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| Tuesday, February 13, 2001, Chandigarh, India   
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Filipino rebels raid army camp, kill 12 MANILA, Feb 12 — Communist rebels raided a Philippine Army camp and killed 12 people on Monday while tens of thousands of workers, singing revolutionary hymns, gave a murdered leftist leader a hero’s burial in Manila. Thousands of refugees flood Guinea Indonesia, Aceh rebels sign pact Israeli troops kill 2 Palestinians |
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| Links with Hinduja UK Cabinet Secy may depose LONDON, Feb 12 — In a curious development, Britain’s Cabinet Secretary Sir Richard Wilson may face the possibility of giving evidence in the inquiry he had himself set up into the Hinduja passport affair, after media reported today that he had lunch with NRI businessmen Hinduja brothers. Clinton faces impeachment over pardons UNP withdraws poll case
against Chandrika ‘It was really Gore, not Bush’
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Filipino rebels raid army camp, kill 12 MANILA,
Feb 12 — Communist rebels raided a Philippine Army camp and killed 12 people on Monday while tens of thousands of workers, singing revolutionary hymns, gave a murdered leftist leader a hero’s burial in Manila. Only two soldiers, both of them wounded, survived Monday’s rebel attack. It was the first major rebel assault on a military target since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took office more than three weeks ago in a “people power” uprising that ended former actor Joseph Estrada’s rule. The attack on an army outpost on Samar island in the central Philippines coincided with Arroyo’s efforts to revive the stalled peace talks with the Marxist guerrillas. The dead included 11 soldiers and a militiaman, a military report said. It said the attackers suffered heavy casualties but gave no figures. Workers and students estimated by the police to number between 30,000 and 50,000 gathered for the burial of assassinated leftist leader Filemon Lagman in Manila. A red flag embossed with the hammer and sickle sign draped Lagman’s coffin and white and yellow blossoms smothered the casket as a truck bore his remains along a five-km (three-mile) route to the cemetery. Lagman was gunned down by two assassins last week on the Manila university campus. The police said evidence suggested Lagman, who broke from the mainstream leftist Communist Party of the Philippines in 1995 and organised a militant union, might have been killed by another leftist group. The attack by 100 New People’s Army (NPA) rebels in Samar occurred two days after Arroyo announced she had set up two teams of negotiators to try to re-start negotiations with the Marxist group and with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The MILF is one of two groups fighting for an Islamic state in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country. Arroyo has reversed Estrada’s tough policy against the two rebel groups, saying the country needed to be united to confront its many economic problems. The military estimates NPA strength at 11,000 men and the strength of the MILF at 15,000.
— Reuters |
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Thousands of refugees flood Guinea CONAKRY, Feb 12 — Mr Lubbers, who visited camps in conflict-stricken southeast Guinea yesterday, planned to meet government ministers to discuss the plight of Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees. An escalating conflict between dissidents and government soldiers on Guinea’s southern border has forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee camps where they had sought refuge in recent years from civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The fighting has also cut off aid to an estimated 2,50,000 refugees and displaced Guineans in the so-called Parrot’s Beak, which juts into rebel-held territory in Sierra Leone. The UN has called it the worst refugee crisis in the world. Mr Lubbers made clear that Guinea’s government and its army had a duty to ensure the safety of refugees within its borders. “We have already some progress there of better coordination with the government of Guinea,” he told refugees at Massakoundou camp yesterday. “Their military are instrumental to provide security.” The UNHCR refugee agency is trucking hundreds of refugees a day from the conflict zone to camps in safer areas to the north. Nevertheless, UNHCR staff said several of the agency’s vehicles were still being held by Guinean soldiers after being requisitioned. They said Lubbers would be pushing for more cooperation from the Army when he met ministers. The former Dutch Prime Minister, who took over as UN High Commissioner for refugees last month, pledged to talk with all parties to ensure the safety of civilians trapped in the war zone. “We need a corridor of security and safety for refugees and humanitarian workers,” Mr Lubbres said yesterday after driving in an UNHCR convoy past villages destroyed in previous rebel attacks. Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front rebels are accused of fighting alongside Guinean dissidents and Liberian nationals against Guinean troops in southern Guinea. Hundreds of people have been killed in the five months of attacks. Liberia in turn accuses Guinea of harbouring rebels fighting government forces in northern Liberia.
