KABUL: Behind an unmarked door on a quiet residential street, half a dozen young Chinese women in miniskirts shimmy to disco tapes or sit entwined with beefy European men. Next to the fully stocked bar, a plastic Christmas tree pulses with tiny lights.

Behind a desk in a spartan government office, a bearded official says he is swamped with job applicants for a proposed department to promote virtue and discourage vice, which would send out religious monitors to uncover and correct un-Islamic behaviour in the populace.

Both scenes coexist in a confused, newly democratic Muslim society grappling with a five-year influx of foreign troops and visitors, who have provided aid and protection but have also brought alcohol, prostitution and other tempting taboos to the deeply traditional and long-isolated country. In recent weeks, the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai has moved aggressively to crack down on what Afghans call imported vices. He is acting partly in response to pressure from domestic religious leaders and partly to upstage Taliban insurgents who are stepping up attacks across the south.

Police in this capital of four million, which is also home to several thousand foreigners, have raided about a dozen restaurants and shops suspected of selling alcohol to Afghans and have seized and destroyed thousands of bottles. Officers have detained more than 100 Chinese women as suspected prostitutes, seven of whom were deported at the airport here on Wednesday.

The cabinet also approved reviving the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice, a body that Afghan governments have maintained through much of the country’s history. It became notoriously punitive under Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, when turbaned enforcers whipped women if their veils slipped and arrested men for wearing too-short beards or playing chess.

The proposal, which must be ratified by parliament, has outraged human rights groups, Western-oriented Afghan leaders and Western diplomats here because of the concept’s association with the Taliban, which was ousted by a US military assault in 2001 and replaced by a transitional democracy with UN guidance and international military and economic support.

Afghan officials have hastened to reassure their international allies that the reconstituted vice and virtue squads would focus on education. “We would be as different from the Taliban as earth and sky,” said Sulieman Hamid, an official of the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs who would oversee the virtue and vice monitors. “They used Islam for political purposes. We only want to stop people from committing bad acts and help maintain the honour of Islam.”

He said the monitors would not replace police enforcement of law, intrude in private homes, operate separate prisons or contradict constitutional rights. “No one has any reason to be frightened,” said Abdul Jabbar Sabit, an adviser to the Interior Ministry who supervised the recent bar raids and deportations. “We would not beat people or force women to wear scarves. But we have to do something to protect society, to tell people they should not drink alcohol or smoke hashish or kill their Muslim brothers.”

If the parliament takes up the issue, it is likely to pit factions led by Muslim clerics and former militia leaders against others composed of professionals, women and Western-educated figures. These groups represent major competing strains in Afghan society as it charts a path between traditional values and modern democratic norms.

“It is very difficult for people here to say they are against the virtue and vice committee, but I am against a department that could be a way of bringing the extremists back,” said Shukria Barakzai, a female legislator. “If they want to do something about corruption and domestic violence, fine, but I don’t need a department to decide if I am a bad or a good Muslim.”

In the same week that the government sent alleged prostitutes back to China, it faced a different foreign challenge to Islamic culture — the arrival of about 1,200 evangelical Christians from South Korea. They intended to stage a public rally last weekend, but after diplomatic negotiations, they were sent home because Afghan officials feared they would offend local Muslims by proselytizing and risk being physically attacked.

The depth of Islamic passion here — and the wide disparity between Afghan and Western views of religious rights — were also dramatized in March when an Afghan man who converted to Christianity was threatened with capital punishment. Under foreign pressure, the government let him quietly flee to Italy, but the incident shocked many Americans who thought their troops had liberated Afghanistan from persecution.

Today, Afghan officials are eager to please their foreign benefactors and guests, yet also face pressure from local religious leaders to stem the accompanying flow of imported pleasures — from French wines to Internet pornography — that can now easily reach young Afghans. “Some of the foreign aid groups help us, but others have another agenda to influence us in the wrong direction. They are unwanted guests,” said Enayatullah Balegh, a Muslim cleric who teaches Islamic law at Kabul University. “We need the aid and the coalition forces, but we do not want the West interfering in our religion.”

The trickiest part for officials is how to treat establishments that cater to both foreigners and Afghans, who increasingly socialize together. Under Afghan law, a business may serve liquor to foreigners but not to Afghans, even if they are at the same table, which can cause embarrassment and discomfort. Since the police raids two weeks ago, a number of restaurants have shut down, most of them Chinese-owned businesses that allegedly provided prostitutes. Others have hid their liquor, put up placards barring Afghans and reported a sharp drop in customers of all nationalities.

