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Tuesday,
May 27, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
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Musharraf
‘scuttled’ India’s ‘Secularism
to win battle for Cong’
Freedom of media eroded: Khaleda |
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Small
movies make big at Cannes
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Musharraf ‘scuttled’ India’s entry into OIC
Islamabad, May 26 General Musharraf averted an “unprecedented disaster” for foreign policy by threatening to pull out from the OIC after the Islamic group geared up to move a resolution to admit India in its ranks at Foreign Ministers meeting in Khartoum in Sudan last year, ‘The News’ daily said today. “The OIC of foreign ministers held in Khartoum in June, 2002, in a closed door meeting began discussing the possibility of admitting India as a member of the OIC considering its massive population of Muslims,” it quoted an unnamed official of the Pakistan Foreign Ministry as saying. India has the second largest population of Muslims in the world after Indonesia. The OIC’s move was backed by several Arab countries he said but declined to reveal their names. Watching the situation going out of hand, the then Information Minister, Nisar Memon represented Pakistan in the absence of a full-fledged Foreign Minister, called General Musharraf and sought his guidance. General Musharraf immediately asked Memon to contact the OIC Secretary-General as well as the key Arab states in favour of the move to admit India and convey to them that if a resolution is passed, Pakistan will immediately withdraw from the OIC,” he said adding that Musharraf also authorised Memon to hold an immediate press conference to castigate the Gulf countries if they went ahead with their resolution. The OIC, however, dropped the resolution after Memon conveyed General Musharraf’s threat. “The warning worked and Pakistan managed to scuttle the movement for the resolution...and (instead) managed to have the OIC pass a resolution, condemning the flagrant human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir,” he said. On its part India declined to extend diplomatic recognition to the OIC for its reluctance to admit it.
PTI |
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‘Secularism to win battle for Cong’
Islamabad, May 26 At a seminar on India’s Destiny: Secularism or Hindutva at the Institute of Regional Studies here, Mr Aiyar said in the past 10 years the BJP had made enormous strides by posing itself as the natural party of cultural nationalism and by cleverly mixing it with composite nationalism. “The Congress is therefore, caught in the dilemma of determining whether a softer line on secularism or a hard secular fundamentalism is the right response to the imperative of not only returning the Congress to power, but also the much more fundamental question of how the Congress should position itself to prevent its agenda for the modern nationhood of India from being hijacked by an alternative saffron version,” he said. “This was by no means a difficult new choice for the Congress to make, as it has been fighting all fundamentalist forces from the days of the Independence movement,” he said.
PTI |
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Freedom of media eroded: Khaleda Dhaka (Bangladesh), May 26 Addressing the representatives of media from the South Asian countries who have gathered here to deliberate on “Media and Democracy” as part of the South Asian Free Media Association
(SAFMA) meeting, Begum Zia said at the dawn of the 21st century, total freedom was an important factor. There was no scope to ignore the object of unfettered freedom of the media and freedom from all controls and influences. She said unfortunately, when successes were being achieved by the media in its endeavour to come out of controls imposed by the state and the government in the developing democratic countries, there were complaints that the dominant international media was being influenced in disseminating information for various reasons. “Their reliability has, therefore, become a matter of dispute.” The Prime Minister pointed out that another painful reality was the presence of owners’ interests, political allegiance, doctrinal bias, social terror and individual dishonesty which were leading to the eroding of the media freedom. This often curtailed the rights of the individuals and institutions involved in published news or commentary and of the readers, viewers and listeners of the print and electronic media. She urged the South Asian countries to come together and move forward towards prosperity like the ASEAN countries had done. Seeking answers to the reasons for the South Asian countries lagging behind, she pointed out that there were enough resources in the region for it to emerge stronger. But the things hampering this growth were some little problems and disputes. “If we solve the little problems and disputes among ourselves and proceed along the path of mutual cooperation, we would not then have to depend upon others. In the light of the changed world realities, this urge for regional cooperation has become stronger,” she said. Urging the media to play a bigger role in this field, she asserted that the “mental block that still stands like a wall in this field should be demolished”. She also stressed on the fact that fear and tension with regard to security must be reduced. “We are not being able to build a common struggle against the complex problems like poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy, malnutrition, environmental pollution and human trafficking which were our common enemy because of the fact that the sensitive question of security among the countries of the region was considered very important due to political, cultural, economic interest and historical realities”. The Bangladesh Prime Minister asked the media to play a greater role in this area also. Besides building a positive public opinion, the media must also exert influence in policy formulation, she
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Small movies make big at Cannes
Cannes (France), May 26 Turkey’s lone entry was about loneliness and was made in a good deal of solitude, with director Nuri Bilge Ceylan doing most of the work and family and friends chipping in with the rest. But “Distant” (“Uzak”) scooped one of the fest’s top honours, the runner-up Grand Prize, as well as a joint Best Actor for the two lead roles in the haunting film “about emptiness” — Muzaffer Ozdemir and the late Mehmet Emin Toprak, killed in a car accident in December. “The two were my friends,” Ceylan said. “They’ve both acted in all my films.” The partly autobiographical film by the 44-year-old director and photographer is largely a tete-a-tete between a weary intellectual whose private life and everyday habits are upset by the arrival of a jobless relative. Ceylan not only wrote and directed the shoestring budget film, but was also behind the camera and at the editing table. His wife and mother both have small roles in the film and the relative was his cousin in real life. Afghanistan, meanwhile, made its Cannes debut with “Osama” by Sedigh Barmak, who worked in a country that owns just one recently repaired 35-mm camera and which has made no more than 40 films in a century while neighbour India shoots three a day. “Osama” attracted heaps of attention and won a special mention by the jury in the Camera d’Or section which judges new directors. France’s AFCAE, an association of arthouse cinemas, gave it top honours.
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China halts sale of meat to check SARS
Beijing, May 26 Health authorities, medical workers, hospitals and patients are likely to be involved in legal wrangling over the high SARS infection rate in Beijing hospitals during the initial outbreak of the SARS ‘China Daily’ reported. Hospitals were initially the biggest origin of the highly contagious disease in Beijing. However, Liu said it would be difficult to prove that someone was infected with the disease while at a hospital. Meanwhile, Chinese provincial governments are taking strict measures to stop the trade and consumption of meat of wild animals after the discovery of SARS virus in a host of forest animals like civet cats, a report said today. The new research findings, released on Friday and Saturday, has evoked wide repercussions throughout the country, especially in south China’s Guangdong province, where wild animal meat is considered a delicacy, the report said.
PTI |
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Small films made the big time at
the Cannes film festival this year, with family-style productions from
Iran, Turkey and even Afghanistan making waves and sweeping the awards.
Even the big winner at Cannes, “Elephant” by US director Gus Van
Sant, was made on peanuts by Hollywood standards at $ 3 million and used
amateurs to play high school students ahead of a gun massacre just like
that at Columbine.
