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U.S. Marines, Including Women, Dead in Falluja; Iranian Election; China Floods; Tsunami: Six Months Later

Aired June 24, 2005 - 12:03   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ZAIN VERJEE, CNN ANCHOR: Countering criticism and a lot of questions about Iraq, the U.S. president, George W. Bush, and Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. The most significant thing coming out of this press conference, really, from the U.S. president, who said there are not going to be any timetables to a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. He also added, "Why have a timetable, then concede to the enemy, and have them wait us out?"
He said the only timetable he knows of is a timetable to set up the Iraqi constitution. He emphasized we will continue to build up Iraqi forces and success will only occur when the political process moves forward and Sunnis are involved in the process.

Asked by another reporter also about the rift between the civilian and the military leadership on the state of the insurgency in Iraq, the president said, "There is no question, the enemy wants to shake our will. We understand the nature of the enemy, but there is reason to be optimistic. There has been progress. There is a new democracy in Iraq."

I'm Zain Verjee at the CNN Center.

JIM CLANCY, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Clancy. This is YOUR WORLD TODAY on CNN International.

The White House meeting, as Zain was telling us, between these leaders of the U.S. and Iraq comes amid plummeting public approval ratings for the war in the United States. And daily insurgent attacks, including one reported this day, a suicide bombing in Falluja.

Our coverage begins this hour with Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon.

Jamie, what can you tell us about this attack in Falluja? And who are the victims?

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, again, another reminder that the insurgents in Iraq still have the ability to launch deadly attacks against not just Iraqi civilians and Iraqi police, but U.S. military personnel as well. According to the U.S. military, a Marine convoy traveling in Falluja last night was hit by a suicide car bomber. As many as six Marines are believed to have been killed.

In fact, two have been confirmed dead. And three Marines and a sailor are believed to be dead, but the identifications have not been completed. Thirteen also wounded in that incident. And we're also told that among the victims is a number of women, although we haven't been told exactly how many women are involved.

This came, essentially, the same day the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, flanked by his top commanders, made an appearance on Capitol Hill in Washington to defend the U.S. Policy in Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (voice-over): Along with insurgents, U.S. commanders are now battling the growing perception that the U.S. is losing in Iraq.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: And any who say that we've lost this war, or that we're losing this war, are wrong. We are not.

MCINTYRE: Flanked by his commanders, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress the worst thing the U.S. could do now is set a deadline to get out of Iraq.

RUMSFELD: It would throw a lifeline to terrorists, who in recent months have suffered significant loses and casualties, been denied havens, and suffered weakened popular support.

MCINTYRE: But Rumsfeld's top commander seemed to break ranks with Vice President Dick Cheney's assessment that the insurgency is in its last throes, testifying there are now more foreign fighters in Iraq than there were six months ago.

GEN. JOHN ABIZAID, COMMANDER, CENTRAL COMMAND: In terms of the overall strength of the insurgency, I would say it's about the same as it was.

SEN. CARL LEVIN (D), MICHIGAN: So you wouldn't agree with the statement that it's in its last throes?

ABIZAID: I don't know that I would make any comment about that, other than to say there's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency.

MCINTYRE: Rumsfeld drew the ire of some senators. West Virginia's Robert Byrd accused him of sneering.

SEN. ROBERT BYRD (D), WEST VIRGINIA: The people out there want us to ask questions. So get off your high horse when you come up here.

MCINTYRE: But the most contentious exchange was with long-time adversary Senator Ted Kennedy.

SEN. EDWARD KENNEDY (D), MASSACHUSETTS: We are in serious trouble in Iraq, and this war has been consistently and grossly mismanaged. And we are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire. Our troops are dying, and there really is no end in sight.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE: In an exclusive interview with CNN, Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he stands by the assessment that the insurgency's in its last throe, but he did not offer any prediction of how long it would last -- Jim.

CLANCY: Jamie I'm going to ask you to stay right there. I want to talk with both you and Jane Arraf, who is embedded with U.S. troops in northern Iraq there near the Syrian border.

And Jane, let me just ask you. You hear this debate that Jamie was outlining there. Is it being heard by the troops as well? What do they think about this debate and their morale?

JANE ARRAF, CNN SR. BAGHDAD CORRESPONDENT: Jim, in one sense, they are a bit far away from that debate that's going on in Washington, because they are actually living it. And when we speak to Marines who are there on the front lines, and pretty well everywhere in central Iraq these days, is the front lines. What they are more concerned about is really what their families think, whether their wives are going to stay married to them if they come back to Iraq for another deployment, whether they have the support of their parents.

It's not really so much the opinion polls or anything like that. In fact, here, in the outer reaches of Iraq where this battle is really taking place, they don't have a lot of access to the Internet. They don't have a lot of access to phones. But they do know how their families feel about things. And that's what matters to them -- Jim.

CLANCY: Let me go back then to Jamie for a little bit and talk about something that came up in that White House press conference. It was mentioned first by the president, himself.

Mr. Bush saying that the training and the equipping of Iraqi forces is going ahead. They are going to assume the fight. How does the Pentagon assess it's going?

MCINTYRE: Well, they say it's going fairly well, although they admit that many of the Iraqi units are not fully capable. But, you know, the interesting thing is, it's not just the training of the troops that's important, but it's, for lack of a better term, the bureaucracy that supports them.

I mean, you can have fairly well-trained troops, but they need to have the whole government structure of a support system that's going to continue to feed that military and something that the military feels loyal to, to protect. So they really see going hand in glove, both the political progress and the military forces being built up. And they do believe that over time that combination will eventually defeat the insurgents, or at least bring it to a level which is much more acceptable than what they see today.

CLANCY: Jane Arraf, there in northern Iraq, you get a chance to see it first-hand, close up. And you work with military commanders that work with those Iraqi forces. What are they saying? What's the analysis? All right, we may have lost Jane. We'll try that again and see if we can get Jane back.

Just to answer the question of whether or not the U.S. military in the field sees that Iraqi forces are being trained.

Do we have Jane back yet? No, Jane. I'm sorry. Jane Arraf, we've lost her.

Jamie McIntyre, back at the Pentagon, when we're looking at all this situation, we really appreciate hearing from you and the Pentagon, getting some of the information that we are getting there on all these important issues. Jamie McIntyre there.

MCINTYRE: Well, Jim, let me just say that the -- this issue of how capable the Iraqi forces are came up during the briefing. And what's happened is, in recognition that perhaps the capabilities have been overstated in the past at the Pentagon, the military's come up with an actual rating system to be able to rate the forces in Iraq the same way the U.S. military is rated, based on capabilities in various areas.

Unfortunately, that's classified. They don't want to give out basically how effective those forces are. And you saw some tension in the hearings yesterday by some members of Congress who say basically the American public has a right to know how well this is going, because that's the whole linchpin of the strategy for success. But the military commanders were unwilling to give the break down of how capable they thought those units were in a public sector.

CLANCY: Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon. Again, Jamie, thank you.

VERJEE: Turning now to Iran. With a choice between a relatively moderate former president and Tehran's ultra Islamist mayor, Iranians are voting in a presidential runoff that could have major impact on nuclear talks with the west.

Matthew Chance is in the Iranian capital, and he has more now on the two candidates, as well as the voting which was extended by two hours.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They came to vote, not just for a president, but for the path the Islamic republic should take. This is the most closely-fought election Iran has seen for decades. Supporters of both candidates out in force.

"Ahmadinejad is a decisive man," says Abdullah, "and he has come to work for the people and to serve the people. He's come to chop off the hands of those who betrayed this country," he says.

"The movement we started for freedom and democracy, Rafsanjani is following that," says Shiday (ph). "Ahmadinejad may not only stop this movement, he'll even turn it back, and we'll be suppressed again," she told me.

Even by Iranian standards, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is considered a hard-liner. He has pledged to redistribute wealth and fight corruption, issues close to the heart of many of Iran's poor. But it's widely feared he'll freeze the modest social freedoms enjoyed by Iranians too, perhaps reintroducing male and female segregation in public places.

It's a fear bolstering support for his opponent. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been Iran's president twice before. In this election, the 70-year-old Islamic cleric can claim to be the moderate choice.

Promises to extend social reforms, privatize industry and build ties with the west play well among Iran's rich. But in an election that's exposed wide gaps between rich and poor, Iran's next president may struggle to bridge the divide.

(on camera): This election seems to have drawn a line straight through Iranian society, separating those that would like to see the reforms that have been achieved stay in place from those who would like to see Iran return to the fundamentalist principles of the Islamic revolution. The impact of Iran's choice could be widely felt.

Matthew Chance, CNN, Tehran.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: There's more on Iran's election on our Web site. Who's running, what do they stand for, who backs them, and what could lie ahead? Check it out at cnn.com/world.

CLANCY: Thousands of mourners fill the streets of Beirut, Lebanon, for the funeral of slain antis-Syrian politician George Hawi. The funeral procession for the former Lebanese communist leader wound through the capital streets before it reached a Greek Orthodox church at the city's center.

Newly elected parliament member Saad Hariri attended the funeral. Like Hawi, Hariri's father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was killed in a bomb explosion.

In southern China, hundreds are dead and more than a million people have been forced to flee their homes in some of the worst flooding in the last century. Andrew Stevens reports forecasters are warning this may only be the beginning.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A dramatic rescue of flood victims in southern China captured by local TV. These students winched to safety from the roof of their primary school during a three-hour rescue operation. They were lucky.

After two weeks of pounding torrential rain, flooding has taken the lives of more than 500 people in southern China. That's according to Chinese authorities. The hardest hit areas lie across six provinces in the south of the country. Farm land is under water, roads have been washed away, and hundreds of thousands people evacuated from low-lying areas.

In Wuangzhou (ph), an industrial city about 200 kilometers west of the southern capital, Guangzhou, and scene of some of the worst flooding, the streets are under water. And the military have been called in to help divert flood waters.

For many, it's already too late. Swollen rivers have burst their banks. Houses flattened, or now stranded in the middle of newly formed waterways.

The heavy rains have extended as far south as China's enclave of Hong Kong, where there's also been flooding, but no injuries. Macou (ph) is also on high alert as the Pul River (ph) continues to rise.

In southern China, it's known as the season of flooding. But this year looks unusually severe. Forecasters are warning that more heavy rain is on the way, as authorities warn the loss of life could continue to rise.

Andrew Stevens, CNN, Hong Kong.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: Signs of progress and relations between North and South Korea.

CLANCY: Also still ahead, we're going to tell you what is going on in Sudan today. Fighting in the northeast has broken out.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CLANCY: Sudan, the largest country in Africa, is facing an increasingly complex problem. Rebels in the southeast -- in the northeast, I should say, of the country report government planes are bombing civilian targets there. The rebels say these alleged attacks are retaliation for capturing two government garrisons near a vital oil pipeline that is close to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.

Sudanese officials say the aircraft are only searching for rebel strongholds in the area. They deny any bombings.

A short while ago, we talked to the country's foreign minister. He says Khartoum is willing to negotiate with those rebels.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MUSTAFA OSMAN ISMAEL, SUDANESE FOREIGN MINISTER: We said, if you are going to respond to any group to take arms and to attack civilians, then this is going to be a very bad habit. We are ready to negotiate with them as we negotiate with the southerners, and we reached an agreement. We are negotiating in (INAUDIBLE) in order to reach an agreement. Why fighting?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CLANCY: Mustafa Osman Ismael, a foreign minister, is in Washington for talks with U.S. State Department official. His government under increasing pressure from the U.S. and the European Union.

VERJEE: Let's check the headlines in the United States now.

Pentagon officials say they did nothing wrong in failing to notify the public that they were gathering highly personal information on students. They say it was an oversight. The gathering of social personal data for recruiting purposes has been going on since 2003. Privacy advocates say it's a clear violation of the law.

