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| Saturday, September 16, 2000, Chandigarh, India   
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Wahid orders arrest
of Suharto’s son Indonesia, UN sign deal on Timor 3 more nations’ truckers
join fuel protest Suu Kyi plans to leave capital
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Iraqi jet ‘violates’
Saudi air space Lopez’s terms for
having child Chechens
put $ 2 m on Putin’s head 
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Wahid orders arrest of Suharto’s son JAKARTA, Sept 15 (Reuters) — Indonesian Defence Minister M.D. Mahfud on Friday suggested that the corruption trial of former President Suharto be called off, warning that more violence might ensue if the landmark case proceeds. “If we keep meddling with this matter we will not have time to take care of other problems because we will continue to be harassed...More terror will keep coming,” Mr Mahfud said in an interview with Reuters. His comments coincide with officials’ statements that Suharto backers might be behind recent bomb blasts in Jakarta, including a car bomb attack on Wednesday that killed 15 persons on the eve of the resumption of the ex-autocrat’s graft trial. On Friday, President Abdurrahman Wahid said he had ordered police to arrest Suharto’s youngest son, Hutomo (Tommy) Mandala Putra, in relation to a probe into a bomb attack. He did not elaborate. Mr Mahfud suggested that Jakarta should seek reconciliation outside the court — an act, however, that might ignite students already enraged that Suharto has so far avoided the court at the first two sessions because of ill health. He joined other officials in accusing cronies of Suharto of being behind the spate of bombings to hit Jakarta in recent months, including this week’s blast at the stock exchange, but he offered no evidence. “They (the bombings) are being funded by conglomerates who took advantage of Suharto’s Government as well as Suharto’s cronies who have a large amount of money,” he said. His accusations are among the strongest by any member of the government about who might be behind the series of bombings in the capital. A return of any ill-gotten wealth by Suharto, and a public apology, could be a deal reached outside court, Mr Mahfud added. Mr Wahid has said he will pardon Suharto if he is found guilty. The ex-president has been charged with corruption involving millions of dollars but denies any wrongdoing. Many of Suharto’s associates grew enormously wealthy during his 32-year rule as their vast network of companies prospered from government contracts and other opportunities. |
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Indonesia, UN sign
deal on Timor JAKARTA, Sept 15 (Reuters) — Indonesia and the UN on Friday signed an agreement to work together in resolving the fate of 120,000 East Timorese refugees stuck in squalid camps along the West Timor border. The memorandum of understanding, signed on the resort island of Bali, comes after intense foreign pressure on Indonesia to disband violent pro-Jakarta militia who last week murdered three UN international aid staff at a West Timor border town. That pressure will grow when US Defence Secretary William Cohen visits Jakarta early next week. His visit was to have been followed by a trip to Jakarta by a UN Security Council delegation to demand Indonesia disband the militia, who killed hundreds and left much of East Timor in ruins. Indonesia has effectively blocked that trip, saying that it wanted to deal with the issue itself first. |
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3 more nations’ truckers join fuel protest BARCELONA (Spain), Sept 15 (Reuters) — Truckers in Spain, Ireland and Poland joined Europe-wide protests against high petrol prices on Friday while Britain and Belgium struggled to recover from the paralysing effects of days of fuel blockades. Convoys of Spanish truckers and farmers joined forces to slow traffic on the main ring road around Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city, and farmers planned similar action in Merida, in the western Extremadura agricultural region. Others planned to picket the site of this weekend’s Spanish-German summit in the city of Segovia, in central Spain, between Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. In Ireland, motorists faced disruption on rural and urban highways as thousands of truckers clogged roads with a go-slow protest. Hauliers pushed ahead with a threatened 24-hour-long campaign after the government rejected their demand that it should cut diesel fuel tax by a third. In Poland, columns of trucks driving slow at 30 kmph caused, traffic snarls in several larger cities but the country’s main roads remained generally clear. The protest was due to end later. Across Europe, government taxes make up the bulk of what drivers pay at the pump and add to the pain of crude prices, still at their highest in a decade. In the latest and largest protests in the Netherlands, truckers launched new wildcat blockades throughout the country, bringing motorway traffic in many areas to a complete halt. Angry German truckers caused traffic chaos for the fourth day running, jamming the northern city of Bremen, while Opposition politicians launched a parliamentary bid to cut fuel taxes. Schroeder’s Centre-Left Government has so far resisted demands to suspend so-called “eco-taxes”, which it started imposing last year on polluting fuels. But in Italy the government bowed to truckers’ demands for new fuel discounts, averting the threat of protests. Transport Minister Pierluigi Bersani and representatives of truckers’ unions signed an accord in the early hours of the morning. Meanwhile, Britain’s week-long blockade of fuel refineries and depots ebbed away on Thursday amid signs that companies were having to lay off workers, supermarkets were running short of basic foods and hospitals were scaling down operations as staff failed to make it to work. Some 300 designated petrol stations were being supplied for the use of essential services only on Friday, but it will take days for the entire network of 13,000 sites to be refilled. At around 80 pence ($1.13) a