalem, with a mall and a multiplex and an Ace Hardware store.

The Israeli government has said that it will never give up the three main settlement blocks― Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel ― inside the West Bank and within the security barrier that Israel built. Information about them is thus extremely delicate, and that was one reason that the government refused earlier requests to provide the data.

The earlier data showed Maale Adumim containing 86 percent private Palestinian land, which seemed very high to its residents. According to the new data, however, only 0.54 percent of the settlement is listed as private land. The single case of Maale Adumim represents much of the difference in the total percentage of private land between the old and new data. Without the new Maale Adumim data, the difference between the old and new data is about one percentage point.

In settlements west of the separation barrier, which Israel intends to keep and which include Maale Adumim, the amount of private land is 24 percent, compared with 41.4 percent in the earlier data.

In settlements that Israel would presumably give up in any peace settlement, the percentage of private land is 40 percent, higher than the earlier data, which was 36.4 percent.

In the two other main settlement blocs that Israel intends to keep, Ariel is now listed as 31.4 percent private, compared with 35.1 percent before. Gush Etzion is listed now as 19 percent private, compared with 25.1 percent before.

In Givat Zeev, a settlement that Israel also intends to keep, the old data showed that the settlement contained 44.3 percent private land; the new data shows the figure to be 49.6 percent.

Dror Etkes of Peace Now, which put together the reports, said the group had asked the Civil Administration to explain the discrepancy on Maale Adumim, but had not gotten an answer.

In a written statement issued late Tuesday night, Capt. Zidki Maman, also a spokesman for the Civil Administration, said, "We were disappointed to see that despite the clarifications made by the Civil Administration regarding the previous report and the database given to Peace Now, the most recent report is still inaccurate in many places, thus misrepresenting the reality concerning the status of the settlements."

But Etkes of Peace Now noted that the government chose to provide no details, and refused to hand over data specifying what land was owned by Israelis.

Some of the land listed as private has been seized legally, though supposedly temporarily, by the Israeli military for security purposes. Many settlements were built on such land, even though it is supposed to be returned to its owners. The military simply signs a renewal of the seizure order every few years. But the military keeps secret how much land is under such temporary seizure orders.

In a 1979 court case, the Israeli Supreme Court declared that the seizure of private land for establishing settlements for security purposes is illegal. But the official data shows that 32 percent of the land in settlements established after 1979 is private land.

Pakistani Militants Hit Targets Close to Home

PESHAWAR, Pakistan ― Along the Afghan border, not far from this northwestern city, Islamic militants have used a firm foothold over the past year to train and dispatch suicide bombers against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

But in recent weeks the suicide bombers have turned on Pakistan itself, carrying out six attacks and killing 35 people. Militant leaders have threatened to unleash scores more, in effect opening a new front in their war.

Diplomats and concerned residents see the bombings as proof of a spreading “Talibanization,” as Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, calls it, which has seeped into more settled districts of Pakistan from the tribal areas along the border, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have made a home.

In Peshawar and other parts of North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the tribal areas, residents say English-language schools have received threats, schoolgirls have been warned to veil themselves, music is being banned and men are told not to shave their beards.

Then there is the mounting toll of the suicide bombings. One of the most lethal killed 15 people in Peshawar, most of them police officers, including the popular police chief.

The police, on the front line of the violence, have suffered most in many of the suicide attacks, diplomats and officials say. They are increasingly demoralized and cowed, allowing the militancy to spread still further, they warn.

Suicide bombings are not new in Pakistan. There have been several high-profile cases linked to Al Qaeda in which bombers have tried to kill General Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, and singled out foreign targets, French engineers and the United States Consulate in Karachi.

But the indiscriminate terror, sown by lone bombers, with explosives strapped to their chests wandering into a crowd, is a new experience for Pakistanis, and it has shocked and angered many here.

“Are these attacks isolated incidents of fanatic wrath, or is it some widespread coordinated effort to intimidate the state itself?” asked The Nation, a daily newspaper, in an editorial after the latest bombing against an antiterrorist judge in Multan. “Coordinated or not, these are dangerous times to be seen as representatives of the state; the militants are driving home a point.”

