War Victims

For no particular crime, Russian soldiers beat Uvayes Batalov every day for nearly a month. They starved him, jolted him with electricity and locked him for days with other prisoners in a specially overheated railroad car with little water. "The guards came to the door and said, 'Do you want some fresh air?' " recalled Batalov, a 26-year-old Chechen construction worker who was unarmed at the time of his arrest. "We said, 'We do, yes!' So they came in and beat us with clubs. Later they came back.

The price of war Re "Remembering California's war dead," Nov. 6 You cite figures indicating that there have been 6,204 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a veteran of World War II, I can still remember the wounds and suffering of that long-ago time. Veterans Day will soon be upon us, and it should bring home the fact that every war really represents a failure of humans to conduct their affairs in a sensible and civilized way. Dead soldiers are victims even more than they are heroes.

During a solemn 10 a.m. Mass at St. John's Cathedral on Sunday, Deacon Lester Mackenzie recited the names and ages of six Americans who had lost their lives in Iraq the previous week. Pray for them, he told the congregation, and for prisoners of war and those missing in action. Then Mackenzie, who is being ordained today as an Episcopal priest, called on parishioners "to pray for the Iraqi people who have died, whose names we do not know." St.

The bicycle man prefers working in the sun, sitting on a cushion nailed to a wooden block, stretching out his right leg, the one with a missing foot, taken years ago in that instant when a man's life veers another way. Abdul Hibib has been fixing bicycles for almost 30 years. His hands are quick, clicking gears, moving across spokes as if he's plucking a harp. So much worn rubber and troubled history have rolled past him. His country tumbled from war to war while he tinkered with bicycles, outlasting the Soviets, surviving the Taliban.

In response to "War Prisoner" (letter, Sept. 29): I feel for those people who are victims of war. I feel for people who can't distinguish between being held captive by an enemy nation and being held captive by your own country, and I pray that people understand this major difference so that history does not do a repeat. JOHN J. SAITO Regional Director Japanese American Citizen League Los Angeles

Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said police believe that about 800 victims of the Kosovo war were buried in mass graves in the Yugoslav republic. He vowed that no one guilty of war crimes would escape justice. Mihajlovic, a leading member of the reformist alliance that last year ousted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, said police would find out who had ordered the "monstrous operation" to transport bodies to mass graves across Serbia.

Sudan is keeping aid workers from helping victims of fighting between the government and rebels, said officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross, the United Nations and others have repeatedly protested their lack of access to the western region of Darfur, where aid agencies estimate that fighting has killed hundreds and forced more than 600,000 to flee.

An international panel made an impassioned plea Thursday for funds to build a children's hospital in the war-ravaged African country of Burundi. Among the speakers at a news conference at the African Community Resource Center at 6th Street and Vermont Avenue were a former vice president of Burundi, a member of the Albert Schweitzer Society International and Prince Daniel Grimaldi, a relative of the late Princess Diana.

The bloody tragedy of the decade-long El Salvador civil war has become so painfully familiar and persistent that it now belongs with the "impossible" strifes-without-end: Northern Ireland, Ethiopia, the Middle East. Media coverage has long ago cast the Salvadoran battle with a pall of weary sameness, nightly horrors that eventually numb the viewer. This, of course, is dangerous. To lose sight of this war would be to lose touch with the realities of Latin America.

Not long ago, Francis Akonyu's fantasy was to have something to eat, to have the hair grow back on his head and to return to his homeland in Uganda with both of his parents alive. He also wished for a place without gunfire. Thursday, he was in Disneyland--far from famine, death, poverty, war and disease. Along with 30 other war orphans, the 11-year-old survivor was performing at the park as a member of the African Children's Choir.

When Claudia Llosa was growing up in Lima, Peru, adolescence wasn't a time for hanging out with friends in the streets. The country was in the grip of a brutal civil war pitting the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas against a government determined to stamp them out at any cost. "The message was, 'Stay inside! Hide yourself! Be careful!' " Llosa, 33, recalled recently during an interview at a West Hollywood hotel, speaking in Spanish. "I knew that I would speak of the theme one day, but I didn't know how to come face to face with it. It was a reality that changed everything.

Whenever I walk past a window I feel a stab of fear. Traffic scares me because I think that any one of the cars could blow up. Sudden sounds terrify me. It's been several weeks since the suicide bombing last month of the Hamra hotel, where I was working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times' Baghdad Bureau. Yet I still keep reliving the moment the bomb exploded outside our window and a 2-inch shard of glass penetrated my chest, leaving a bloody gash. It was only a split second of terror, a fragmentary flash of sound, fury and pain, but it replays over and over in my mind, haunting me with reminders of how close I was to death.

Spain's world-famous magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, has made many enemies over the years. He has indicted Osama bin Laden. He has gone after Spanish paramilitaries, Basque separatists and members of drug mafias. On this side of the Atlantic, Garzon is best known as the judge who pushed the frontiers of international law, trying to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from London and launching an inquiry into the suspected torture of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo.

War's violence claimed the lives of more than 2,400 Afghan civilians in 2009, the United Nations said Wednesday, the largest annual death toll for noncombatants since the U.S.-led invasion eight years ago. But the proportion of civilian deaths attributed to Western and Afghan security forces dropped sharply in the wake of strict new rules of engagement issued in the summer by U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces...

As she rubs the stump where her left ankle used to be, Park Choon-young recalls her life in this town that she calls a cursed place, a no man's land where the very ground is fraught with peril. Countless land mines planted here, she says, have wreaked an incredible personal toll: The petite 84-year-old widow lost two sons and a grandson to explosions after they accidentally detonated mines while walking in the dense woods outside town. About four decades ago, Park also stepped on a mine in a farm field.

A nurse rocked him awake as pale dawn light crept into the room. "C'mon now, c'mon," the nurse murmured. "Time to get up." Reggie Lane was once a hulking man of 260 pounds. Friends called him "Big Dad." Now, he weighed less than 200 pounds and his brain was severely damaged. He groaned angry, wordless cries. The nurse moved fast. Two bursts of deodorant spray under each useless arm. Then he dressed Lane and used a mechanical arm to hoist him into a wheelchair. He wheeled Big Dad down a hallway and parked the chair in a beige dining room, in front of a picture window.

Calabasas High School students wrapped up a six-day cookie and candy sale Tuesday, netting about $740 for war victims in Bosnia. "We cannot go out and fight, we cannot go out and rescue people on the battlefield," said Calabasas French teacher Elisabeth Boghosian, who helped organize the bake sale. "This is one small way we can do something for those victims."

Even in a country that has endured so much suffering, few images could more tragically convey the senseless violence gripping Somalia today than the expressionless stare of a 5-year-old boy named Omar. As he slept next to his mother one recent morning, a stray bullet from a nearby gun battle struck him in the back of the head. He made no movement or sound, so his family members didn't even notice at first. Later they saw blood oozing from a small hole in his head and thought it was a snakebite.

The skeletal remains of hundreds of people killed 15 years ago near the small Liberian village of Kpolokpai were transported in wheelbarrows to a marked mass grave Sunday where they were buried in a formal ceremony. The church service honoring the dead is intended to try to put to rest this particular chapter in Liberia's 14-year civil war, which left an estimated 250,000 people dead. Mourners, including church leaders and farmers, stood with their hands folded as the remains were lowered into a 10-foot-wide pit. Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that the Kpolokpai massacre in 1994 was led by fighters of the Liberia Peace Council, a rebel group fighting Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia.