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| Tuesday, October 17, 2000, Chandigarh, India   
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Palestinians dead set against summit Pak terms for use of N-bomb Saudi Arabia seeks hijackers’ extradition Estrada ready to face impeachment Nepalese UN troops face court martial Hands off Taiwan: China |
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No foreign vessel hit ‘Kursk’: probe 10 Abu Sayyaf rebels surrender
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Palestinians dead set against summit DESPERATE to halt the most serious conflagration in West Asia in a decade, President Bill Clinton arrived in Egypt to try to salvage an Israeli-Palestinian summit from a failure that could resonate far beyond the region. As the summit opened in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm-el-Sheikh, Israeli and
Palestinian officials said they hoped for little more than a verbal understanding to end 18 days of rocket attacks, gunbattles and mob rule. The violence claimed its 100th victim yesterday, when a man died of a head wound in Ramallah. A senior Palestinian official said the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat was under intense domestic pressure to withdraw. As for the seven-year peace process, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, told his Cabinet that it was all but dead. “In the end, we will make peace with the Palestinians, but the current Palestinian leadership is now showing that it is finding it very difficult to make the decisions related to an agreement,” a Cabinet statement said yesterday. And so from the peace of the brave promised seven years ago when the peace process began, at Sharm-el-Sheikh it will come down to a ceasefire for the desperate. “The crisis is not confined to the Palestinian territories or Israel but it threatens the whole region and extends beyond,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said after meeting the Egyptian President. Although the day brought a relative lull in the violence, tensions in the region remain high. In Beirut, the Hezbullah guerrilla group said it had captured a Colonel in Israeli intelligence but an Israeli spokesman said the hostage was a businessman of Arab extraction who had been kidnapped in Europe. The summit is an enterprise handicapped from the outset. Mr Arafat’s attendance is the result of intense pressure from Washington, and his mere presence is fiercely opposed by many among his people. At Ramallah, more than 2,000 people turned out for a demonstration condemning the summit as a surrender. “Our blood is still fresh in the street, we are in a state of mourning, there are black flags on our houses,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, a Palestinian analyst. “We have awakened all the horses in the Arab world. Why should Arafat turn up alone, and on a donkey? Why should we go to a summit whose main purpose is to save Barak?” A senior Palestinian official who accompanied Mr Arafat to meetings with Mr Mubarak yesterday, said: “Without agreement on the agenda, there will be no summit. The Egyptian and Palestinian agenda differs from the American agenda. We have differences with them,” Mr Nabil Shaath said. Mr Barak also has precious little room for manoeuvre, having opened negotiations with the right-wing Likud party to form an emergency government, an act that would definitively kill off the peace process. Likud leaders said they would stay out if Mr Barak tried to restart negotiations with Mr Arafat at the summit. The Israeli Prime Minister’s demands reflect that hardening of positions. They include: an immediate end to the violence; the rearrest of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants released at the weekend; punishment for Palestinian police and members of Mr Arafat’s Fatah organisation who opened fire on Israeli soldiers; censorship of the Palestinian media, whom the Israelis accuse of inciting the violence; and preservation of Jewish pilgrimage sites at Nablus and Jericho, which have been attacked by Palestinians. Mr Arafat met one condition by putting 34 Hamas militants back in jail. However, he issued demands of his own: Israel to withdraw its forces from the outskirts of Palestinian cities, and to end the closure of the West Bank and Gaza which has cut people off from the jobs in Israel that are the lifeline of the local economy. Mr Clinton’s challenge now will be to reconcile those opposing demands, especially the divisions over an international enquiry, which wrecked a summit in Paris between Mr Arafat and Mr Barak. If he fails, he risks the implosion of his diplomacy in the run-up to the November 7 US elections, and the consequences from a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence, on November 15 or later. Mr Barak said that he would insist on the disbanding of the Fatah armed militias, called the tanzim, which means organisation in Arabic, and the return of Islamic militants to Palestinian jails. That argument is expressed most forcefully in Nablus, a stronghold of Hamas, as well as the tanzim. Officially, the tanzim operate with Mr Arafat’s sanction, but there are no guarantees he can rein them in. Key figures in the tanzim preach a far harder