Laden not to threaten USA from Afghan soil
ISLAMABAD, Aug 24 — Alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden has promised not to threaten the USA or any other country while he is in Afghanistan, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was quoted today as saying. Meanwhile Laden was told to show restraint by Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar.

N-strikes on terror groups 'a US policy'
LONDON, Aug 24 — Nuclear strikes against terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction are part of official US military doctrine, it was claimed yesterday.

Chernomyrdin named successor

MOSCOW, Aug 24 (PTI) — Russian President Boris Yeltsin today named Interim Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin as his successor for the presidential election due in 2000.

In a nationwide broadcast, Mr Yeltsin also urged Parliament and the countrymen to support the sacking of Mr Sergei Kiriyenko and his entire government yesterday.

The main motive behind Mr Chernomyrdin’s nomination as acting Prime Minister was to ensure “continuity of power in are 2000”, he said.

“The main virtues of Viktor Stepanovich (Chernomyrdin) is that he is a man of integrity, honest and a thorough person. I think these qualities would be a decisive argument in the presidential election, neither the power, nor the dismissal has corrupted him,” Mr Yeltsin pointed out.

Explaining the recent dismissals and appointments, he, however, said it was “not a simple decision” for him to take.

Mr Kiriyenko (36) will, however, remain in the cabinet, Mr Yeltsin said, of his sacked protege.

“Five months ago, no one expected the international financial crisis to hit Russia so hard, or the economic situation to deteriorate to such an extent,” he said, defending his move to sack Mr Kiriyenko. Five months back, when Mr Kiriyenko was appointed in place of Mr Chernomyrdin he did not know that the world economic and financial crisis would have such deep and negative impact on Russia. He thanked Mr Kiriyenko for his work in the past five months.

“What we need today is a heavyweight like Chernomyrdin. With his experience and understanding of the situation,” he stressed, urging the Duma, the Federation Council and Regional leaders to back the new Prime Minister and approve his nomination without delay.

However, the Communist-led Left Front in the Duma urged President Yeltsin to withdraw the nomination of Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin as the new Prime Minister and hold all-party consultations to draw up a new economic course.

Speaking at the meeting of the parliamentary party leaders represented in Duma coordination council, Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov reiterated the demand for the formation of the “government of people’s trust”.

His ally in the Left Front, leader of the agrarian faction Nikolai Kharitonov, added that Parliament had to know about the programme of the Cabinet before approval of the Prime Minister. He also demanded that the President should moot a constitutional amendment to expand the powers of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet.

Meanwhile, Mr Yeltsin’s Press Secretary announced that the Russian President would keep his foreign policy intact despite changing the Prime Minister.

According to the Russian constitution, Duma has to vote on Mr Chernomyrdin’s nomination by August 31. In case of three negative votes for the Prime Minister, Mr Yeltsin can dissolve the Lower House and announce mid-term polls.

AP adds: Earlier, President Boris Yeltsin reached for his favourite tactic: firing his own deputies to try and shift the blame.

While he may lack ideas on how to tackle Russia’s never-ending problems, Mr Yeltsin is never slow when it comes to claiming it wasn’t his fault. However, most Russians long ago stopped believing that the man at the top is not to blame.

The President’s sudden dismissal of Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko yesterday is the latest in a long line of government shake-ups.

Whenever the government’s policies have run into trouble or popular resistance, Mr Yeltsin has unflinchingly blamed the men he appointed and dodged any responsibility.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union left him master of the Kremlin seven years ago, Mr Yeltsin has followed two rules: the blame for whatever goes wrong must be laid on others, and no one can rise above him or encroach upon his power or position.

At times, the government has ended up looking like a comic opera.

Much of the latest financial crisis reflects world economic problems and the drop in Russia’s vital oil sales that has forced the Russian Government to back down on promises not to devalue the currency.

Perhaps no government could have done much about such problems, but Mr Yeltsin sees only one thing: blaming somebody else.

Several of Russia’s top liberal economic reformers have become political yo-yos, filling and then losing ministerial posts from year to year as they fail to produce results or their policies hit popular opposition.

