LONDON: When Amanda stepped off a boat in Southampton, earlier this year, she had, she says, just escaped a police cell in West Africa where she had been raped, sexually assaulted and tortured by guards and fellow prisoners. Suffering from severe abdominal pain and the trauma of leaving her two young children behind, she believed she had reached safe ground. But days after her arrival in Britain, she was taken to a detention centre and locked up for a month, during which time her asylum claim was rejected.

With no legal representation at her appeal, Amanda was forced to relive her ordeal before a judge she found hostile, and who accused her of lying about the rape. The appeal was turned down.

Campaigners say such experiences are far from unusual. Although it is estimated that at least 50 per cent of women seeking asylum in the UK have experienced rape or sexual violence in their countries of origin, a report published yesterday found that in two thirds of cases rape claims were dismissed as fabrications. Misjudging Rape was commissioned by the Black Women's Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape to draw attention to the behaviour of immigration judges who serve on the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT), which decides appeals against rulings made by the Home Office. As the Home Office refuses around 80 per cent of claims following initial asylum interviews, the two London-based groups argue that fair AIT hearings are essential.

The report examined 65 rulings by these immigration judges and found that rape claims were believed in only 35 per cent of cases. The level of disbelief was often justified by the view that the woman had failed to mention the rape in the initial stages of the claim and must therefore be making it up.

Cases where allegations were disbelieved included a 15-year-old girl who said she was raped by Ugandan government agents in front of her father (an opposition politician). Having reached 18 and had her asylum claim rejected, she faces repatriation. Then there is the Ethiopian Muslim woman whose description of rape was rejected on the basis that she had not complained to family members (this was described as making "no sense at all"). Only a third of women in the cases examined had access to an independent report by a doctor, psychiatrist or specialist organisation to corroborate their rape claims at the hearing. Where adjournments were requested for the preparation of such reports, immigration judges refused in more than 70 per cent of cases.

"In our experience, most judges are dismissing women and destroying their credibility," says Cristel Amiss, of the Black Women's Rape Action Project. "All the evidence confirms our fears that women and girls are being used as a soft target to bring down the asylum figures."

Amanda, who is in her 30s, finds it hard to talk about what happened after she was arrested for allowing anti-government meetings to take place in the business she ran in her home country. Her hands shake and she cries as she speaks. "The guys in the cell pushed me. One said I have to pay "charges". One of the guys forcibly had sex with me. When the shift changed, the guards were insulting me. The officer came in and grabbed me by the hair and took me to the toilet. He had sex with me. The other ones were laughing."

Amanda escaped with the help of a guard and a local pastor, who arranged her passage from the station to the nearest fishing port, from where she made her way to Southampton several months ago. She was taken to Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre. "We entered a van with a cage inside and I remember reaching a place with a high gate ... I was thinking I would meet people who would help me but there was nobody to say what was happening. I thought, maybe they are going to behead me."At Yarl's Wood Amanda was promised access to a lawyer, but says she met one only five minutes before her initial Home Office interview, giving no time to relate her experiences before the interview began. Her claim was rejected.

She fared no better at the appeal hearing before the AIT a month later. A lawyer had been appointed by Legal Aid but failed to appear and Amanda says she was left to tell the court her story without legal advice.

Amanda says the immigration judge refused requests both from her and from Home Office officials to adjourn the case, allegedly saying the hearing could go ahead without her solicitor. He then described her supporting documents as forgeries and dismissed her account of rape, even after she showed him where the guard had ripped out her hair. In his ruling the judge described rape as a terrible crime, but said it was also terrible to make false allegations because genuine complaints were more likely to be disbelieved.

Amiss says this judge has used exactly the same argument in several other rulings.

Louise Hooper, a barrister who regularly represents women at AIT hearings, says she has "worked in other areas of law but I've never seen a court so partisan in nature. Not all judges are bad but there is a cohort who do not believe anything that anyone claiming asylum ever says. Frankly, they appear to see it as their role to keep people out."

It is widely accepted that women face an uphill struggle to prove their refugee status under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which states that a person may be recognised as a refugee, "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion".