Reverend Billy Graham holds what he says will be his final U.S. crusade. This weekend, the 86-year-old will be preaching at a New York park. It's been nearly six decades since the evangelist held his first revival campaign there. Graham is expected to draw as many as 70,000 people per session.

And the Bush administration is rejecting Democratic calls for a White House strategist to apologize for remarks about the 9/11 attacks. Speaking at a fund-raiser, Karl Rove said Democrats wanted to use therapy, not military action, to deal with terrorists. The comments outraged Democrats. The White House says he was simply highlighting different philosophies.

CLANCY: Well, coming up next on CNN, the fix is in.

VERJEE: It is. Ryan Chilcote on the so-called competition to be Russia's army queen.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

VERJEE: Welcome back. Time to check on what's moving the markets both in the U.S. and in Europe. For that, over to New York and to Chris Huntington.

(STOCK MARKET REPORT)

CLANCY: We're going to have a roundup of the main stories coming up in just a moment. And then...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If you can help somebody, you should. Even if you can't -- you know, if you think you can't afford it or you don't know how it's going to work out, you just do it anyway.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VERJEE: We'll introduce you to people lending much more than a helping hand in the aftermath of the tsunami.

CLANCY: And who is going to be Russia's next army queen? Well, we've heard the fix is already in. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CLANCY: Welcome back to YOUR WORLD TODAY on CNN International. I'm Jim Clancy.

VERJEE: And I'm Zain Verjee.

Here are some of the top stories we're following. Polls are about to close in Iran's presidential runoff after the voting period was extended by two hours. On the ballot, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate, he's casting himself that way, at least, who favors reform and closer ties with the West. He faces Teheran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an ultraconservative who could roll back social changes pushed through by outgoing president, Mohammed Khatami.

CLANCY: There has been a deadly attack on U.S. forces in Falluja, west of Baghdad. Five Marines and a sailor believed to have been killed. Thirteen others wounded when a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle near their convoy. Many of the casualties are said to have been female Marines. Bodies of four of the victims have been yet been recovered or identified.

U.S. President George W. Bush assured Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari that there will be no timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Al Jaafari agreed by saying now is not the time to fall back. Mr. Bush says the enemy will be defeated, and expressed optimism about the progress on the ground.

CLANCY: When U.S. Marines and Iraqi security forces swept through the towns along the Syrian border, they discovered bomb-making workshops, car bomb factories, and they discovered torture houses as well.

Jane Arraf spoke with four men freed by U.S. and Iraqi forces, and heard their stories.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JANE ARRAF, CNN BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): There was no key to these shackles. A U.S. Marine cut through the metal. An Iraqi soldier removed it. The man was painfully thin. He'd been bound and tortured for three weeks.

There were four men here. Terrified of their captors, they begged us not to identify them in any way. Just after they were discovered, they told us their story. Two were former Iraqi border police and two unemployed young men, held from 8 to 22 days in a house in the city near the Syrian border.

Their hands and feet were bound. They were blindfolded. Their ears were stuffed with cotton and covered in tape, so they couldn't hear the voices of their captors. When one of the younger men would say he just wanted to see his mother, a man would whisper in his ear, "There's only death for you."

They were tortured.

(on camera): This is the worst of the rooms, very heavy rope hanging here from the ceiling. They say they were hung here by their feet. One of them tells us that, as he was hung, he was dipped in water, his head dipped first in a bucket of water. They would bring him up again and then they would give him electric shocks.

(voice-over): One of the men is so broken, he can barely sit up or speak. His skull is bandaged. There's a deep wound on his nose from having his head slammed into the floor.

"You saved our lives," he says to the Iraqi soldier who asked him how he feels being freed. Another man was whipped with cables and a rubber hose. His back is crisscrossed with raised welts and dried blood.

Their captors fled when the bombing started. The hostages were held in a complex used to make car bombs. As Marines fired on the adjoining buildings, the men feared the building would collapse around them.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): We entered the house and I heard them yelling, but the Americans don't understand Iraqi. They were blindfolded and their ears were taped. I took off their blindfolds and wiped their faces and gave them water.

