Rather than become a politician, he would have pursued a career as a canon lawyer or a doctor, the Life Senator said.
The Pope, meanwhile, has been criticised for inviting Mr Andreotti to address a health-care conference at the Vatican, during which the two were photographed chatting and shaking hands.On Tuesday, a university student who was reading a prayer at a papal Mass departed from his text and quoted the words of Aldo Moro, the murdered former prime minister, in describing Mr Andreotti. Giulio Andreotti, the former Italian prime minister who is on trial in Sicily for alleged Mafia links, wishes he had never become involved in politics. Currying favour among an angry and disillusioned electorate always was going to be an uphill task Now his job is harder still.. It is difficult to believe, however, that anyone beyond a stone’s throw from the Red Square will take the results seriously. The poll is not subject to any independent monitoring.Yesterday’s developments will do nothing to improve the standing of President Boris Yeltsin, whose decision to invade Chechnya a year ago caused deep resentment.Indeed, coming only three days before polls to elect a new State Duma, or lower house, the latest fighting will do little to advance the cause of the government-backed party.Tomorrow President Yeltsin will addressthe nation. There also were exchanges of gunfire in Grozny yesterday, where only one polling booth – used by the local Russian-backed administration – remained open by lunchtime.The Kremlin wants the election – which is expected to return the present Russian- backed prime minister, Doku Zavgayev, to office – to lend legitimacy to the puppet administration in the republic. The threshold has been lowered from the customary 50 per cent turnout to 25 per cent, and numbers have been boosted by allowing those Russian soldiers permanently based in Chechnya to take part.The chances that the elections in Chechnya will run their course are lessening.

Reports were trickling in last night of violence in two other towns, Novogroznensky and Shatoi.The attack came on the first day of voting in local and national elections in Chechnya which the Kremlin – to the astonishment of many observers – has insisted on holding, but which the rebels have long vowed to disrupt.The Russian authorities decided to open the polling booths for three days, a move which was intended to ensure that enough people vote to make the election legitimate. This time – according to the Itar-Tass news agency – they took a hospital, but allowed almost all patients and doctors to leave unharmed, detaining only one person. But one Russian soldier manning a checkpoint about three miles away told Reuters there were “very many” dead and wounded. Another said that the Chechen fighters had “taken almost the entire town”, which is about 20 miles east of Grozny.In June, Chechen rebels took 1,000 people hostage after seizing a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budennovsk in a conflict in which 100 people died. Helicopter gunships pounded the city centre and there was heavy street fighting, in which at least a dozen people were killed, after Chechen fighters seized a hospital and several buildings, according to news reports from the area.
A statement by the Russian military command in Chechnya said that about 600 rebels took part in the fighting in Gudermes, which lasted all day, and were “hiding in residential areas, actually behind the backs of civilians, and firing at federal troops sent to the town”.Details of the conflict were still sketchy last night, as Russian troops reportedly had sealed off the entire city, which lay under a veil of black smoke.

”That’s Bassam Imasalni,” another Marj el-Zahour veteran said, pointing to the portrait of an unsmiling, slightly bearded young man with dark, serious eyes. “He was trapped in his home by the Israelis but came out fighting with his rifle – he only died because there were too many of them.”. Boris Yeltsin’s high-risk efforts to legitimise Russia’s puppet government in Chechnya by holding elections in the breakaway republic were under threat last night after the war flared anew when rebels stormed into its second largest city, Gudermes. To the Islamist board were pinned dozens of snapshots of Hamas and Islamic Jihad ”martyrs”, holding pistols and automatic rifles and heavy machine guns. Out in the hallway, hundreds of students clustered round the noticeboards of the militant Palestinian groups. Some of the settlers will leave but others will stay, especially in settlements in the Jordan Valley, in the north-west, and in all those areas where the settlements are already virtual cities.”It sounded as if Sheikh Jarrar was using ”a certain language”, had mellowed just a little; not in his opposition to a peace he regards as unjust but in the time it will take to prove its injustice and to persuade Palestinians that only a return to Islamic principles – rather than the PLO-style nationalist variety – will resolve their tragedy.

The West Bank will be split into cantons by the Israelis who have built all these by-pass roads for the settlers which divide up our land. ”But it will be confined to the holy sites – Arafat will maybe be able to take control of some areas annexed to Jerusalem. “Bosnia is in the heart of Europe, it’s a special case,” he said. “The solution they have reached is to keep the Muslims under supervision and to prevent third parties like the Islamists from gaining any power. But Palestine is in the heart of the Islamic world and here the Americans are looking after their interests in the Middle East – oil and Israel.”I pushed Sheikh Jarrar back to the subject of Jerusalem, of which he spoke so many times at Marj el-Zahour.

“It’s a personal view – I think there will be a solution for Jerusalem,” he said. “The Islamic movement,” Sheikh Jarrar said firmly, “would be weakened if it participated, because there is no democratic atmosphere.”All the young men around the room nodded obediently when Sheikh Jarrar returned to a familiar theme: the massive, all-embracing power of America, whose interference in international affairs was directed solely by the interests of the United States – in Bosnia as well as the Middle East. “We want good relations with the Palestinian authority,” he said. “But the Islamic people are not interested in participating in the Palestinian elections next month. These elections will not satisfy the Islamic movement because it would be a form of blackmail – because these elections are being held to support the peace process.”Merely to participate in elections would be to accept the PLO-Israeli agreement That, clearly, is the concern of Hamas.