Expedite START-III: China
BEIJING, Sept 6 — China has expressed hope that major nuclear powers, the USA and Russia would reach an early agreement on dismantling their nuclear arsenal under the third stage of Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-III).

Anwar trial resumes

Terrorist-army nexus in Pak “alarming”

East Timor riots
Police chief admits loss of control

JAKARTA, Sept 6 (Reuters) — Indonesia’s police chief said today that the escalating violence in East Timor, which has voted for independence from Jakarta, was out of control.

“The latest developments are not yet calm. It is still out of control. The government (in East Timor) is not functioning”, national police chief Roesmanhadi told reporters. He was in East Timor yesterday.

Pro-Jakarta militias have effectively taken control of large swathes of the impoverished former Portuguese colony since last week’s UN-organised referendum in which nearly 80 per cent of East Timorese voted to break away from Indonesia.

Sources in East Timor say dozens, perhaps hundreds, have been killed as pro-Jakarta mobs have gone on the rampage.

But Mr Roesmanhadi said the last report he had put the death toll at 20 with 13 injured.

He added that East Timor Bishop Carlos Belo, whose home was attacked by militiamen and set on fire earlier in the day, was being evacuated to the city of Baucau, east of the capital, Dili.

Meanwhile, a three-member UN electoral commission said today that the August 30 vote on self determination in East Timor was a fair and an accurate reflection of the will of the people there.

“The commission was able to declare that the popular consultation had been procedurally fair and in accordance with the New York agreements”, said the commission in a written statement distributed to journalists.

It referred to the agreement signed in New York on May 5 between Indonesia, Portugal and the UN which allowed for the UN-held ballot in East Timor.

SYDNEY: Australia is willing to take in East Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmao and Dili Bishop Carlos Belo, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said today.

“If the worst comes to the worst and he is told to go back to East Timor his life is threatened and wants to come to Australia, obviously, he can come here,” Mr Downer said.

Mr Downer also offered sanctuary to Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Belo, whose Dili residence was torched by rampaging pro-Jakarta militias and himself taken by army helicopter to Bacau, 115 km from Dili.

The UN is compiling eyewitness evidence that the Indonesian military orchestrated a campaign of killings by pro-Jakarta militias in East Timor, according to a leaked report published in Australia today.

Citing leaked UN’s assessments, the Sydney Morning Herald said 14,000 soldiers under officers, hand-picked by Indonesian Defence Minister General Wiranto, had condoned and directed attacks by anti-independence militias.

The military had also ordered the 8,000-strong Indonesian police contingent to remain passive during many assaults, with open threats to their families if they intervened, it said.

GENEVA: The International Committee of the Red Cross today said its compound in the east Timorese capital of Dili had been seized by armed militias and the fate of some 2,000 refugees who had been there was unknown.

Spokesman Urs Boegli said 11 international ICRC staffers had been marched from the compound by the anti-independence militias and handed over to the Indonesian authorities at a police station. They were understood to be largely unharmed and were expected to be flown out of the territory.

UNITED NATIONS: The UN Security Council has decided to send a mission to Jakarta to get Indonesia to halt the violence that has swept East Timor since it voted for independence.

The council President, Mr Peter Van Walsum of the Netherlands, said Indonesia had “welcomed the intention” of the council.

The mission would consist of no more than five persons, he said yesterday.

Its composition could be decided today and the team would leave as soon as possible, Mr Walsum said.

A draft council statement condemned in the strongest terms the intensifying violence in East Timor and underlined the responsibility of the government of Indonesia to guarantee peace and security there.

The draft said the council was “planning the despatch of a Security Council mission to discuss concrete steps with the government of Indonesia to allow peaceful implementation of the ballot result.”

Other council members had reservations about the mission, the source said. They were Bahrain and Malaysia, the only Muslim countries currently on the 15-member council.

The council condemned in the “strongest terms” the spiralling violence in Timor, “specially the murders of UN local staff and the attack on the UN premises in Liquica town”, which led to the shooting of one UN staff.

Dili ‘having heads on sticks’

DARWIN (Australia), Sept 6 (Reuters) — East Timor’s capital Dili is a “city of fear’’, with decapitated heads on sticks lining roads as militias roamed freely attacking people with guns and machetes, evacuees and East Timorese in Australia said today.

“What I have seen is increasing anarchy. I am seeing signs of terrified people all over the place,’’ Caritas sister Libby Rogerson said after arriving here in the first wave of an Australian evacuation from Dili.

