Benazir demands early poll
ISLAMABAD, Oct 17 — Pakistan’s military rulers should move swiftly to hold elections and return the troops to their barracks, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said in an interview published today.

More Asians become US citizens
WASHINGTON, Oct 17 — Although the overall US naturalisation rate from 1990 to 1997 dropped to a smaller proportion than at any time in the past century, the citizenship rate for immigrants from Asia actually increased from 40 per cent to 44 per cent during the same period, a new US Census Bureau study has found.

Schindler’s original list found
STUTTGART (Germany), Oct 17— A newspaper said it had obtained documents left by German businessman Oskar Schindler, including an original list of 1,200 Jews he saved from death in Nazi concentration camps.

Contest for gurdwara hots up
SURREY, Oct 17 — The use of tables and chairs in the community meal room of a prominent Sikh shrine in this Canadian city has become the main issue in the elections to the gurdwara’s executive committee.

3 militiamen die in E. Timor
DILI (East Timor), Oct 17 — Three anti-independence militants were killed and three wounded today in a gun battle between militiamen and peacekeeping forces in East Timor, an official said.

Pakistan to back Kashmiris’ struggle

ISLAMABAD, Oct 17 (PTI, Reuters) — Pakistan's new military rulers, Gen Pervez Musharraf, today announced unilateral military de-escalation along the Indo-Pak border and pull back of troops that have moved to the border areas "in recent past."

General Musharraf, in his second national broadcast since seizing power on October 12, said he wanted Pakistan and India to work together to take South Asia out of economic deprivation.

In a televised address to the nation, he also offered to resume "result-oriented" talks with India on "all issues" but said Pakistan would continue its support to the Kashmiri people for their right to "self-determination."

He said India must honour all UN resolutions on Kashmir, which New Delhi considers as outdated.

The General announced the setting up of a six-member National Security Council (NSC) to run the affairs of the country and without giving any time-frame pledged to restore "true democracy".

"The army will not stay in power indefinitely," he said.

The council, to be headed by General Musharraf, will include Pakistan's air force and naval chiefs as also experts in legal, foreign and national affairs.

Declaring that "this is not martial law" but "another path towards democracy", General Musharraf, attired in military fitting, said the Constitution was not scrapped and only suspended and that the army "does not intend to stay in power indefinitely".

Promising to revive Pakistan's sagging economy, he said "today we have reached a stage where our economy has crumbled, our credibility is lost, institutions lie demolished, provincial disharmony has caused cracks in the federation and people, who were once brothers, are at each others throat."

He asserted that corrupt politicians would be pursued, illicit wealth would be recovered national confidence would be built apart from strengthening the federation and removing inter-provincial disharmony.

Urging "all defaulters to come forth and settle their debts within four weeks" or face action, General Musharraf said if they failed to settle their loans, "their names would be published and the law will take its due course".

General Musharraf said the military seized power to guide Pakistan out of a "dark age" and he had no choice but to overthrow the government.

He said it was unthinkable that Sharif's associates denied his aircraft landing rights at Karachi last Tuesday and added that the plane might have crashed or been forced to land in India.

India to get Russian bombers on lease

MOSCOW, Oct 17 (PTI) — Russia is to lease an unspecified number of deadly TU-22M3 long-range bombers to India to enhance the IAF’s strike capability and sell an airborne warning and conrol system (AWACS) aircraft, media report here said.

The move has been confirmed by Russian Air Chief General Anatoly Kornukov, who visited India between October 4 and 10, to ‘Nezavisimoe Voyennoye Obozrenie" (independent military review) weekly in its latest issue.

Earlier reports had said 10 brand-new TU-22M3 planes were ready for delivery at Kazan Aviation Plant in Tatarstan (on Volga river).

The swing-wing supresonic bombers, inducted in to the Soviet Air Force in 1977, have an effective strike range of 2200 km and can carry up to 24 tonnes of bombs and missiles, including "smart" weapons.

India will be the only country, besides former Soviet Union constituent, Ukraine, to receive these bombers, Russian defence experts say.

The decision to lease these bombers was reportedly taken by President Boris Yeltsin in the spirit of his promise made to Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh during his Moscow visit in April that New Delhi would continue to get "cutting-edge" defence technology from Moscow.

India is also going to buy a A-50 AWACS aircraft from Russia, the weekly reported.

Musharraf was Sharif’s blue-eyed boy

NEW DELHI, Oct 17 (PTI) — Pakistan Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf, who dethroned Premier Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup, is known for his betraying nature and has always "kicked the very ladder he used for climbing up in his career", says a new book.

"Though a blue-eyed boy of Mr Sharif, General Musharraf’s good relationships with him could not last even six months after he was made the Chief of Army Staff", says a new book, "Pak Proxy War — A Story of ISI, Bin Laden and Kargil".

"By March, 1999, a noticeable degree of coolness had crept into their relationship," it says, claiming that way back in 1995 there was a move "by disgruntled elements in Pakistan army" to boot out Ms Benazir Bhutto and instal General Musharraf as "head of the Islamic state".

