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| Thursday, September 7, 2000, Chandigarh, India   
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Pro-Jakarta militias kill 4 UN workers in W.Timor Don’t standardise cultures: Jaswant UN Millennium Summit opens S. Council reform a distant prospect |
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Khaleda Zia indicted
for corruption Pressure on Arafat to soften stand HC stays Ershad’s
expulsion Asian murdered in ‘racial attack’ Army hands over 36 bodies to LTTE Hostage release put off Nazia’s body laid
to rest
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Pro-Jakarta militias kill 4 UN workers in W.Timor JAKARTA, Sept 6 (Reuters) — Rampaging pro-Indonesian militiamen killed at least three United Nations refugee workers in West Timor today, stabbing the victims and then setting their bodies on fire in the streets, the military said. (According to AFP, four UN refugee workers were killed. The murder of the agency’s three international staff occurred when thousands of machete-wielding militiamen stormed the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) in Atambua, a major refugee centre near the border with UN-controlled East Timor. The killings took place despite mounting international pressure on Jakarta to rein in the militias operating in Indonesian West Timor with support from elements of the military and police from safe havens in East Timorese refugee camps. “The mob stabbed them to death inside the headquarters and dragged their bodies to the road and set them on fire”, a military intelligence officer told from Atambua. He said all the three confirmed dead were UNCHR workers and their “partly burnt” bodies had been taken to the Atambua public hospital. The victims were from Croatia, Ethiopia and Puerto Rico, said the officer. “There were about 5,000 of them going on a rampage...we tried to stop them but they were totally out of control; It was crazy,” the officer added. UNCHR official Joseph Yeo, quoting the police, told newsmen from Dili that three international staff members had been killed in the attack. A United Nations helicopter has since airlifted 32 injured people from Atambua and was heading for the East Timor capital, Dili. All foreign aid staff in Atambua were being evacuated after the rampage, triggered by the murder of a militiaman earlier. The official Antara news agency said the murdered militiaman was one of 19 people Indonesia last week formally declared as suspects in an investigation into the pro-Jakarta bloodshed that erupted a year ago after East Timor voted overwhelmingly to end Indonesian rule. A UN official speaking by phone from the West Timor capital of Kupang told AFP that a fourth international staff member was dragged out of a hotel and burnt in front of it, he quoted the local staff as saying. “We don’t know the name of the person or who he worked for. We have four foreign staff unaccounted for, but they could be in hiding, because a lot of international staff were being chased by militia”, said the UNHCR worker. President Abdurrahman Wahid, in New York for the Millennium Summit, is likely to face an angry response from other foreign leaders despite his insistence Jakarta is doing the best it can to control the militias. The UN only last week resumed aid work in West Timor after suspending it following brutal attacks on its staff there. Mr Yeo said the UNCHR had asked the Indonesian military and police and the UN East Timor peacekeeping operation to help evacuate all its foreign staff from West Timor, totalling about 25, as well as other foreign workers in Atambua. A UN peacekeeping official at the East Timor border town of Suai said foreigners in Atambua were likely to be driven across the border into East Timor as soon as it was safe. In Geneva, a UNCHR spokesman, Mr Kris Janowski, said reports from police and other local sources in Atambua said the office had been wrecked and agency vehicles there destroyed. “The security situation in Atambua is believed to be extremely serious,” he said. The West Timor military chief, Colo Jurefar, said his troops had done their best, but could not control the rioters who were wild with grief over the earlier death and mutilation of a comrade. “We tried to quell the situation but some (protesters) just went wild”, he told Reuters. “The whole incident was triggered by the death of a pro-integration leader the night before. He was mutilated with some parts of the body gone,” said Col Jurefar, head of the East Nusatenggara military command which covers West Timor. More than 120,000 refugees remain in West Timor after the militias forced them from their homes in the East when these were razed after last year’s UN-brokered vote. Many of the refugees are near Atambua, the main town in the eastern part of West Timor. |
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Don’t standardise cultures: Jaswant UNITED NATIONS, Sept 6 (PTI) —India has warned the international community against attempts to standardise global cultures and said no effort should be spared in strengthening the principles of pluralism and democracy. “Promotion of universalism must also not become a means to undermine the rich diversity of the human race, thought and civilisational accomplishments,” External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh said at the “round table on dialogue among civilisations” initiated by Iran yesterday. He said civilisation could not be based on narrow religious affinities and added there should be a sense of shared responsibility, acceptance of diversity and mutual respect. “Indian tradition has fostered the value of creative interaction and peaceful coexistence for thousands of years among our people as amongst people of the world. It is this vibrant mosaic that is questioned by the belief that civilisation can be based only on narrow religious affinities,” Jaswant Singh said. However, Jaswant Singh cautioned that maintenance and promotion of identities and protection of cultural and civilisational traditions must not become a tool to shield ultra nationalism. |
