J&K: Sharif wants timeframe
ISLAMABAD, Aug 13 — Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said today that his government’s policy for a dialogue with India remained unchanged, but insisted that it should lead to solving the contentious Kashmir issue within a “definite timeframe.”

Top war criminal’s memoirs
‘I just obeyed Hitler’s orders’
BERLIN, Aug 13 — Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the deportation and murder of millions of Jews during World War II, has said obeying an order was the most important thing for him.

8 die in blast
MANILA, Aug 13 — Explosions and a fire devastated the local offices of The Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation today, killing at least eight persons and injuring 11, witnesses and the police said.

Action against 3 spies recommended
WASHINGTON, Aug 13 — Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, citing a “total breakdown in the system,” recommended disciplinary action against a former director and two officials at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory because of failures identified in the China espionage investigation.

Rebels down 6 Russian copters

MOSCOW, Aug 13 (UNI) — The situation in the autonomous republic of Dagestan has worsened with infiltrators from the adjoining breakaway republic of Chechenya taking control of more mountainous areas.

Even as Russian President Boris Yeltsin was conferring with Minister for Emergency Affairs Sergei Shoigo in the Kremlin, infiltrators entering the region shot down six helicopters, killing and injuring several troops in the ground battle in the hilly terrains, Voice of Russia reported yesterday.

Those injured in the attack included three generals leading the Russian interior ministry troops.

Thousands of refugees have fled their homes to escape the wrath of the intruding infiltrators, the radio disclosed.

Meanwhile, a Novosti despatch said here that the Russian upper house of Parliament yesterday gave permission for arming the civilian population of Dagestan to enable them to fight against the “Mijahideen”.

In its emergency session, the upper house warned the Centre not to repeat the mistakes of the 1994-1996 Chechen war, which led the Chechen separatists to set up their independent government in Chechenya. “Dagestan must not be allowed to turn into another breakaway republic,’’ the members of the house said.

According to Novosti, the anti-Moscow military operations in Dagestan are being supervised by Chechen extremist leader Shamil Basayev, who, two years ago, had taken hostage several hundreds of Russians living near the borders of Chechenya.

Also, the newly-constituted Dagestani “Shura (assembly)” is now going over to active warfare and has decided to impeach the President of the republic Mohammed Ali Mahmud in absentia, on charges of owing allegiance to the Centre, it said.

According to reports from Dagestan, infiltrators and local fundamentalists have already captured 14 settlements and have blockaded Botlikh district.

AFP adds: Russia’s new acting premier Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that developments in Dagestan, where Russian troops have sought to put down an Islamic insurgency, are “improving in our favor,” Interfax reported.

He made the statement as he arrived on a visit to Tomsk, Siberia, saying he was receiving constant updates on the situation.

GENEVA, (Reuters): More than 6,000 people, mostly women and children, have fled the fighting in Dagestan, the United Nations refugee agency said today.

Ms Judith Kumin, spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said regional authorities had provided the figure, saying the civilians, both Dagestani and ethnic Russians, had fled to the capital Makhachkala and Buynaksk.

“There may be an equal number who have scattered to villages outside the conflict area,” she told a news briefing adding, “obviously, for security reasons, no international agency is operating in Dagestan.” The UNHCR had closed its office in dagestan at the end of 1996.

Army kills 147 Hutus

BUSORO, BURUNDI, Aug 13 (Reuters) — Burundian villagers yesterday accused the Tutsi-dominated army of killing 147 Hutu civilians in revenge for a Hutu rebel attack, but the Army blamed rebels for the killings.

The reported massacre followed an attack on Tuesday by ethnic Hutu rebels on the nearby market of Kanyosha, 7 km from the Burundian capital and a subsequent army crackdown on the area.

More than 1,50,000 people have been killed in Burundi’s civil war, which started in October 1993, and human rights groups accuse both rebels from the ethnic Hutu majority and the army of massacres of civilians.

“The rebels attacked the market (on Tuesday) and withdrew into the hills,’’ one villager told Reuters in the nearby district of Gacajinshi in Busoro village, where he had fled.

“When the soldiers intervened it was too late (to catch the rebels) and they killed 80 innocent civilians at Ntovumo and 67 at Gacajinshi,’’ said the villager.

The story was backed up by several other traumatised Hutu villagers.

No response to appeal: USA

WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 (UNI) — The Clinton Administration has acknowledged that India and Pakistan have not responded to its Wednesday’s appeal for honouring their 1991 agreement designed to avert aerial clashes, the type of which they had in recent days adding to the border tension that persisted after the Kargil conflict.

"We have been talking to them about it and urging that they do so. I don’t have any confirmation that both parties have indicated that they will do so,’’ State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said yesterday.

The agreement forbids aircraft from flying within about six miles of the Indo-Pakistani border without prior notice and it lays down procedure to deal with violations.

UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan has said it does not want conflict with India and is ready for a dialogue on bilateral issues, but accused New Delhi’s leadership of not responding “positively”.

Asking the international community to put pressure on India to have a “result-oriented and meaningful dialogue” with Pakistan on issues facing them, Islamabad’s new Ambassador to the UN Mr Inam-ul-Haque, said yesterday that the Indian leadership was not responding to the talks offer either because of the coming parliamentary poll or some other “domestic compulsions.”

Addressing a press conference, he claimed that India had violated the 1991 agreement, which prohibited war planes from coming within 10 km of the border, by shooting down a Pakistani navy plane on Tuesday, killing navy personnel.

Mr Haque criticised the UN Secretary-General for taking the stand that he would not intervene in the Kashmir issue unless both Islamabad and New Delhi want it, saying his position need not be “necessarily correct.”