Tracing events leading to his rise to the "highest office a soldier can aspire to", author Rajeev Sharma says, "The choice of General Musharraf as the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) was strange because he is Mohajir of Azamgarh/Karachi origin".

General Musharraf has in fact come a long way from a position when as a Brigadier "he had caught the eye of (then) President Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s".

"The Brigadier perhaps had one characteristic which struck a chord in General Zia’s heart... (he) was a devout Deobandi and was in the good books of the Jamaat-e-Islami", he said.

In fact, his proximity to the hardcore Jamaati fundamentalists came handy when their "strong recommendation" bolstered his chances of being appointed as Army Chief, the book says.

General Musharraf’s personality can well be gauged from the fact that though a Mohajir himself "he detests Mohajirs", the author writes.

"He settled down in Gujranwalla in Punjab and prefers to project himself as a Punjabi rather than a Mohajir. His hatred for Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and its chief Altaf Hussain is well known", Sharma says.

There have been other controversies as well during his career, he says, adding that "In September, 1995, when Ms Bhutto was the Prime Minister, Pakistani Customs had seized a car in the North West Frontier Province on charges of illegally carrying a huge cache of arms and ammunition.

"Investigations led to the stunning disclosure that the arms were meant for some disgruntled elements in the Pakistan Army who wanted to overthrow the Bhutto government and instal General Musharraf as head of the Islamic state".

Dwelling on General Musharraf’s relations with Mr Sharif, who "handpicked" the General to head the country’s most powerful organisation, Sharma says things started deteriorating in March, 1999, when "much to the chagrin of Mr Sharif, he (Musharraf) passed an order that as the supervisory authority (of Water and Power Development Authority), the Army would henceforth conduct all negotiations with independent power producers".

"This order clearly meant clipping the wings of politicians and bureaucrats. Mr Sharif asked him to rescind the order, but he declined to oblige," Sharma notes.

"As if this was not enough, General Musharraf ordered preparation of a list of all those who had not paid their dues to the WAPDA... Mr Sharif was in for a major embarrassment when the name of a Shia woman in his Cabinet, Abida Hussain, was leaked to the Press" as being one of them.

"Abida had to quit the government," Sharma writes, noting "to add insult to injury, stories appeared in Pakistani media that Mr Sharif’s family itself topped the list of defaulters".

More Asians become US citizens
from Aziz Haniffa

WASHINGTON, Oct 17 — Although the overall US naturalisation rate from 1990 to 1997 dropped to a smaller proportion than at any time in the past century, the citizenship rate for immigrants from Asia actually increased from 40 per cent to 44 per cent during the same period, a new US Census Bureau study has found.

According to the study, only 35 per cent of the foreign-born people in the USA in 1997 were naturalised citizens, compared to 64 per cent in 1970 and more than 50 per cent at the height of the nation’s last great wave of immigration in the early part of this century.

However, among immigrants from Asia, not only was there an increase in the naturalisation rate, but education, income, home-ownership rates were higher than other foreign-born groups and almost on a par with the native population.

The overall sharp drop in the slow pace of attaining citizenship, which necessarily could stymie the growth of political power for new immigrant communities, has been attributed in part to the rising population of illegal immigrants who cannot become citizens easily.

Other factors include the government’s immense backlog in naturalisation applications and, according to some analysts, an apathy towards citizenship by many immigrants, even long-time residents who may have arrived in the USA 15 or 20 years ago.

In 1970, about 90 per cent of the foreign-born people who had been living in the USA for more than 20 years were citizens. By 1997, the figure had dropped to 67 per cent.

In 1970, 58 per cent of immigrants living in the USA for 10 to 14 years were citizens, but in 1997, the figure had dropped to 30 per cent.

Pro-immigration advocates believe that the decline in citizenship in recent years is also the result of policy changes by the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) that have made it more difficult and expensive for residents to naturalise.

Unlike in the past, the INS has stopped using community organisations to help process naturalisation applications and has also increased the application fee from $45 in 1990 to over $200 now.

The census study, titled "Profile of the Foreign-Born Population of the United States:1997," said the foreign-born population in 1997 had climbed to a record 25.8 million, with nine million naturalised citizens and 16.7 million non-citizens.

In September this year, nearly 1.8 million people were awaiting action on their naturalisation applications submitted as long as two or three years ago. The backlog at the INS for naturalisation applicants was over 1.4 million and nearly one million more applicants were waiting to receive their permanent residency or "green cards".

In addition, according to INS estimates, there were at least five million illegal immigrants in the country and large numbers of other immigrants who have temporary residency permits, and unlike in the past, strict new immigration laws that took effect in 1996 made it much more difficult for these people to obtain permanent residency, much less citizenship.

— India Abroad News Service

Benazir demands early poll

ISLAMABAD, Oct 17 (AFP) — Pakistan’s military rulers should move swiftly to hold elections and return the troops to their barracks, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said in an interview published today.

"No one in the country, least of all the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), will accept the situation if the intervention turns out to be the beginning of another dictatorship and era of tyranny," Bhutto told The News.

