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Saturday,
November 23, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Parties attack Pervez on
amendments Jamali to be sworn in
today
Tremors rock Pak again The media in India and Pakistan shows remarkable restraint when it comes to commenting on the USA’s pursuit of its national interests in the subcontinent, no matter how devastating they prove for the region. Perhaps this restraint is shown in deference to the sensitivities of this sole world power. |
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Article sparks riots, 100
dead Sharia shadow on pageant US lawmaker gets her
facts wrong
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Parties attack Pervez on amendments Islamabad, November 22 Delivering hard-hitting speeches in the National Assembly during the election of the Prime Minister yesterday, the country’s political parties have launched a bitter attack on President Musharraf for attempting to continue his rule with his amendments which legalised his election through a referendum and granted him powers to dismiss the parliament. As speaker after speaker attacked the amendments, none from the pro-military Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) got up to defend it, though in the end its candidate Mir Zafarullah Jamali won with 172 votes, barely one vote more than the required majority. Launching a broadside against the government Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the prime ministerial candidate of the Islamic party alliance Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) said the 1973 constitution was a consensus document. Any attempt to tamper with it could dismember the country as it happened in 1971 when the then military rulers prevented the Awami League from taking over power. “A dictator cannot be allowed to demolish the constitution, which came into being after a decade old struggle,” Mr Rehman said. Mr Rehman, along with all other leaders of the top political parties criticised the newly elected Speaker, Mr Amir Hussain for stating that the legal framework order incorporating President Musharraf’s amendments was part of the constitution. “This was clear denial of Pakistan’s sovereignty and integrity. We need to have an independent foreign policy,” he said. Mr Rehman also came down hard on the economic policies of the Musharraf regime, saying that these policies had failed to address the core economic issues like poverty, and illiteracy. He said the country should be run according to the injunctions of the holy Kuran and Sunnah. In his speech Qazi Hussain Ahmed, another MMA leader said, “Poverty and price hike is playing havoc with the poor, political institutions have shattered, there is lack of harmony in the country and the soldiers are becoming a reason for the destruction of institutions rather than construction,” he said.
PTI |
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Jamali to be sworn in today Islamabad, November 22 “The oath will be administered at a special ceremony at Aiwan-e-Sadar, the office of the President in Islamabad, the announcement made late last night said. Soon after Mr Jamali’s election, President Musharraf had called him over phone and congratulated him. The President assured the Prime Minister-elect of his support and continued good wishes, APP news agency reported. Mr Jamali, a senior leader of the pro-Musharraf PML-Q, was expected to be sworn in initially with a small team of ministers and expand the cabinet after the elections to the Senate to induct some of the top ministers currently serving in President Musharraf’s Cabinet. But the Senate poll, which were to be held on November 12 have been put off due to political uncertainty over the formation of the new government. Four ministers of the Musharraf’s Cabinet including the high-profile Finance Minister Shoukat Aziz, have applied for PML-Q ticket to contest the Senate election, which would be held on proportional representation basis. The other ministers included the Interior Minister Lieut Gen Moinuddin Haider (retd), the Law Minister, Mr Khalid Ranjha, and the Railway Minister and former ISI chief Lieut Gen Jahangir Qazi (retd).
PTI |
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Tremors rock Pak again Islamabad, November 22 Landslides seriously hampered relief work, blocking access roads to valleys in the Karakorum mountains close to the Nanga Parbat peak, they said. “People lie in the open at night, afraid to go indoors,” Muhammad Ali Yugvi, senior-most government official in the area, told Reuters by telephone from Diamer district, where most of the casualties took place early today. Though Pakistan’s military-led government has flown hundreds of tents, thousands of blankets and other emergency goods to the main northern town of Gilgit, delivering relief supplies in the scenic Astor valley is a key challenge.
