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Friday,
June 14, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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India, Pakistan lack
N-safeguards: experts G8 to keep up pressure on India, Pak Rumsfeld takes
U-turn on Al-Qaida Al-Qaida suspect’s wife freed Wake-up call for Indian mission at UN Israel occupies Palestine town Loya Jirga selects chief India ranks 11th in defence spending |
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Rocket attack on Pak Governor
3 die in US plane crash near Kabul
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India, Pakistan lack N-safeguards: experts London, June 13 “They say it is too easy for rogue or misinformed commanders to unleash a nuclear missile or bomber. What’s more, a warhead could detonate by accident, making its owner think it had been bombed, and triggering a counterstrike,” New Scientist magazine said. Although both countries say their warheads are disassembled and stored safely, the experts said just moving them around or loading them into aircraft could be dangerous. The USA did extensive testing on conventional weapons before designing nuclear warheads that would not go off if some explosive accidentally ignited, but neither India nor Pakistan did similar tests, according to New Scientist. “An accidental explosion would leave little evidence that it was accidental,” Geoff Forden of the Security Studies programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the magazine. “The government would naturally assume it had been attacked and retaliate,” he added. If an accidental explosion occurred, American satellites which monitor launches could in theory confirm that it was not an attack. “But experts wonder if their advice would be believed, even if it came in time to avert a counterstrike,” the magazine said. M.V. Ramana, a nuclear researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey, said if conventional explosives in a warhead blew up but did not cause a chain reaction, a large area could be contaminated with nuclear material.
Reuters |
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G8 to keep up pressure on India, Pak
Whistler (British Columbia), June 13 Ministers from the Group of Eight nations — Canada, Britain, the USA, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Russia — said there could be no repeat of the standoff. "There was absolute agreement that we don’t want to go through this again," US Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters during a break during the two-day meeting in the western Canadian ski resort of Whistler. "The way to (do this) is to meet our commitments that we have made...to create the opportunity for dialogue between the two sides, dialogue that must ultimately lead to a discussion of Kashmir and a final solution to Kashmir." US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who is in the South Asia region, said yesterday that India had taken constructive steps to move away from a possible conflict, but that Washington was anxious to see tensions lowered further. The Foreign Ministers are helping prepare the ground for a summit of G8 leaders in Canada at the end of the month that is bound to focus heavily on the India-Pakistan crisis. Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham, who is chairing the meeting in Whistler, said the G8 had agreed to maintain pressure on both sides but had not yet decided whether it should send him to the region as a special envoy for the group. "We have very serious concerns about the escalation of tensions between these two states...We have agreed on the need for sustained high-level diplomatic engagement with India and Pakistan," he told a separate news conference.
Reuters |
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Rumsfeld takes U-turn on Al-Qaida Islamabad, June 13 “The facts are that I do not have evidence and the USA does not have evidence of Al-Qaida in Kashmir,” Mr Rumsfeld told reporters after talks with President Pervez Musharraf. Mr Rumsfeld said the USA had “a good deal of scraps of intelligence” from “people saying that they believe Al-Qaida are in Kashmir or in various locations.” “It tends to be speculative,” Mr Rumsfeld said. “It is not actionable. It is not verifiable.” He said the US-Pakistani cooperation against Al-Qaida was so close that if there was any “actionable intelligence” about Al-Qaida’s presence, “there isn’t any doubt in my mind but that the Pakistan Government would go find them and deal with them.” As Mr Rumsfeld held talks in Islamabad, the President and the Prime Minister of Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) joined about 500 persons at a demonstration in the regional capital Muzafarrabad to denounce the “duplicitous policies” of the USA over the region. Meanwhile, Pakistan on Thursday denied claims by Mr Rumsfeld that Al-Qaida agents were operating in Kashmir. “It is absolutely incorrect,” presidential spokesman Major-Gen Rashid Qureshi said.
AP, AFP |
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Al-Qaida suspect’s wife freed Kuala Lumpur, June 13 Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who is also Home Minister in charge of the police, yesterday signed an order for the release of Chomel Mohamed, a Home Ministry official said. “The order should be served on her today by the police but it is a conditional release,” the official said, without giving the details. Chomel, wife of a former army officer Yazid Sufaat, was picked up on April 17 under the Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for indefinite detention without trial.