Attack prevented ‘extremists’ summit’

LONDON, Aug 24 (AFP) — Millionaire Islamic militant Osama bin Laden has admitted that the recent US missile strike in Afghanistan prevented a planned summit of Islamic extremists, according to the Editor of an Arabic-language publication, quoted today in The Times.

Abdel-Bari Atwan, Editor of the London-based paper Al-Guds Al-Arabi, told The Times he had the information from one of Laden’s spokesmen who had called him by satellite phone from a camp in Afghanistan.

“He (Laden’s spokesman) admitted that President Clinton was correct. There was going to be a meeting at Khost (Afghanistan) last Friday. But it was cancelled because Laden knew a raid was being planned by the Americans. He called it off,” The Times quoted the Editor as saying.

After the Cruise missiles attack on Thursday against a suspected Islamic terrorist training camp near Khost, US President Bill Clinton said the USA had “reason to believe that a gathering of key terrorist leaders was to take place there today (Thursday), thus underscoring the urgency of our actions.”

The Times said that besides Laden, those due to have attended the “summit” included the head of the Egyptian Jihad movement and leaders of several other extremist groups.

The Times said the meeting was to have taken place in the Zhawar Kili Al-Badr camp near Khost.

WASHINGTON (AP): If Saudi-born extremist Osama Laden were killed in further US action against his terror network, the USA would have no regrets about his death, Secretary of Defence William Cohen has said.

“No one would weep over the death of someone who is that fanatical about killing innocent human beings,” Mr Cohen said on NBC Television on Sunday.

“If he has declared war against the United States, which he has, and if he is part of the command and control of that terror network then if he is in the line of fire as such, that’s his problem,” he said.

An executive order prohibiting assassinations has been in effect since the mid-1970s, and the White House has emphasised it was not targeting Laden in last Thursday’s missile attacks on terrorist camps in Afghanistan. In a simultaneous exercise, ship-fired US Cruise missiles targeted a drug-manufacturing factory in Sudan, accused by the Americans of helping make chemical weapons.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the attacks were aimed not at Laden but at his command and control facilities and generally against those who were involved in this.

“We do not think that just focusing on one single individual this way proves anything,” she said on ABC television.

US raids played into Arab hands
from David Hirst in Cairo

“THIS is a godsend to the Islamists, and, I would say, to the Arabs in general”, said Mohammed Odah, an Egyptian ex-Marxist and harsh critic of the Islamists, on hearing of the US raids on Sudan and Afghanistan.

He meant that the raids would greatly enhance the Islamists’ prestige in the region after the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam atrocities.

There had been widespread embarrassment in the Arab and Muslim world. Africans had died in far larger numbers than Americans, the proclaimed targets of the embassy bombs. Nothing in Islam could justify this, it was said. Those bombs played into the hands of all those in the West who wanted to see Islam as a new “evil empire” to replace the Soviet Union. And Israel was looking particularly virtuous after it played such a prominent role in the Nairobi rescue operation.

A few voices in the Arab world had expressed the usual outrage at the way in which the West automatically discerned an Islamic hand behind the atrocities. But they were in a minority because the vast majority came to the conclusion that the bombings were of West Asian origin. Few doubted that they were the handiwork of the so-called World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, led by Osama bin Laden, and other, notably Egyptian, groups associated with him.

Having wrung their hands, Arab commentators, reiterated one of their most familiar themes: that the USA should start looking for the real, underlying causes of West Asian terrorism. It should ask itself a fundamental question: why is it and not other countries so systematically targeted? The Arabs will see in these US raids all the proof they need that the USA will remain resolutely blind to those underlying causes. The raids might gratify American public opinion but they will do nothing to prevent more of the terror which the World Islamic Front, and others, have promised.

It is because of these victims, wrote another moderate Islamic Egyptian commentator, Fahmi Howeidi, that Nairobi and Dar es Salaam did not really get the Arab and Muslim condemnation they deserved. In fact, he said, Osama bin Laden had already become something of a folk hero. This, he argued, was not because the Arabs condoned terrorism but because they felt such animosity towards the Americans. Even the right wing, generally pro-Western Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd quoted a peasant as saying: “The American got what they deserved”.

