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By Pascal Fletcher in Caracas, Venezuela

May 16, 2005

IF Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was assassinated, his Government had a contingency plan to prevent his enemies from taking control of the world's No. 5 oil exporter, the President said.

"Some people might want to kill me, but they don't dare ... because if they did, they fear what would happen the next day," the Venezuelan leader said in a television broadcast.

Mr Chavez, a firebrand nationalist who often accuses the US Government and domestic opponents of plotting to topple or kill him, and who survived a coup in 2002, said his ministers, the armed forces and his supporters would know what to do if he were ever assassinated.

"We have a plan worked out in the event something happens to me. Those who are thinking about it should know this and that they won't have a good time of it if this happens," he said during his weekly "Hello President" TV and radio show.

Mr Chavez, who was first elected in 1998, did not detail the plan. But he has said before that if he were killed, Venezuela would become ungovernable and its oil shipments to its biggest client, the US, would be halted.

US officials dismiss his allegations of a US assassination plot as ridiculous. But they often criticise him as a left-wing trouble maker allied to Cuba's communist president, Fidel Castro, a long-time foe of Washington.

Mr Chavez, who won a referendum on his rule last August, said if his enemies did kill him, he did not think they could govern Venezuela. A recent opinion poll put his popularity level at 70.5 per cent, a five-year high.

In a message to his supporters yesterday, he said, "You can't let anyone come and seize our country".

"The revolution should be intensified," he added in a four-hour broadcast in which he criticised the US model of capitalism and expressed his preference for socialism.

Mr Chavez has been spending Venezuela's oil wealth to fund free health and education services for the poor and distribute subsidies and credits for workers' co-operatives he says should be the basis for a new kind of socialism.

His critics say his statist and interventionist economic policies, and systematic persecution of political opponents, are turning Venezuela into a replica of Castro's Cuba.

But Mr Chavez denies this. "The Cuban model can't be copied. We don't want to copy it and we won't," he said yesterday.

Iraq blames Arab militants for two weeks of carnage

(AFP)

15 May 2005

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government blamed foreign Arab militants on Sunday for igniting a startling upsurge in rebel violence that has claimed more than 400 lives within the space of two weeks.

Leith Kubba, spokesman for new Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, described the attacks as a “virus from abroad” perpetrated by militants brought up in Islamist areas in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

“There has been a renewed increase of attacks in Iraqi towns and particularly in Baghdad... These criminals are trying to prove that the government is incapable of protecting the people,” he said.

The insurgency was spurred by “extremist groups from abroad” who were out to set “a scene of permanent violence” to “intimidate people” and turn them against the government, he told a news conference.

“They do not have a political plan. They do not have a long-term strategy” and aim only to fight US forces wherever they can find them, Kubba said.

“This is a virus that came from abroad and has started to spread to the Iraqi youth,” he added.

Some 400 people have been killed and hundreds of others wounded in about 70 car bomb attacks since the government took office at the start of the month, he said, making it one of the bloodiest periods in Iraq’s postwar transition.

“Everyone knows that there are neighbourhoods in Jordan and Saudi Arabia characterised by aggressive and extremist thought which are producing individuals who think they can enter paradise by attacking the first police station in Iraq,” he commented.

Kubba suggested that the current wave of indiscriminate bombings proved that the rebels had “no political plan and no long-term strategy” and were fighting a rear-guard action.

“The number of those who sympathise with them has decreased” because of the indiscriminate bombings, he said, adding that rebels were trying to better “the quality” of their attacks to compensate for their falling numbers.

The government spokesman’s comments are not the first time a top Iraqi official has explicity blamed foreign elements for the litany of violence currently haunting Iraq.

Syrian intelligence has been blamed for being behind recent attacks in the north of the country, charges vehemently denied by Damascus.

Evidence that a Jordanian was behind the February 28 suicide attack in Hilla south of Baghdad that killed 118 people prompted a diplomatic crisis between Amman and Iraq as well as furious Shiite protests.

Iraq’s most wanted man – Al Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- is himself a Jordanian national who faces a death penalty handed down in absentia in his homeland.

Five suspects, four of them Palestinian, detained after a deadly Baghdad bombing last week were paraded on Iraqi state television overnight, “confessing” to their role in the attack which killed 15 people and wounded 84.

One of the Palestinians, who identified himself as Amer Abdullah, a resident of the eastern Baghdad neighbourhood of Baladiyat, told how he prepared the car bomb at the request of another Palestinian he identified as Ibrahim Idi.

“Ibrahim Idi promised me 300 dollars but I never got a cent,” he said, adding that Idi “travels frequently to Syria,” Iraq’s western neighbour which has been the target of repeated US allegations of complicity with anti-US insurgents.

However the Palestinians’ arrest has been contested both by their neighbours and by Iraq’s main Sunni Muslim clerics’ association who insist they are innocent.

Kubba claimed that tribes that in the past were sympathetic to the rebels are now shifting their support as the government broadens its appeal by including Sunni Arabs in the cabinet and other positions of authority.