“If the international community is going to leave two countries to resolve their problems by themselves bilaterally, and if those problems are not resolved for decade after decade, what are these countries to do?” he asked.

This is the first time a Pakistani envoy has come out openly against Mr Annan though this stand of non-interference had been taken by previous Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

J&K: Sharif wants timeframe

ISLAMABAD, Aug 13 (PTI) — Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said today that his government’s policy for a dialogue with India remained unchanged, but insisted that it should lead to solving the contentious Kashmir issue within a “definite timeframe.”

“Our policy of dialogue with India remains unchanged but the dialogue must be meaningful and within a definite timeframe. It must lead to the solution of the Kashmir problem ensuring a just and durable peace in our region,” Sharif said in a message to the nation on the eve of Independence Day.

Incidentally Mr Sharif had been quoted by the “Frontier post” in Karachi yesterday saying that the shooting down of the Pakistani aircraft by India would “complicate” matters hinting at delay in resumption of the dialogue process.

Top war criminal’s memoirs
‘I just obeyed Hitler’s orders’

BERLIN, Aug 13 (PTI) — Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the deportation and murder of millions of Jews during World War II, has said obeying an order was the most important thing for him.

“Obeying an order was the most important thing to me. It could be that was in the nature of the German,” said Adolf Hitler’s “technician of death” in a memoir while seeking to explain his central role in the extermination by the Nazis of six million European Jews.

Eichmann, who promoted the use of gas chambers in concentration camps, said in his memoirs: “From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of the system.”

Eichmann, who portrayed himself as a mid-level official who was only following Hitler’s orders during his trial in Israel in 1961, was executed by the Israeli authorities in 1962.

The former Nazi officer’s 127 pages of hand written reflections with the heading “My Memoirs” were published recently in a German newspaper “Die Welt.” The memoirs were found by the newspaper in prosecution files brought to Germany at the Centre for Research on Nazi Crimes in the southern German town of Ludwigsburg after his execution.

The appearance of the pages comes two days after Israel announced it would hand over the 1,300-page memoir Eichmann wrote in prison to a German research institution.

Analysts said Eichmann’s stress on the need to obey orders appears to be part of an attempt to portray himself as a man driven by a visceral sense of duty rather than hatred to organise the mass murder of the Jews.

The memoir discovered at Ludwigsburg said so deep was the instinct for obedience in him that Eichmann wrote when the Nazis were defeated in 1945, he was in a panic at the prospect of living an existence not dictated by orders.

Eichmann first went to the death camp in 1941, the year he was promoted as Lieutenant Colonel. He made subsequent visits there and to other death camps in Poland to analyse progress in the elimination of the jews.

“I was to report on the Fuehrer’s plan to destory the Jews. I was sent to Treblinka, Minsk, Lemberg and Auschwitz. When I see the images before my eyes, it all comes back to me,” he wrote.

8 die in blast

MANILA, Aug 13 (Reuters) — Explosions and a fire devastated the local offices of The Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation today, killing at least eight persons and injuring 11, witnesses and the police said.

Two smaller explosions and a fire followed, wrecking the bureau’s investigation offices where suspects are questioned and seized material like narcotics, arms and ammunition are stored, he said.

The bureau’s five-storeyed national headquarters, adjacent to the investigation office bungalows, was damaged and its windows shattered, witnesses said. The bureau is the domestic equivalent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Action against 3 spies recommended

WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (AP) — Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, citing a “total breakdown in the system,” recommended disciplinary action against a former director and two officials at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory because of failures identified in the China espionage investigation.

Mr Richardson did not identify the three officials yesterday. But sources familiar with the internal investigation said one of them was Siegfried “Sig” Hecker, who was director of the New Mexico weapons lab from 1986 to 1997.

The three officials’ “responsibilities were clear and that they failed to meet their responsibilities” in the investigation of alleged spying by Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, Mr Richardson said.

Lee was fired last March after being under investigation since 1996.

Clinton’s legal bill
WASHINGTON: US President Bill Clinton’s legal expense trust has paid about half his $ 10.5 million legal bills but donations have dwindled since the impeachment battle ended and he may leave office deep in debt. Officials of the trust said on Thursday that they had raised about $ 2.6 million since the start of the year, including the maximum $ 10,000 donations from actor Michael Douglas and entertainment Mogul David Geffen. — Reuters

Liberals to stay
TOKYO: Japan’s Liberal Party, junior partner in a coalition with Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has decided to stay in the ruling bloc, the Liberals leader Ichiro Ozawa said today. “We will continue to maintain a cooperative structure with the LDP” Mr Ozawa, who had earlier threatened to quit the coalition in a dispute over an electoral reform bill, told reporters. — Reuters

US refugee quota
WASHINGTON: The number of refugees allowed entry into the USA in 2000 will increase from 78,000 to 100,000 by the authorisation of President Bill Clinton, the White House has disclosed. In a memo to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Mr Clinton set the regional allocation of slots at 14,000 from Africa, 8,000 from East Asia and 3,000 from Latin America and 8.000 from the Near East and South Asia.— DPA

Ship was ‘blown up’
STOCKHOLM: In a startling announcement, it has been claimed that MS Estonia was blown up the night she sank. The Baltic Lines passenger-ferry, Estonia, sunk on the night of September 29, 1994, off the southern coast of Finland, on a scheduled trip from Tallin, Estonia to Stockholm. In the worst post-war civilian naval catastrophe in Europe, of the 989 souls aboard, only 138 survived. — UNI