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UN Millennium Summit opens UNITED NATIONS, Sept 6 (Agencies) — The 55th General Assembly of the United Nations opened today, the eve of a summit conference of more than 150 heads of state or government. The Millennium Assembly will run till September 23 and include a three-day Millennium Summit which starts tomorrow. Former Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri was elected President of the 55th annual session. Mr Holkeri, who was elected yesterday, succeeds Namibian Foreign Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab who presided over the just-concluded 54th session. Finland’s first woman President Tarja Halonen and Namibian President Sam Nujoma will jointly preside over the Millennium Summit beginning today. The summit, which will be addressed by 150 world leaders, is expected to adopt a lengthy declaration in which all nations would pledge to halve the population living on less than a dollar a day and ensure primary education to all by 2015. The document, which is still being finalised, is expected to endorse UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s call for halting and reversing the rising incidence of HIV-aids, which is devastating societies especially in Africa. Mr Annan has also strongly supported the British proposal for expansion of the Security Council and rejected the contention that it would make the body weak and ineffective. Dismissing the suggestion that the Security Council should be kept small to ensure its effectiveness, he said “it is not beyond human ingenuity to do that. And I reject the idea that expansion necessarily will lead to a confused, ineffective Security Council which fudges on all issues.” India is a strong contender for a permanent seat in an expanded council which presently has five permanent members. Meanwhile the Pacific island state of Tuvalu was admitted to the United Nations, taking the world body’s membership to 189. Later, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said “Tuvalu may be one of the smallest nations in our organisation, but it is also one of the most peaceful.” In a related development North Korea accused the USA of instigating an airport search of North Korean diplomats, including the country’s Number 2 leader, who angrily called off participation in the UN Millennium Summit and a New York meeting with the president of South Korea. The incident on Monday at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, will hurt US-North Korean ties as well as slow reconciliation between the two Koreas, the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, Li Hyong Chol, said at a news conference
yesterday. |
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S. Council reform a distant prospect UNITED NATIONS, Sept 6 — Even as the three-day Millennium Summit began today, the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, struck a note of difference about world leaders reaching an agreement on the much-advertised reform of the UN Security Council. Mr Annan told a press conference that member states would need to work on this issue. Mr Theo-Ben Gurirab, President of the 54th Session of the General Assembly, which formally wound up yesterday, regretted the lack of agreement after seven years of debate and said it had proved “impossible” for member states to resolve the major sticking-points, among them the admission of new permanent members, the exercise of veto and some problematic procedural matters. Mr Gurirab used his valedictory statement to the General Assembly to deplore the gradual “denigration” of the Assembly, and called on the member states, particularly those from the developing countries, to “redress the persistent attacks on, and the marginalisation of, the foremost organ of the United Nations, the General Assembly.” The President of the 55th session of the General Assembly, Mr Harri Holkeri of Finland, also struck a similar note in his inaugural address, stressing that to engage on a dialogue on an equal basis, the global community needed the Assembly. Even before the opening of the summit, the event is providing to be a nightmare for the residents of Manhattan, what with unprecedented security and traffic restrictions. Even the accredited media covering the summit are experiencing hassles. Nearly 100 protest demonstrations in the vicinity of the UN are scheduled to espouse a variety of causes in which different countries are involved. |
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Khaleda Zia indicted for corruption DHAKA, Sept 6 (DPA) — Bangladesh’s main opposition leader and former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia was formally indicted today on corruption charges, which if proved in a court of law could disqualify her for holding any public office or running for a parliamentary seat. The Bureau of Anti-Corruption filed a criminal case against Zia and two of her former ministers for allegedly receiving $ 35 million as kickbacks during purchase of two airbuses for the national airlines. The two aircraft were bought from France during Zia’s tenure in office between 1991-1996. “The charges against me are fabricated to malign my public image as a politician,’’ said Ms Zia, chief of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Begum Zia’s lawyers said the opposition leader would file a legal petition at the high court soon to quash the charges against her. A team of Bangladeshi anti-corruption officials visited France for investigations and collected documents for the case. |