The attacks all stem from the tribal area of Waziristan, according to a senior government official, who asked not to be identified because investigations are continuing. There, he said, groups supporting jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, sectarian groups and militant splinter cells have morphed into a kind of hydra.

“They are all there in South Waziristan’s Wana region,” the official said. “It’s no longer an Afghan-only problem. It has become as much a Pakistan problem too.”

Still, it remains unclear if there is a single strategy behind the suicide bombings. Some have been apparently sectarian in nature, part of a decades-old problem in Pakistan between extremist Shiite and Sunni groups.

But militants allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda appear to be behind four of the six most recent attacks, acting in retaliation for military strikes by Pakistani forces against their groups in the tribal regions.

Of those, at least three attacks can be traced back to Baitullah Mehsud, a militant commander based in South Waziristan, who is known to have sent suicide bombers from his mountain redoubt to Afghanistan, police officials said.

Mr. Mehsud, a former fighter with the Taliban, said his main desire was to fight United States-led coalition and NATO forces in Afghanistan. He entered into a peace deal with the Pakistani government in 2005, agreeing not to attack Pakistani forces, as long as he could continue his jihad across the border.

But under increasing pressure from the United States, and acting on a tip from American intelligence, Pakistani authorities sent helicopters to strike at a presumed hide-out of his followers on Jan. 6, killing eight people.

Mr. Mehsud vowed revenge, and several of the recent suicide bombings are believed to be in retaliation.

A suicide bomb attack on a military convoy on Jan. 22 was carried out by Mr. Mehsud’s men. Another attack by a bomber on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Jan. 26, which killed a policeman, was attributed to Mr. Mehsud as well. So was an attack that killed a policeman in Dera Ismail Khan on Jan. 29, police officials say.

General Musharraf vowed at a Feb. 2 news conference to go after Mr. Mehsud. But the governor of North-West Frontier Province, Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai, preferred to send a delegation of elders to talk to him. The militant commander later denied any involvement, but the bombings slowed.

There is consensus that a large-scale military operation, like the kinds that have failed in recent years, is not the solution. But some diplomats say that the series of peace deals that the government struck with tribal leaders and militants in South and North Waziristan has not worked either.

For instance, according to another Western diplomat, General Musharraf knows the North Waziristan agreement is only 20 to 30 percent effective, but he continues to back it for lack of another plan.

The accord has brought some order to the area’s capital, Miram Shah, according to officials with knowledge of North Waziristan. It has also forced a split among the militants, with the more aggressive followers of Mr. Mehsud and their Qaeda allies congregating in the town of Mir Ali, they said.

Some officials are now arguing that the government should move against the militants in Mir Ali, while supporting the more reasonable ones.

One practical solution is to train local tribesmen to buttress the Frontier Corps, which polices the tribal areas and could be used as a buffer to protect the settled neighboring districts.

Hundreds of recruits from Waziristan are already training in border and customs control, among other things, under a program sponsored by the United States Department of Justice, according to an American diplomat. But it is not clear whether the program will succeed.

While local men would be more acceptable to the tribesmen, their sympathies may well lie with the militants, and the Frontier Corps has been accused of turning a blind eye to the militants’ cross-border activities.

U.N. Finds Evidence That Russian Gunships Aided in Missile Attacks on Villages in Georgia

MOSCOW, March 13 ― A United Nations observer mission in Georgia on Tuesday opened an investigation into missile attacks in three remote Georgian villages, and the initial evidence suggested that Russian helicopter gunships were involved.

The military action, which occurred Sunday night and damaged several buildings in the Kodori Gorge, a mountainous area of the Caucasus ridge along Russia’s southwestern border, caused no injuries to the local population, the Georgian authorities said.

But it threatened to aggravate the already tense relations between Russia and Georgia, a former Soviet republic that has resisted the Kremlin’s efforts at regional dominance.

Both Russia and the forces of the nearby breakaway region of Abkhazia denied involvement in the attacks, leaving the strikes, for now, an unacknowledged use of military force in an volatile corner of the former Soviet world.

Georgian officials claimed on Monday that Mi-24 attack helicopters from Russia had flown sorties over the border during the previous night and had struck government buildings and houses in the towns of Azhara, Chkhalta and Gentsvishi.

