NEWS The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, November 23, 2005 - 9 Ethnic factions agree to remake gov t in Bosnia Lebanese women throw rose petals and rice at the ambulance that carries the coffin of Hezbollah fighter Youssef Barakat, who was killed by Israeli forces on Monday, during his funeral procession in the village of Zibbeqine, near the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday. sre jets.strike targets Lebaon Under U.S. pressure, groups resolve to redraft constitution forged after civil war WASHINGTON (AP) - With a prod from the United States, leaders of Bosnia's three major ethnic factions agreed yester- day to remake their divided government a decade after the end of their bloody civil war, Europe's bloodiest fighting since World War I. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heralded the Balkan accord struck in Washington, but warned that international patience has run out for the accused war criminals who walk free in Bosnia. "There can be no more excuses and no more delays," Rice said at a State Department luncheon celebrating the 10th anniversary of a U.S.-brokered peace set- tlement. "Ten years is long enough." Rice spoke at a luncheon with Bosnian political leaders and diplomats from the Clinton administration. The 1995 agreement signed in Day- ton, Ohio, ended a three-year civil war only by allowing Serbs, Croats and Muslims to preside over separate polit- ical spheres. The result was an inef- ficient, three-headed government that Rice said was appropriate for its day, but is now outmoded. The nation of 4 million people - about the size of Los Angeles - has 14 different education departments. "Today, Bosnia-Herzegovina is joining the international community," Rice said. Yesterday's agreement com- mits Bosnian leaders to revamp the national constitution by March of next year, with an eye to joining the North American Treaty Organization and the European Union. European nations have told the Bos- nians that they have little hope of joining the EU, with its trade, border, economic and political advantages, under the coun- try's current constitution. Ivo Miro Jovic, chairman of Bosnia's three-president arrangement, spoke after Rice at the luncheon. "This key that opens this door of the future has been given to us, but only if we know how to use it and open the door," he said through a translator. The accord marks the second time in a month that Rice has applied U.S. pressure to secure incremental agreements among former enemies. Last week in Jerusalem, she put the finishing touches to an Israeli- Palestinian pact that opens the borders of the Gaza Strip. The Bosnian conflict began out of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and killed 260,000 people and drove 1.8 million from their homes. The war stunned Europe and the Unit- ed States, which were slow to get involved and watched while an educated, Western- looking nation was shredded along centu- ries-old ethnic and religious lines. "We will never forget the massacre at Srebenica," Rice said Tuesday, referring to the Bosnian Serb slaughter of 7,500 Muslims in July 1995. The killings galva- nized international will to end the war. "America's position is clear and uncom- promising: Every Balkan country must arrest its indicted war criminals or it will have no future in NATO," Rice said. In a separate statement, the Serb entity within Bosnia said it will cooperate with an international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. And all the leaders said they were deter- mined to deliver all persons indicted for war crimes to the tribunal in the Hague. The most notorious of these are Rado- van Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, accused of masterminding brutal Bosnian Serb offensives against Muslims. Rice mentioned the two ex-leaders by name yesterday. Both are believed to be living under Serb protection, moving about the region with relative ease. Karadzic published a book of poetry last month. Separately, Rice said the United States wants quick resolution to the lingering ethnic standoff in neighboring Kosovo. Legally part of Serbia-Montenegro, Koso- vo has been administered by the United Nations following a 1999 Serb military crackdown on the province's ethnic Alba- nian separatists. Although the Bosnian announcement was short on details, U.S. diplomats said Serbs, Croats and Muslims had all agreed to junk the three-president system and make parliamentary and administrative reforms. Hezbollah and Lebanese army denies that warplanes struck southern Lebanon JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel said its warplanes struck in Lebanon yesterday in what Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz described as the largest-scale Israeli response to cross-border attacks by Lebanese guerrillas since 2000. Mofaz spoke just hours after Israeli fighter jets attacked a command post of Hezbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon and after army bulldozers entered Lebanon to demolish a Hezbollah post just north of the community of Ghajar. Hezbollah and