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Sunday,
December 23, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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We don’t
have infinite patience: Jaswant
PPP slams
Musharraf on terrorism
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Nepal
gears up for SAARC summit Kathmandu, December 22 Preparations for the 11th SAARC summit are in full swing here despite rising tension in the region and a state of emergency declared in the Himalayan kingdom. Security has been beefed up around the summit venue, SAARC Secretariat, Tribhuvan International Airport and places included in the itinerary of the visiting dignitaries.
US
officials defend gaps in Laden tape US spies
offer tips on modern interrogation ‘Bush
wants $ 15 b more for security’
F 7s to
be inducted in Pak fleet Scribe
dies after years of torture
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We don’t have infinite patience: Jaswant Kabul, December 22 “India by conviction is a great power. But it is not flexing its muscles. We are simply telling the rest of the world that India is on the march and it will not be stopped. It is much better that the rest of the world recognises this fact,” Mr Jaswant Singh told reporters after unfurling the National Flag on the premises of the Embassy with strains of the National Anthem renting the air. Mr Jaswant Singh, who represented India at the installation of the new interim government headed by Mr Hamid Karzai, termed the reopening of the Embassy as a historic occasion and said: “I do it with a sense of fulfilment as a soldier of India. The Embassy now restarts where it rightfully belonged.” The Embassy was closed on September 26, 1996, barely 12 hours before the entry of the Taliban into the capital of the war-torn country. Later, talking to reporters Mr Jaswant Singh asserted that India did not have “infinite” patience, and said the recall of the Indian High Commissioner from Islamabad was only a “signal” to Pakistan that it recognised the enormity of the situation after the attack on Indian Parliament. “The step was only a signal, a message to Pakistan so that it recognises the enormity of the situation,” Mr Jaswant Singh said when asked about New Delhi’s decision yesterday to recall High Commissioner Vijay Nambiar. He said the attack on Parliament was not just an attack on the “stones and mortars of a building called Parliament but on the very sovereignty of India.” He said India had patience, but it “is not infinite”. “India has been patient and waiting since December 13 for some kind of recognition from the Pakistan Government about the enormity of the situation. Nothing of that sort came. The issue was deliberated by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) at great length and it was decided to pull out India’s High Commissioner to Pakistan,” he said. Mr Jaswant Singh ducked a question when asked whether India was considering a military option to deal with the situation saying that “I am not in Kabul to discuss such options.” Meanwhile, Britain reopened its Embassy in Kabul after 12 years today. In a modest morning ceremony, charge d’affaires Andrew Tesoriere hoisted the Union Jack over the Embassy in the heart of Kabul that had been closed since 1989, the grounds maintained by a skeleton Afghan staff.
PTI, Reuters |
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Russia
urges India, Pak to show restraint
Moscow, December 22 “Moscow continues to closely watch the developments of this alarming situation, which unfortunately has not displayed any signs of improvements so far,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov told the Interfax news agency. He said Russia was seriously concerned about the increasing tensions in relations between India and Pakistan and expressed the hope that New Delhi and Islamabad would not resort to any extreme moves. “Russia views the resumption of political dialogue between the two countries on the basis of the Lahore agreement as the only way to resolve the problems in their relations,” Mr Losyukov said, adding that “there is no alternative to this.” Russia had yesterday called for resumption of political dialogue between India and Pakistan to de-escalate tensions following the December 13 terrorist attack on Parliament House.