line than the Palestinian leader, and want to seal off his options of returning to negotiations. They are seeking alliances with Hamas, and other Islamist groups which have opposed the peace process from the outset, and are now calling for violent action. At Balata, where posters of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein now hang as a symbol of Arab defiance, the tanzim leaders say they have just begun to fight. They predict a long and bloody guerrilla war against Israeli soldiers, and armed extremists in the 145 Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The tanzim raised their first militia of 500 armed men in Nablus a week ago, and it has already been bloodied in clashes with local Jewish extremists. Additional chapters are being raised in Gaza and in the West Bank cities of Jenin, Hebron and Ramallah. — The Guardian, London |
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Pak terms for use of N-bomb WASHINGTON, Oct 16 (PTI) —Pakistan could use its nuclear bomb against India if its security is
jeopardised, its military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf, told cbs-60 minutes television programme. “I would never like to use it first of all. But if you ask me a direct question when would I use them. If Pakistan’s security gets jeopardised, then only one would like to think of it,” General Musharraf told the
TV programme yesterday. The military ruler said he was proud of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb “for Pakistan’s sake.” Asked how secure were Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, General Musharraf said “Very secure. That is my guarantee. The national command authority is in place.” According to the Federation of American Scientists Pakistan has 25 to 35 nuclear bombs which have the capability to target any city in India. Gen Anthony Zinni, retired chief of the Central Command, told cbs that General Musharraf may be America’s last hope in Pakistan, and if he fails, the fundamentalists would get hold of the “Islamic bomb.” Justifying the coup, General Musharraf said “the people of Pakistan were fed up with what was going on” in the country and that he “restored confidence.” General Musharraf asserted “Pakistan is not a banana republic or a failed state in the region with nuclear weapons, a state that could end up in a nuclear war with India.” |
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Saudi Arabia seeks hijackers’ extradition RIYADH, Oct 16 (AFP) — Saudi Arabia today asked Iraq to extradite the two Saudi hijackers who forced a Saudi Arabia Airlines Boeing 777 to land in Baghdad. Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz told reporters “we demand the handing over of the two hijackers” who are being held by the Iraqi authorities. Riyadh would “have recourse to all established procedures to obtain the extradition of the two hijackers,” he said, starting with
Interpol. He cited an international convention outlawing hijacking and an anti-terrorism convention, which the Prince said both Saudi Arabia and Iraq had signed with all other Arab countries two years ago. “We hope the hijackers will be handed over to us so they can face justice,” Prince Nayef said. The minister said the hijackers were both Saudis employed in the security forces who used a service revolver to take over the aircraft. The two friends “managed to smuggle a revolver aboard the plane which they used to hijack the aircraft,” the Prince told reporters. They forced the pilot of the Saudi Arabian Airlines flight from Jeddah to London to land in Baghdad on Saturday. He named the pair as Faisal Naji al-Balawi, (26) who worked in Jeddah airport as a security officer, and Ayesh Ali al-Fridi, a border guard in Najran, in the south of the kingdom. The first used his position to avoid security checks to carry the revolver on board the Boeing 777.Saudi Arabia and Iraq do not have diplomatic relations, which were broken off during the Gulf war in 1991 after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces in August 1990. Meanwhile, the Saudi Arabian Airlines plane at the centre of the weekend hijack drama arrived in Riyadh late yesterday after flying in from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, to where it had been forced to make a detour. Saudi Interior Minister Nayef bin Abdel Aziz and Defence Ministry officials met the 90 passengers and 14 crew aboard the Boeing 777 after it touched down. The passengers and crew had been freed in Baghdad when the two hijackers — said by a Gulf source to be Saudi soldiers armed with revolvers — surrendered peacefully to the Iraqi authorities after seizing control of the Jeddah-to-London flight on Saturday. |
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Estrada ready to face impeachment MANILA, Oct 16 (Reuters) — Philippine President Joseph Estrada, battling allegations of links with gambling lords, said on Monday that he was ready to face any impeachment proceedings against him in Congress. Estrada also accused the opposition of planning to sow chaos in the country. “They plan to start fires, throw bombs in the streets to create disorder in our country. I have an intelligence report that they are going to do this,” he said. Church and business leaders have demanded Estrada’s resignation after a former presidential ally accused him of receiving 414 million pesos ($ 8.7 million) in payoff from gambling syndicates running an illegal numbers game. |