This is partly because women's political activity often takes a different form to men's -- hiding people, for example, or, like Amanda, cooking for political meetings -- which is harder to prove than membership of a party. It is also because they are targeted in different ways, the most obvious method being rape, a common weapon of war and political oppression, which, unlike torture, is not explicitly recognised by the convention.

To correct this imbalance, the UN has urged countries to adopt guidelines to ensure women's asylum claims are dealt with equitably. To its credit, the Immigration Appellate Authority, the forerunner to today's AIT, published such guidelines for adjudicators (now immigration judges) in 2000 to ensure that procedures "do not prejudice women asylum seekers".

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service

KABUL: News that the Iraq study group recommends a fresh injection of US combat troops for Afghanistan will come as sweet relief to embattled Nato commanders.

Once the White House's proudest foreign policy success, Afghanistan is slowly starting to resemble the sort of quagmire the US is struggling to escape in Iraq.

This year's dramatic Taliban resurgence has seen record numbers of suicide attacks and roadside bombs, a booming drugs trade and almost 4,000 deaths including 190 foreign soldiers.

While the US provides about half of the 40,000 outside troops in Afghanistan, the Iraq study group highlights a glaring fact facing soldiers on the ground -- it is not enough.

It says: "The huge focus of US political, military, and economic support has necessarily diverted attention from Afghanistan. We must not lose sight of the importance of the situation inside Afghanistan and the renewed threat posed by the Taliban. If the Taliban were to control more of Afghanistan, it could provide Al Qaeda the political space to conduct terrorist operations ... It is critical for the US to provide additional political, economic, and military support."

Some but not all of the extra soldiers could come from units withdrawn from Iraq, the report says. In a section arguing for dialogue with Tehran over Iraq, it also notes that Iran and the US have cooperated over Afghanistan.

But the report says that even after the eventual US withdrawal of combat brigades from Iraq, America would retain a considerable military presence in the region, in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as Afghanistan.

This will help the US, among other missions, "to deter even more destructive interference in Iraq by Syria and Iran" -- an apparent threat of military strikes against the two countries.

Analysts say US failure to send sufficient troops to Afghanistan in late 2001 was a blunder. "American policymakers ... misjudged their own capacity to carry out major strategic change on the cheap," said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert, in a recent report.

Instead the US military relied on alliances with friendly warlords to exert control and help in the hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives. But as the US moved its military and intelligence assets out of Afghanistan in preparation for the invasion of Iraq, the same warlords were already undermining the democracy that George Bush wanted to nurture.

The warlords built drug empires, engaged in widespread corruption and undermined the president, Hamid Karzai. The Taliban skilfully exploited the situation this year through intimidation and propaganda aimed at largely illiterate southern Pashtuns.

US soldiers on the ground are reportedly angry that they botched an opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda and hunt for Osama bin Laden in favour of a doomed adventure in Iraq. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

LONDON: All the Chicken Lickens in Britain's business press have been running about for the past fortnight shouting: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The cause of this hysteria, adroitly stoked up by our biggest arms firm, BAE Systems, is that the economy is allegedly in danger because the Saudi royal family may take away a warplane contract worth £10bn.

But a senior British diplomat, Stephen Day, said publicly this week what many sensible people have been thinking for some time. He told the Financial Times that Britain might be better off if it ended its corrupt liaison with Saudi Arabia. The former ambassador to Qatar said there were no political or strategic grounds for continuing with these monster arms deals: "The UK now risks fuelling the perception that the British are shoring up a corrupt regime without sound military reasons ... Britain really has to sit back and think from first principles how it can help the Middle East ... Selling arms to Saudi Arabia is not the way."

These words are heresy to the arms industry, and no doubt to the entourage of political actors on its payroll, which has included: Lord Powell, the brother of the prime minister's chief of staff; Michael Portillo, the former Tory defence secretary; and Sir Kevin Tebbit, the recently retired permanent secretary at the MoD, now on the board of Smiths Group, a major BAE subcontractor.