— Reuters |
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Indonesia, Aceh rebels sign pact JAKARTA, Feb 12 — Just days before a shaky interim ceasefire was due to expire, the Indonesian Government and separatist Acehnese rebels have signed a new temporary accord to reduce violence in restive Aceh province, local reports said today. The agreement, reached during weekend talks in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, came as seven more persons were killed and 20 injured in violence, The Jakarta Post reported. The government and the armed Free Aceh Movement (GAM) agreed to halt violence, including illegal raids by the armed forces and ambushes by guerrilla fighters. However, previous agreements in May, 2000, and in January have failed to stop the de facto war in Aceh, which has killed more than 5,000 persons in the past decade. At least 120 have been killed since a ceasefire extension began on January 15. Both Indonesian defence forces and the GAM have continued to violate the pact, with the military launching raids and the rebels responding with ambushes. Meanwhile many Indonesians think that President Abdurrahman Wahid should resign and agreed with a recent parliamentary move to censure him over his involvement in financial scandals, two opinion polls showed. The surveys coincide with fresh criticism over Mr Wahid’s plan to embark on yet another overseas trip later this month, at a time when violent protests and political bickering threaten to jeopardise Indonesia’s fragile transition to democracy. A Media Indonesia newspaper survey showed nearly 70 per cent of 1,178 respondents agreed that Mr Wahid should quit following Parliament’s rebuke which follows growing disillusion with the Muslim cleric’s rocky 15-month rule. The latest edition of the leading tempo magazine, which hit the stands today, showed that 88 per cent of 516 persons surveyed agreed with Parliament’s decision to censure Mr Wahid over the scandals, worth a total of $ 6.1 million. Mr Wahid has denied any wrongdoing.
— DPA |
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Israeli troops kill 2 Palestinians RAMALLAH, Feb 12 — Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians in separate incidents in the West Bank today, Palestinian hospital sources and witnesses said. Witnesses said Ziad Abu Sway (20), was killed when Israeli soldiers shot at a bus carrying Palestinian labourers near Al-Khader village close to the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Mohammed Barmil (47), was hit in the neck by a shrapnel and seriously wounded in the same incident. Palestinian hospital officials said Atef Ahmed Al-Nabulsi was shot dead near the West Bank city of Ramallah and was taken by Israeli soldiers to a military hospital. At least 387 persons, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in the fighting which erupted in late September. BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla movement refused to comment today on allegations that one of its members had been arrested in Israel while preparing to stage an attack. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s office said on Sunday that Israel’s internal security service Shin Beth had arrested Jihad Shuman, “who holds a British passport and is suspected of having been sent from Lebanon by Hezbollah to stage an attack in Israel”. “We have no information and no comment to make on this matter,” Hezbollah’s press office said. The Israeli statement said Shuman was arrested in early January and “is still being interrogated on his recruitment in Lebanon and his mission in Israel”. Shortly before the statement was published, Shuman’s lawyer, Lea Tzemel, said her 32-year-old client had been heard by the Jerusalem district court. She said Shuman was charged with “having been commissioned by a terrorist organisation to stage attacks in Israel”. He pleaded not guilty and categorically denied he had entered Israel with the intention of carrying out “terrorist activities”, she said, adding that he complained of “having been tortured during his
detention”.
— Reuters, AFP |
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Links with Hinduja LONDON, Feb 12 — In a curious development, Britain’s Cabinet Secretary Sir Richard Wilson may face the possibility of giving evidence in the inquiry he had himself set up into the Hinduja passport affair, after media reported today that he had lunch with NRI businessmen Hinduja brothers. A report in the Daily Telegraph said Sir Richard, the most powerful civil servant in the country, had lunch with the Hinduja brothers at their London home in July 1998 along with Minister for Europe Keith Vaz. Sir Richard’s spokesman, however, insisted that the passport issue was not raised at the lunch and said before the meeting, the Cabinet Secretary was told by the Foreign Office that Hindujas were important to commercial ties between the UK and India. The spokesman described the lunch — during Hinduja group Chairman Srichand Hinduja’s bid to secure a British passport-as a “get to know you session”. “They did not discuss passports and he was not aware that either of them was applying for a passport,” he said. However, according to the report, Sir Richard’s presence at the lunch rang “alarm bells” at Westminster, with both Tories and Liberal Democrats demanding a full explanation. Friends of Mr Peter Mandelson, who resigned as Northern Ireland Secretary over the affair, also seized on the admission, accusing