The inescapable fact, the commentators say, is that US standing has never been lower in the region. And no one finds this more awkward than the pro-Western Arab government such as that of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. For him the only real problem is Israel and US bias towards it. “It is creating a hell of a hatred which I don’t like”, he said earlier this year. Most Arab governments will doubtless condemn the US raids, much as they condemned the embassy bombings, for they know that they will make their position more awkward than ever. — The Guardian, London

Clinton may have to quit: Nunn

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (PTI) — A senior Democrat has accused US President Bill Clinton of placing his personal interests over the nation and said he may have to resign in the wake of recent developments in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“It is now clear that President Clinton is primarily responsible for dragging this nation through seven months of preoccupation with the Monica Lewinsky story. The national interest required that he correct any false statements and apologise to the nation months ago,” Mr Nunn said in an article in the Washington Post today.

“Even for those who accept President Clinton’s definition of his behaviour as ‘not appropriate’ rather than deplorable and accept his previous testimony (in the Paula Jones case) as ‘legally accurate,’ not perjury, it must be clear that for the past seven months he has placed his own personal interests above the national interest,” he said.

Mr Nunn, a highly respected Democrat and former Senator from Georgia, said Mr Clinton’s behaviour had resulted in weakening the office of the President and lowered people’s moral discourse.

“The latest developments has also resulted in the exposure of our children to a negative role model, increased public cynicism towards elected officials as well as the political and judicial process and diversion of national attention from important domestic and international challenges,” Mr Nunn, who headed the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1972 to 1996, said.

Urging Mr Clinton to voluntarily disclose all relevant matters concerning alleged acts of illegality to the independent counsel, to the congressional leadership and to the American people, he said: “In the weeks ahead, the President must lead by putting the country’s interest first.”

Meanwhile, House Speaker Newt Gingrich says the House of Representatives probably will seek evidence from all of independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigations of Mr Clinton, not just the parts related to Ms Lewinsky, before deciding whether to launch an impeachment inquiry.

He told The Washington Post in an interview reported on Monday that he believed only "a pattern of felonies and not a single human mistake" could constitute grounds for an impeachment inquiry.

Suu Kyi ends protest

YANGON, Aug 24 (Reuters) — Myanmar Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi today ended a 13-day roadside protest against military government restrictions on her movements, a source in her National League for Democracy (NLD) said.

Suu Kyi was seen entering her compound on Yangon’s University Avenue in the afternoon, the source said. Suu Kyi and three supporters had remained in a mini van outside the capital since August 12. Having been denied permission to travel to the west of the country and in turn refusing government demands to return to Yangon.

“She has just got back home,” the source, who did not want to be identified, told Reuters.

The NLD earlier issued a statement saying it wanted Suu Kyi to call off the protest due to her “critical health condition”.

Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, staged a similar protest last month when the authorities stopped her car at the same bridge. The six-day stand-off ended on July 29 when security personnel forcibly returned Suu Kyi to her Yangon home.

The NLD has vowed to shortly convene a Parliament, based on elections it won in May, 1990, and is pressing Myanmar’s generals to release 97 NLD members it says have been detained.

The generals have so far not responded to the NLD’s demand that its members be released from detention, but diplomats said the military’s silence could be promising for Suu Kyi.

“If they had said they would not do it, then you can be sure they never would,” one diplomat said. “So the fact they haven’t ruled it out may be a good sign.”

Laden not to threaten USA from Afghan soil

ISLAMABAD, Aug 24 (AFP) — Alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden has promised not to threaten the USA or any other country while he is in Afghanistan, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was quoted today as saying.

The Afghan Islamic Press quoted Omar as saying bin Laden made the pledge after he (Omar) expressed displeasure over the reported threats against the USA following its missile attack in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, a report from Jerusalem said Israel stepped up security measures at its main airports today after Islamic radicals threatened retaliation for the US raids in Sudan and Afghanistan, public radio reported.

Checks on passengers and baggage, already draconian on Israel airports, were intensified and security patrols were reinforced in waiting rooms and by ticket counters, the radio said.

The measures were put into effect at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport and also at smaller airfields around the country, including at the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

Islamic groups have threatened to strike at US and Israeli targets, including airliners, following the US missile attacks last week in Sudan and Afghanistan.

