The village, surrounded by dense forest but only 50 kilometres from a major iron-ore mine, already has three steel plants in its midst. Tata, a major Indian company, wants to build another, much bigger than the rest. The villagers, who belong to the indigenous Ho tribe, want none of it: last year police broke up two protest rallies with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Now the bulldozers and diggers went to work, levelling a paddy field which occupied part of the site where Tata’s planned new steel plant is supposed to rise The disaster was under way. For days there had been rumours that something was about to happen. It was dawn on 2 January 2006 when the quiet morning rituals of Kalinganagar, a village in eastern India, were drowned in a noise like the end of the world: a stream of bulldozers and excavators and khaki-painted lorries containing more than 400 armed police came grinding into the village. Basant has always had deaths, with over-enthusiastic kite-fliers falling from roofs or electrocuted when the metal-stringed kites hit power lines. But deaths of the innocent were too much.Kites had already been banned by the Supreme Court last year, but after intense pressure from Lahoris stripped of their favourite festival, the court had agreed the ban would be suspended for the two weeks up to the festival..

“My son’s death has ruined my life.”Enraged people staged protests after the deaths, burning kites on the streets of Lahore and the provincial government of Punjab ordered a complete ban. Two child passengers on motorbikes – a legal mode of transport for children – and a college student were among the seven who died.Four-year-old Shayan Ahmad was with his father, Mohammed Rizwan, riding on the fuel tank of his father’s motorbike, when he hit a kite string “I saw my son dying helplessly,” said Mr Rizwan. In Lahore, kites are not for children.The tradition has had tragic consequences, with several motorbike riders killed when they unwittingly drive into the glass-coated strings or wires that are everywhere in the city. Lahoris fly their kites with special strings coated in ground glass, or made from thin metal wires, which they use to cut the strings of their opponents’ kites. Seven people have been killed by kite strings coated with glass over the past fortnight, including a four-year-old boy who bled to death in his father’s arms after his throat was cut. Usually, in the annual festival of Basant, more than a million kites fly over Lahore. People come from across the world as residents fly kites from their rooftops and the night’s sky is floodlit with kite-flying.But there is a fiercely competitive edge.

On the eve of this weekend’s competition, the Pakistani authorities have decided to clamp down on an activity which they regard as reckless and even potentially fatal.
At least 74 people were arrested for flying or selling kites on the streets of Lahore after the ban was announced. The famous Lahore kite festival, the biggest celebration in the city’s calendar and irresistible occasion for kite enthusiasts the world over, will this year be different in one crucial respect: kite flying will be banned. “We distinguish between illegal outposts, which will be demolished, and legal communities established according to the law.” He said the original advice had not been upheld by decisions of the Israeli courts.In yesterday’s New York Times, Mr Gorenberg said: “Today it is clear that Israel’s future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank.” He adds: “Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.”. It also contests that the Fourth Geneva Convention’s clear prohibition of transfers of civilian population to occupied lands was drafted to deal with forced population transfers in central and eastern Europe in the Second World War.Yesterday, Mark Regev, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Israel did not accept that settlements properly decided by the government contravened international law.

He pointed out that the government specifically decreed military courts had to apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.Israel has long argued that the policy of settlement conforms with the 1922 League of Nations decision at the San Remo conference in favour of Jewish settlement in Palestine. His new book, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements will generate fresh debate on the legality of the West Bank settlements in the wake of Ariel Sharon’s decision to withdraw 8,500 settlers from Gaza last August.Most of the international community has held that Jewish settlement in the territories seized in the 1967 war contravened international law, and the Geneva Conventions in particular, but this has long been publicly contested by Israel.The highly classified internal advice was given by Theodor Meron, who left Israel a decade later and became a leading international jurist who until the end of last year was president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.After the 1967 Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, made it known he wanted settlements in the Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the war, and in the Jordan Valley, to make Israel’s borders more defensible, Mr Meron was asked whether international law allowed such settlement.The counsel sanctioned short-term settlement “by military bodies rather than civilian ones”, but explicitly ruled out civilian settlements which were energetically established by successive Israel governments, leading to an Israeli population of more than 240,00 in the West Bank today.The Israeli acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has made it clear that while Israel is prepared to withdraw further settlements from the West Bank, it intends, unilaterally if it cannot reach a negotiated peace deal, to annex territory occupied by others, including the three big settlement blocks of Ma’ale Admumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel.The Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, 78, who is still in a coma, had secured assurances from President George Bush that borders in a “final status” agreement with the Palestinians would allow such blocks to remain in Israel.Mr Meron’s advice, also referred to in another recent book on the 1967 war and its aftermath by the eminent Israeli journalist Tom Segev, also explicitly rejected an argument now used by Israel to defend the legality of settlements, namely that the West Bank was not “normal” occupied territory because it had not indisputably belonged to another sovereign national power and had been unilaterally annexed by Jordan.Mr Meron said the international community would regard settlement as showing “intent to annex the West Bank”, adding that “certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory”. Growth of Jewish settlements over the next three decades followed.
The official advice that a policy which is now a major obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had no basis in international law has been highlighted by the Israeli historian, Gershom Gorenberg. A “top secret” memo by the Foreign Ministry’s then legal counsel said that would “contravene the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention”.

Israeli ministers were secretly warned just after the Six-Day War in 1967 that any policy of building settlements across occupied Palestinian territories violated international law. Three videotapes of Carroll delivered by her kidnappers to Arab satellite television stations identified the group holding her as the Revenge Brigades. Carroll’s kidnappers have publicly demanded the release of all female detainees in Iraq. The Monitor launched a campaign on Iraqi television stations Wednesday asking Iraqis, in Arabic, to “Please help with the release of journalist Jill Carroll.” The list of those kidnapped and killed in Iraq includes Margaret Hassan, the director of CARE international in Iraq and a citizen of Britain, Ireland and Iraq; and Americans Ronald Schulz, an industrial electrician; Nicholas Berg, a businessman; Jack Hensley, a civil engineer; and Eugene “Jack” Armstrong..