The Saudis are said to be displeased with the Serious Fraud Office, which is making belated headway in a huge corruption investigation, homing in on accounts in Swiss banks. The Saudis are also put out, it is said, that Whitehall files have surfaced revealing how a former British ambassador reported that Crown Prince Sultan "has a corrupt interest in all contracts".

Other defence ministry files, later hastily retrieved from the national archives, let out the awkward information that the price of previous BAE-Saudi arms deals had been inflated by £600m, allowing room for gigantic commissions.

The prime minister is now said to be agonising about whether honesty is the best policy, or whether the country (and his MPs' marginal seats) can withstand the alleged loss of 50,000 British jobs. All these scare stories are heavily exaggerated. The real target of the SFO investigation is not the Saudi regime, but BAE at its Farnborough headquarters. And the investigation, well-informed sources say, is not about arms deals long ago. It has unearthed what looks very like a well-organised conspiracy, run through British Virgin Islands front companies and discreet lawyers in Geneva, to channel almost £1bn in secret payments to the Middle East over the last five years.

But every time the SFO makes a breakthrough, BAE's political machine seems to try to derail it. The trade department and the MoD previously attempted a Whitehall coup to stop the SFO serving orders on BAE that would disclose its secret middlemen. That 2005 assault on the integrity of the attorney general was renewed again last week, with the same appeal to the "national interest".

Even more embarrassingly, US state department files show how Sir Kevin Tebbit, while still in post, was summoned to Washington to be berated by an administration official. —Dawn/ The Guardian News Service

WASHINGTON: James Baker is a lawyer, a fixer, a Republican, a friend of the Bush family, and a deeply political animal. He is not an independent radical or a man known for original thinking. So the question in the wake of his Iraq Study Group's predictably uncontroversial report is: why was it ever set up?

The first purpose was to provide an alibi for the president ahead of last month's congressional elections. Critics of his disastrous strategy in Iraq could be told that Bush was listening to the American people and understood their concerns. That is why he had set up a blue ribbon panel to evaluate all options. Nothing was taboo.

The tactic did not work, and Bush and his Republican party took a heavy beating. It was not Baker's fault so much as a sign that voters felt they had to send a message to Baker as well as to Bush. A majority of Americans as well as Iraqis want US troops to leave.

The second purpose behind the study group was to co-opt the Democrats behind Bush's war. Making it a bipartisan panel with an equal number of members from both parties was intended to make it hard for Democrats to reject its report. Baker, after all, was the man who masterminded the manoeuvrings in 2000 over whether Florida should have a full recount. His job was to get Al Gore and the rest of the Democrats to swallow their anger and fall into line behind the argument that there was no time and the better strategy was to take the dispute to the supreme court -- where Bush's side had a clear judicial majority.

Now the plan is to get the Democrats locked into agreeing with the main thrust of Bush's Iraq policy over the next two years, with the aim of preventing it from provoking a major divide during the 2008 campaign for the White House. It is not a difficult task. The main Democratic contenders, starting with Hillary Clinton, are weak fence-sitters who show no desire to challenge Bush directly. None are as clear-sighted as John Murtha, the Pennsylvania congressman, who started calling for a US troop withdrawal a year ago. Nor, unless he or she is yet to emerge, is there a Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy with the authority to rally voters against a failed president as there was when LBJ was mired in Vietnam.

The third purpose in appointing Baker's panel is the most extraordinary.

The country's political elite wants to ignore the American people's doubts, and build a new consensus behind a strategy of staying in Iraq on an open-ended basis with no exit in sight. "Success depends on unity of the American people at a time of political polarisation ... Foreign policy is doomed to failure -- as is any action in Iraq -- if not supported by broad, sustained consensus," say Baker and his Democratic co-chair, Lee Hamilton, in their introduction. In other words, if things go wrong, it will be the American people's fault for not trusting in the wisdom of their leaders.

The Baker panel recognises, as does Bush, that the central plank in US policy in Iraq over the next two years has to be a dramatic reduction in US casualties. At the present rate, it will only be a few days until more Americans will have died in Iraq than in the attacks of 9/11. Adding the US death toll in Afghanistan that point has already been reached.

Bush's war on terror has killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden's terror.

