Their anger spilled on to the department store.”If we had a government that listened to us, there wouldn’t be a riot like this. Only five of them were carried away alive, all of them unconscious or with broken limbs.Apart from looters, the victims seem to have included shopkeepers protecting their businesses, and ordinary shoppers caught in the riot.Three sisters and a brother lingered weeping outside the shopping centres yesterday afternoon, looking for some sign of their youngest sister, Chaerunisa, who went shopping on Wednesday and never came home.”I got back with my husband from Saudi Arabia last week,” said her sister, Fauziah, “and my mother told her to go out and buy some Arab cheese for us to eat. “They had CDs, music centres clothes, textiles.”The fires were started in the burger restaurant and in the entrance hall of the department store – the yellow arches of the McDonald’s sign, distorted by the heat, drip down the outer wall like an image from Salvador Dali.But as the fire burned on the lower floors, there were large numbers of people upstairs, in the third-floor supermarket and electrical store, the fourth-floor food hall and bookshop, and the sixth-floor sports department.The scenes inside, after the looters realised that they were trapped, can scarcely be imagined.Haji Eko saw eight people jump out of the windows. All through Wednesday morning mobs of poor Jakartans assembled spontaneously and began their pillage in dozens of neighbourhoods all over the city.There was a dangerous, skittish atmosphere among the crowd, which was seized by sudden panics and surges. But you cannot sack a city of Jakarta’s size without destroying human lives along with it, as the horrible and ironic story of the Yogya department store shows.As many as 200 people died here on Wednesday, most of them looters trapped by their own fire.By yesterday afternoon they had pieced together only 88 at the Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital in central Jakarta.Fifteen of them were identifiable.

After milling aimlessly in the middle of the street, a cry would go up and hundreds of people would sprint in one direction, either towards a new target or away from an imagined threat.They reached the Yogya department store in the early afternoon, by which time several of the adjoining businesses had brought down their shutters for the day.At 2.30pm, according to local people, they began pelting the plate glass- windows of the ground-floor McDonald’s with stones.At 3pm they forced their way in and began looting.”They brought the stuff out, put it down in the yard and then went back in for more,” said Haji Eko, who worked in the adjacent Bank CIC, now a gutted shell. Most of the rest have been reduced to the lumps of flesh, bone and jewellery in the black trays.The tragedy here began no differently from thousands of other acts of looting all over the city. A man helps out by holding them up for inspection, or turning them over with the end of a burned stick: a wrist, an elbow joint, something that might be a thigh or buttock, and a clenched pair of burned human hands.
On the wrist is an intact metal watch, its hands stopped for ever at the moment on Wednesday afternoon when Jakarta’s people started to pay the price for the mayhem in which they have indulged this week.Until yesterday morning, despite two days of looting, smashing and burning, there had been remarkably few confirmed casualties, no more than 25 dead in three days. An ally of President Mohammad Khatami, he has criticised hardline Islamists for taking the law into their own hands.Ayatollah Khomeini, the country’s late spiritual leader, dismissed Ayatollah Montazeri as his designated successor shortly before his death in 1989. Ayatollah Montazeri had criticised government policies, including treatment of political prisoners.- Reuters. IT IS six hours since the fire went out, the clean-up job is well under way, and only fragments remain to be scooped up from the Yogya department store. The salvage workers have seen much worse than this, but they handle the pieces gingerly as they carry them out and drop them into into charred trays at the top of the steps.

Here they are on public display: a trickle of people approach and sort through the pieces, looking for one that they recognise. State radio said demonstrators carried banners condemning supporters of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri as “internal elements of world arrogance [the West]” The radio did not report any clashes. Ayatollah Montazeri’s supporters had urged people to chant slogans demanding freedom of speech and thought.
Ayatollah Montazeri was placed under house arrest and prevented from teaching after he questioned Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority in a speech in November.The radio said, without explaining, that the Isfahan prayers were led by a cleric other than Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, a moderate who usually leads Friday prayers. CROWDS marched in the Iranian city of Isfahan yesterday to denounce backers of a dissident Muslim cleric and support the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This is being referred to as a confederation, not a federation. The Alliance will not have its own bureaucratic structures and it will be presided over by its constituent party leaders in turn. By the end of this year, however, it hopes to have a common political programme.That is when the fun will begin.

How will the Alliance devise one programme to encompass the fiercely pro-European soft centre of Mr Bayrou, the pro- European but Thatcherite Mr Madelin and the contending liberal, pro-European and nationalist, anti-European factions of the Gaullists? The danger will be that, far from cutting the ground from under the FN and La Droite, a fuzzily pro-European Alliance will drive more Gaullists and others towards the far right.. Up to the middle of this week, it seemed that the traditional right would split into at least four warring groups: the Gaullists; a “centre” party; a Thatcherite “liberal” party; and a fast-growing new party called La Droite (the Right), which has declared its readiness to go into permanent partnership with the FN.The agreement came out of the blue after secret negotiations between the RPR’s president, Phillippe Seguin, and the UDF president, Francois Leotard. If the alliance prospers, it virtually guarantees that he will be the sole candidate of the “traditional” right in the next presidential election in four years’ time.Both the UDF and the Gaullists have been severely weakened by the unauthorised local deals made by some of their provincial leaders with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN following regional elections last March. It will be the first time the Gaullists have entered a formal alliance with other parties.Previously, they would go no further than a loose electoral pact with the UDF. At first glance, the deal would be good news for the neo-Gaullists’ founder, Mr Chirac. He said: “Most want to live in Israel because it is easier to get jobs and they are closer to their relatives.”Their numbers are minuscule compared with the 155,000 Jewish settlers and 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

As we were asking Mr Gessese how he felt about being in a settlement in the occupied territories, Michal Finkel, a community co-ordinator in Ofra, said: “It is journalists asking questions who make the problems He doesn’t care where he is. It wasn’t his decision to come here.” She says, rightly, that the government made the decision to send the Falash Mura to Ofra.Yossi Shturm, spokesman for the Jewish Agency, which organised the immigration of the Ethiopians, says only 1 or 2 per cent of them are being sent to the settlements. But her father was educated in the colonial era by Presbyterian missionaries and subsequently became, more prosaically, a veterinary officer.More prosaically, Mulima feels. Which perhaps explains why she has moved into the field of aid and development.