In a related development, a Kenyan newspaper report today said the key suspects in the Nairobi US embassy bomb attack will be tried in the USA as the investigation appeared to be making progress.

The East African Standard, quoting unnamed senior Kenyan police sources, said the police, which had been working closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the case agreed that the principal accused should have a US trial.

Former Vice-President Mwai Kibaki, head of the Democratic Party and official opposition leader, said there was an extradition treaty allowing this and Kenya had not the means to ensure counter-terrorist security during a protracted trial.

The unconfirmed Standard report said that as soon as the investigation leads to criminal charges being preferred, the suspects would be "transferred to the USA under international law."

In London, a Labour foreign affairs specialist today said Britain should investigate the immigrant status of a London-based Islamist acting as a spokesman for Osama bin Laden with a view to deporting him.

Donald Anderson, Chairman of the House of Commons Committee on Foreign Policy, said he understood the Interior Ministry was examining the position of many London-based political wings of armed groups from around the world.

And referring to Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, leader of Al Muhajiroun, which wants a world Islmaic state, Anderson said, "I wonder what this man’s immigration status is and whether we in Britain should harbour such fanatics."

Speaking to BBC radio earlier, the Sheikh declared the USA was to "blame" for all casualties in the "war’’ between bin Laden, blamed for bombing two US embassies in East Africa, and America.

Laden told to show restraint

Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, says he will urge Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden to show restraint and let the Islamic militia respond to the US attacks, news reports here said today.

“There cannot be two different and parallel emirates in Afghanistan. We have a central Taliban-led authority ruling the country and it ought to be obeyed,” Omar said in a telephone interview to The News daily.

N-strikes on terror groups 'a US policy'
From Richard Norton Taylor

LONDON, Aug 24 — Nuclear strikes against terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction are part of official US military doctrine, it was claimed yesterday.

“Non-state actors” are included in a list of likely targets for nuclear strikes in a Joint Chiefs of Staff “Doctrine for Joint Theatre Nuclear Operation”, according to the British-American Security Information Council (Basic), an independent research group.

The document states that “neither the law of armed conflict nor any other customary or conventional international law prohibits the use of nuclear weapons in armed conflicts”.

Mr Dan Plesch, director of Basic, said last night: “For the US to consider formally using nuclear weapons against non-state actors only serves to make the ‘unthinkable’ act of nuclear war more ‘thinkable’ ”.

Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire accused by Washington of being the mastermind behind the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and implicated in a series of earlier terrorist attacks in West Asia, was once hailed by the CIA as a freedom fighter.

He was feted by the CIA for his role as a fighter, financier and recruiter of the Mujahideen guerrillas who fought the Soviet Army occupying Afghanistan during the 1980s. His forces were supplied with weapons by the CIA, and with British-made blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles by M16.

His camp in Khost, in north-east Afghanistan, one of the targets of US cruise missile attacks on Thursday, was built with the help of the CIA. Laden was backed by the USA on the principle that your enemy’s enemy is your friend. He, presumably, made a similar calculation. Once Afghanistan’s Soviet occupiers were defeated, Laden turned against the USA, regarding it as equally an enemy of Islam.

While he was protected in Afghanistan by the ultra-Islamist Taliban, whose leaders were also equipped with weapons supplied by the West and by Pakistan, thousands of his West Asian fighters from the anti-Soviet war returned home to Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, a kind of militant Islamist diaspora in states where jobs were scarce and governments autocratic.

Laden, who is in his 40s, inherited a fortune estimated at up to $300 million (almost £ 190 million) from his late father, a Saudi construction magnate. A former associate, Khaled Fuawaz, is quoted in the latest issue of the Reader’s Digest as recalling that early in the Afghan war, Laden volunteered the services of his family’s firm to blast new roads through the mountains.

When he could not find drivers willing to face Russian helicopters, he drove the bulldozers himself, Mr Fuawaz maintained.

His support for the Afghan Mujahideen was, initially, encouraged by Saudi Arabia. But he soon made it clear his aim was to drive the West, and the USA in particular, from West Asia. He is reported to have met the Saudi defence minister, Prince Sultan, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 offering his help in defeating Baghdad on condition the USA was not involved.