UNI |
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Osama most likely dead: Musharraf
Beijing, December 22 In an interview broadcast today on Chinese state television, General Musharraf said Pakistan would hand Bin Laden to the USA if he’s caught. “He’s not in Pakistan, of that we are reasonably sure. But we can’t be a hundred per cent sure. We have sealed the borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” General Musharraf said. “The Tora Bora region in which he was supposed to be operating... has about eight passes leading into Pakistan,” General Musharraf said. “We are guarding each one of these passes.” “Maybe he is dead because of all the operations that have been conducted, the bombardment of all the caves,” General Musharraf said. “There is a great possibility that he may have lost his life there.” “If he does enter, if we identify him, he will be handed over,” General Musharraf added. Kabul: Saudi-born militant millionaire Osama bin Laden has not been sighted for a week and could be dead in Afghanistan, but the USA had no firm information, top US Cdr Gen Tommy Franks said today. “I can’t say that I or someone I know has physically laid eyes on Bin Laden in the past week,’’ he told reporters in Kabul where he was attending the inauguration of the interim Afghan administration. “There really are only about three
possibilities. He can be in Tora Bora or in that area dead, he can be somewhere else in Afghanistan and still alive or perhaps he may have gotten over into Pakistan,’’ Mr Franks said.
AP, Reuters |
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PPP slams Musharraf on terrorism Islamabad, December 22 Expressing concern over rising tensions between India and Pakistan over the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament House, the PPP here said for nearly three years, the Musharraf regime had been promising to regulate madarsas and to prevent militancy from spilling over into areas prohibited by international law. “Despite many tall claims, the Musharraf regime has failed to deliver on the private armies and that failure is posing problems for the country,” it said. The PPP, according to the statement, said the party did not know which group was involved in the attack, but noted that “rise of private militias has damaged the country’s interests and made it vulnerable to international criticism”. It said General Musharraf’s increasing reliance on the USA to resolve the regional tensions was not good for Pakistan. “The inability to find solutions ourselves has led to increasing external reliance instead of internal reliance,” it said. “The internal paralysis and the turning to Washington was also evident in Islamabad’s handling of the Kargil crisis, its inability to convince the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden, its inability to persuade Afghans for an in-house change to prevent the Afghan war that broke out and now its inability to handle the Parliament House attack in India”, the statement said. “Reducing tension and building peace in the region is the need of the hour to prevent a possible conflict between the two countries,” the statement said.
PTI |
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Hamas, Jihad suspend suicide attacks Jerusalem, December 22 The show of
solidarity seemed to be aimed at halting increasingly bloody fighting
between the Palestinian police and militants, which reached a climax
yesterday when six persons were killed and over 80 wounded in a
gunbattle in Gaza. The USA, which put pressure on Mr Arafat to arrest
militants after 29 Israelis were killed in recent suicide bombings,
expressed wariness at the groups’ announcements and demanded Mr
Arafat carry on with his crackdown. “I realise they’ve said they
won’t conduct suicide bombings. That has to lead to the conclusion
that maybe someday they’ll say they will. The point is that the
Palestinian authority needs to make sure that they can’t,” US
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. Israel expressed
scepticism, dismissing the statements as a ploy to ease pressure on Mr
Arafat. “This is a tactical move by Hamas which is a terrorist
organisation,” said Gideon Meir, a senior Foreign Ministry official.
“I think there is an agreement, a silent agreement to postpone the
crackdown for a while.” A senior Islamic Jihad member said the
group had decided to suspend suicide attacks against Israel
temporarily while it worked out whether to halt them for a longer
period. Palestinian officials said the decision was taken at a
meeting of Palestinian factions in the West Bank city of Ramallah to
discuss future strategy. Asked if he could confirm the decision to
freeze suicide attacks temporarily, Nafez Azzam, a senior Islamic
Jihad official in Gaza, said “yes.” Reuters |
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Nepal gears up for SAARC summit Kathmandu, December 22 Security has been beefed up around the summit venue, SAARC Secretariat, Tribhuvan International Airport and places included in the itinerary of the visiting dignitaries. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf have confirmed their participation in the meet, being held in the country for the first time after democracy was restored. “All leaders of the SAARC countries, including Mr Vajpayee and General Musharraf, have confirmed their participation”, spokesman for Nepal’s Foreign Ministry Gyan Prasad Acharya said. The summit, beginning on January 4, would focus mainly on poverty alleviation, the South Asian Free Trade Agreement, anti-terrorism measures and adoption of two important conventions relating to the social issues: girl trafficking and child protection, he said. The Kathmandu declaration would be adopted on the concluding day (January 6), he said, adding the draft was being finalised. Nepal hosted the 3rd SAARC summit in 1987 which was presided over by the late King Birendra. The coming summit will be presided by Nepalese Premier Sher Bahadur Deuba. A year after the Colombo summit in 1998, the summit scheduled to be held in Kathmandu in 1999 was postponed for an indefinite period following the military takeover in Islamabad. SAARC had its own agenda to deliberate upon, a Foreign Ministry official said, adding that the summit was meant mainly to discuss a common issues and common agenda. The issue of granting membership to Afghanistan and Myanmar might also come up during the summit, official sources said. SAARC comprises seven member countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The pre-summit meetings, beginning on December 29, will be held till January 3.