Sir Richard of “compromising” himself. Mr Mandelson was due to give evidence to the Hammond inquiry at the Home Office tomorrow. Former treasury solicitor Sir Anthony Hammond was appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the application and granting of citizenship to Srichand Hinduja in March 1999. Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said last night that he would be tabling parliamentary questions on the issue. “Sir Richard must have been aware of secret service reports which led to the last government turning down the Hindujas’ passport applications because he sits on internal intelligence committees,” he said. “It is peculiar that someone who is Cabinet Secretary should be having lunch with people who seem to have no connection with his job in anyway. He is yet another important person the Hindujas have managed to get access to for reasons that are unclear,” he said. Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Andrew Lansley said “Sir Richard may like to explain why he felt it appropriate to have lunch with the Hindujas.” There were no rules barring cabinet secretaries from meeting entrepreneurs, but Sir Richard was one of those who subsequently played a key role in establishing Mandelson’s links with the Hindujas, the report said. He also circulated a memorandum to other senior civil servants asking them to declare any contacts with the Hindujas. — PTI |
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Clinton faces
impeachment over pardons WASHINGTON, Feb 12 —
“I’m not suggesting that it should be done, but President Clinton technically could still be impeached,” said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania in an interview with Fox television yesterday. Mr Specter, a member of the Senate judiciary committee, is looking into 140 pardons and 36 sentence commutations issued by Mr Clinton at the eleventh hour of his presidency and is expected to hold a hearing on the matter on Wednesday. The loudest outcry was caused by Mr Clinton’s pardon of tycoon Marc Rich, who fled the USA for Switzerland in 1983 in the face of $ 48 million tax evasion charges. Rich was also charged with trading with
Iran in violation of a US trade embargo. The pardon shocked even Clinton allies after disclosure that Rich’s ex-wife, Ms Denise Rich, had donated more than $ 1 million to the Democratic Party and $ 450,000 to a fund financing Mr Clinton’s future presidential library. Clinton aides had apparently counted on much more of Ms Denise Rich’s largesse, however Democratic fundraisers have been pressing her to commit as much as $ 25 million to the library, US News and World Report magazine reported. According to Newsweek, the US Attorney for New York is considering opening a criminal probe into the Rich pardon to see if Ms Denise Rich had been used as a conduit for donations from the fugitive billionaire himself.
AFP |
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UNP withdraws
poll case against Chandrika COLOMBO, Feb 12 — Sri Lanka’s main Opposition party today withdrew a legal challenge to President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s election in 1999 saying the Supreme Court had made its case more difficult to prove. The court ordered the United National Party to confine its evidence to the charge of “general intimidation” — only one of the eight allegations set out in the petition, the UNP’s Deputy Leader, Gamini Athukorale, who filed the case, said. “I have been advised by my lawyers that the Supreme Court order has materially changed the character of my petition and the burden placed on me,” Mr Athukorale said in statement. “I have been in this context advised not to proceed with the inquiry,” the statement said. Ms Kumaratunga won a second six year term in December 1999 after comfortably beating her main rival, UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, but only just securing the 50 per cent primary vote she needed to claim an outright win. The statement said the court had asked the UNP to prove it would have received an additional 1.2 million votes when the actual margin of Kumaratunga’s victory over Wickremesinghe was around 700,000 votes. Opposition groups and election monitors said the election was marred by vote rigging and violence by Kumaratunga’s People’s Alliance (PA), but they are generally seen as freer and fairer than last October’s parliamentary polls. The PA lost its parliamentary majority and UNP has since been stepping up pressure on the fragile coalition Kumaratunga cobbled together after the polls. An estimated 100,000 UNP supporters demonstrated in Colombo on Friday denouncing Kumaratunga’s economic policies and vowing to oust her.
Reuters |
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‘It was really Gore, not Bush’ WASHINGTON, Feb 12 — An unofficial handcount of ballets by the Ornaldo Sentinel has strengthened the view of Democrats and many others that former US Vice-President Al Gore really won the presidential election but could not get the highest office because of the Supreme Court’s decision to stop further recounting by hands. The Sentinel’s handcount of ballots showed that Mr Gore would have gained 203 extra votes in Orange County alone if it had conducted a hand recount of all of its ballots that machines could not read after the November 7 election. Hand counts by the paper showed that Mr Gore would have made a net gain of 569 votes — 32 more than Mr Bush’s certified margin of victory statewide. Orange County voters marked paper ballots with special pens. Ballots so marked are fed into counting machines at each precinct, which immediately reject those with errors and give voters a chance to correct them. Because of that system Orange County had one of the lowest rates of rejected ballots in the state. The Sentinel’s examination found that the most common reason for rejection of ballets was that voters apparently used pens other than those provided in the voting booths.
— PTI |
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