litre, Britons have the highest prices in Europe, some 10 to 40 per cent higher than those in other major countries. Meanwhile, British Home Secretary Jack Straw said he would head a special task force set up to avoid a repetition of this week’s fuel crisis by improving coordination with the country’s oil companies. He said the government had failed to anticipate the extent of the chaos that a few thousand peaceful demonstrators protesting over high fuel prices could cause. Truckers and farmers blockaded oil refineries and depots across the country for seven days to back their demand for cuts in the taxes that make British fuel the most expensive in Europe. DUBLIN: Irish motorists faced disruption on rural and urban highways on Friday as thousands of truckers clogged roads with a go-slow protest over fuel prices. Hauliers pushed ahead with the threatened 24-hour-long campaign after the government rejected their demand to cut diesel fuel tax by a third. Convoys of slow-moving trucks slowed traffic — in many cases to a standstill — around five Irish cities including the capital Dublin, although traffic in city centres was reported to be moving as normal. In Belgium, businesses and commuters were struggling back to normal on Friday after truckers ended nationwide protests that brought the country to a virtual standstill. Cars, buses and trams flowed freely around Brussels’ streets and tunnels, easing commuters’ frustrations after five days in which the city centre was virtually paralysed by huge trucks blocking roads. Most of the truckers left the capital late on Thursday night after their unions accepted an $83 million compensation package following tough negotiations with a government which refused to bow to demands for a direct cut in fuel taxes. |
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Suu Kyi plans to leave capital YANGON, Sept 15 (AP) — Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, left her residence today after two weeks of virtual house arrest and dared the military government to stop her from travelling outside the capital. The military regime yesterday, which announced it was lifting restrictions against Suu Kyi and eight other central executive committee members of her National League for Democracy, denied telephone contact and visits by all people but their closest relatives. Accompanied by other party leaders, Suu Kyi today entered her newly reopened party headquarters in Yangon. “We are a legal political party and they have no right to raid our party,” she told reporters. “I shall be travelling outside Yangon within the next 10 days for party work. It will be an organised trip, and we will do it openly. It is high time that the ruling SPDC (state peace and development council) stops putting restrictions on our rights,” she said. |
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Window on Pakistan FOR the past one week, two Asian rulers, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan’s military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf have been under scrutiny. Their utterances in New York and Washington (more of Mr Vajpayee) have been minutely dissected. Pakistan Today, The Nation, Pakistan Times, Dawn and often belligerent Jung have written extensively on the subject. The focus is naturally on Kashmir, bilateral relations, peace on the subcontinent and the role of the international community. It is clear that most of the senior columnists are deeply concerned at what is happening in Pakistan and whether democracy holds any future there. There is a fear of “Talibanisation” of Pakistan, and this has been forcefully discussed by Dr Mubashir Hasan in Pakistan Today. Jung in its comment on Friday labelled Mr Vajpayee as an extremist Hindu leader determined to pick up a fight with Pakistan. Rashid Patel, the columnist has also accused the Indian Prime Minister of threatening Pakistan all the time and lobbying hard to sell his ideas on Pakistan and Kashmir. Noting that the relations between the two countries were never so bad as today, Jung said,‘‘it is the RSS brand of fundamentalism and religious intolerance that is leading to the murder of hundreds of Muslims and Christians in India. So long as the BJP is in power, intolerance is definitely going to increase. It is time for India to listen to world powers like the USA and Japan and others who have been pleading for a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute and also check intolerance at the home front’’. Just opposed to this Urdu daily’s sharp comment, come the sober pleadings of Dr Hasan on “Talibanising” Pakistan. It is more out of concern and pain that the noted thinker warned: “Pre-1974 Afghanistan started to change through a brutal, internationally aided civil war in the seventies, which raged through the eighties and ended up with the “Talibanisation” of the country in the mid-nineties. ‘Talibanisation’ is based on a special interpretation of the Islamic faith — an interpretation and ideological stance that was not native to Afghanistan. It had emerged out of Pakistan. In 1974, even earlier, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto succumbed to, rather than resist, the pressures exerted by the leadership of the armed forces he himself had put in place, and the political opposition to ‘Islamise’ Pakistani society according to this particular interpretation. In July, 1977, Gen Zia-ul-Haq and his political allies, fully backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia and other, lavished money and weapons, education and training, skills and experience for the advancement of jehad led by zealots who believed in this particular interpretation of Islam. After Zia the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, advised by the military, continued to follow Zia’s polices and actively aided and guided the forces from which the Taliban leadership emerged in 1994, conquered Herat in 1995, Kabul in 1996 and Mazar-e-Sharif in 1996”. Pakistan Today also noted, “The successive governments of Pakistan and our military leadership bear major responsibility for spawning, popularising and providing physical power to the particular exclusionary ideological stance of the