Only experienced and well-trained pilots could have made some of the shots, they said, as the approach to the targets required flying in darkness with night-vision goggles through a narrow and often fog-bound gorge.

There was evidence suggesting that artillery or ground-to-ground rockets might have been fired at the villages as well. Investigators were still examining the shrapnel, however, and the question of whether ground-to-ground ordnance had also been used was not clear, a military officer involved in the United Nations’ investigation said.

All of the towns are near the breakaway region of Abkhazia, a Russian-supported enclave inside Georgia’s borders that has not recognized the Georgian central government since the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian forces are posted in Abkhaz territory and have equipment capable of ground-to-ground bombardments, although the Russian units are formally on peacekeeping duty.

Georgia lost a brief war with Abkhaz separatists in the early 1990s. Since then, the area has been a self-declared republic that seeks independence. No nation has formally recognized it, but Russia has served as its patron, providing aid and political support and granting citizenship to almost all of its residents.

The Kodori Gorge was also outside of Georgia’s control for more than a decade, run by a local strongman and an irregular militia until Georgian forces chased away the militia in July and restored the gorge to the central government’s control.

The operation in July allowed Georgians previously expelled from Abkhazia by the war to open offices of a government-in-exile in Azhara, which lies within the liberated area. It also raised hopes in Georgia that it was a step toward national reunification, which has been a central ambition of Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-Western president ― and a source of tension with Russia and the de facto Abkhaz government.

It was the new office of the government-in-exile, housed in a bright pink building that has frequently been in Georgia’s national news, that was struck Sunday night. Pictures of the impact area, posted on a Georgian Web site, show that what seemed to have been a missile struck a flagpole and detonated, shearing the pole and splattering the facade of the building with shrapnel. The remains of the ordnance then slammed into the outside wall, making a large hole.

The shrapnel collected from the site suggested that it had been fired from an Mi-24, said Eka Zguladze, Georgia’s deputy minister of internal affairs, by telephone. The Mi-24 is a Russian attack gunship in abundance just over the border inside Russia, where several aviation units support counterinsurgency operations in Chechnya.

Ms. Zguladze said that United Nations investigators had collected evidence at 13 other impact sites as well and that at least 20 missiles were known to have struck the area.

The United Nations refused to comment on the amount or nature of the shrapnel it had collected, saying the investigation was continuing and patrols examining the impact sites in the mountains had not completed their work. The patrols included United Nations staff members as well as representatives from Abkhazia, Georgia and the Russian peacekeeping force.

“They are going to need at least a couple of days up there to do a thorough job,” Stan Vietsman, the special assistant to the special representative of the United Nations secretary general, said by telephone.

Shedding Light on Humanity's Dark Side

Rufina Amaya, the woman who was often identified as the last, or only, survivor of the massacre at the village of El Mozote, died last week. She was not, strictly speaking, the only survivor of that monstrous event, but she appears to have been the only one who emerged with her wits about her, a clear memory of what took place, and the will to describe how hundreds of people, including her husband and four of her children, were systematically butchered on Dec. 11, 1981, in an impoverished corner of El Salvador.

The massacre took place in the early days of the United States' involvement in El Salvador. In that conflict, radical leftist guerrillas tried to overthrow a ruling establishment utterly loathed by the population at large for its corruption and human rights atrocities. The Reagan administration intervened to train and equip the Salvadoran army, and to shore up the government against what it feared would become a red tide of communism lapping at the very borders of the Rio Grande.

The news articles describing a rampage of murder by the army in a place called El Mozote were written by me and by my friend and colleague Ray Bonner. In early January of 1982, Bonner, who was working for the New York Times, told me that he and the photographer Susan Meiselas had been invited by the guerrilla leadership to tour the rugged province of Morazán, an area of El Salvador bordering on Honduras where the guerrillas held sway, and which reporters had long been eager to visit. After frantic and pleading calls to my own guerrilla media contacts in Mexico City, a trip was arranged for me as well. The Washington Post, for which I was a stringer at the time, approved the trip. We did not suspect that I was being allowed into guerrilla territory to report on a massacre.

