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| Thursday, June 8, 2000, Chandigarh, India   
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Militia frees Prime Minister of Solomons Tusevljak is Bosnian PM NATO ‘guilty’ of war crimes Russian aircraft
carrier for India soon Rebels reject
self-rule offer AIDS epidemic
strikes Siberian city Gorbachev saved
from drowning Legislators vote to
dissolve Knesset Duty to family & prostitution LTTE submarine in Thai shipyard |
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EU agrees on
racial equality
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Militia frees Prime Minister of Solomons BRISBANE, June 7 (Reuters, AFP) — Solomon Islands Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa’alu was freed from militia custody today after being held at gunpoint for two days, one of his ministers said. Minister of State Alfred Sasako told Reuters by telephone from the Solomons capital Honiara that the Malaita Eagles militia had handed the Prime Minister over to his regular security guards at 6:30 p.m. (0730 gmt). “The Prime Minister is free,’’ Mr Sasako said. ‘’he is in high spirits but he is not used to the treatment he was given over the last two days.’’ It was the second coup attempt in the south Pacific in the past month. Deposed Fijian Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry is still being held hostage with members of his government by coup leader George Speight. Meanwhile, Solomon Islands rebel leader Andrew Nori said his Malaita Eagle fighters may have killed 50 to 100 men from a rival militia today when they bombarded them from a captured police gunboat, near to the capital Honiara. “When the patrol boat arrived it fired its 50 calibre guns and from eyewitnesses on the boat there were heavy casualties and the casualties could be between 50 and 100,’’ Nori told Reuters in a telephone interview from Honiara. The report of the deaths could not immediately be independently verified but another witness said rival militants had counter attacked and were said to be on the outskirts of the capital. The South Pacific country, about 1,800 km northeast of Australia, is suffering the worst violence in its history as an independent state with ethnic groups from the islands of Malaita and Guadalcanal struggling for dominance. Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation Radio said a police patrol boat was used by the Malaita militia and some para-military police to “bombard the shoreline around Lunga area, east of Honiara’’. Nori’s Malaita Eagle Force (MEF) militia took over Honiara on Monday, raiding police armouries, taking over police patrol boats and arresting Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa’alu. SYDNEY,
(AFP): Fighting intensified between rival guerrilla armies in the Solomon Islands on Wednesday despite an announcement by coup leader Andrew Nori that he was ready to make peace with the government. Details of casualties were not known, but unconfirmed reports said as many as 50 to 100 men could have been killed or wounded. Several thousand men were reported to be engaged in a pitched battle between the well-armed Malaita Eagle Force
(MEF) and the more numerous but less well-armed Isatabu Freedom Movement
(IFM), that started near the airport before dawn. An evacuated school was hit during what Amnesty International described as “indiscriminate shelling” by rebel forces from a seized gunboat east of the capital, Honiara. Various sources said
MEF fighters were also using the gunboat to bombard the IFM, indigenous militants from the main island of Guadalcanal who are trying to drive out long-term settlers from neighbouring Malaita. New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff told
CNN that he had received confirmed reports that MEF fighters had seized two gunboats, and were using the boats’ heavy machine-guns to attack
IFM forces on the shore. But he said he was not able to confirm any casualty figures. Asked whether the Solomons could be slipping into civil war, he said: “there’s a real danger of that. We don’t want to go down that path.” |
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Tusevljak is Bosnian PM SARAJEVO (Bosnia-Herzegovina), June 7 (AP) —Bosnia’s multiethnic parliament has approved an obscure Serb economics professor as the country’s first Prime Minister since the end of the Bosnian war. Yesterday selection of Spasoje Tusevljak, a 48-year-old member of the faculty of the University in Lukavica, drew negative responses from international officials. “Frankly, I’m very disappointed,” US Ambassador Thomas Miller said of the selection. According to the 1995 Dayton agreement which ended the Bosnian war, the country was supposed to have had a Prime Minister by now. But the three former warring factions, Muslims, Serbs and Croats - could not agree on which ethnic group would hold the post. A compromise was found in the appointment of a Council of Ministers, in which members of the body would rotate in the position of the chairman, effectively the head of government. But in February, the Constitutional Court ruled the arrangement in violation of the Dayton accords. Since then, Bosnia has been without a head of government. The three-member collective presidency was to propose a new candidate for the post. A first candidate failed to get support from Parliament. Tusevljak was then proposed and won parliamentary approval. He is a virtual unknown. A few weeks ago, Bosnia’s top international official, Wolfgang Petritsch, publicly dubbed him “Mister Who?” In a related development Mr Alija Izetbegovic, who led Bosnia’s Muslim-led government through the Bosnian war, has announced that he will resign from Bosnia’s collective presidency in October. Mr Izetbegovic, 74, cited his age and health for his decision to withdraw from the three-member presidency at the end of his term as the chairman of the presidency on October. 