M A I N   N E W S

PM highlights Pak coup
From T.V. Lakshminarayan
Tribune News Service

PORT LOUIS, March 11 — In a message apparently hinted at the US administration, the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, without naming Pakistan, has chosen to utilise his visit to Mauritius to highlight the military coup in Islamabad.

Coming barely 10 days before the US President, Mr Bill Clinton is scheduled to visit India, Mr Vajpayee during his three-day visit, concluding tomorrow, on two occasions raised the importance of democracy in world peace order but refrained from naming Pakistan.

Addressing a gathering of academicians at Mauritius University, where he was honoured with a doctorate on civil law today, the Prime Minister emphasised that “democracy and developments are two sides of the same coin”.

Referring to India’s experience and conviction that socio-economic development was intrinsically linked to democracy and open society, the Prime Minister said “while elsewhere in the world there are signs of intolerance and societies withdrawing behind bigotry and religious exclusivism, we in India have used the spirit of democracy to harmonise relations within and between religious linguistic and ethnic communities.”

Mr Vajpayee made a reference to Pakistan developments during a speech last night, where he said the democracy had been India’s best guarantor of economic development and social progress.

“Any attempt to strangle democratic aspirations in any part of the world is a threat to democracy. This threat needs to be removed if democracy has to survive, he said”.

He also spoke about the scourge of terrorism which was linked with drug-trafficking, arms smuggling, money-laundering and religious fundamentalism. He said there was a need for a global strategy to counter terrorism.

Another issue that Mr Vajpayee raised and which is bound to be taken up during Mr Clinton’s visit was the worrisome impact of economic globalisation.

Mr Vajpayee pointed out that economic globalisation has resulted in increasing income inequality, both within and between nations.

He said it was ironical that while globalisation and opening of economies were supposed to encourage competition and ensure freedom of choice for individuals, in recent times there had been a tendency among big companies to go in for mergers and acquisitions.

“The emergence of these new mega corporations threatens both competition and freedom of choice”, Mr Vajpayee said, adding that these huge global corporations enjoyed sufficient financial clout to erode the regulatory powers of nations and ride roughshod over the rights of individual to determine their future.

Yet another area of concern referred to by the Prime Minister was the growing debt burden of developing countries. Since this burden grows yearly with new debts being contracted to pay off current interested charges, Mr Vajpayee said this resulted in a continual haemorrhage of wealth from the developing countries to the developed countries.

He said while globalisation was supposed to deliver economic equality among nations, the reality was that inequality was on the increase.

As many as 250 years ago, the richest countries were only five times richer than the poorest, and Europe only twice as rich as China or India. In 1976, Switzerland was 52 times richer than Mozambique and in 1997, it was 508 times richer.

Saying that increasing inequality had bred increasing poverty, the Prime Minister added that the situation was made worse by the fact that developing countries with decreasing resources, both natural and financial, were finding it increasingly difficult to meet their social obligations.

Mr Vajpayee said there was a need for global initiative to correct poverty as in a globalised economy, poverty eradication could not be treated as the exclusive responsibility of individual nations.

He also spoke against the tendency of the developed countries to use trade and investment to promote biased political and economic objectives in such vital areas as labour standards, intellectual property rights, human rights and environment.

The Prime Minister also spoke about the threat to traditional values and identities of individual nations by the increasingly pervasive market values.

He said there was a concern about the conflict between global market-based values and local values based on cultural and regional specificity.

“This conflict needs to be resolved and traditional values preserved from market values that tend to have a dehumanising and desensitising impact because of their over-emphasis on the material as well as the excellence of the individual as opposed to the excellence of society as a whole”, he said.

‘Shift’ Sharif trial venue

ISLAMABAD, March 11 (PTI) — A day after their colleague was gunned down, nervous defence lawyers for deposed Premier Nawaz Sharif said today they want their client’s hijacking trial relocated out of Karachi as a “matter of caution”.

Khawaja Sultan Ahmad, chief defence attorney for Nawaz Sharif in the plane hijacking case, said the daylight murder of Iqbal Radh was not only shocking, but “it has scared us and we would like to have the venue of the trial shifted from Karachi either to Lahore or Islamabad as a matter of caution”.

In another development, Ejaz Batlvi, one of the prominent lawyers defending deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has withdrawn from the case fearing for his life.

Meanwhile, the body of Iqbal Radh was laid to rest at a Karachi graveyard today.

The Lahore-based defence team “is staying in a hotel in a city strange to us. There is no security for us in Karachi. We are too vulnerable to such incidents as it is very easy to target us,” Mr Ahmad was quoted today by the Internet edition of English daily “The Dawn” as saying.

He said the killing has “created certain suspicions” in the minds of the defence counsel. Whether police investigators find the motive behind the gruesome killing or it is termed a “blind murder”, the defence lawyers will not be able to proceed with the case in Karachi.

The police should investigate the matter and find out if the murder was motivated by political vendetta, he added.

Mr Ahmad charged his security was withdrawn the day he was appointed defence lawyer for Nawaz Sharif. “Security is provided only to official lawyers”.

Reuters (Karachi): A Pakistani judge said ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif would not be allowed to attend Saturday’s funeral of a defence lawyer who was shot dead.

Mr Sharif had sought permission to attend the funeral of Iqbal Raad, a leading member of his defence team who was shot dead in his office on Friday along with two others by unidentified gunmen.

But another of his lawyers, Khawja Naveed, said the court decided to follow the rules of the jail where Mr Sharif was being held, which said prisoners were allowed out only to attend funerals for blood relatives.

“In the morning the parole application was verbally rejected by the government so we approached the court but the court says that jail rules do not allow it,” Mr Naveed told Reuters.