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Area around Jesus' baptism site being cleared of land mines
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TIA GOLDENBERG
Associated Press
Updated: Mar 29, 2018, 6:57 PM
Published: Mar 29, 2018, 6:58 PM

QASR EL-YAHUD, West Bank (AP) — Pilgrims seeking serenity during a visit to Jesus' traditional baptism site may be rattled to discover they are surrounded by thousands of land mines left over from dormant Mideast conflicts.

But a project now underway plans to rid the West Bank site of the explosive devices, clearing away the relics of war that have blemished the sacred place for nearly five decades.

Land mines still speckle many parts of Israeli war-won territory. But the effort at the baptism site carries particular weight because of its importance to the world's Christians and the delicate international diplomacy that was required to take the project off the ground.

The project's organizers had to navigate a virtual minefield of often quarreling church denominations, as well as Israeli and Palestinian officials.

"To see a site that is visited by over half a million pilgrims and tourists each year and for them to come in their buses and be so close to land mines is very unusual," said James Cowan, the head of The HALO Trust, an international mine-clearing charity carrying out the project in partnership with Israel's Defense Ministry. "We hope that pilgrims and tourists will be able to visit this site and celebrate the baptism of Christ in the way that was intended."

Christians believe John the Baptist baptized Jesus at the site, a lush stretch of the Jordan River flanked by desert — Christianity's third holiest site after the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, built on the spot where Christian belief says Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, constructed on the site where tradition holds Jesus was born.

The baptism marks the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. Many modern-day visitors don white robes and immerse themselves in the sacred waters in a show of faith.

Churches were built in the area as early as the 4th century. By the 1930s, Greek, Coptic, Syrian and Catholic churches, among others, all had plots in the river valley, erecting golden-domed shrines and other structures.


Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war. Shortly after that, clergy fled their plots and Israel began planting land mines both on church land and in the surrounding area to fend off enemies. Israeli officials say that among the 3,000 explosive devices in the baptism site's vicinity are also booby traps laid by Palestinian militants, as well as explosives from the time when the territory was under Jordanian control. Unexploded ordnances also litter the area.

"Israel sees this as a very important project, to restore this place to its former glory," said Marcel Aviv, the director of the Israeli de-mining authority, INMAA. "We will do all the necessary quality assurances so that the territory will be totally clean and totally safe so that civilians can wander around here."

A small path was cleared for Pope John Paul II's visit in 2000 and pilgrims for years had to coordinate their visits with the Israeli military, because of security and land mine concerns.

In 2011, the site was officially opened to the public after Israel cleared a narrow road leading to the Jordan River. Today, buses ferry hundreds of thousands of visitors along that road each year, with the surrounding area remaining off limits.

The $1.15 million de-mining project, half of which was funded by the Israeli Defense Ministry and half by private donors, aims to open up access to the area for pilgrims, clergy and tourists in about a year.

The de-mining project began earlier in March with work on the Ethiopian church's property, where barbed-wire fencing with yellow "DANGER MINES!" signs encircles crumbling, sand-hued buildings, one with a rusted cross. Bulldozers sifted through the mine-laden earth.

Within the church compound, an armored vehicle dug into the earth, hoisting up a chunk of soil and then straining it through a sifter, searching for anti-personnel mines the size of a block of Camembert cheese.

Mounds of soil were heaped in piles around the area, each marked cleared from mines or still hazardous. In the distance, a string of anti-tank mines, each slightly larger than a 30-centimeter (12-inch) pizza, protruded from the ground.

To detect the mines, experts have had to look at historical records, interview former Israeli soldiers and survey old maps.

Anti-tank mines, with heavier charges, are embedded to the west of an access road while anti-personnel mines and booby traps are located within the church plots.

But experts said the reconnaissance work isn't exact and the geography — the ever-shifting top soil of the Jordan River Valley — has displaced some of them. Painstaking hard work fills in the gaps, with drones, dogs, metal detectors and bulldozers used to sniff out and snuff out the leftover mines.

"It's a challenge that requires working slowly, in a safe way and not to take any chances," said Aviv, from Israel's de-mining authority.

Eight churches are scattered across the nearly 250-acre expanse of land that borders the baptism site. The churches share custodianship of many sites in the Holy Land and often butt heads over how to manage them. It took about four years to get all denominations to agree to the terms of the project, a process that saw Cowan, The HALO Trust director, meet church leaders, including Pope Francis.

HALO also waded into the Mideast conflict, seeking approval to work on the site from Israel, which controls the area, and getting a green light from the Palestinians who claim the West Bank as part of their future state.

Majid Fityani, the Palestinian governor of the nearby city of Jericho, welcomed the de-mining.

"We have been demanding the removal of these mines for a long time," he said. "We are interested in removing these mines that were planted by Israel because this is our land."