Sabit said UN officials and foreign diplomats had complained about the raids, which also affected successful Thai- and Lebanese-owned establishments. But he said that “government enemies” were spreading lies about the crackdown and that it was aimed solely at places that had illegally provided liquor or prostitutes to Afghans.

For many Afghans, the issue of foreign vices arouses contradictory emotions. Young men often acknowledge hankering to explore forbidden pleasures, even while saying they disapprove. Until the recent deportations, ogling Chinese women on the streets was a major pastime here, but angry mobs attacked and vandalized several Chinese brothels during an anti-foreign riot on May 29. Indian movies featuring sensual dancing women are usually sold out, and online pornography sites are constantly perused at local Internet cafes. “These movies have a very bad impact on people, and they should be banned,” said Reza Mousani, 21, who was in a crowd of young men waiting outside a movie house.—Dawn/Washing ton Post News Service

MARWAHIN: It is perhaps the world’s most dangerous road, snaking up and down through boulder-strewn hills and wadis along the Lebanese-Israeli border. By Israel’s account, its forces are moving between four and six miles beyond it to take control of a long strip of Lebanese territory before the UN Security Council votes for a cessation of hostilities.

But reporters travelling along the border road on Saturday found no signs of an Israeli presence, let alone success. People in only one village had seen Israeli troops recently. Elsewhere, there was evidence of Israeli failures: burnt-out or crippled tanks. Despite the message of success Israel’s generals and politicians are giving their public, the reality on the ground appeared mixed.

At the western end of the border road just inland from the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (Unifil) at Naqura, Hezbollah fighters were launching Katysuha rockets from positions within three miles of Israel. Driving east through Aalma ech Chaab and Dhaira, reporters could see clusters of antennae and army huts on the Israeli side of the border but no sign of any incursion.

At Marwahin, where the road offers a clear view of the greenhouses and neat red-tiled roofs of the Israeli community of Zarit only 200 yards away, the ground was scarred with tank tracks. A broken metal towing cable lay on the ground, an apparent sign of mishap. Nearby were bits of caterpillar track. A mile further at the junction of the side-road to Debel a burnt-out Merkava tank was stuck in the trees, its cannon pointing limply downwards. Here the border runs along the top of a hill where a heavily fortified Israeli base sits cheek by jowl alongside UN monitoring position 5-42, a collection of white trailers and a watchtower inside blast walls. The road to Debel was littered with more broken tracks and towing cables. Hezbollah’s resistance had clearly made its mark.

Beyond the Debel turnoff, reporters could hear a fierce battle for the village of Aita ech Chaab. Israeli shells and tank rounds were pounding it and setting fire to bushes on the hillsides to deny Hezbollah fighters cover. It is the only place on the north-south border where Israel seemed to be trying to advance.

Israel has not sought to penetrate the next village of Rmeish, which has a Christian population of several hundred. The last portion of the border before it turns north towards Metulla — the current centre of the fighting — contains the towns of Bint Jbeil and Aitaroun, which Israeli forces tried to take in the first days of the war but were repelled by Hezbollah guerillas. Nine Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting.

The trip along the border road became possible when Israel allowed a UN convoy to bring food aid to the isolated Christian village of Debel. This was the first access to border villages for 10 days.

With one white armoured personnel carrier in front and another at the back, three UN food lorries set off from Naqura. The thump of outgoing tank and artillery rounds provided a constant accompaniment from the Israeli side. In a press car behind the convoy sat the Archbishop of Tyre, clad in a white cassock. The Israeli onslaught has hit Shia villages hardest because of links with Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters, but many Christans have stayed, their houses intact but their supplies dwindling fast.

“They have the dignity of mountain people. They don’t want to live as refugees in a school in Beirut”, said Archbishop Chucrallah Hajje, while French and Ghanaian troops unloaded food parcels outside the small church. Before the convoy set off from UN headquarters, monitors said Israeli forces came in by day but pulled back at night, remaining a few hundred yards inside the border.

As a claim to control territory this seemed less than convincing. Israeli troops were still being shot at from villages, the observers said. The deepest Israeli presence inside Lebanon that the convoy encountered was at Jibbain, a Sunni village two miles from the border. The archbishop wanted to give aid here too, in part to show his concern was not only for bringing aid to Christians.

On Sunday Israeli commandos landed near Mansouri on the coast north of Naqoura, killing a Lebanese army intelligence official and wounding seven soldiers. The purpose may have been to squeeze the Hezbollah launch teams between Jibbain and Mansouri. If so, it would confirm that, rather than an occupation of south Lebanon, the Israelis are going for limited gains. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

EAST LONDON: South Africa’s most prolific mass murderer takes another sip of coffee, eases back in his chair and pauses when asked if it is true he shot more than 100 black people. “I can’t argue with that,” says Louis van Schoor. “I never kept count.”