Traveling only by night and on foot through government-controlled territory, I reached the guerrilla-held region of El Mozote as Bonner and Meiselas were on their way out. My camera had been damaged during a river crossing and so the next day I saw, but could not photograph, a ruined chapel and three adjoining adobe houses where the charred remains of dozens of victims--it was impossible to tell how many--lay half-hidden among the rubble. Along the paths connecting El Mozote to smaller hamlets, parched corpses lay in the baking sun. There were bodies in the abandoned cornfields, in one-room houses where a pedal-operated sewing machine was a sign of great wealth, in the citrus groves where birds still chirped. There were, in fact, bodies everywhere--children, men, women, draft animals -- and the air reeked.

I was taken to see Rufina Amaya, a small-boned woman in her thirties, dressed like any campesina in a skirt and short-sleeved blouse, a frilly apron and plastic sandals, and with a face that seemed to have turned to stone. In precise detail she told me the same story she would repeat throughout the years, and that forensic evidence would confirm a decade later.

An army officer who was a friend of her husband's, she said, had told the villagers early in December not to worry about a coming offensive against the guerrillas, because El Mozote, which had a large evangelical population, was not known to be subversivo, or subversive.

The troops arrived the following day and, after an initial brutal search, told the villagers that they could return to their homes. "We were happy then," Señora Amaya recalled. " 'The repression is over,' we said."

But the troops returned. Acting on orders, they separated the villagers into groups of men, young girls, and women and children. Rufina Amaya managed to slip behind some trees as her group was being herded to the killing ground, and from there she witnessed the murders, which went on until late at night. An army officer, told by an underling that a soldier was refusing to kill children, said, "Where is the sonofabitch who said that? I am going to kill him," and bayoneted a child on the spot. She heard her own children crying out for her as they met their deaths. The troops herded people into the church and houses facing a patch of grass that served as the village plaza. They shot the villagers or dismembered them with machetes, then set the structures on fire. At last, believing they had killed all the citizens of El Mozote and the surrounding hamlets, the troops withdrew.

Now that the bones of the victims have been unearthed, and cleaned, and counted, and provided with proper burial, it is astonishing to think that for years Rufina Amaya was called a liar. What she was describing, after all, was the brutal murder of her flesh and blood, of her neighbors and fellow worshipers at the chapel. Why would she have lied about such things?

The problem was that the subsistence farmers who died at El Mozote and in the surrounding villages were simply fodder in one of the last battles of the Cold War. What was at stake in believing Rufina Amaya's testimony, along with Susan Meiselas's photographs and our firsthand reports, was the Reagan administration's continued support for the Salvadoran government. Because this support was so controversial back home, it depended on twice-yearly congressional certification that the Salvadorans were making progress on human rights.

In congressional hearings and to the press, high-level officials roundly denied that any atrocity had taken place. Bonner was called a liar in a Wall Street Journal editorial. I was not. Rereading our stories from that day, I reflected that I was spared thanks to the well-meaning, and tortured, editing of my original story in The Post, which, as published, was full of phrases like Rufina Amaya "broke down only when speaking of what she said were the deaths of her children." What she said were her children, or what she said were their deaths? Even the syntax was bad.

The massacre at El Mozote remained a disputed fact until a peace treaty was signed between the government and the guerrillas of El Salvador in 1992. In the face of strong government opposition, members of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team were appointed by a U.N. truth commission to excavate the zone, and exhumation work continued until 2004. At that time, the remains of more than 300 men, women, children and infants had been recovered in the main killing grounds, but the list of victims from the village and nearby hamlets includes more than 800 names. As far as is known, this was the single largest massacre to take place in this hemisphere in modern times.

The events at El Mozote are no longer in dispute, but after a quarter of a century they are also no longer even a memory for the majority of Salvadorans, most of whom had not been born on the day when young girls were dragged screaming to the hills to be raped, and children cried out to their mothers as they were murdered. In this country, people who once argued passionately over El Salvador would be hard pressed to remember when they last talked--or cared--about the fate of that tiny country. Having pumped tens of millions of dollars into the Salvadoran military, the U.S. government paid a fraction of the amount for the reconstruction effort once the war ended. And Rufina Amaya, a small, dark-skinned peasant woman, who had no other weapon but her fierce will to live and to keep alive the memory of what she saw one vile day, is dead of a stroke at the age of 64. She will be remembered in El Salvador because she is now part of its history. She is part of the history of this country, too.