12. “In August, I will be 75 and the job of a member of the presidency requires a physical condition that I no longer have,” Mr Izetbegovic announced in a statement yesterday. The presidency includes one representative from each ethnic group - Muslims, Serbs and Croats — which fought the 1992-1995 war. |
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NATO ‘guilty’ of war crimes WASHINGTON, June 7 (AP) — Amnesty International has accused NATO forces of unlawfully killing civilians in Kosovo and said one attack that killed 16 “was a war crime”. NATO immediately released a statement saying the allegations are “baseless and ill-founded”. “NATO forces violated the laws of war leading to cases of unlawful killing of civilians,” the US chapter of the human rights group said yesterday in a statement releasing its 60-page report. “NATO did not always meet its legal obligations in selecting targets and in choosing means and methods of attack”. The Amnesty International report examined a number of attacks in the 78-day bombing campaign, including those that struck railroad bridges, convoys of displaced civilians and the headquarters of Serbian state television. “In... the attack on the headquarters of Serbian state radio and television, NATO launched a direct attack on a civilian object, killing 16 civilians,” the report said. “Such an attack was a war
crime”, it said. “Civilian deaths could have been significantly reduced if NATO forces had fully adhered to the laws of war during operation allied force”, the organisation added. The laws of war include prohibitions on any direct attacks against civilians or civilian objects, it said. In various attacks, including the Grdelica railroad bridge on April 12, the road bridge in Lunane on May 1 and Varvarin bridge on May 30, NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians. AI charged that no proper investigation had been conducted by NATO or its member states into these incidents. No measures were taken against anyone responsible except in the case of the attack against the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. |
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Russian aircraft
carrier for India soon MOSCOW, June 7 (UNI) — India is to receive Russia’s revamped and fully re-equipped aircraft carrier “Admiral Gorshkov’’ in the near future. According to ‘Voice of Russia’ yesterday, the contract papers for the carrier were ready to be initialled. However, no further details were given about the signing ceremony which might coincide with the Indian Defence Minister, Mr George Fernandes’ scheduled visit to Moscow. The aircraft carrier decommissioned from the Russian naval service few years ago, was offered free of cost to
India.
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Rebels reject
self-rule offer
JOLO, June 7 (AFP) — Extremist gunmen holding 21 mostly foreign hostages have rejected a Philippine offer of expanded Muslim self-rule in this southern island, sources close to government negotiators said today. Senior leaders of Abu Sayyaf wrote to chief government negotiator Roberto Aventajado last
weekend stating that “your offer of an expanded autonomy may not be acceptable to the Bangsamoro people,” according to a copy of their letter. The establishment of
Bangsamoro, or Moro nation, in the southern third of the largely Roman Catholic Philippine Archipelago is the ultimate objective of Muslim separatist movements which have wracked the Mindanao region for nearly 30 years. The Abu Sayyaf rebels had demanded the setting up of an Islamic state as the price for freeing the hostages they had kidnapped in the Malaysian resort of Sipadan on April 23. |
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AIDS epidemic
strikes Siberian city
MOSCOW, June 7 (AFP) — An AIDS epidemic has hit the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg, where the number of infected persons has risen from 26 to 240 since last year, Itar-Tass reported today. The chief doctor who signed a resolution calling for emergency measures to be adopted estimated that between 800 and 1,000 persons would be infected by the end of the year, private television channel NTV said. Specialists at the city health centre said the sharp rise paralleled an increase in drug use. “Ninety per cent of those infected with the aids virus inject themselves with drugs,” Nadezhda Bashkova, head of the infections unit at the centre, told
NTV. |
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Gorbachev saved
from drowning
