Nationalists

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The opposition Nationalist Party dropped yesterday its demand that Taiwan's military be allowed to vote again after a disputed presidential election a week ago, making it nearly certain that President Chen Shui-bian will be sworn in May 20 for another four-year term. Taiwan's stock market soared as nine days of political turmoil appeared to have ended with the main political parties reaching an understanding on many of the issues that have divided them since a shooting incident involving the president hours before the election.

MOSCOW - Nobel laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive icon of the Russian intelligentsia and chronicler of communist repression, has died of heart failure, Russian news agencies reported. He was 89. Stephan Solzhenitsyn told the Associated Press his father died late yesterday, but he declined to comment further. The soulful writer and spiritual father of Russia's nationalist patriotic movement lived to be reunited with his beloved homeland after two decades of exile - only to be as distressed by communism's damage to the Russian character as he was by his earlier forced estrangement from the land and people he loved.

KARACHI, Pakistan - A powerful bomb killed at least 10 people, nine of them civilians, when it exploded yesterday afternoon near an army truck parked in a crowded outdoor market in Quetta, Pakistani officials said. The attack, one of the deadliest in the country this year, could signal that the government now faces two separate security threats: one from religious militants concentrated in the country's northwestern tribal areas, the other from ethnic nationalists in the southwest, in Baluchistan province, of which Quetta is the capital.

MOSCOW - When Rabbi Zinovy L. Kogan arrived at the Moscow city prosecutor's office recently, investigators grilled him for two hours about an allegedly incendiary text published by his religious organization. The suspect work? A Russian translation of a 19th-century book of rules governing Jewish life. By printing thousands of copies of Kitzur Shulhan Arukh and distributing them through Jewish religious schools, Kogan had angered Russian nationalists. One filed a formal complaint last year with the prosecutor general, claiming the book incited religious hatred against people of other faiths.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Four years after Bosnia's war, weekend elections showed how deep the ethnic divide in this country remains, as Muslim voters shifted toward moderate leaders while Serbs and Croats stayed with old-style nationalists. Although official preliminary results in the vote for municipal councils were not expected until today, the contending parties' estimates of their showings yesterday were being regarded as reliable. In the past, such assertions have generally proved accurate.

FOR THE FIRST time in 60 years, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan's main opposition party, the Nationalists, will meet today in Beijing. It is a historic moment with the potential to bring about tremendous good or damage to tense relations between mainland China and the breakaway island. However, it is discolored by the most base sort of politics -- the enemy of my enemy is my ally -- and so must be viewed very cautiously. The last time these political parties met was in 1945, right after the end of World War II, when they failed to negotiate a peace settlement.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The war is beginning to come home to Serbia's stronghold capital.Terrorist attacks have begun here in Belgrade, which is also the capital of the united Yugoslavia. They are the only option for Croatian militants since the combined forces of Serbian nationalists and the army with its Serb-dominated officer corps are enough to keep Croatia's weaker forces tied up in breakaway Croatia.At least six bombs exploded last week in Belgrade's leading restaurants, shattering the illusory tranquillity of the previous weeks and wounding several people.

HONG KONG - Taiwanese voters rejected President Chen Shui-bian's aggressive approach to managing relations with China by not giving his party and its allies a majority in legislative elections yesterday. The stunning defeat for Chen's forces, which opinion polls had not predicted, is certain to lead to a reappraisal of the pace at which the president wants to carve out a national identity for Taiwan that is independent from China's. The results are certain to please China's leaders, who distrust Chen's intentions and have never renounced the threat to invade Taiwan should the island declare itself independent.

MOSCOW -- Communists joined forces with extreme nationalists in the lower house of Russia's new parliament yesterday to elect as chairman a firm opponent of President Boris N. Yeltsin's reform program.In doing so, the forces arrayed against the president made clear how easily they can control the Federal Assembly's lower body, the Duma.On a day when tempers once more got out of hand -- a frustrated legislator threw a punch at Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the extroverted nationalist, during the lunch break -- most of Mr. Yeltsin's allies in the end simply abstained on the final vote.

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Riot police fought with demonstrators and used water cannons mounted on armored cars last night as a large rally in front of the presidential palace turned unexpectedly violent. A crowd estimated by organizers at 300,000 and by the police at 100,000 assembled peacefully yesterday afternoon to call for a parliamentary investigation into a shooting incident that wounded President Chen Shui-bian on the eve of elections last month and may have helped him win re-election. Most of the crowd dispersed at sunset, but a few thousand remained and began skirmishing with riot police.