PTI |
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Karzai faces
huge rebuilding task Kabul, December 22 He is unusually qualified to shoulder the huge task of trying to lead his war-torn country back to normal life. A mix of traditional ties and modern experience he won the support of delegates at UN - sponsored talks in Bonn this month even though he was absent, away with his tribesmen negotiating the surrender by the Taliban of their last stronghold in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. That is also a promising basis for the new government that took office today, an early birthday present for Karzai who was born on December 24, 1957. Wearing his trademark lambskin hat, Karzai was sworn in as President of the 30-member interim government that will rule for six months, in a ceremony in Kabul attended by 2,000 tribal leaders, incoming Cabinet members and diplomats. In the new government, the Northern Alliance coalition of ethnic minorities has pledged to share power with the dominant Pashtuns to bring peace after 23 years of war. Karzai’s traditional credentials could scarcely be better. He is the chief of the large Popalzai tribesmen group around Kandahar and scion of a royalist family with a tradition of public service. During the 1980s Soviet war, he helped fund and arm fighters from his tribe in southern Afghanistan where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar launched his fundamentalist Taliban movement. Karzai was deputy Foreign Minister from 1992 to 1994 after the mujahideen (holy warriors) defeated the Communists. He had spent much of the 1980s in the USA, where his family ran Afghan restaurants in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore, and enjoys strong Western support. One of the main hurdles for the anti-Taliban camp was the lack of leaders among the Pashtuns, the group that often saw the Taliban as defenders of Pashtun interests against the northern minorities. Karzai stepped in to fill that void on October 8, a day after the US bombing campaign began, when he entered southern Afghanistan to mobilise Pashtun tribesmen against the Taliban and survived an attack by dozens of Taliban fighters. Afghan expert Ahmed Rashid said Karzai shared the view of the Alliance triumvirate — Interior Minister Yunis Qanuni, Defence Minister Mohammad Fahim and Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah — that impoverished Afghanistan had to replace its traditional warlord approach with a modern parliamentary democracy. “If you can link up modern North and modern South, you can form a decent government,’’ he said. Karzai and his father, former senator Abdul Ahad Karzai, began campaigning against the Taliban in 1997 from their exile base in Quetta, the closest Pakistani city to Kandahar. Born in Kandahar, the fourth of seven sons, he went to school in Kabul before coming to India to study political science. He followed his father into politics in the 1980s and dedicated himself to the cause of opposing the Soviet occupation. Another of Karzai’s traditionalist qualifications is his love for the national sport buzkashi, a tumultuous game in which horsemen battle for possession of a headless goat. In late September, Karzai told Reuters from Quetta that he dreamed of the day when Afghans could hold a free Loya Jirga, or traditional assembly, and then celebrate with a wild game of buzkashi.
