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| Wednesday, June 7, 2000, Chandigarh, India   
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Proxy wars ‘affect’ women’s status NEW YORK, June 6 — Proxy wars and externally sponsored terrorism faced by some democratic and pluralistic societies have a direct impact on the status of women and children there, India said at a special session of the UN General Assembly here today. ‘No military solution’ in Fiji 50 dead in clashes in Indonesia
Search begins for “Nazi loot” Iranian ‘coordinated’ Pan Am bombing Chechen
President “wounded” |
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Proxy wars ‘affect’ women’s status NEW YORK, June 6 (UNI, PTI) — Proxy wars and externally sponsored terrorism faced by some democratic and pluralistic societies have a direct impact on the status of women and children there, India said at a special session of the UN General Assembly here today. Addressing the plenary of the June 5-9 session on “Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st century”, leader of the Indian delegation, Union Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, without naming any countries observed that such proxy wars made women and children their first targets, impeding their advancement. He also singled out feminisation of poverty and marginalisation of women as the twin scourges which the world community needs to address immediately. Stating that the concept of complementarity between the sexes rather than conflict had inspired India through the ages till the present day, Dr Joshi said the country could offer an effective conceptual framework for empowerment and emancipation of women across the globe. “There is a need to commit ourselves even more strongly to work not only for the full empowerment of women but towards their full empowerment in full freedom,” he added. The fight for gender equality, from liberation to emancipation to empowerment, was a continuing struggle to demolish negative social attitudes, Dr Joshi said. Removal of illiteracy and malnutrition continued to suffer from gender bias. Maternal mortality rates were unacceptably high in developing countries. While national governments were doing their best to check this, the international community must also bear its share of responsibility, Dr Joshi averred. Speaking about initiatives taken by India, he said the government was mainstreaming gender in all policies and programmes across all sectors. Political empowerment had already become a reality at the
grassroots level through reservation of one-third seats in elected local bodies for women. The 85th constitutional amendment providing similar reservation in national Parliament and state legislative assemblies was pending. This and strong partnership between women’s movement and NGOS had brought about a perceptible improvement in the position of Indian women, Dr Joshi said. The political part of the document to be issued at the end of the UN General Assembly’s review of the Beijing women’s conference decisions is more or less ready, Dr Joshi has said. The document will be issued at the end of the meeting on Friday. India heads one of the two committees which are preparing the final documents. The other is headed by Canada. The special session discussed the implementation of the platform of action adopted at Beijing women’s conference five years ago. On the opening day, only four out of 29 speakers were men, including Dr Joshi. Other countries which sent men to make presentations were Gabon, Namibia and Angola. Meanwhile, the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) launched its biennial report, “Progress of the World’s Women,” sponsoring an exhibition and a panel discussion on the advances made by women since the Beijing conference. The European Union has backed women rights’ activists who blasted Pakistan and four other countries for trying to block world’s progress towards gender equality. EU rejected Pakistan, Algeria, Libya, Iran and Vatican’s move to weaken the Beijing declaration and called for protection from religious groups which seek to link sex only to procreation. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and US first lady Hillary Clinton have asked governments to take steps to end violence against women and bridge the economic divide between genders. Both expressed a firm conviction that education is the basic ingredient towards empowerment of women. More than 10,000 women from across the world are attending the conference to pressurise the governments to strengthen, and not dilute, the platform of action agreed to at Beijing. IPS adds: The international community has fallen far short of its commitments to empower women and achieve gender equality, according to a new report released by the UNIFEM. Of the 188 member states, only eight have successfully met global agreements to achieve gender equality in secondary education enrollment, and at least a 30 per cent share of women’s seats in Parliament during the last decade. Seven out of the eight countries are from the industrial world: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. The only country from the developing world is South Africa. While the USA has achieved 100 per cent girls’ enrollment, it has only achieved a 12 per cent share of women’s seat in the US Congress, ranking 10 out of the 24 industrial nations. |
