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Monday,
January 14, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Take
steps, US message to Pakistan
Ban on
ultras ‘to have little effect’ |
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Kalashnikov
still rules in Kabul DNA search
to know Osama’s fate
UK’s
most wanted terror suspect disappears
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Take steps, US message to Pakistan Washington, January 13 Welcoming Musharraf’s much-awaited speech to the nation, Powell said he “has taken a bold and principled stand to set Pakistan squarely against terrorism and extremism both in and outside Pakistan.” But, said Philip Oldenburg, professor at Columbia University, even for the USA, “I don’t think this (speech) is great. “Indians have been telling the USA that ‘we are not interested in the words, we are interested in the activity, we want to see certain direct efforts to make it difficult for these groups to act.’ Secretary Powell’s reaction is committing Musharraf into including Kashmir.” By interpreting Musharraf’s statements to include Kashmir, US analysts say, Washington was forcing the General to match his words to action, a demand India has consistently stressed. Analysts contend that by declaring Pakistan as a frontline state, Powell was again pressuring Islamabad to take more steps to ban terrorist activity within its borders. “Pakistan cannot deny that it is a frontline state against terrorism,” said Oldenburg. “The USA is spinning it — to get him boxed into his words that Kashmir is included. After doing that it will be a question of defining what is terrorism. While Musharraf has left that ambiguous between ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘terrorists’ it is obvious that those who attack Parliament, state assemblies or innocent people are terrorists.” “I don’t think his speech matters,” said Selig Harrison of the Centre for International Policy, a Washington think-tank. “What matters is what’s happening on the ground, whether the violent activity will continue at the present level.” “You can’t get Islamic forces under control in Pakistan as long as you have the military government in Pakistan because they are basically entrenched in the military,” he said. “It’s because the military is in power that this situation has become so bad.” Harrison reiterated that the USA should make it clear to Pakistan that unless it dismantles the military activities of these groups, the USA will not follow through on its economic aid. “If Pakistan is not reducing the violence in Kashmir, then the USA should take longer to crank out the aid. The enormous amount of aid we are providing to Pakistan should be conditional on the action in Kashmir, not statements, ” he added. Meanwhile, the international community welcomed President Pervez Musharraf’s announcement to fight terrorism within and outside Pakistan, with the USA and the UN saying that this would help in easing the “dangerous” Indo-Pak tension. “General Musharraf’s firm decision against terrorism and his commitment the principle that no person or organisation will be allowed to indulge in terrorism as means to further his cause,” US President George W. Bush said in a statement read out by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Mr Bush said General Musharraf in his address to the nation yesterday “clearly stated that the solution to the Kashmir issue lies in peaceful means and dialogue”, while outlining his plan to combat terrorism. Secretary of State Colin Powell said: “In the light of the speech and the strong actions that President Musharraf has taken so far and the new actions to which he has committed his country, the USA believes the basis exists for the resolution of tension between India and Pakistan through diplomatic and peaceful means.” Echoing similar feeling, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan termed General Musharraf’s anti-terrorism measures as “significant” and said this was a “further step towards easing the dangerous situation in the region.” Mr Annan “welcomes the emphasis in the speech today by General Musharraf on tolerance, the rule of law and the need to fight terrorism and extremism. He regards the anti-terrorist measures announced by the President, including the banning of several armed extremist organisations, as a significant step towards easing the dangerous situation in the region,” a UN spokesman said. “The Secretary-General takes this opportunity to reiterate his conviction that the differences between India and Pakistan can only be resolved peacefully,’’ the spokesman said in a written statement. Britain expressed the hope that India would respond positively to General Musharraf’s remarks about resolving the Kashmir issue through peaceful means and to the ban on
Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, groups responsible for the attack on Indian Parliament. “We welcome President Musharraf’s clear appeal for a normalisation of relations with India and the resolution of differences over Kashmir through peaceful means and dialogue,” said a statement by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office. A statement issued by Russian Foreign Ministry noted the “positive tone” of the General’s declared intention to put an end to the activities of extremist organisations operating from territory under Pakistani control but asserted Pakistan would be judged by concrete actions to halt terrorist
actions. IANS, PTI, Reuters |
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Ban on ultras ‘to have little effect’ New York, January 13 It also felt that the ban on Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad will have “little practical effect” as Pakistan had already detained the leaders of these terrorist outfits, raided their offices and frozen their bank accounts. In the half century since Pakistan was born from partition of colonial
India, no Pakistani leader has faced a more menacing set of challenges than Musharraf confronted in his address to the nation, said The New York Times in an article ‘Pakistani leader stands at dangerous crossroad.’ “He announced new measures to crack down on Islamic militants who have fomented terrorism in Pakistan and abroad, knowing that the groups he was taking aim are entrenched, heavily armed and sworn to kill... Anybody obstructing their Islamic holy war,” the daily said.
PTI |
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Crackdown delay worsened matters: PPP Islamabad, January 13 The PPP led by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, which has been advocating the crackdown on the militants for some time, criticised General Musharraf for delaying the action, till India massed its troops at the border. It said General Musharraf lost another opportunity of rapprochement at the recent SAARC summit in Kathmandu. The PPP also criticised the hour-long speech saying that the General failed to acknowledge that his “unelected” government had pursued wrong policies. Such policies had tarnished country’s image in the comity of nations, it said. In his reaction
PML (N) spokesman Ashan Iqbal said the apologetic attitude of President
Musharraf cannot ward off threat of war. President of Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD), an umbrella organisation of Opposition parties, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, condemned the “rules of behaviour” regarding activities of religious organisations announced by General Musharraf, according to which seminaries would have to be registered and new mosques could not be built without a no objection certificate.
PTI |
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Kalashnikov still rules
in Kabul Kabul, January 13 But what galled Abbasi most, as he lay in hospital with a bullet hole in his side, was that the criminals were militiamen who claim to have liberated Kabul from the Taliban. ‘The policemen from before are all gone and these people are looting and plundering the city,’ he said. ‘They are all bad people. They have no sentiment and no mercy — from the highest commander to the very lowest ranks.’ In Kabul, the Kalashnikov rules. Two months after the capital fell to the troops of the Northern Alliance, men in combat gear loiter on street corners with rocket launchers and assault rifles, or screech around the capital in pick-up trucks with blacked-out windows. The troops were supposed to have left the city by yesterday afternoon — the deadline for the disarming and evacuation of the militias set by interim leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. There is little sign that will happen, suggesting that the government will have to move cautiously to avoid a head-on confrontation with the thousands of armed men roaming the streets. But the delay, and the rising popular resentment at a wave of armed robberies, carjackings and murders by the militiamen, is compromising the interim government’s standing in the eyes of its own people. The presence of the gunmen also complicates the deployment of the 1,150-strong British-led international peacekeeping force in Kabul. These peacekeepers began joint patrols with the Afghan police last week, but the British officials say they will not be actively involved in disarming the militias. The murder of a wealthy trader last week, bludgeoned to death on his morning walk to work, and several much-discussed armed robberies have sharpened fears of a descent into the lawlessness that defined the era of the early 1990s.
The Observer London |
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DNA search
to know Osama’s fate London, January 13 The tissue samples are being collected in forensic bags of the type used by detectives at murder scenes and sent refrigerated to the USA. There FBI scientists are trying to match them with DNA culled from swabs provided by members of Bin Laden’s immediate family. FBI agents travelled to Saudi Arabia in November, and took DNA from some of Bin Laden’s 53 siblings. It is believed they also asked for a sample from his mother. They used the standard method in criminal inquiries, a mouth swab, brushed lightly inside the cheek, to remove surface skin cells. Quoting intelligence sources, The Observer today reported that they were “virtually certain” that Bin Laden was still hiding in the caves just hours before the main Al-Qaida strongholds fell last December. SYDNEY:
A video released today allegedly showed Al-Qaida network training terrorists for a mass assassination of world leaders at a golf tournament. The video tape, obtained by Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV, also showed militants rehearsing a hostage situation where they screamed their commands in English and shot one hostage dead.
PTI, AFP |
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Cyrus Vance no more Washington, January 13 Vance, who had Alzheimer’s disease, was a patient at Cedar Sinai Hospital whose spokesmen could not give any information on the cause of death. As Secretary of State for former President Jimmy Carter, Vance helped fashion the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. He sought to secure a permanent arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union, helped normalise U.S. relations with China and helped gain approval for treaties on the Panama Canal. But in April 1980, Carter approved a military operation to rescue hostages seized the previous year at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Vance so strongly opposed the idea that he resigned — and the rescue attempt ended in spectacular failure. Vance was one of the few senior U.S. officials ever to step down on a point of principle. Three years ago Vance urged the USA and Iran to resume diplomatic relations. “With the passing of Cyrus Vance, America has lost a true patriot,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a statement issued late on Saturday. “He was a man of principle, whose quiet contributions were often the difference between success and failure, as at the historic Camp David conference of 1979. In Yugoslavia, in the Caucasus and in South Africa, he wielded his wisdom and principled humanity for the greater good.” Powell added. In 1991, the then U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar appointed him as negotiator in the former Yugoslavia. He was part of a team that won a ceasefire between Serbs and Croats in Croatia but resigned in 1993 after failing to end the fighting in Bosnia. In March 1968, Vance, who had been a Vietnam war hawk while at the Pentagon, joined other Democratic Party leaders in telling Johnson the war had to stop. Vance was born on March 27, 1917, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. His father died when he was five and Cyrus was raised by his mother and his father’s cousin, John Davis, a Congressman and ambassador to Britain who was the Democratic Presidential candidate against Calvin Coolidge in 1924. He graduated from Yale in 1939, obtained his law degree there in 1942 and joined the Navy as a lieutenant. His marriage to Gay Sloane produced four daughters and a son.
Reuters |
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UK’s most
wanted terror suspect disappears London, January 13 Abu Qatada, a Jordanian scholar of jihad, or holy war, was top of a list of suspects handed to the Home Secretary by the intelligence services before Christmas to be detained under new legislation. The news came as the UK Foreign Office said a Briton was among the first 20 Taliban and Al-Qaida prisoners taken from Afghanistan to the Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on Friday by the US forces. The unnamed man will be tried by a military tribunal. The police seeking Abu Qatada raided his home in West London early last week hoping to find evidence of his whereabouts. His flight will be a major embarrassment for the government, whose controversial anti-terrorism laws were described by an official as ‘tailor-made’ to put Abu Qatada behind bars.
The Observer |
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Islamic groups in Pakistan come out strongly against President
General Pervez Musharraf's televised address to the nation, while
others welcome it, describing it as a positive development.
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