ARRAF: Torture was nothing new under Saddam Hussein, but this is like nothing they've ever seen.

"Why are they trying to destroy Iraq?" this Iraqi soldier asks.

This is, perhaps, the worst, but just one section of a city. A city, it seems, taken over by masters of terror and their students.

Jane Arraf, CNN, Iraq.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: North Korean envoys returned home from South Korea without setting a date for nuclear disarmament talks, but their talks did bring a pledge of food aid for Seoul. Andrea Koppel reports on the gravity of the food crisis in North Korea.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's another warning about North Korea, but of a different kind.

TONY BANBURY, WORLD FOOD PROGRAM: We're totally running out of food. We are at a very low level.

KOPPEL: While the U.S. and much of the world remain focused on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, the U.N.'s World Food Program, also known at WFP, is sounding another kind of alarm.

BANBURY: No new donations come in. Eighty percent of the six- and-a-half million people we are trying to help will be without our assistance, and they will be in a desperate situation.

KOPPEL: WFP says dwindling donations coupled with high food prices as a result of Kim Jong-Il's economic reforms are to blame. This week, the Bush administration said it would send over 50 thousand tons of food this year. That's about 25 percent of what it donated only a few years ago when the current nuclear crisis with Pyongyang over its secret uranium enrichment first erupted. But the White House denies it's using food as a diplomatic weapon.

SCOTT MCCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECY.: We want to make sure that there are assurances that that food is going to those who need it, not to the government, or to the military in North Korea.

KOPPEL: But WFP says North Korea has already signed off on a new monitoring system, giving them more confidence food aid will reach the neediest of North Koreans, women, children and the elderly.

(on camera): The Bush administration says it's not ruling out sending more aid in the months to come. But WFP says that might not be soon enough to hold off what it claims could be the worst food shortage in over 10 years. The last one is believed to have killed between one million to two million North Koreans.

Andrea Koppel, CNN, at the State Department.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: The tsunami disaster produced a massive international relief effort.

CLANCY: Coming up, right here on YOUR WORLD TODAY, you're meet with some of the volunteers who are helping to rebuild.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CLANCY: Remember some of those pictures?

We want to welcome all of you back. You are watching an hour of world news on CNN International.

VERJEE: The U.N. has praised the international community's response to the tsunamis.

CLANCY: Six months on now, more than $10 billion in all that has been pledged to help in the recovery.

VERJEE: But really, it's the people, and not just the money, that's made a difference.

CLANCY: From around the world, volunteers have been traveling to the region to work.

VERJEE: Aneesh Raman caught up with some of them in Thailand.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ANEESH RAMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When Justin Strauss saw reports of an Asian tsunami, he gave more than a donation. He gave himself. Leaving his construction job in Hilltop, Pennsylvania, the former Peace Corps volunteer signed up again, bringing his skills to Thailand's hardest-hit villages.

JUSTIN STRAUSS, TSUNAMI VOLUNTEER: I knew I'd be facing a lot of difficulties as far as sights and stories of what I hear here. And I'm glad I did it.

RAMAN: For three months, Justin has lived and labored among tsunami survivors, building homes on a landscape ravaged by the waves, building relationships with people who have nothing left.

Sixty-three year old Chung Nam Utiman (ph) lost 11 family members to the tsunami. And in its aftermath, gained an unlikely friend.

STRAUSS: I was told about his story and told that he's been working by himself. And to me, that was a perfect partner to work with. I mean, to try to lend a hand.

RAMAN: Every day, Justin comes here to work. Every day, the two grow closer. Chung Nam (ph) calls Justin his son. Justin calls this a second home.

(on camera): The work out here is really difficult. Beyond the infrastructure issues, it's monsoon season. And when it's not raining, it is unbearably hot. And for some of the volunteers it's the first time they're doing anything like this.

(voice-over): Songwriter Dana Underwood came to comfort survivors. She had never done humanitarian work before. But she had also never seen such devastation.