Reuters |
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American interests and South Asia’s woes The media in India and Pakistan shows remarkable restraint when it comes to commenting on the USA’s pursuit of its national interests in the subcontinent, no matter how devastating they prove for the region. Perhaps this restraint is shown in deference to the sensitivities of this sole world power. Or, may be, there is a lurking belief on both sides of the Indo-Pak border that US influence on the other may be a restraining factor. That both countries keep on complaining to the USA against one another reflects this belief. The American friendship with the Pakistani military regimes (and not with Pakistan) in the past 18 years has produced three diabolic results: (a) it has stifled democracy for a long time to come; (b) as a corollary to the first result, fundamentalism that has bred Islamic terrorism has flourished; (c) again, as a corollary to the first two results, hostility with India has almost become a dire necessity for the survival of all US-supported dictatorial regimes in Pakistan. It will be naive to believe that these three results happened unintentionally. Democracy in Pakistan could not be acceptable to the USA in the 1950s when the cold war had started. Americans connived at Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear programme because their main target was the Soviet Union, which had got itself trapped in Afghanistan by sending its troops there. During the cold war, it had been the US policy to befriend Islamic obscurantist countries and discard and malign moderate Muslim nations. Similarly, in individual countries, it supported communal elements against secular elements. It suspected all secular and nationalist forces supported the Soviet Union. In Pakistan, it launched a massive programme for producing jehadis during the Afghan war. Thousands of madrasas were set up with the help of the ISI and with funding from Muslim and Western countries. It was during the revived friendship between the USA and the Pakistani army that (i) the latter clandestinely acquired nuclear power, which was to be later shared by others, including North Korea; (ii) democracy and modernity received a big jolt; (iii) drug and gun-running generated parallel economy; (iv) jehad, that came to be known as terrorism, was promoted; (v) terrorism became a state policy; (vi) terrorism became a big roadblock in the way to normalisation of Indo-Pakistan relations. Like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government had to go to clear the way for the US final war against the Soviet Union, his daughter Benazir Bhutto’s government, too, was removed 13 years later in 1990 by the then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was once alleged to be a CIA agent in Pakistan. According to Pakistani writer Munir Ahmed, Ms Bhutto had to go because she was not willing to allow Pakistani troops join the US-led forces for attacking Iraq. The defeat of Ms Bhutto’s PPP and the victory of Mr Nawaz Sharif’s PML in the mid-term elections later that year were alleged to be the result of massive rigging. Gen Aslam Beg, who was the army chief then, revealed that the ISI had distributed money among politicians to defeat the PPP. It is quite possible that an all-out attack on Afghanistan to flush out the Al-Qaida and the Taliban had been planned after the August, 1998, failure of the US marines’ missile attacks. If so, Pakistan had to be controlled not by an elected government, but a military dictator. This writer suspects that the decision to ease out Nawaz Sharif had been taken in 1998 itself. Ironically, the USA now expects Gen Pervez Musharraf to reverse jehad and the Islamic militancy, for the promotion of which it spent billions of dollars in the 1980s. It is now spending money on sustaining General Musharraf, who they believe can put down jehadi forces. American support to military regimes in Pakistan has been a major factor in Indo-Pak relations. The Pakistani army believes that perennial hostility with India is a guarantee of its survival. |
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Article sparks riots, 100
dead
Lagos, November 22 Federal officials were in Kaduna for crisis talks with local religious leaders, who appealed for calm following three days of bloody disturbances in the flashpoint city, state spokesman Muktar Sirajo said. The fighting was triggered on Wednesday when Muslim youths burned down a newspaper office in protest at a “blasphemous” article. The international pageant is due to take place in the Nigerian capital Abuja on December 7 and the presence of the 90 beauty queens in the country has offended the conservative sensibilities of many Muslims. But since the fighting started in Kaduna, the riots had degenerated into a street battle between parts of the city’s rival Muslim and Christian communities, local agencies said. Similar clashes there two years ago left more than 2,000 persons dead. Mr George Bennet, regional representative of the International Federation of the Red Cross, said a 50-strong Nigerian Red Cross emergency team in Kaduna had confirmed 100 deaths. “There are also indications that the trouble has flared again this morning,” he said in Lagos. Earlier, a spokesman of the Nigerian Red Cross was unable to confirm the death toll, but said at least 521 injured persons had been evacuated by volunteer medical teams to city hospitals.
AFP |
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Sharia shadow on pageant London, November 22 That 11 Miss World contestants (so far) are withdrawing in protest from the competition, set to take place in the Nigerian capital of Abuja on December 7, is without doubt a PR disaster for the oil-producing nation. So far, contestants from Kenya, the Ivory Coast, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, France, Austria, Switzerland, Iceland, Panama and Costa Rica have said they will not go to Nigeria. Masja Juel (Miss Denmark) told the London-based Guardian newspaper when she won the Danish title, she was very “excited.” But when she learnt that Amina Lawal was going to be stoned to death “simply for having sex outside of marriage” she “just couldn’t believe it’. “How can this kind of thing happen in 2002? What kind of country would do such a terrible thing?’ she asked. Such has been the volume of bad publicity aroused around the world by the case of 30-year Amina that the youngest son of the Queen, Prince Edward, pulled out of a London gala banquet for the event. This is despite the fact he was due to accept a cheque for US $ 1,50,000 from Miss World organisers for his father’s Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. Back in Nigeria though, all is not lost for Amina. Fears that she would be stoned to death rose when her first appeal against the death sentence was dismissed by a higher Sharia court at Funtua, in Katsina state, in northern Nigeria, on August 19. However, she has now lodged another appeal with the highest Sharia Court — the Sharia Court of Appeal — at Kaduna. If that is lost, she will still have recourse to the Federal Court of Appeal, and then, to the Supreme Court of Nigeria. And if the latter fails, President Olusegun Obasanjo can grant a reprieve, through the exercise of his prerogative of mercy. What seems clear though by these (laudable) appeal opportunities is the ever-deepening rift between the secular and the religious in Nigerian society. And no one at this stage can say for certain which side will win. The case of Amina has not been the only instance where the Miss World event has led to social strife in Nigeria. The chosen date, November 30, coincided with the end of a major Islamic fast. So the date was changed to December 7. President Obasanjo, aware of the Muslim opposition to the event, also cancelled a meeting-cum-photo opportunity he was to have with the contestants.
Guardian |
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US lawmaker gets her
facts wrong “Mr Speaker, the party that controls the national government in India, the BJP, has enacted a ban on religious conversions in Tamil Nadu, a state which it controls. The law prohibits anyone from converting to any religion except Hinduism.” This extraordinary statement betraying gross ignorance of the Indian political structure and misinterpretation of the law banning forcible conversions comes from no less a person than a US lawmaker. Democrat Congress woman Cynthia McKinney, known for her periodic outbursts against India, was trying to tell her colleagues in the House of Representatives last week that there was no religious freedom in India. |
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