AFP |
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Wake-up call for Indian mission at UN IT is easy enough for anyone to set up a website, but it is not so easy to keep it up-to-date. The Indian Permanent Mission at the UN in New York proves the point. It is now two weeks since the new Indian Ambassador at the United Nations, Mr Vijay Nambiar, presented his credentials to the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan. He succeeded Mr Kamalesh Sharma, who recently retired from the Indian Foreign Service, and now heads the UN Mission of Support in East Timor. The website of the Permanent Mission still shows Mr Sharma as the Indian Ambassador and provides his curriculum vitae. There is no news about the taking over of the charge of the Mission by Mr Nambiar. The website gives a biographical sketch of the External Affairs Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, but it is not
possible to download that of the current Minister of State, Mr Omar Abdullah. Maybe, it carries information about his predecessor. In contrast, the Permanent Mission of Pakistan in New York provides up-to-date information about its new Ambassador, Mr Munir Akram, who presented his credentials the same day as Mr Nambiar did. The website also carries excerpts of his press conference that took place just a day after he took over as his country’s envoy and his subsequent statements at the UN. |
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Israel occupies Palestine town Jenin, June 13 Two Palestinians were wounded in exchanges of fire, according to Palestinian security sources, while an Israeli military spokesman said an Israeli officer and a soldier had been slightly wounded and taken to hospital. Around 40 tanks and armoured personnel carriers backed by three helicopter gunships entered the township of 15,000 inhabitants south of the city of Jenin, residents said. The Israeli troops arrested a dozen persons and attacked security service headquarters in Tubas, witnesses said. The Israeli spokesman said seven Palestinians suspected of involvement in anti-Israeli attacks had been arrested in the village of Beit Furik in a nearby zone under Israeli security control. Israeli troops withdrew from positions around Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s battered compound and evacuated Ramallah late yesterday, but continued to surround the West Bank city following a three-day re-occupation. DUBAI: Bahrain’s Crown Prince said in remarks published on Thursday that he opposed Palestinian militant attacks against Israeli civilians and urged fellow Arabs to be united behind this ‘’principled position’’. Arab governments have avoided direct comment on Palestinian suicide bombings that have killed scores of Israelis and unleashed Israel’s crushing military onslaught on Palestinian-ruled areas in the West Bank. ‘’Bahrain opposes the targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinian operations,’’ the pan-Arab “al-Hayat” newspaper quoted Crown Prince Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa as saying. WASHINGTON: The White House on Thursday sought to move away from Mr Colin Powell’s remark on a temporary Palestinian state indicating it was not reflective of the President’s position but the Secretary of State stuck to his statement, saying that it had been part of the dialogue for months. “I think...the Secretary was reflecting on some of the things that we have heard from different people from around the world...and so the Secretary from time to time will reflect on the advice he gets and do so publicly, which is his prerogative, of course”, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday. Reacting to Mr Fleischer’s statement, Mr Powell said, “The concept of a final political settlement and provisional interim steps have been part of the dialogue for months.”
Agencies |
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Loya Jirga selects chief Kabul, June 13 Pro-interim government candidate Ismail Qasimyar was chosen as head of the Loya Jirga early today after an all-night session, said Sayed Mir Hassan Mehdavi, a delegate representing Kabul’s journalists’ union. Candidates supporting former King Mohammad Zahir Shah made a good showing in the contest for the post, he said. The choice of Loya Jirga Chairman is not expected to have any impact on who becomes President — interim leader Hamid Karzai, the favourite of the USA, is widely expected to get the job. "We have been killing each other for 23 years," Mehdavi said. "We are sitting now to decide the destiny of our people." He said the new Cabinet would be a mix of people from different ethnic groups and there had been suggestions that the new President would be a Pashtun — no surprise as Karzai is a majority Pashtun — with the first Vice-President a Tajik. The judiciary would be led by an Uzbek. The Loya Jirga will choose an 111-member parliament that will sit soon after the new government, which will be in place for 18 months until general elections are held, is chosen. "The Loya Jirga is trying to assert itself and take control," one delegate said. "It doesn’t want to be a rubber stamp." Sitting on the sidelines, however, is the former King, Zahir Shah, who, despite his stated position that he has no claim to any position of power, could still play a role. The task of the Loya Jirga is to choose a cabinet that somehow mollifies the King’s supporters and the powerful ethnic minority Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance, that forms the core of the interim government.
Reuters |
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India ranks 11th in defence spending Stockholm, June 13 With India occupying the 11th slot among the largest military spenders topped by the USA, military spending rose worldwide for the third consecutive year in 2001 after a long period of decline following the end of the Cold War, the report said. Military expenditure climbed by 2 per cent in 2001 to $ 839 billion or 2.6 per cent of gross domestic product worldwide and $ 137 per person, SIPRI said. Spending has risen by 7 per cent in three years, after the decade 1987-98 during which it consecutively fell. The institute noted, however, that its figures were likely to be revised upwards "considerably" when supplementary expenditures resulting from the September 11 attacks on the USA and the ensuing war on terrorism had been fully taken into account. SIPRI said the war on terrorism was likely to have a "significant" impact on international relations and security for at least a decade, and as a result predicted rising military expenditure for the future. The regions with the highest rates of growth in military expenditure over the period 1998-2001 were Africa (31 per cent), central and eastern Europe (28 per cent), South Asia (26 per cent) and the West Asia (25 per cent).
AFP |
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Rocket attack on Pak Governor Miranshah, (Pakistan), June 13 Mr Shah is on a tour of the lawless tribal region, where some Taliban and Al-Qaida fighters are believed to have escaped to after fleeing US-led forces in Afghanistan. “The missile fell only 400 yards away from the Governor’s cottage,’’ the official said, adding that the second missile landed close to where the Governor’s helicopter was parked.
Reuters |
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3 die in US plane crash near Kabul Washington, June 13 Seven crew and passengers survived when the MC-130H model special forces plane crashed shortly after take-off in the Gardez region yesterday. Defence officials have indicated that the plane was not shot down. “Remains have been recovered and will be prepared for shipment back to the USA” the officials said in a statement posted on the Internet. The seven survivors, including one with a broken leg, have been transferred to a hospital in Kandahar, the statement said.
DPA |
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Top US medals for 2 Indian scientists
Washington, June 13 |
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BUSH ENSURING INDO-PAK TENSION REDUCTION MUSLIMS SAFER IN INDIA THAN PAK: HUSSAIN AMERICANS LINKED TO AL-QAIDA PICKED FROM PAK STOP ANTI-PERVEZ ACTIVITIES, UAE TELLS BENAZIR POWELL WANTS PERMANENT SOLUTION TO FEUD |
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