DANA UNDERWOOD, TSUNAMI VOLUNTEER: When I saw this, it just -- everything that happened was on such a grand scale and so horrifying that I just knew, you know, even if I couldn't affiliate with someone, that I could go and lift a bucket.

RAMAN: It's now been five months, and Underwood's mom came from Chicago hoping to bring her daughter home. But Dana's staying. Counseling the displaced is more important today than it was the day after the disaster.

UNDERWOOD: The shock is wearing off of what happened. And so depression is starting to set in. And you can just sort of see people wonder why things are taking so long, and, you know, wonder why people have forgotten what's gone on here.

RAMAN: Tens of thousands of foreign volunteers have made their way through southern Thailand, each with their own story, their own reason for coming, their own lessons learned.

UNDERWOOD: I've learned that if you can help somebody, you should, even if you can't -- you know, if you think you can't afford it, or you don't know how it's going to work out, you just do it anyway, because it does.

RAMAN: Aneesh Raman, CNN, Thailand.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: Atika Shubert joins us now from Banda Aceh in Indonesia. Aneesh Raman joins us from Bangkok, in Thailand. Atika, to you first. Six months on since the tsunami. How are people who's lives were destroyed by the tsunami surviving today?

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They've been really trying to pick up the pieces as best they can. But it's still pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence here for the tens of thousands whose homes were washed away. Of course, many people lost family. Many orphans now. All of them living in these temporary shelters here, what they call barracks. The wooden housing that will last them about a year.

Their priority, they say, is to rebuild as communities, in particular starting with houses. Thousands of concrete houses are now being built all across the province. People are hoping to move into them as soon as possible, really, to start a normal life again, see if they can get back to what it was like before the tsunami hit this region.

VERJEE: What about in Thailand, Aneesh? How are people living there? Are they getting help from the government, aid agencies, other villages?

RAMAN: Well, Thailand, essentially, is the tale of two stories. What Atika is speaking of is taking place on the southern coast, in the hardest-hit areas of Koh Mak and Punad (ph). There -- we were there last week -- people living in essentially refugee camps, rooms that are no bigger than themselves, where they've been now for some months and could likely be for months more. They are, as Atika said, desperately in need of housing, desperately in need of industry.

But in Phuket, itself, the story there is one of tourism. If people don't come back for the high season, Zain, which is the end of this year, into early next, if those hotels don't have, they tell us, at least 80 percent occupancy, that entire industry could cripple and could fall down. So two stories in Phuket. Both equally desperate to move forward.

VERJEE: Atika, are people still afraid?

SHUBERT: People are still afraid. They are particularly afraid to move back to those regions that were worst hit. The port area, the villages by the seashore. Many of the people we talk to here say they don't want to move there and they want the government to provide them land, other areas where they can rebuild their lives again.

So there is still quite a bit of trauma. And you have to remember that after the tsunami, there was another major earthquake that hit this region, and aftershocks still continue. So there is a lot of fear here. And they want the government to provide the kind of security and safety that they say they need. VERJEE: And Aneesh, what about people that you've spoken to in Thailand? How are they remembering the tsunami?

RAMAN: Well, it's interesting. I asked a number of people what, for them, would be the lingering memory of the tsunami now six months on. And for most of them, you did hear stories of devastation, destruction. But one hotel owner, I had thought he would say something similar to what I'd heard from others, but for him -- and I think Atika could say for a lot of people as well -- the defining thought is one of positive upliftment, of inspiration, of the weeks after when the world poured out, when aid came in, when the entire global community was aware of what had taken place and was reaching out to help.

That, for them, is something that they cling to, because it gives them the power to move forward. A lot of these people are desperate to not relive those harrowing days, December 26th on. They need to start lives again. And to do that, they need to move beyond those horrific scenes.

VERJEE: Atika, so many children were orphaned by the tsunami. What's happening to them?