Reuters |
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US officials defend gaps in Laden tape Washington, December 22 The Pentagon has declined to release a more complete version of the transcript, despite claims in the US press, corroborated by independent translators who studied it carefully, that the gaps coincide with information that could embarrass Saudi Arabia, an important US ally in the West Asia. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the government was satisfied with the tape from an intelligence standpoint, though he declined to elaborate. The Department of Defence said “it up front all along” it would not release a verbatim transcript because of flaws in the recording, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer noted, reading the full warning aloud to journalists yesterday. At the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher said some words were omitted out of a concern for the accuracy of the entire tape.
AFP |
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US spies offer tips on modern interrogation Washington, December 22 Sometimes a simple offer of cigarettes to a deprived chain smoker will do the trick, say army experts. Or play on prisoners’ patriotism, or fears, or despair — whatever it takes to establish rapport and get them talking. “Most people want to talk,” said army’s 1st Sgt Katrina Cobb, who trains army intelligence personnel at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. “They want to tell their side of what happened.” As the USA and its allies begin to sort through and interrogate some of the 7,000 Taliban and Al-Qaida prisoners in Afghanistan, they are asking questions whose answers could be critical to the war on terrorism. The FBI wants information about terrorist activity within the USA; the CIA wants to know about overseas Al-Qaida cells and the location of group leaders, and the military wants to hear tactical information about enemy force concentration and capabilities. To get it, Army and other intelligence officials say techniques have evolved in recent years from adversarial interrogations to attempts at more cordial “conversations.” More reliable information may come from a low-level but cooperative supply clerk, instead of an enemy commander who has no interest in talking.
AP |
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‘Bush
wants $ 15 b more for security’ Washington, December 22 Congress has approved some $ 20 billion this year for homeland security, most of it after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But the paper quoted unnamed administration officials and congressional budget experts as saying that Mr Bush wanted to raise this by at least $ 15 billion next year.
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Pak minister’s brother killed Islamabad, December 22 Ehteshamuddin Haider (60), was leaving the Fatmid Foundation where he was one of the trustees, when three unidentified assailants opened fire on his car and killed him, they said. The gunmen, who came on two motor cycles, fired on the front of the car, with Klashnikov rifles, media reports quoted the police as saying. Ehteshamuddin was taken to the Civil Hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. The reason behind the attack was not clear or whether it was in any way connected with the strong statements being issued by Maoinuddin Haider criticising the extremist and sectarian religious outfits. The Interior Minister has been making strong statements against the extremist religious groups in Pakistan and has threatened to take action against them.
PTI |
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F 7s to
be inducted in Pak fleet Islamabad, December 22 Initially, it proposes to induct two squadrons of the F 7 fighters which will make their debut at the fly-past of the ceremonial “Pakistan Day” parade on March 23, where President Musharraf will be the chief guest. The deal to purchase F 7s was finalised when the Chief of the Pakistan Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Musahib Ali Mir, visited China in February last.
UNI |
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Scribe dies after years of torture Seoul, December 22 Song died of Parkison’s disease yesterday at the age of 74. He was subjected to torture and endless harassment under the military-backed governments of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, he was severely tortured by gangs loyal to then military junta leader Chun Doo-Hwan after Chun took power through a coup and arrested the opposition leader Kim Dae-Jung and other pro-democracy fighters. After starting out as a news agency reporter in 1953, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Dong-A, one of the major Korean dailies, until 1974 when he abandoned the coveted post in protest against a mass layoff of his colleagues who led a free-Press movement under former dictator Park Chung-Hee. Song returned to journalism to help launch the Hankyoreh daily in 1988 with other former dissident journalists. “I am a journalist and I would be born again as a journalist,” Song was quoted as telling his colleagues before he became paralysed and lost the ability to speak. Song, who became bedridden in the early 1990s, is survived by his wife, two sons and four daughters. He will be buried in the May 18 Cemetery in Kwangju, where some 200 protesters, killed during a 1980 pro-democracy uprising, are buried.
AFP |
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The
Jang Group of Publications of Pakistan organised a two-day
international seminar, "Terrorism, a new challenge to the
world of Islam," in a local hotel.
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