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Nepalese UN troops face court martial KATHMANDU, Oct 16 (AFP) — About 26 Nepalese soldiers are to be court martialled for illegally selling ammunition to Muslim militants while on UN peacekeeping duty in Lebanon, a highly-placed army source said today. The 26, including a Colonel, were under detention in military barracks in Nepal ahead of the court martials, the source said. ‘‘The army officials were charged with having sold between 10,000 to 15,000 units of 5.56 mm bullets to Hezbollah and other groups fighting in Lebanon,’’ the source said. Brig-Gen Kiran Shamsher Thapa is to head an inquiry into the affair which could last four to six weeks, he added. ‘‘The Nepalese government has been under strong pressure from the international community which had accused Nepalese soldiers, including the Colonel, of selling highly sophisticated ammunition to the Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli groups in Lebanon,’’ the source added. ‘‘If found guilty, the army personnel may be fined and sentenced to tough imprisonment terms of between five to fifteen years’’, the source said. One army officer, who did not want to be named, said: ‘‘The 26 corrupt officers have defamed the honour and prestige of the Nepalese Army which has earned name and fame in the UN peacekeeping forces for several decades. The soldiers allegedly sold the bullets between January and February this year. |
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Hands off Taiwan: China BEIJING, Oct 16 (PTI) — China today pledged to the international community that it will never seek hegemony, but warned foreign powers not to meddle in Taiwan affairs. “The development and powerfulness of China will constitute no threat to anyone, but will rather promote world peace, stability and development. Never to seek hegemony is the Chinese people’s solemn pledge to the world,” a white paper on national defence, issued by the State Council, China’s Cabinet, says. “China firmly pursues a defensive national defence policy and is determined to safeguard its state sovereignty, national unity, territorial integrity and security,” the white paper said today, the last day of a four-day military exercise, the biggest since 1964. “The Chinese people know full well the value of peace,” the white paper, titled “China’s National Defence in 2000,” assures China’s neighbours who are apprehensive of Beijing’s rising economic and military power. |
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No foreign vessel hit ‘Kursk’: probe MOSCOW, Oct 16 (UNI) — Russian nuclear power submarine Kursk did not sink because of any collision with a foreign submarine, according to Russian Investigating Commission Chairman and Deputy Premier Ilya Klebanov. No evidence has been found to substantiate the general impression of an American submarine having hit Kursk, Mr Klebanov told Novosti in St Petersburg yesterday. He said almost 60 km area around the sea-bed where Kursk was lying had been scoured and no foreign object had been found. The Russian Deputy Premier also claimed that the two nuclear reactors aboard the submarine were quite safe and no radiation had been leaked from them. The submarine had sunk on August 12 in Russia’s northern seas and remains in the sea-bed eversince with 118 bodies of the crew members. Meanwhile, Director-General of the Design Bureau, Rubin, Igor Spassky has confirmed earlier reports about two explosions having taken place inside the submarine within 35 seconds. Between the two explosions, the submarine moved the 400 metres area and sank, and during these fleeting moments, all crew members had died, Mr
Spassky said. Russia hopes many foreign companies will join hands with in bringing up the sunk submarine. Talks have been held with Norway and the USA and now a Belgian company is also in the field with quite attractive proposals, the Russian Deputy Premier
said. |
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10 Abu Sayyaf rebels surrender MANILA, Oct 16
(DPA) — Ten members of a Muslim extremist group holding five hostages in the southern Philippines have surrendered to government troops as a major attack against the rebels entered its second month, the military said today. The armed forces’ headquarters in Manila said in a report that the 10 Abu Sayyaf rebels surrendered yesterday to pursuing soldiers in the swampland village of Batao in Maimbung town, Jolo island, Sulu province 1,000 km south of Manila. “The group yielded one M-16 automatic rifle, one M-14 rifle, eight garand rifles, and one grenade launcher, the report said. The surrender brought to 48 the total number of Abu Sayyaf rebels who have surrendered to the government forces since the military blitz started on September 16. Government troops continue to scour the 10-km long swampland in
Maimbung, where the group of Abu Sayyaf commanders Galib Andang, known as Robot, and Mujib
Susukan, were believed to be hiding together with three Malaysian hostages. |
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