An advance team of Japanese soldiers arrived yesterday in Kuwait for training at a US military base before they cross overland to Iraq on a humanitarian mission that puts the nation's soldiers in a combat zone for the first time since World War II.
The approximately 30 soldiers, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying military duffel bags, arrived on a commercial flight from Tokyo to prepare for a mission that has run into strong opposition at home. They filed into a waiting, chartered bus, which two US military 4-wheel-drive vehicles escorted out of the airport and off to an American base in the Kuwaiti desert.
When fully in place in Iraq by March, a 1,000-strong Japanese contingent will help purify local water supplies, rebuild schools and provide medical care in southern Iraq. They will carry arms for self-protection, but their role will be noncombatant.
Many Japanese oppose sending troops into Iraq, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's argument that Japan is fulfilling its international commitments hasn't silenced critics. Japan's defeat in World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered horrifying reminders of the devastation of war.
The prime minister is also building momentum for a historic rethinking of the constraints placed on the military by the war-renouncing 1947 constitution, written by the US. His party is drafting a revision of the document, which has never been amended.
Although Japanese lawmakers approved noncombat duties with UN peacekeeping operations a decade ago, Japanese peacekeepers never before have been sent into situations as dangerous as post-war Iraq, where guerrilla attacks are a daily occurrence. No Japanese peacekeeper has ever been killed.
The rest of the Japanese force could start leaving Japan this month. After training in Kuwait, Japanese soldiers could start arriving in Iraq in early February. About 600 Japanese ground soldiers are being deployed along with roughly 400 sailors and air force personnel.
A small military team already has flown from Tokyo to inspect the area in southern Iraq where the Japanese will be based.
On Friday, the commander of the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, hailed the imminent arrival of Japanese humanitarian troops as a "tremendous contribution."
Sanchez said the US "clearly understands the limitations and the national guidance that has been given to the Japanese troops."
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS