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Monday,
February 25, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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No pullout of security forces from Jaffna: PM
Ramallah, (West Bank), February 24 The Palestinian leadership held an urgent meeting here today to discuss Israel’s “shameful” decision not to allow Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to leave Ramallah, saying it would sever all ties until Israel revoked the decision.
New York, February 24 Osama bin Laden survived US bombing raids on Tora Bora and other mountainous Afghanistan regions and probably remains hidden in the remote terrain straddling Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, the New York Times reported today, citing senior Bush administration officials. |
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Washington, February 24 The father of murdered Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl is cut up with the Israeli media for making public his son’s Israeli citizenship, saying it could affect investigations.
Scribe was killed
before beheading Lynching bodes ill for Kabul Terrorism capital offence in S. Arabia
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No pullout of security forces from Jaffna: PM Colombo, February 24 “We are happy that India has been helping us. We will ask for more help in the future in terms of getting international support for the ongoing peace process and getting foreign aid,’’ he said at a special press conference here. He said that besides India, his government was in touch with the USA, Japan, and the European Union not only for more aid, but also to exert more pressure on the LTTE to come to the negotiating table. Commenting on the next step of the peace process Prime Minister Wickremesinghe said that the government did not want to be too rigid and place more conditions for talks, since these could prevent the LTTE from entering the negotiation table. “At the moment we cannot say no to anything except a separate state. We want the LTTE to come and sit at the table for talks. Once that is done, we can discuss the core issues of the conflict with them as to what they want and how far we could meet them. As far as we are concerned we also have our main demands such as the country cannot be divided, territorial integrity should be safeguarded, there cannot be any constitutional arrangement that could lead to a separation, there cannot be armed groups operating and so on. We want all to be the citizens of Sri Lanka and be treated equally,’’ the Prime Minister said. He assured that the government security forces and police would not be withdrawn from the Jaffna peninsula and would continue to maintain their present territories. “But they will be relocated from places such as religious centres and schools. There are no major differences in the present MoU as compared to the 1995 truce agreement of President Kumaratunga’s government,’’ he said. Mr Wickremesinghe said the navy could stop any boats for security checks and the international monitors, who are arriving in Colombo today, would use the naval craft to monitor whether the ceasefire agreement was being maintained at sea. The Prime Minister refuted President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s charge that neither she nor the Cabinet was consulted before singing the open-ended ceasefire agreement with the LTTE. Mr Wickremesinghe, who signed the agreement, said the Cabinet was well briefed about the MoU on February 20 and 21 and it was the President who was absent from the meeting on both days. “We wanted the MoU to be signed before February 24 since we did not want to extend the unilateral ceasefire once again. Still I briefed her on the MoU well. But she asked for some more time. The PM said Prabhakaran’s signing the agreement first had forced him to sign, thus pushing the so-called politics of cohabitation into a deadlock. Earliar Mr Wickremesinghe expressed the hope of opening full-fledged talks with Tamil rebels aimed at ending the country’s minority ethnic conflict under a Norwegian-backed peace process in three months. Mr Wickremesinghe told journalists in Colombo that within the next three months, “talks about talks’’ would be held to discuss through Norwegian facilitators the matters which should be taken up in the full-fledged talks to find a political solution to the conflict.
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Palestinians to sever all ties with Israel Ramallah, (West Bank), February 24 “This is a shameful decision. It is unacceptable, and a clear message that this government does not want a ceasefire, it does not want calm,” Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told AFP. “I hope the USA and Europe will recognise that this government’s programme will only lead the region into war and bloodshed and the whole world should intervene before it is too late,” he added. Israel’s security cabinet decided today to allow Arafat to leave his compound in Ramallah but not to move freely from the West Bank town where he has been confined by Israel since December 3, officials said. Top Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rudeina said there would be no more political or security meetings with Israel until it went back on the decision, and called on the world community to “isolate” the right-leaning government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He said the decision not to allow Arafat to leave the town where he has been blockaded for almost three months came at a time when international efforts were raising hopes for a reduction in the violence that has rocked the region. General Amin al-Hindi, head of Palestinian intelligence, said the Palestinians would boycott a joint security meeting scheduled for late today and aimed at easing the conflict. Jerusalem: Israel’s security cabinet on Sunday decided that it would keep Yasser Arafat confined to the West Bank city of Ramallah, perpetuating a two-month-old siege of the Palestinian leader’s headquarters, a senior Israeli political source said. Israeli cabinet ministers considered removing the ring of tanks around Arafat’s offices after Palestinian security forces arrested three suspects in the October killing of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. Their detention was Israel’s main demand in easing up on the Palestinian leader. The source said the decision made it likely that Israeli tanks would be pulled back from positions about 100 metres from Arafat’s presidential compound.
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Laden may be alive: USA New York, February 24 The Times reported that unidentified senior administration officials said they had new indications that the Saudi-born extremist remained at large in the border area. The evidence
cast doubt on earlier theories that Bin Laden had been killed in the war, died of kidney disease or fled to Iran or Yemen. The officials cited by the newspaper said the fresh assessment of Bin Laden’s whereabouts was based on information gained within the past month. A senior administration official said the new evidence was “very fragile’’ and refused to provide further details. But The Times quoted the official as saying: “We are quite certain he is alive and we think he is somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It may be that he moves back and forth between the two.’’ The newspaper quoted other officials saying the area where Bin Laden might be hiding was in southeastern Afghanistan and the adjacent tribal areas of the Pakistani provinces of the Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan that had been strongholds of Islamic militancy and deeply suspicious of outside interference. Meanwhile, at least 100 Al-Qaeda operatives are inside the USA and pose the most immediate threat of a fresh terrorist attack on US soil, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has said. “There are 100 or more Al Qaeda operatives inside the USA, some of whom have been here for a considerable period of time,” Senator Bob Graham of Florida said on the CNN programme “Novak, Hunt and Shields” yesterday. All had been trained “to carry out terrorist plots when they were called upon to do so,” Mr Graham said who received regular intelligence briefings from the CIA and the FBI. “That probably is the most immediate threat of a terrorist attack against the USA”. Other international terrorist organisations also had agents inside the USA, Mr Graham added, without elaborating.
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Pearl’s father cut up with Israeli media Washington, February 24 Prof Yehuda Pearl believes the disclosure about his son’s citizenship could adversely affect investigative efforts by the Pakistani police to apprehend the killers and track down the murdered reporter’s body. In a telephone conversation from his Los Angeles residence with Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Prof Pearl expressed regret and anger over the revelation by the Israeli media of his family’s “Israeli connection.” The US media, which was aware of the information, complied with the family’s request not to make it public. The American media was asked to comply with this request after confirmation that the 38-year-old reporter was dead. He said he had not viewed the videotape in which his son’s murder was documented and had no intention of doing so. He was told of his son’s death on Thursday by US officials after they had viewed the videotape and were convinced of its authenticity. According to assessments presented to Prof Pearl, his son was killed 10 days after being kidnapped on January 23. The news is based on experts viewing a videotape of his murder. The Pakistani police investigators said yesterday that Daniel Pearl’s murderers never meant to release him. The police warned foreign organisations in the country that they should be careful as the kidnapping may be part of a more far-reaching terrorist plot. They also reported that the man who delivered the videotape documenting Daniel Pearl’s murder was arrested for questioning in Karachi. Pearl, born in Princoton, New Jersey, worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 12 years. His last job was to report from Afghanistan and Pakistan and the US war against terror. On Thursday, Fahad Naseem, one of three men accused of involvement in the kidnapping, said Pearl was abducted because he was a Jew working against Islam.
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Scribe was killed before beheading Washington, February 24 The three-and-a-half minute digital videotape delivered to the authorities in Karachi included several different scenes that had been spliced together, making it impossible to determine exactly how or when Pearl was killed, The Washington Post reports from Islamabad. The tape, however, made it clear that he was not awake when his throat was slit. Investigators have, meanwhile, begun searching for an Arab believed to be involved in the Pearl case. The Pakistani authorities said this had made them reassess whether the kidnapping and killing were linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network. Officials in Washington and Islamabad, said, “The paper have begun considering the possibility of extraditing those accused of Pearl’s death to the USA for trial.