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‘No military solution’ in Fiji SUVA, June 6 (AFP, Reuters) —Fiji’s martial law commander today ruled out any military solution to end the country’s hostage crisis, after coup leader George Speight warned the military against storming the besieged Parliament. “There will be no military solution, the military will not go in,” said army chief Commander Voreqe Bainimarama. “That’s it, we are not going to budge.” “He added that he would accept no new demands from Speight, who had been told that he had to give up his hostages and weapons in return for an amnesty. Speight yesterday threatened to shoot his 31 hostages, including ethnic Indian Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, if the military attempts to force its way into Parliament where they are being held. Despite the tough talk, most of the rebel soldiers offered amnesty for their role in the coup have elected to stick with Speight inside the parliamentary compound high above Suva harbour where he is holding deposed Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. Commodore Frank Bainimarama on Tuesday gave the soldiers an ultimatum — drop their weapons and return to barracks or lose their commissions. But by the 3 p.m. (0830 IST) deadline, only three soldiers had left the parliamentary compound. Fiji suspended LONDON (Reuters): Common-wealth Foreign Ministers suspended Fiji from the grouping’s decision-making councils today over the coup in the South Pacific nation but decided against imposing economic sanctions. “Fiji should be suspended from the Councils of the Commonwealth pending the restoration of democracy and the rule of law,” Botswana’s Foreign Minister Mompati Merafhe, chair of the CMAG ministerial group, told reporters. |
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50 dead in clashes in Indonesia JAKARTA, June 6 (DPA) — At least 50 persons were killed when sectarian violence erupted today in another of Indonesia’s strife-torn provinces, Central Sulawesi, bringing the death toll to 162 since Muslims and Christians resumed clashes two weeks ago. “Reports we are receiving from Poso district is that the new communal fighting broke out early Tuesday morning, killing at least 50 persons,” Mr Yunan Lampasio, a provincial spokesman, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) by telephone from Central Sulawesi’s Capital, Palu. Poso was the scene of the province’s first religious clashes in early April when a drunken scuffle between Muslims and Christians escalated into armed fighting. That violence followed sectarian clashes in the neighbouring Moluccas Islands, where more than 3,000 persons had been killed in the past 16 months. The Jakarta Government has blamed extremists loyal to former President Suharto for fomenting religious violence nation-wide to protect business interests and destabilise the government in order to stop a corruption investigation against him. Today’s fatalities brought the death toll to at least 162 since renewed clashes erupted in Poso on May 23 following a lull of several weeks. Mr Yunan said dozens of warring residents attacked and burned homes at Malei village of Poso district early today. The police and military officials in Poso also confirmed the renewed violence, but gave no further
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Search begins for “Nazi loot” LAKE TOPLITZ (Austria), June 6 (Reuters) — A US-led diving expedition has begun to search the depths of an Austrian Alpine lake for a rumoured trove of Nazi booty and documents. The dive into central Austria’s Lake Toplitz yesterday is being spearheaded by US broadcasting network CBS for its weekly flagship current affairs show “60 minutes”. Technical expertise is being provided by deep sea explorers Oceaneering, who recovered valuables from the Titanic. “We don’t know for certain if there’s anything down there, but we’re interested in finding World War II era artefacts and historically relevant documents from the secret police,” CBS’s Bill Owens told reporters. Lake Toplitz and its legendary cache of gold, Third Reich documents and other priceless treasures have long lured divers in search of loot after local farmers witnessed uniformed Nazi soldiers bringing large wooden crates to its shores in 1945. Toplitz lies in the picturesque Salzkammergut lake district in the province of Styria and is surrounded by the sheer cliffs of the Totes Gebirge, or dead mountain range. The lake is 2 km long, 1,312 ft wide and 338 ft deep. The water is devoid of oxygen after a depth of 65 feet, while sunlight fails to penetrate its murky depths. The complete lack of oxygen means that items neither rot nor rust. Oceaneering and its team of five have allowed for around 30 days to scour the lake. The first phase of the dive will be to sketch the exact landscape of the lake’s bed using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) directed from a floating platform. The ROV is equipped with video and sonar equipment. “We’ll fly it underwater like a helicopter and make a tight-grid pattern of the bed,’’ said Ridge Albaugh from Oceaneering. “Video is the only sure way of finding out what’s down there.” If objects are sighted, then phase two will bring them to the surface. The Americans shrugged off doubts that there would be anything left for them to discover after several dives over the past decades. |