What Baker proposes is essentially a continuation of what Bush is already doing -- trying to reduce US deaths by moving troops out of the front line while avoiding any commitment to a full US withdrawal. Baker fails to consider an early withdrawal objectively, describing that option as "precipitate" and "premature". —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

QUEDLINBURG: The Christmas market in this medieval German town could be off a page in a children's picture book. The sugary smell of “Gluehwein” (mulled wine) wafts over wooden stalls selling toys and gingerbread while children sway to seasonal songs. Christmas lights illuminate the half-timbered houses around the square.

Last Saturday evening, three burly policemen stood under those fairy lights clutching truncheons.

Their job: to stop neo-Nazi violence.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later bottles started flying, a scuffle ensued and an ambulance drew up. The chatty waitress in a restaurant under Quedlinburg's town hall suddenly became flustered and locked the door, keeping her customers inside.

“Sorry, this has been happening a bit lately,” she said, mentioning a neo-Nazi attack last weekend on some teenagers.

In statistics which make alarming reading given Germany's Nazi history, right wing-motivated violence is on the rise in the country as a whole and especially in the former east German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

MORE ATTACKS: The “Miteinander” (together) victim support group registered 110 right wing-motivated acts of violence in the first half of this year in Saxony-Anhalt. That was more than in any other state and compared to 129 incidents in the whole of 2005.

Police in Quedlinburg have reacted by installing video cameras, reinforced the number of officers on night duty, launched a campaign to help the community recognise politically motivated crime and are trying to react more quickly when incidents occur.“The aim is to get quick convictions for perpetrators,” said a police spokesman. He said the far-right scene was not well-organised and police know the individuals involved.

The UNESCO world heritage site of Quedlinburg counts as one of Germany's prettiest towns. According to folklore, the nearby Harz mountain range is home to witches and woodland spirits.

But during the day, it is the neo-Nazis who make their presence felt.

Hanging around the square, they are recognisable by their skinhead haircuts, military clothing with far-right slogans like “Stahlgewitter” (storm of steel) and Burberry caps.

Statistics show racist attacks are rife in Saxony-Anhalt where unemployment was about 16.5 per cent in October compared with 9.8 per cent in Germany as a whole.—Reuters

BAGHDAD: As the sun sets and residents of Baghdad's Hurriya district hurry home, Firas Hasan and his friends grab their Kalashnikov rifles and head onto the deserted streets.

The volunteers are not insurgents but members of one of dozens of armed “neighbourhood watch” groups that have appeared across the capital as areas are increasingly carved out between rival religious communities amid mounting sectarian bloodshed.

“The terrorists target us because we're Shi'ite Muslims,” Hasan said. “We can't trust anyone. We've established our presence in the area by questioning strangers and stopping cars to deter these criminals.”

Hasan says the group began patrolling the streets three months ago when Sunni insurgents from a nearby area drove into the district and dumped a large sack on the pavement. Inside were the remains of one of their friends who was kidnapped a day earlier.“When we opened up the sack we found Khalil's head and chopped-up body parts inside,” he recalled as he wiped the barrel of his rifle. “From then on, we knew we needed to protect ourselves so we formed this group at his funeral.”

Across the Tigris river, in the mainly Sunni Adhamiya district, Abu Anas says his group of armed men is on alert for Shi'ite militiamen, especially after six bombs in nearby Sadr City killed over 200 people two weeks ago.

The attack was the deadliest since the US-led invasion in 2003, and set Sunnis preparing for violent reprisals, which many feared would plunge Iraq into all-out civil war.

A subsequent increase in defensive measures by armed groups in different districts -- and “mortar wars” between rival communities -- fuelled new fears that the capital could be carved up into sectarian enclaves divided by front-lines.

ROOFTOP POSITIONS: “We work two six-hour shifts from six in the evening to six the following morning, we take up positions on the roofs of our houses in the second shift,” Abu Anas said. “We are all volunteers but sometimes families give us some money and food.”

“The area has been calm but we are always ready to attack the Mehdi Army if they come into our streets, even if they use police vehicles,” he added.—Reuters