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Lynching
bodes ill for Kabul Over the years, as history informs us, lynching was regularly practised by American whites in the South and the victims were the blacks. The Ku Klux Klan and other scum in American society had no qualms about catching hold of any black man and putting him to death and then rejoicing at their valour. The so-called police were mute spectators. Lynching remains a black spot in American history, but as is typical of a genuinely free society, no one had attempted to push this under the carpet. Dr Murli Manohar Joshi and the NCERT, please note! A public lynching still came as a shock even when practised in a nation like Afghanistan which is just emerging out a turmoil. The happenings at the Kabul report which resulted in mob killing of the country’s Aviation Minister, Abdul Rahman, may shock civilised society but then under the prevailing circumstances in Kabul, the incident was just an addition to the list of tragedies. It is a common rule that ministers always got priority over the common citizen. Abdul Rehman was simply following this dictum. As thousands of Haj pilgrims waited impatiently in the freezing cold for flights to the holy land, the minister chose to ignore their plight and blithely walked into his aircraft for a conference in New Delhi. There were reports that two women waiting for the Haj flights froze to death at the airport. This only added fuel to the fire. Abdul Rahman’s death, tragic as it was, raises some major issues. What kind of security and infrastructure does Kabul enjoy that a Cabinet Minister could be lynched in public, that too at an airport? If the International Assistant Security Force (ASAF) was deployed at the airport, why didn’t it take action? The lynching bodes ill for the future of the people of Afghanistan who have been worst-affected by the US bombings and the cutting off of supplies. While the warlords make merry cutting up the land into pockets of influence, there is hardly anywhere the poor people could turn to. This situation can create ugly situations as the one happened at the Kabul airport. Not surprisingly, American reaction to the killing of Abdul Rahman was rather muted. Obviously, the USA and its TV channels had lost interest in Kabul. The nation had had its fill of experimenting with new and deadly weapons and inflicting mass damage to the countryside. Now, it was time to take a breather and pursue other members of the ‘axis of evil’. The USA and its allies had realised the futility of chasing and capturing Osama bin Laden. Obviously, all bombs in the most powerful country in the word could not ferret out this one man. But the world was full of other enemies, and why not pursue them? Western powers led by the USA had played the same trick on poor Afghanistan when they encouraged the Taliban with arms and men to fight the communist regime. The CIA, in collaboration with Pakistan’s ISI, was hand in glove with the Taliban and backed its acts of savagery. Once the Communist rulers were out, the West left Afghanistan at the mercy of the Taliban who were unfit to rule any country. And Afghanistan paid a heavy price, having been dragged back to the Stone Age. All this did not bother the West, till they realised that the Taliban and men like Osama bin Laden could turn into monsters like Frankenstein. Political and military interference by the West in other undeveloped nations has followed the same pattern for several decades. The CIA along with the Belgian colonial rulers and their mercenaries murdered popular Congolese Marxist leader Patrice Lumumba but offered no alternative. Britain, who thrived on a special relationship with the USA, went a step further. Its former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became one of the strongest supporters of General Pinochet. What a choice for western democracy! What is unique was that such a cruel experiment was carried out not once, but twice within a period of 15 years. The West argued that it wanted a stable democracy in Kabul, but its approach was wrong. Afghanistan, remote and sensitive, cannot be pitchforked to a modern, western type of democracy. The ‘friends’ of Afghanistan must guide its leaders to look inwards and take immediate action on several vital fronts. In a nation not blessed by nature, food, drinking water and health were areas of major importance. Bedeviled by severe drought and civil war, Afghanistan has been bled white. Its leaders must tackle on a war footing, streamlining of food supplies, setting up of medical clinics in the remote villages. One feels sorry for the death of Aviation Minister, Abdul Rahman, but the Afghan Government must now put an end to such junkets. People’s problems must be tackled first. |
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Terrorism capital offence in S. Arabia Mena (South Arabia), February 24 King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah also told Muslims performing the final rituals of the annual Haj pilgrimage that people under occupation were entitled to fight for freedom and independence. The joint message carried by the official SPA news agency made no specific mention of the September attacks on New York and Washington, but said: “In our view, terrorism is a forbidden (crime of) spreading mischief on earth and perpetrators must be punished no matter who they are or where they are.”
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In video: Pakistan has
stepped up security at all US diplomatic missions and businesses,
saying it could not rule out attacks following the death of US
reporter Daniel Pearl. 