Seated at a restaurant terrace in East London, a seaside town in the Eastern Cape, the former security guard is a picture of relaxed confidence, soaking up sunshine while reminiscing about his days as an apartheid folk hero.

Hired to protect white-owned businesses in the 1980s, he is thought to have shot 101 people, killing 39, in a three-year spree. Some were burglars; others were passers-by dragged in from the street. All were black or coloured, the term for those of mixed race.

Convicted of murder but released from jail after 12 years, Van Schoor is unrepentant. “I was doing my job — I was paid to protect property. I never apologised for what I did.” He is not the only one. The whites in East London who turned a blind eye to his killing spree have not apologised and whites in general, according to black clerics and politicians, have not owned up to apartheid-era atrocities.

That reluctance to atone has been laid bare in a book published last week, The Colour of Murder, by Heidi Holland, which investigates the blood-soaked trail not only of Van Schoor but also his daughter, Sabrina, who hired a hitman to murder her mother. The macabre tale is likely to reignite debate about those whites who shun the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and mock rainbow nation rhetoric. “The story is of a family but it is also the story of a divided country and of the people of that country trying to find new ways to live with each other,” says Ms Holland.

Since his release two years ago, after benefiting from a sentence reduction for all convicts issued by Nelson Mandela when he was president, Van Schoor, 55, has slimmed down, shaved off his beard and kept a low profile, working as a cattle farm foreman outside East London. During his 1992 trial white residents displayed “I Love Louis” stickers decorated with three bullet holes through a bleeding heart. Sympathy endures, says Van Schoor. “The reaction is 90% positive. Strangers say, ‘Hey, it’s good to see you.’”

Magistrates and the police, grateful for the terror instilled in black people, covered his tracks until local journalists and human rights campaigners exposed the carnage as apartheid crumbled. Van Schoor was convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders.

Upon his release in 2004, Van Schoor said he had found God and, when prompted, expressed sorrow to his victims’ relatives. “I apologise if any of my actions caused them hurt.”

In an interview this week, he tried to clarify his position. “I never apologised for what I did. I apologised for any hurt or pain that I caused through my actions during the course of my work.” Thanks to his changed appearance and low profile he has faced no backlash. Few black people recognise him, including the bookseller who took his order for The Colour of Murder. When Van Schoor gave his name the penny dropped. “She nearly fell off her chair,” he says, smiling.

Married four times and now engaged to a local woman, Van Schoor, says he is “happy and content”. But he does not seem to approve of the new South Africa. “Everything has changed — people’s attitudes, the service in shops, it’s not the same.” On the contrary, lament black leaders, one crucial thing has stayed the same: the refusal of many whites to admit past sins. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, recently said the privileged minority that once feared retribution had not shown enough gratitude for peaceful inclusion in a multi-racial democracy. Nkosinathi Biko, the son of the murdered anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, noted the dearth of white voices during last month’s commemorations of the June 1976 Soweto uprising, when police slaughtered black schoolchildren. A liberal white commentator, Max du Preez, called the silence embarrassing.

Nowhere is it more deafening than East London. Van Schoor’s rampage was made possible by a white establishment that made no outcry as his victims piled up, many of them impoverished children such as Liefie Peters, 13, gunned down while hiding in the toilet of a Wimpy restaurant after breaking in to steal cash.

This week, eating a burger yards from where Van Schoor cornered his prey, Jacques Durandt, a 33-year-old white former member of the security forces, defended the killer. “I won’t say he’s a murderer. For him it was a job.” Wannitta Kindness, a 36-year-old white taxi driver parked outside the restaurant, says the security guard might have fired even if the intruder was white. “But you don’t find white people breaking into places.”

Others echoed the refrain: denied jobs reserved for black people, targeted by criminals, harassed in the street, victims in South Africa these days have pale skin and they see no reason to apologise. “The blacks don’t want equality,” says Ms Kindness. “They want to be on top.”

East London does boast at least one white advocate of racial harmony: Van Schoor’s daughter, Sabrina, 25. While her father was in jail she shocked the white community by dating black men and giving birth to a mixed-race child. In 2002, in a grisly irony, she hired a black man to slit her mother’s throat, claiming she was a racist bully.

Convicted of murder and sent to the same prison as her father, Sabrina van Schoor is seen as a martyr by some black people. She seems popular among fellow inmates at Fort Glamorgan jail. “That girl, she’s not like the whites outside of here. She’s OK,” says one inmate.