Mine agencies from both sides are brought in to supervise HALO's work, the group said. Jordan provides access to the baptism site from the other side of the river and Cowan also met with the country's king to discuss the matter.

"We pray and hope that the clearance of land mines around the baptism site will contribute to peace and reconciliation in our region, which is very much needed at this time," Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of the Holy Land, said in a statement. "We are glad that after many years, pilgrims from around the world will be able to fully experience and venerate this holy site."

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Associated Press writer Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.
Putin raises tension on Ukraine, suspends START nuclear pact
Putin
Putin
Associated Press
Published: Feb 21, 2023, 4:50 PM

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow's participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United States, announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech where he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.

"We aren't fighting the Ukrainian people," Putin said ahead of the war's first anniversary Friday. "The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country."

The speech reiterated a litany of grievances he has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign while vowing no military letup in a conflict that has reawakened Cold War fears.

On top of that, Putin sharply upped the ante by declaring Moscow would suspend its participation in the New START Treaty. The pact, signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia, caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads the two sides can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.

Putin also said Russia should stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the U.S. does so, a move that would end a global ban on such tests in place since the Cold War era.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Moscow's decision as "really unfortunate and very irresponsible."

"We'll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does," he said while visiting Greece.

It was the second time in recent days the Ukraine war showed it could spread into perilous new terrain, after Blinken told China at the weekend that it would be a "serious problem" if Beijing provided arms and ammunition to Russia.

China and Russia have aligned their foreign policies to oppose Washington. Beijing has refused to condemn Russia's invasion or atrocities against civilians in Ukraine while strongly criticizing Western economic sanctions on Moscow. At the end of last year, Russia and China held joint naval drills in the East China Sea.

The deputy head of Ukraine's intelligence service, Vadym Skibitskyi, told The Associated Press that his agency hasn't so far seen any signs that China is providing weapons to Moscow.

Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and made a dash toward Kyiv, apparently expecting to overrun the capital quickly. But stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces — supported by Western weapons — turned back Moscow's troops. While Ukraine has reclaimed many areas initially seized by Russia, the sides have become bogged down elsewhere.

The war has revived the divide between Russia and the West, reinvigorated the NATO alliance, and created the biggest threat to Putin's rule of more than two-decades. U.S. President Joe Biden, fresh off a surprise visit to Kyiv, was in Poland on Tuesday to solidify that Western unity.

While Russia's Constitution mandates that the president deliver the speech annually, Putin never gave one in 2022, as his troops rolled into Ukraine and suffered repeated setbacks. Much of it covered old ground, as Putin offered his own version of recent history, discounting Ukraine's arguments that it needed Western help to thwart a Russian military takeover.

"Western elites aren't trying to conceal their goals, to inflict a 'strategic defeat' to Russia," Putin said in the speech broadcast on all state TV channels. "They intend to transform the local conflict into a global confrontation."

He added that Russia was prepared to respond since "it will be a matter of our country's existence." He has repeatedly depicted NATO's expansion to include countries close to Russia as an existential threat to his country.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who was in Ukraine on Tuesday, said she hoped Putin had taken a different approach.

"What we heard this morning was propaganda that we already know," Meloni said in English. "He says (Russia) worked on diplomacy to avoid the conflict, but the truth is that there is somebody who is the invader and somebody who is defending itself."

Putin denied any wrongdoing in Ukraine, even after Kremlin forces struck civilian targets, including hospitals, and are widely accused of war crimes. Ukraine's military reported Tuesday that Russian forces shelled the southern cities of Kherson and Ochakiv while Putin spoke, killing six.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lamented that Russian forces were "again mercilessly killing the civilian population."

Putin began his speech with strong words for those countries that provided Kyiv with crucial military support and warned them against supplying any longer-range weapons.

"It's they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it," Putin said before an audience of lawmakers, state officials and soldiers.

Putin also accused the West of taking aim at Russian culture, religion and values because it is aware that "it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield."

Likewise, he said Western sanctions hadn't "achieved anything and will not achieve anything."

Reflecting the Kremlin's clampdown on free speech and press, it barred coverage of the address by media from "unfriendly" countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and those in the European Union, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying their journalists could watch the broadcast.

He previously told reporters that the speech's delay had to do with Putin's "work schedule," but Russian media reports linked it to the setbacks by Russian forces. The Russian president also postponed the state-of-the-nation address in 2017. Last year, the Kremlin also canceled two other big annual events — Putin's news conference and a highly scripted phone-in marathon taking questions from the public.

Analysts expected Putin's speech would be tough in the wake of Biden's visit to Kyiv on Monday, which he did not mention. In his his own speech later Tuesday, Biden is expected to highlight the commitment of the central European country and other allies to Ukraine over the past year.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Biden's address would not be "some kind of head to head" with Putin's.

"This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else," said.