the Lebanese army denied Israeli warplanes struck in southern Lebanon yesterday. On Monday, Israeli warplanes struck a number of Hez- bollah targets, Israeli security officials said. The Israeli strike came a day after the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah fired mortars and rockets toward the Israeli-Lebanese border, wounding 11 Israeli soldiers and damaging a house in an Israeli border community. The shelling sent thousands of Israeli civilians into bomb-shelters. Israeli return fire killed four Hezbollah guerrillas. Monday's Hezbollah attack "was the largest- scale, most hostile since the departure of Israeli forces from Lebanon (in 2000)," Mofaz said in remarks broadcast on Israel Radio. The Israeli response "was the widest against attempts by Hez- bollah to escalate the situation." Mofaz said Israel hit targets that "had not been attacked since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon," including Hezbollah command, intelligence and com- munication posts. The defense minister also said Hezbollah appar- ently suffered the greatest number of casualties since Israel's pullout from Lebanon. The fighting marked a sudden upswing in violence, the first cross-border fighting in five months. The United States accused Hezbollah of provoking the fighting, and urged the Lebanese government to take charge of the area. Lebanon has requested that UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed in the country, appeal to Israel to persuade it not to further retaliate for the Hezbollah strikes, Israel Army Radio. Israeli army chief Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz con- firmed that Lebanon had turned to UNIFIL, but would not elaborate. Hezbollah frequently targets Israeli troops in the Chebaa Farms area, which the Iranian-backed group says should have been returned by Israel when it withdrew from south Lebanon. Israel says it captured the area from Syria in 1967 and will discuss its control of the land only in any future peace talks with the Arab country. Hezbollah's actions appeared to have political motivations. As the powerful Shiite Muslim militant group in control of the Lebanese side of the border with Israel, Hezbollah is an ally of Syria in Lebanon. In recent weeks it has stepped up its criticism of the United Nations and its investigation into the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. U.N. report: Starvation kills 6 million children each year United Nations food agency announces goal to reduce number of starving by half in 2015 ROME (AP) - Hunger and malnutrition kill nearly 6 million children a year, and more people are mal- nourished in sub-Saharan Africa this decade than in the 1990s, according to a U.N. report released yesterday. Many of the children die from diseases that are treat- able, including diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and mea- sles, said the report by the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of malnourished people grew to 203.5 million people in 2000-02 from 170.4 million 10 years earlier, the report states, noting that hun- ger and malnutrition are among the main causes of poverty, illiteracy, disease and deaths in developing countries. The U.N. food agency said the goal of reducing the num- ber of the world's hungry by half by the year 2015, set by the World Food Summit in 1996 and reinforced by the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, remains distant but attainable. "If each of the developing regions continues to reduce hunger at the current pace, only South America and the Caribbean will reach the Millennium Development Goal target," Jacques Diouf, the agency's director-general, wrote in the report, the agency's annual update on world hunger. The food agency said the Asia-Pacific region also has a good chance of reaching the targets "if it can acceler- ate progress slightly over the next few years." "Most, if not all of the ... targets can be reached, but only if efforts are redoubled and refocused," Diouf said. "To bring the number of hungry people down, priority must be given to rural areas and to agriculture as the mainstay of rural livelihoods." U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, on a visit to Rome to meet with FAO and Italian officials, said yesterday that free trade and economic growth were key to fighting hunger. "We have world goals in-terms of reducing hunger, and in terms of long-term prospects, it really does involve the ability of countries to engage in economic relationships with each other," he said. "We want econo- mies around the world to improve, that is really what's going to provide the long term stable base upon which people are let out of poverty." Diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, which kill more than 6 million people a year, hit the hungry and poor the hardest, according to the report's findings. Mil- lions of families are pushed deeper into poverty and hunger by the illness and death of breadwinners, the cost of health care, paying for funerals and support of orphans. I U "Don't let your H A I R got ahead of .." f .