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Iranian ‘coordinated’ Pan Am bombing US and Turkish investigators were questioning an Iranian defector on Monday who told a US television programme that he was a senior intelligence official who had coordinated the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie and a string of other international terrorist attacks. US intelligence sources confirmed that the defector, Ahmad Behbahani, was an Iranian agent, but said they were not yet convinced he was as senior as he claimed. They said it was possible that he was exaggerating his importance to negotiate favourable asylum terms in the USA. If Behbahani’s claims are confirmed, they could have a dramatic impact on the continuing trial in the Netherlands of two Libyan agents, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, accused of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing which killed 270 persons in 1988. Behbahani told the CBS programme, “60 Minutes”, that in his role as head of Iran’s state-sponsored terrorist operations abroad, he masterminded the attack as revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger airliner by the US warship Vincennes, five months earlier, at a cost of 290 lives. He said Ahmed Jibril, a Palestinian militant leader based in Damascus, had helped Iranian intelligence to prepare the attack, and that a group of Libyans was given 90 days training at a camp in Iran to help them build the bomb that brought down flight 103. An Iranian-born CBS producer, Roya Hakakian, who slipped into the refugee camp to speak to Behbahani, said: “He was very proud to ... mention that the bomb was so very sophisticated that it required this kind of intensive training”. Behbahani also claimed that Iranian intelligence had arranged the bombing of the Khobar Towers US barracks in Saudi Arabia in June, 1996, and an attack on a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in July, 1994. He claimed to have been ousted in a power struggle inside Iranian intelligence, and to have escaped from Tehran’s Evin prison four months ago. CBS interviewed him at a heavily guarded refugee camp in Turkey. He claimed that he had documentary evidence to back up his allegations, but he was seized by the Turkish security forces before he could hand it over. The Turkish secret service issued a statement on Monday, saying that Behbahani had arrived illegally in Turkey on March 7 and had sought asylum in the USA. “Behbahani, who was seen as suspicious, has been interviewed by our agency”, the statement said. “The person claims that Iran organised some terrorist actions in the past”. US officials confirmed that Washington had despatched agents to question Behbahani and assess his claims. And a US intelligence analyst said: “It’s not clear yet that this guy is who he says he is. He is certainly in Iranian intelligence, probably a hitman eliminating dissidents which the Iranians view as an internal matter, but not a coordinator for all terrorism directed at foreign countries. “It is unlikely he was a coordinator for all terrorist operations. But it’s quite possible that these people gossip and he would have heard things in the corridors and then filled in the gaps”, the analyst said. Many Western intelligence officials have long believed that Iran was the original instigator of the Lockerbie attack. Lawyers for the two Libyan suspects on trial at a special Scottish court at Camp Zeist, have argued that the bombing was carried out by Mohammed Abu Talb, a Palestinian militant who is in a Swedish prison for an unrelated bomb attack. In Iran, a newspaper aligned with Islamic hardliners denounced Behbahani as a member of a anti-government terrorist group, the Mojahedin Khalq. — Guardian News Service |
Chechen
President “wounded” MOSCOW, June 6 (Reuters) — The Commander of the Russian forces in the breakaway Chechnya said today that Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov had been wounded, probably in a shell explosion which killed his bodyguard. Colonel-General Gennady Troshev was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency that the military had drawn this conclusion from intercepting Mr Maskhadov’s telephone and radio conversations. “We have such information,” he said in answer to questions about whether Mr Maskhadov had been hurt. General
Troshev, speaking from the Khankala military base outside Grozny, said in one intercepted conversation Mr Maskhadov had said his bodyguard had been killed. He quoted civilians as saying they had seen Mr Maskhadov with bandages around his head and his chest. There was no mention of any such incident on the rebel Internet web site
kavkaz.org, which said Chechen special forces had attacked a Russian column — their preferred tactic which had taken the lives of many servicemen in recent months. It said a special team of rebels, led by Arbi
Barayev, had attacked the military convoy near a village in the west of the province, killing five “aggressors”. |
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