“Bin Laden spread out maps in front of Prince Sultan,” an unnamed Saudi official told the Reader’s Digest.” He had all kinds of plans for how to defeat the Iraqis without American help. Prince Sultan asked what he planned to do about the Iraqi tanks, aircraft, and chemical and biological weapons. Laden said, “We will defeat them with our faith,.”

Laden and his followers have since been implicated in a series of terrorist attacks, according to Western intelligence. These include the bombings of a Saudi National Guard training centre in Riyadh in 1995 and of a military barracks near Dhahran a year later, in which 19 Americans died. He described the Dhahran attack as “a laudable kind of terrorism” though denying responsibility.

He has been linked to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Centre; and his followers have been linked to the massacre of tourists in Luxor, Egypt, last November.

In 1994, Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and disowned by his family after criticising the royal family, and was forced to move to Sudan. He was expelled from there in 1996 under the threat of US sanctions, and he returned to Afghanistan. The Washington Post reported yesterday that he has spent the past 15 months living about 200 miles south of the site of Thursday’s US attacks, using as his base a fortified and heavily guarded hilltop compound outside the city of Kandahar.

In February, a new group sponsored by Laden, the Islamic International Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, issued a statement. “We — with God’s help, call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it,” it said. This diktat was signed by Islamic militant leaders in Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

On Wednesday, the London-based Arabic newspaper, al-Hayat, received a further statement from the group pledging new “holy struggle operations: and warning that “strikes will continue from everywhere” against the USA. — The Guardian, London

Algeria going nuclear?
MADRID (Spain): Algeria’s military-backed government has developed a nuclear programme that is just two years away from producing weapons-grade plutonium, a Spanish newspaper has reported. Although it has renounced the acquisition of nuclear weapons and accepted an international inspections regime, the Algiers Government is building facilities that will put it in a position to acquire weapons-grade plutonium by the turn of the century, El Pais said on Sunday. The Left-leaning daily quoted a confidential report from the Spanish military intelligence agency known as Cesid that was submitted to the Madrid Government last month. — AP

Ministry scrapped
LAGOS (Nigeria): Nigeria’s military ruler has scrapped the country’s oil ministry and will appoint a civilian technocrat to oversee the West African country’s lucrative petroleum sector, one of the world’s largest, an official has said. Although no one had yet been named to the post, a senior figure in Nigeria’s commercial petroleum sector is expected to head a new directorate to be created by Gen Abdulsalam, Abubakar. — AP

Fishermen released
DUBAI: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Sunday ordered the release of two Indian fishermen, currently in prison in Baghdad, on a request from visiting Lok Sabha Speaker G.M.C. Balayogi. The fishermen had been sentenced by an Iraqi court to six years imprisonment for entering into Iraqi territory illegally, a release from the Indian Embassy at Baghdad said. — PTI

Driving Bond style
PACHUCA (Mexico): It’s what driver’s education would be like if your instructor was James Bond. Tyre-screeching, rubber-burning, stomach-churning turns at 50-80 kph, backing up at 40 kph, spinning 180 degrees, then speeding forward, veering away from criminals shooting at your car. Crime is rising in Mexico and business is thriving for companies that teach executives how to elude kidnappers, robbers and other criminals. — AP

Hitchcock stamps
HITCHCOCK (USA): What’s in a name? A lot of work for the post office in tiny Hitchcock, which is getting hundreds of requests from stamp collectors to hand-cancel stamps and commemorative envelopes honouring movie director Alfred Hitchcock. Postmaster Kathy Price hand-cancels the Hitchcock postage stamps with a special ink stamp that prints out the movie director’s famous profile and the words “suspense station, Hitchcock, S.D. 57348, August 4, 1998” — the first day that the US Postal Service offered the Hitchcock stamp to the public. — AP

Charity walk
LONDON: A charity walk following Princess Diana’s funeral route through London failed to attract much interest on Sunday and so few people turned up that organisers said they might make a loss. The BBC said 15,000 persons were expected to sign up for the 10-km walk, organised by the North London Walking Club, but only about 2,000 registered. — Reuters