“It’s a city of fear, everyone is frightened,’’ Sister Rogerson told Reuters.

Australia-based East Timorese resistance leaders said they had reports from the terror-stricken territory of mutilated bodies and hundreds of heads on sticks on the roadside.

“I’ve been told they could count at least 145 dead bodies on the outskirts of Dili,’’ Mr Alfredo Ferreira, the national council for Timorese resistance representative in Darwin, told Reuters.

Joao Carrascalao, senior East Timorese Resistance officer said: “One person who travelled from Dili to Atambua reported that along side the road there were hundreds of heads on sticks and bodies everywhere.’’

Dagestan rebels seize more areas

MOSCOW, Sept 6 (DPA) — Thousands of Islamic guerrilla fighters today seized more townships in the Russian Caucasus republic of Dagestan in fresh offensives to wrest control of the region from Moscow.

As federal government troops continued operations in central Dagestan to dislodge rebel formations, units near the republic’s border with separatist Chechnya were forced to retreat by groups of gunmen moving through the area, Russian news agencies reported.

Russian police and special forces under siege in the town of Novolakskoye managed to withdraw today after Russian armoured units broke through rebel-held areas, reports said.

Fourteen officers were killed in fighting before the remaining police were evacuated, the authorities said. An armoured personnel carried and an armoured car were destroyed in the operation and the police headquarters burned to the ground.

Earlier, clashes erupted between the Chechen fighters and the Russian forces in Novolakskoye, north-west Dagestan, where 25 police officers were trapped in their headquarters by the rebels, border guards said.

Two of the trapped police officers were killed and several others wounded in the fighting early today, the Interfax news agency said, quoting Dagestan border guards.

Russian forces lost a tank and an armoured car while many were injured, the sources added.

The use of air power was extremely difficult due to the civilian population in the rebel-held areas, Interfax added.

Fighting was also continuing today in the Boyinaksk region in the north and towns of Karamakhy and Chabanmakhy, where Russian forces have been fighting.

Meanwhile, the toll in a bomb blast at a military housing block in Doyinaksk on Saturday rose to 36 dead and over a hundred injured.

Afghan Opposition gains ground

ISLAMABAD, Sept 6 (AP) — Afghanistan’s northern-based Opposition attacked positions of the ruling Taliban Islamic militia today in two northern provinces, capturing a number of strategic posts, an Opposition spokesman said.

Opposition fighters attacked Nahrin district in the northern Baghlan province and captured seven military posts from the Taliban after fierce fighting, Hussain Anwari, an Opposition spokesman told Associated Press by telephone from Afghanistan.

The posts were located on mountain heights, overlooking a rugged route to Pul-e-Khumri, a major district in the Baghlan province.

Nahrin is roughly 180 km from the capital Kabul.

The warring factions are now trading heavy artillery fire, Anwari said. No reports of casualties were available.

There was no immediate comment from the Taliban, who rule almost 90 per cent of Afghanistan, including Kabul. The opposition controls the remaining 10 per cent of the territory.

The opposition also attacked Archi district in the northern Kunduz province which is about 230 km from Kabul.

Use of force in questioning illegal

JERUSALEM, Sept 6 (Reuters) — Israel’s Supreme Court today ruled in a landmark decision that it was illegal for Israeli security service, Shin Bet, to use physical pressure, deemed by human rights groups as torture, in interrogation of detainees.

A special nine-judge panel ruled unanimously in favour of petitions brought by rights organisations and individuals.

“The court declares the Shin Bet does not have the authority to shake a person, to force him into a (contorted) position or to kneel in a frog-like position or deprive him of sleep,” the ruling said.

Until now, the Supreme Court had refrained from ruling on the legality of interrogation techniques used by Israel’s Shin Bet security service primarily against Palestinian detainees.

The ruling effectively overturns a decision by a 1987 Israeli commission that gave the Shin Bet the go-ahead to use moderate physical pressure against suspects believed to have information that could prevent attacks against the Jewish state.

“It took 30 years of human rights abuse to get to this,” said Israeli human rights lawyer Leah Tsemel outside the court. “It will stop torture and moderate physical pressure and make Israel abide by international law,” he said.

Schroeder loses two state elections

BERLIN, Sept 6 (AP) — Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has lost a key electoral test when his governing party ceded a majority in states that have long been the Social Democratic strongholds.

The yesterday’s elections in eastern Brandenburg state and tiny Saarland near the French border were considered referendums on Mr Schroeder’s centrist policies and unpopular reforms to the generous social welfare state.