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Pressure on Arafat to soften stand NEW YORK, Sept 6 (Reuters) — On the eve of today’s West Asia peace meetings in New York, Israel jacked up the pressure on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to make more concessions for the sake of a peace agreement. After yesterday’s talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Mr Barak’s office said the USA supported Israel’s position that Mr Arafat must be more “realistic”. The negotiators have set September 13 as the deadline for a settlement but the Camp David talks snagged on the emotional dispute over who should control east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the West Asian war of 1967. Mr Barak’s office said “Prime Minister Mr Barak and Secretary Ms Albright agreed that without an open, realistic approach on behalf of Palestinian authority chairman Yasser Arafat, there will not be the breakthrough necessary for an agreement.” But a senior US official, briefing reporters on the Albright-Barak meeting, said it would take two sides to make the deal, potentially the one that ends more than 50 years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien yesterday said Mr Arafat would have a direct meeting with Mr Barak in New York but an Israeli official said no such meeting had been arranged. |
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HC stays Ershad’s
expulsion DHAKA, Sept 6 (PTI) — The Bangladesh High Court today stayed for two months the operation of a Parliament Secretariat decision scrapping the membership of former military ruler H M Ershad, following his conviction in a corruption case. Judges Mohammad Hamidul Haq and S K Sinha also asked the Parliament Secretariat to explain within a week why the notification issued by it, stripping Mr Ershad of his 1996 parliamentary seat, should not be declared illegal and made without lawful authority. The court passed the order today on former President Ershad’s writ petition challenging cancellation of his parliament membership by the Jatiya Sansad (National Parliament) Secretariat. After hearing the petitioner and the state yesterday, the two judges asked the Attorney General to produce before them the file regarding the Jatiya Sansad Secretariat order vacating Ershad’s parliament seat. Ershad in his petition claimed that the Parliament Secretariat’s decision — announced last Wednesday — stripping him of his 1996 parliamentary seat, was illegal. Meanwhile, Speaker of the 330-member parliament Humayun Rashid Chowdhury informed the House about the Parliament Secretariat’s decision vacating Mr Ershad’s parliament seat, as it met on the opening day of its session today. |
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Asian murdered in ‘racial attack’ LONDON, Sept 6 (PTI) — A young Asian graduate was murdered at Notting Hill carnival here in a “racial attack”, carried out largely by a Black gang, the police said. Twentyeight-year-old Abdul Bhatti was attacked when he tried to defend a friend being robbed of his necklace, the police said yesterday. Detective Chief Inspector Steve Condon, officer-in-charge of investigations of the case, said the gang indulged in “totally indiscriminate” violence as it rampaged through the crowded streets of West London on Monday. Bhatti, a graduate of Brunel University, died a day later from “traumatic head injury”. Detectives are studying police video footage which captured the 50-strong gang after the murder, though no policeman saw the attack. |
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Army hands over 36 bodies to LTTE COLOMBO, Sept 6 (PTI) — The LTTE has admitted to losing 110 of its cadres in the recent round of fighting in northern Jaffna peninsula, while army’s death toll stood at 109 even as 36 bodies of the rebels killed were handed over to the outfit’s leadership. The LTTE in its update on its website said 110 rebels were killed while resisting the army offensive last weekend to push defences beyond Colombuthurai in the southern outskirts of Jaffna town. Army sources, however, maintained that 299 rebels were killed and 300 injured. Brigadier Karunaratne said army had handed over 36 bodies of LTTE fighters to the rebel leadership through the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC). |
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Hostage release put off MANILA, Sept 6 (AFP) — Philippine kidnappers today delayed the release of six European hostages by at least one day, rescheduling it for Friday, an aide to chief hostage negotiator Roberto Aventajado told AFP. Mr Aventajado told AFP earlier that Abu Sayyaf leader Galib Andang, alias Commander Robot, had told him by telephone that he would release three Frenchmen, two Finns and a German tomorrow. |
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Nazia’s body laid
to rest LONDON, Sept 6 (PTI) — The body of Pakistani pop singer Nazia Hassan has been laid to rest here 23 days after her death. Nazia’s family looked pale and drained at the funeral yesterday after weeks of legal wrangling with her “divorced” husband Ishtiaq Baig to settle custody matters. |
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UNITED NATIONS, Sept 6 —
India has warned the international community against attempts to standardise global cultures and said no effort should be spared in strengthening the principles of pluralism and democracy.