MOSCOW, June 7 (Reuters) — The former Soviet leader, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, was saved by a Costa Rican lifeguard after he swam too far out in the Caribbean Sea, a Russian newspaper reported today. The Russian daily Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that Mr Gorbachev (69) “was not a bad swimmer, but this time he overestimated his strength and swam too far out’’. His daughter Irina and granddaughter Anastasiya called for help and “a modest Costa Rican lifeguard dragged one of the most famous political actors in the world out of the water.” |
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Legislators vote to
dissolve Knesset
JERUSALEM, June 7 (DAP) — The Israeli Knesset (Parliament) today passed an opposition motion to dissolve the House and pave the way for new elections, by 61 votes to 48. The Opposition victory came after three of the six coalition factions broke ranks and voted with it. |
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Duty to family & prostitution UNITED NATIONS, June 7 (Reuters) — Grinding poverty and a sense of duty to family can push some girls as young as seven across national borders and into prostitution, according to experts at a U.N. Global Women’s Conference. At a discussion on trafficking of women and girls on Tuesday, one activist referred to these elemental forces in the case of girls taken from their homes in Nepal and into brothels in the big cities of neighbouring India. “In these circumstances (of extreme poverty), there were parents who were willing to let their daughter go, because they found that if they let one daughter go-for three years they would sustain the rest of the family, and the daughters agreed because they wanted to be dutiful daughters,” said filmmaker and activist Ruchira Gupta. A U.S. State Department report said between one and two million women and girls were coerced each year into prostitution, manual labour and domestic service that amounted to virtual slavery. Some 800,000 of these were forced into sex work in India, and thousands more faced the same fate in Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia and parts of Africa. In part of Nepal, where many young girls are taken from villages and sent to brothels in India, teenage ex-prostitutes have become an effective force of border guards on the lookout for trafficking in young girls, Gupta told an audience of several dozen women. “They are actually standing at the border of India and Nepal, where the agents bring the girls, give payoffs to policemen and take the girls across the border,” Gupta said. Those young women aged 17 to 18, often walk up to a suspicious-looking man or woman with a group of young girls, talk to the girls and tell their stories of brothel life in Bombay, Delhi or Calcutta. If the girls change their minds, they are taken to transit homes along the border, given counselling, support and bus tickets back to Nepal. In Thailand, she said, the government had set up a programme in cooperation with the
Pan-Pacific hotel chain to identify girls at high risk of being sold into prostitution, and they were given scholarships for nine to 18 months of training as hotel workers, florists and other jobs. Housed by UNICEF during training so that counselling is available, 370 girls have gone through the programme, and most have been hired as legitimate hotel workers. Another successful strategy in parts of India, Nepal and the Philippines was sensitivity training for police, Gupta said. |
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LTTE submarine in Thai shipyard BANGKOK, June 7 (DPA) — A half-built mini-submarine discovered in a shipyard in southern Thailand was destined for a “Sea Tigers” sabotage missions in Sri Lanka, news reports said today. The vessel, which was discovered by Thai authorities on April 11 in the seacraft shipyard of Phuket island, 630 km south of Bangkok, was to be delivered to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, said the Bangkok Post newspaper citing “an intelligence official.” The shipyard is partly owned by Christy Reginald Lawrence, a Jaffna-born Tamil holding a Norwegian passport. Thai intelligence officials have long suspected Lawrence of being a member of the rebel Tigers who are currently waging a war against Sri Lankan government troops to recapture Jaffna. Lawrence was arrested in April in the course of a police crackdown on smugglers. Instead of smuggled goods, authorities discovered Tamil Tigers-related material and sophisticated equipment including radar and sonar, on his shipyard premises, said The Bangkok Post. |
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EU agrees on
racial equality
BRUSSELS, June 7 (DPA) — The European Union governments have agreed on first-ever measures to combat discrimination on racial and ethnic grounds. A directive adopted by EU Social Affairs
Ministers yesterday calls for the equal treatment of persons irrespective of their racial or ethnic origin in a range of areas, including access to employment, working conditions and membership of employers’ or workers’ organisations. Access to education and to goods and services is also covered. Officials said the measures were the first ever adopted by the EU under article 13 of the EU’s Amsterdam Treaty.” |
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