BEIJING - With a handshake in the Great Hall of the People, the complicated relationship between China and Taiwan took a symbolic turn toward the optimistic yesterday as Hu Jintao, the head of China's Communist Party, met Lien Chan, the chairman of Taiwan's Nationalist Party. A Chinese leader has never before sat down for talks with a top Taiwanese politician. And their words - each side calling for peace and confidence-building - sounded encouraging. The complication is that Lien, unlike Hu, is not the leader of his country.

FOR THE FIRST time in 60 years, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan's main opposition party, the Nationalists, will meet today in Beijing. It is a historic moment with the potential to bring about tremendous good or damage to tense relations between mainland China and the breakaway island. However, it is discolored by the most base sort of politics -- the enemy of my enemy is my ally -- and so must be viewed very cautiously. The last time these political parties met was in 1945, right after the end of World War II, when they failed to negotiate a peace settlement.

BEIJING - The last time leaders of the Nationalist Party were in China, they were in the south and on the run. It was late 1949 and the Nationalist - or KMT - Party of Chiang Kai-shek had just lost the civil war to the Communists. Chiang and his followers didn't stop running until they had fled the mainland for Taiwan. Now, 56 years later, the KMT leadership is back for the first time on Chinese soil, being welcomed to Beijing by the Communist Party during a symbolic visit that could generate enough goodwill to lead to a breakthrough in the tense China-Taiwan relationship.

HONG KONG - Taiwanese voters rejected President Chen Shui-bian's aggressive approach to managing relations with China by not giving his party and its allies a majority in legislative elections yesterday. The stunning defeat for Chen's forces, which opinion polls had not predicted, is certain to lead to a reappraisal of the pace at which the president wants to carve out a national identity for Taiwan that is independent from China's. The results are certain to please China's leaders, who distrust Chen's intentions and have never renounced the threat to invade Taiwan should the island declare itself independent.

KARACHI, Pakistan - A powerful bomb killed at least 10 people, nine of them civilians, when it exploded yesterday afternoon near an army truck parked in a crowded outdoor market in Quetta, Pakistani officials said. The attack, one of the deadliest in the country this year, could signal that the government now faces two separate security threats: one from religious militants concentrated in the country's northwestern tribal areas, the other from ethnic nationalists in the southwest, in Baluchistan province, of which Quetta is the capital.

War Trash, by Ha Jin. Pantheon Books. 352 pages. $25. You've never read a novel about prisoners of war quite like this one. With few exceptions, POW fiction up to now has been about unity and cunning, the hatching of clever plots against clueless sentries and evil commandants. There is tunneling and wire-cutting. Secret signals issue from woebegone exiles of "the cooler" or "the oven." Above all, there is camaraderie, as soldiers from all walks of life close ranks to torment the common enemy.

War Trash, by Ha Jin. Pantheon Books. 352 pages. $25. You've never read a novel about prisoners of war quite like this one. With few exceptions, POW fiction up to now has been about unity and cunning, the hatching of clever plots against clueless sentries and evil commandants. There is tunneling and wire-cutting. Secret signals issue from woebegone exiles of "the cooler" or "the oven." Above all, there is camaraderie, as soldiers from all walks of life close ranks to torment the common enemy.

PARIS -- Communism is back, in Russia and indeed nearly everywhere in the ex-Soviet bloc; and yet communism is finished.History does not repeat itself, in this case even as farce. Communism as a theory of history and human progress was dead in Russia by the time Stalin had finished with it.It feebly survived until the 1970s in Western Europe, in certain university faculties and among romantic students. Rumor has it that Marxism can still be found, dissimulated among the literary theoreticians, in the United States.

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Riot police fought with demonstrators and used water cannons mounted on armored cars last night as a large rally in front of the presidential palace turned unexpectedly violent. A crowd estimated by organizers at 300,000 and by the police at 100,000 assembled peacefully yesterday afternoon to call for a parliamentary investigation into a shooting incident that wounded President Chen Shui-bian on the eve of elections last month and may have helped him win re-election. Most of the crowd dispersed at sunset, but a few thousand remained and began skirmishing with riot police.

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The opposition Nationalist Party dropped yesterday its demand that Taiwan's military be allowed to vote again after a disputed presidential election a week ago, making it nearly certain that President Chen Shui-bian will be sworn in May 20 for another four-year term. Taiwan's stock market soared as nine days of political turmoil appeared to have ended with the main political parties reaching an understanding on many of the issues that have divided them since a shooting incident involving the president hours before the election.