Bhutto, twice elected premier and twice dismissed, acknowledged that the people of Pakistan had largely accepted the military action, but argued that this was because they were "fed up" with Sharif.

The PPP leader accused Sharif, now detained along with many other members of his administration, of having destroyed one state institution after another.

"Power went to his head and he took on the Army", said Bhutto, who described her own sacking in 1990 as quasi-military coup.

Schindler’s original list found

STUTTGART (Germany), Oct 17 (Reuters) — A newspaper said it had obtained documents left by German businessman Oskar Schindler, including an original list of 1,200 Jews he saved from death in Nazi concentration camps.

The papers left by Schindler, whose defiance of the holocaust was portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film "Schindler’s List", were found in a suitcase put in a north German attic by friends after he died 25 years ago.

"There is absolutely no doubt that these documents are genuine," Uwe Vorkoetter, Editor of the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper, told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

He said the papers had been examined by two historians and former Israeli Supreme Court Judge Moshe Bejski, one of the most prominent surviving "Schindler Jews" who identified people in photos found in the suitcase.

Vorkoetter added that the suitcase had yielded a "mosaic" of information about Schindler’s life both during and after World War II which would fill gaps in what was known about him.

Schindler, through a mixture of cajolery and bribery, persuaded Nazi officials that the Jews who worked at his munitions factory in southern Poland were essential to Adolf Hitler’s war effort.

As Soviet troops advanced in 1944, Schindler’s bookkeeper drew up the list of workers he wanted to take with him to a new factory site further west, sparing them from death in the gas chambers. Six million Jews died in the Nazi holocaust.

The discovery comes as talks between survivors of the Nazi-era slave and forced labour regime and the German companies who exploited them are deadlocked on compensation.

Lawyers representing the victims have rejected a $ 3.3-billion offer made jointly by 16 large companies and the German Government, and further talks are scheduled next month.

Contest for gurdwara hots up

SURREY, Oct 17 — The use of tables and chairs in the community meal room of a prominent Sikh shrine in this Canadian city has become the main issue in the elections to the gurdwara’s executive committee.

With the enrolment of 9,000 new voting members to the congregation, the contest between the rival factions in the Surrey Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara has intensified.

Both the contending parties are promising better management, transparency in keeping and publicising the shrine’s accounts, religious propagation and other measures to spread Sikhism, particularly among the younger generation. Though both sides affirm allegiance to the ‘rehat maryada’ (code of conduct) approved by Akal Takht, the ruling faction led by Mr Balwant Singh Gill promises to stick to the existing tradition of serving ‘langar’ (community lunch) on tables and chairs started by the elders many decades ago in the gurdwara.

On the contrary, the group led by Mr Dalip Singh Mangat seeks to remove tables and chairs from the ‘langar’ hall and replace those with mats on the floor.

Thirty-one thousand voters will be exercising their right to franchise next Sunday. The results after expected the same evening. —IANS

3 militiamen die in E. Timor

DILI (East Timor), Oct 17 (AP) — Three anti-independence militants were killed and three wounded today in a gun battle between militiamen and peacekeeping forces in East Timor, an official said.

No one in the international force was injured in the clash, which took place on Sturday morning in Marko, a village about 15 km from Indonesian-controlled West Timor, said peacekeeping spokesman Col Mark Kelly.

It was the bloodiest clash so far between militia groups and the peacekeepers since the Australian-led, foreign force was deployed to East Timor on September 20 to stop a rampage by Indonesian forces and their militant allies after the territory voted for independence.

Pinochet carnival
SANTIAGO: Human rights activists carried a giant mock birthday cake through the streets of the Chilean capital on Saturday in a Rio-style carnival, marking the first anniversary of Britain’s arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Leading the celebratory parade was an anti-Pinochet activist inside a cage on the back of a pickup truck. He wore a striped jailhouse suit and latex mask depicting the retired General. — Reuters

Geologists freed
MOSCOW: Four Japanese geologists were freed on Saturday after being held hostage by Muslem rebels for almost two months in the central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. The hostages were exchanged in the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border area for several rebels who had been captured by Kyrgyz forces during recent fighting, Interfax news agency reported quoting Kyrgyz security sources. — DPA

Scribes honoured
BAYEUX (France): Journalists from Germany, France, Ireland and the USA who covered war and its aftermath have been honoured with the annual Bayeux Prize. The winners, chosen by an international jury of about 50 journalists, each received $ 8065 on Saturday. — AP

Correspondent jailed
NAIROBI: The AFP correspondent in the Comoro Islands was charged with publishing false information and detained in a Moroni jail awaiting trial after he refused to reveal a source. The AFP protested against Saturday’s arrest in a letter to the military junta in Moroni, and asked for his immediate release as the imprisonment "contravenes the principles of the freedom of the Press and information." — AFP

Death penalty for 3
TEHERAN: A court sentenced to death three Iranians convicted of murder, and ruled that another man be blinded for acting as their sentinel, a newspaper has said. The daily Azad on Saturday said the Teheran judge ordered the Islamic penalty of retribution for three men found guilty of murdering three lorry drivers outside Teheran since 1992, and taking their vehicles. — Reuter