Taliban and playing a critical role in creating conditions that destroyed the old Afghan society and gave rise to the Taliban supremacy. It was Pakistan that brought the Taliban in power in Afghanistan. Is Pakistan going to continue with the policies of the past and end up ‘Talibanising’ itself?” Indeed, the Pakistani Press is alive and kicking, and the best certificate it got is from the Chief Executive himself who accused it of bias and irresponsibility. In New York, he asked the Pakistani media to compare themselves with their Indian counterpart and feel ashamed. “The Pakistani Press is mostly corrupt and on the pay-rolls of vested interests”, he thundered. And some journalists did pay him in the same coin. “Even your intelligence agencies keep some journalists on their pay-rolls”, they said, “I shall stop this,” was his sheepish answer. If Pakistan returns to a democratic rule some day , it would be largely due to the bold and alive media. Otherwise how could Nasim Zehra tell the military rulers the following: “Gen Pervez Musharraf’s mandate should be reforming, to the extent possible, the state structure and also instituting checks and balances within the system through, perhaps, the institutionalisation of the National Security Council or through the restoration of a new version of the Eighth Amendment. His reiterative pledge to create a new political culture and to bring in ‘correct leadership’ should be questioned. Above all by General Musharraf
himself”. |
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Iraqi jet ‘violates’ Saudi air space NEW YORK, Sept 15 (AP) — For the first time in more than a decade, at least one Iraqi fighter jet flew over Saudi Arabia airspace last week, a senior US official said. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said yesterday that Iraq’s purpose may have been to confront the USA during the UN Millennium Summit. Trying to put pressure on President Saddam Hussein, she met eight Iraqi opponents of his rule and discussed trying to build a legal case against him, possibly by forming a war crimes tribunal. “The USA salutes the courage of Iraqis everywhere in the opposition,” Ms Albright said in a statement. Ms Albright warned Iraq, that if it rebuilt its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction or otherwise crossed US “red lines,” it risked a US attack. “We have a credible force in the region and we are prepared to use it at a time and place of our choice,” she said at a news conference. Meanwhile, US planes patrolling a no-fly zone over southern Iraq hit an Iraqi radar installation but the extent of the damage was not immediately known, the Defence Department announced. The site, part of the Iraqi air defence network, was attacked at 6.30 p.m. IST yesterday, according to Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral Craig Quigley. Quigley confirmed that there were “a couple of violations” of the southern no-fly zone by Iraq on September. |
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Lopez’s terms for having child LONDON, Sept 15 (Reuters) — Hollywood actress Jennifer Lopez wants to have a child with lover Puff Daddy, but not before he marries her, Britain’s daily Star Tabloid reported today. Lopez told the paper she wanted to become a mother as soon as possible but would not consider having a child with Rapper Puff daddy until he popped the question. “I want a family. I am at that age when I am feeling like that’s something I want to do,’’ the daily Star quoted Lopez as saying. “But I wouldn’t have a baby until I got married, otherwise my parents would kill me. Its up to my man now.’’ The actress, who has also found success as a pop singer, said she was attracted to the Rapper because they came from the same background and had the same big dreams. “He is portrayed as a tough guy, but he’s my dream man,’’ she told the paper. Lopez, recently voted the sexiest woman in the world by a US Magazine, scotched reports that she had insured her body for $ 1 billion. The actress (30) said she sometimes felt like suing over media reports portraying her as a spoilt diva. |
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Chechens put $ 2 m on Putin’s head MOSCOW, Sept 15 (AFP) — A Chechen rebel website published a price-list today for the documented capture or murder of Russian leaders including President Vladimir Putin, whose bounty was set at $ two million. “The Mujahideen Military command has decided to issue financial rewards for the punishment of the highest degree of criminals in the leadership of the Russian federation,” the statement read. Signed by Chechnya’s most prominent field commanders Shamil Basayev and Khattab, the document named 21 wanted officials, including former President Boris Yeltsin, priced at $ one million, Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev and chief-of-staff Anatoly Kvashnin, both $ 500,000, and Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov at $ 300,000. According to the published statement, video or photographic evidence of the punishment would also be needed. The fighters added that 30 per cent of the price would be paid for a maiming. A more comprehensive list on the www.kavkaz.org website consists of 71 names. |
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Putin’s India visit
from Oct 2 MOSCOW, Sept 15 (AFP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin will come to India on an official visit from October 2 to 5, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said today. The Russian leader would sign a draft of bilateral accords and a major political document during the trip, the official said. Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov would visit New Delhi on Tuesday to prepare grounds for the trip, it added. |
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China sanctions 320 m for Karakoram ISLAMABAD, Sept 15 (ANI) — China has sanctioned Rs 320 million for the 860 km-long Karakoram Highway and seven bridges in the area, Mr Yan Changquing, leader of the eight-member Chinese technical experts team, said here yesterday. The Chinese team is currently on a visit to Pakistan. |
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