Speaking through iron bars, Sabrina van Schoor, powerfully built like her father, says she is nervous about her family history coming under public scrutiny again because of the book. “I’m afraid it might open old wounds.” Blame game goes on in a society dogged by murder and violence. Each time someone is murdered in South Africa — which happens about 50 times more often than it does in Europe — 2010 flashes through the minds of football administrators and politicians. That year, when the country stages the World Cup, has become as much of a test of South Africa’s ability to rule itself as the 1994 election which introduced majority rule.

While most World Cup hosts get nervous at some stage of preparations, about the capacity of stadiums or transport systems, in South Africa the worry is murder. Just as violence threatened to derail the peace train heading for majority rule 12 years ago, so there are fears that it is about to humiliate the country.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service

MADRID: Christopher Columbus, the man credited with discovering the Americas, was a greedy and vindictive tyrant who saved some of his most violent punishments for his own followers, according to a document uncovered by Spanish historians.

As governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus imposed iron discipline on the first Spanish colony in the Americas, in what is now the Caribbean country of Dominican Republic. Punishments included cutting off people’s ears and noses, parading women naked through the streets and selling them into slavery.

“Columbus’ government was characterised by a form of tyranny,” Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who has seen the document, told journalists. One man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off, was placed in shackles and was then auctioned off as a slave. A woman who dared to suggest that Columbus was of lowly birth was punished by his brother Bartolomé, who had also travelled to the Caribbean. She was stripped naked and paraded around the colony on the back of a mule.

“Bartolomé ordered that her tongue be cut out,” said Ms Varela. “Christopher congratulated him for defending the family.” The evidence has been found in a previously lost report drawn up at the time for the Spanish monarchs as they became worried by growing rumours of Columbus’ barbarity and avarice.

The document was written by a member of an order of religious knights, the Order of Calatrava, who had been asked to investigate the allegations against Columbus by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who ruled Spain together at the time.

The report, by Francisco de Bobadilla, lay undiscovered in a state archive in the Spanish city of Valladolid until last year. Bobadilla had already been named governor of the Indies, replacing Columbus, at the time of the report.

The 48-page document gathers evidence from Columbus’ enemies and supporters of his seven-year reign. Ms Varela, one of the two Spanish historians to have studied the document, described life in the colony as “horrifying and hard”. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

MAJDEL KRUM (Israel): “Hezbollah has raised up our heads and lifted our spirits”, said Israeli Arab Ali Manna as he mourned two nephews killed in a rocket attack by the Lebanese guerilla group.

Despite the fact that Arabs make up a third of the 48 people killed by rocket fire on northern Israel, the sympathies of some of the Arab minority lie very much with the Lebanese group rather than the Jewish state.

Manna’s nephews, Mohammad Manna, aged 25, and Baha Fayyad, 30, were killed when a rocket hit the town of Majdel Krum last week.

Although Arabs and Jews are coming under the same hail of rockets and sometimes share the same bomb shelters, the war has further strained ties between the communities.

Israel’s Arabs, who make up nearly a fifth of the population, are descendants of those who stayed when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes during a war that erupted when Israel was founded in 1948.

“Hezbollah’s popularity has increased immensely among the Arabs in Israel,” said Rawda Atallah, head of the Arab Cultural Association in Haifa, a mixed Jewish-Arab city that has been one of the main targets of Hezbollah attacks.

“For the first time there is a sense of regained dignity. They feel for the first time a group is resisting and standing steadfast in the face of the Israeli army,” she said.

Just after the start of the conflict with Hezbollah, sparked by the group’s capture of two Israeli soldiers and killing of eight others on July 12, some Arabs would rush out and cheer when rockets fell on neighbouring Jewish towns.

These days, they are more likely to take cover when the warning sirens sound. But the fear of coming under fire has not discouraged those who supported Hezbollah.

Polls show more than 80 per cent of Israelis back the offensive against Hezbollah that Lebanon says has killed at least 925 people, mostly civilians. Ninety-four Israelis have been killed. Support for the war among Arabs is much lower.

Relations between Israel’s Jews and Arabs have long been difficult. Arabs complain of discrimination, something Israel denies. Israeli Arabs have generally sympathised with Palestinian kin waging an uprising for nearly six years.

Some Israeli commentators have suggested that Arabs should be stripped of citizenship if they support Hezbollah.

Israeli media have published reports alleging that Israeli Arabs are colluding with Hezbollah and even helping the guerillas direct their rocket fire through text messages.—Reuters