“We have lost both elections” Mr Schroeder told reporters at Social Democratic headquarters.

Mr Schroeder, a pragmatist in a party devoted to social welfare benefits, nonetheless pledged to stay his centrist reform course, saying the controversial budget cuts were critical to ensuring Germany’s economic recovery.

The Social Democratic lost about 15 per cent support in the eastern Brandenburg state, winning just 39 per cent of the vote compared with 54 per cent in the last election five years ago, according to official results.

Significantly, voters in the poor eastern state that just 10-year-ago became part of a reunified Germany voted the far-right German People’s Party, or the DVU, into state Parliament with 5.1 per cent of the vote.

Expedite START-III: China

BEIJING, Sept 6 (PTI) — China has expressed hope that major nuclear powers, the USA and Russia would reach an early agreement on dismantling their nuclear arsenal under the third stage of Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-III).

“We hope that the nuclear warheads will be dismantled, and not just removed from deployment to stockpile. It is our sincere hope that the treaty can be reached at the earliest possible date,” the Director-General of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Department of Arms Control and Disarmament, Mr Sha Zukang said.

Commenting on the recent US-Russia talks on the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty and START-III in Moscow, Mr Sha, China’s top disarmament official told PTI here that the START-III treaty, as Russia and the USA envisioned, will drastically reduce the number of strategic nuclear warheads of the two countries.

This would be conducive to the further deep reduction of these two countries’ excessive nuclear weapons as well as to the multilateral disarmament process, Mr Sha said.

Meanwhile, China has stated that the Conference on Disarmament (CD), as a multilateral disarmament negotiating body, is irreplaceable in terms of its status and role.

Even though it has not been able to get down to treaty negotiations for the time being, conference can be conducted on major issues of international peace and security, and on some specific disarmament items, Chinese Ambassador for Disarmament Affairs Li Changhe was quoted as saying.

Anwar trial resumes

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 6 (AP) — The highly-charged sex trial of Anwar Ibrahim resumed today after a two-week recess, but was adjourned quickly after a defence plea for impeaching the ousted Deputy Prime Minister’s accuser.

Defence lawyer Christopher Fernando argued the trial could not proceed until High Court Judge Ariffin Jaka had ruled on Mr Azizan Abu Bakar, the man who accuses Mr Ibrahim of repeatedly sodomising him.

Terrorist-army nexus in Pak “alarming”

WASHINGTON, Sept 6 (PTI) — Rising fanaticism and fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan is causing concern in most nations, including the USA and China, the Indian Ambassador to the USA, Mr Naresh Chandra, has said.

“The terrorist-army nexus in Pakistan has alarmed most countries...and in a friendly way we are also deeply concerned about its adverse effects on Pakistani society itself,” he said in a TV chat show yesterday.

Kargil was the latest example of a “very dangerous nexus between terrorists and a professional army,” he said.

About the pro-Pakistan slant in US media, he said India did not believe in indulging in active propaganda unlike Pakistan.

Rat invasion
MANAGUA: Thousands of rats have invaded Northern Nicaragua, devouring food supplies and leaving 5,000 families at the risk of starving, government officials have said. The rats have eaten about 95 per cent of the corn, rice and bean crops, which, in turn, has sent prices in the region rising by 500 per cent, said Mairo Barreda, who heads a government-sponsored development programme for Indians in the Atlantico Sur province. — AFP

Car crash
RONAN (Montana): An 11-year-old girl driving her mother’s car, apparently with permission, lost control of the vehicle and crashed, killing a nine-year-old girl who was a passenger, the authorities said. The passenger was thrown from the car when it crashed on Saturday night, Montana highway patrolman Tim Wyckoff said. Three girls were in the car, which overturned twice and came to rest on its top. — AP

Fugitive held
NEW HAVEN: Former fugitive broker Martin Frankel is being held in Germany on charges unrelated to his alleged theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from US insurance companies, Frankel’s US lawyer said on Sunday. Hugh Keefe, Frankel’s New Haven, Connecticut-based lawyer, told Reuters Frankel was arraigned in Hamburg, Germany, on Sunday on a charge of possessing a fake British passport. — Reuters

Professors’ stir
TEGUCIGALPA (Honduras): Anatomy professors at Medical School at Honduras’s main university have said they were on strike to demand administrators supply them with more cadavers from hospitals and morgues. “It would be really hard for the Dean of Medical School to satisfy this need on his own, unless he goes out on the street with a pistol in his hand,” Victor Ramos, a medical professor, said on Sunday. — Reuters