SHUBERT: Well, many of those children were taken in by extended families, by their friends and neighbors, really just enfolded into a larger community. So, in that sense, many of the children have found safe homes. However, it's taken a long time for many of them to try and find, perhaps, their parents, if they're still alive, or other extended family members.

So in some cases, what we have found, is that, for example, siblings that both may have survived but had been adopted by two separate families, have been separated. And now separated for six months, they could be separated for more than a year. So the question is, what do we do with those children now? How do we rehabilitate them back into the family units they were before, find the families that are willing and able to take them on?

Of course, it's very difficult for a family that lost everything in the tsunami to take on another mouth to feed. This is something the aid agencies are working on, particularly aid agencies Like Unicef and Save The Children.

RAMAN: Atika Shubert in Indonesia, Aneesh Raman in Thailand. Well, the struggle to rebuild devastated lives continues half a year after the tsunami.

Join CNN's Veronica Pedrosa for a special report. "Tsunami: Six Months On." That's this weekend. It airs on Sunday at 1300 GMT. That's 3:00 p.m. in Berlin, 10:00 p.m. in Tokyo.

(WEATHER REPORT)

CLANCY: Turning now to the U.S. and the stories making headlines there. Not out of the woods yet. That's what firefighters in California and Arizona are saying as they battle raging wildfires. The blazes have charred thousands of acres in Arizona's Tonto National Forest, and destroyed some homes in a Southern California town as well.

A reprieve for big bird. After a week of intense lobbying, U.S. lawmakers voted to restore $100 million in threatened cuts to public television and radio. The PBS channel, which airs the popular "Sesame Street program, called the vote a huge moral victory for public broadcasting.

And a new twist in the now three-week-old case of a missing U.S. tourist in Aruba. The father of one of the four suspects in Natalee Holloway's disappearance now under arrest. Judge Paul Van Der Sloot was taken into custody Thursday. Police think he does know something about the 18-year-old's disappearance.

VERJEE: Some soldiers in the Russian army are trading in their combat boots for high heels.

CLANCY: Coming up, find out why the government is solidly behind the idea.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

VERJEE: The Russian military's trying to show its softer, gentler side.

CLANCY: And putting a pretty face on its image. In the process, it hopes. Ryan Chilcote has more on that.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The Army Queen contestants were met with all the ceremony usually reserved for soldiers on their way to battle. After demonstrating their soldierly skills in the field, it was time for those still standing, like Larisa Karpukhina, who we followed, to show off their beauty. Nineteen made it to the final stage.

(on camera): The Queen of the Armed Forces pageant is designed to put a prettier face on the not-so attractive prospect of serving in the Russian military.

(voice-over): The army's face has been battered by pictures like these of hazing. The war in Chechnya hasn't helped either. Every year, tens of thousands of Russians dodge the draft.

Enter, the makeup troops. There is no sparing the unconventional weapons of lipstick and hair spray for the good of the army.

"There's a stereotype that the army is bad," Larisa Karpukhina says. "We want to prove to them that it's not as bad, scary, or rough as people think."

To keep the audience interested, the pageantry featured song and dance from Russia's imperial roots, and not-so-distant Soviet past. There was even a risque number from Russia's old-time nemesis, the USA. The Cosmic Forces Cadets rooted for their star, Petty Officer Karpukhina. The Army says last year's contest did produce a rise in the enlistments.

"Under President Vladimir Putin," this cadet tells me, the Army has really risen. "When we graduate from the academy in three years, I think the army will be at the level where it should be."

Karpukhina didn't win. In fact, she confirmed to us a backstage rumor that the pageant had been fixed. The judges knew even before the contest started the crown would go to this lieutenant from the northern fleet.

"Maybe it upset me a little," she told me, "but on the whole, I'm happy I took part. And I did everything I could to win. Well, you know what they say, all's fair in love and war." And it seems in contest, to pick a queen of the Russian army.

Ryan Chilcote, CNN, Moscow.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: All right. That's it for this show. I'm Zain Verjee.

I'm Jim Clancy. For Zain and I are and all of the reporters on duty around the world this day, thank you for spending a bit of your day with us.

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