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July 22, 2001, Chandigarh, India   
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Musharraf misusing
Kashmir issue: Pakistan Opposition
MOSCOW NOTEBOOK
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G-8 leaders disagree on Kyoto Protocol Genoa, July 21 The Group of Eight leaders failed to narrow their differences today over the stalled Kyoto Protocol to combat the threat of global warming, an official said.
UN accord
on small arms trade
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Musharraf misusing Kashmir issue: Pakistan Opposition Islamabad, July 21 “General Musharraf blatantly used the Agra summit to perpetuate his illegitimate rule and get himself recognised as President by the Indian leadership,” the two mainstream parties — the PPP, led by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and the PML, headed by deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif — said. In his last night’s televised press conference, General Musharraf had alleged that politicians had no courage to talk about Kashmir and said the “politicians did nothing to resolve the core issue of Kashmir”. Reacting to the military ruler’s allegations, a PPP spokesperson Faratullah Babar said here that General Musharraf was “blatantly and brazenly” using the Kashmir issue and the Indo-Pak relations to strengthen his hold on the Presidency. Mr Babar said General Musharraf has “cleverly” used India’s invitation to “sneak” into the Presidency. Less than a month after India invited him, he ousted incumbent President Rafiq Tarar and declared himself President on June 20, he said. “He is now attempting to consolidate his hold on the Presidency by getting an endorsement from the local body representatives after the completion of the local body poll, currently underway,” Mr Babar said and demanded that the military ruler should hold general election and restore democracy. Questioning General Musharraf’s attempt to hold the Indo-Pak relations a “hostage” to the single issue of Kashmir, he said “Kashmir undoubtedly is the issue between two countries that has led to the conflict. Therefore efforts should be made to manage the conflict as it cannot be resolved overnight.” He said there should be a step-by-step approach to resolve the issue than holding the Indo-Pak relations “hostage” to the Kashmir problem. “General Musharraf used the summit for his personal benefit to capture the Presidency and used the failure of Agra summit to consolidate his constituency,” he alleged. PML Chief Coordinator Ashan Iqbal also accused General Musharraf of distorting the Lahore Declaration and using the Agra summit for his “personal gains”. In the declaration it was clearly mentioned that both countries should settle all disputes, including Jammu and Kashmir, through peaceful means, he told the Pakistani newspaper The Nation. “The mentioning of Kashmir in the declaration ensured the centrality of the issue,” he said, adding that the Lahore Declaration provided a platform for both countries to settle all outstanding disputes and establish peace in the region. Mr Babar, referring to General Musharraf’s allegations that Simla and Lahore accords failed because they had not mentioned Kashmir, said Simla Accord, signed by his party’s founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, has very prominently mentioned Kashmir. He said Simla not only addressed the centrality of Kashmir, but also ensured the longest spell of peace between the two countries. The PPP spokesperson said Simla and Lahore accords had to be the basis for the next round of talks as there was no agreement in Agra.
PTI |
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Hizbul rules
out offer of ceasefire Islamabad, July 21 “There is no chance of declaring ceasefire at this juncture,’’ he told a group of visiting Indian newspersons at his militant group’s headquarters in
Rawalpandi last evening. He threatened that the militants would step up their activities in the troubled state as he felt that armed struggle was the only way to achieve the desired goal of the people. “The militants have to take recourse of the armed struggle,” he said. He said when his militant group made an offer of ceasefire in July, 2001, there was no positive response from the Indian Government.
UNI |
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MOSCOW
NOTEBOOK ON my first visit to Putin’s Russia, I was prepared to see many changes from the earlier visits , I think two to Yeltsin’s, one to Gorbachev’s, and many to the preceding decades of the rise and fall of one of the most significant countries of the 20th century. But the range and number of changes I encountered exceeded my expectations. The first encounter began as I boarded the Aeroflot plane. It was not one of those trusted and trustworthy but noisy and lumbering machines which used to be the standard workhorse of this airline. No comrades. It was a spanking new Boeing, and spotlessly clean. The bathrooms did not have the array of perfume bottles seen on other international airlines. But they had no blemishes on their hygiene even though many passengers could have been from the Delhi-Panipat milk train. The air hostesses were unsmiling and not very “user friendly” as I would have noted in my younger years, but they were briskly attentive. Putin’s quick-step-eyes-front style has caught on. As it had done on leaving New Delhi, the flight landed on the dot. At the immigration counter the passport was still examined in the old Russian way, that is long and suspiciously, and in the baggage collection area there were still only half a dozen trollies, and on each sat a hefty porter. His expression made his intention clear: that either you must hire him or risk breaking your back in lugging your luggage all the long way to the exit. They reminded me of the unionised porters I had run into once on arrival at the “Trivandrum” airport ( as it was called before our linguistic liberation). They had left me in no doubt that either my self-rolled and small suitcase must be carried by one of them or seized by them. Compromise was reached only when I offered the full porterage in exchange for permission to roll my bag myself. But two surprises followed. A number of persons in the arrival area, obviously waiting for another flight, carried placards which said “ Welcome, delegates to the NATO Workshop.” That sounded strange. In recent years Moscow had protested vigorously when NATO tried so much as to set foot near Russia’s borders, and now it was hosting the enemy right in the capital. I would have liked to pretend to be a delegate, just to be able to ask a casual question or two about what had made the change and when. But then I remembered the first law of Moscow which earlier visits had taught me: When in Russia speak Russian or keep quiet. I know of no other world capital which is so impervious to English and so proud to be so. You cannot even read road names to know where you are going, because any resemblance between the English alphabet you know and the Cyrillic alphabet you see is purely coincidental. For instance “Restaurant” is still spelt “Pectopah” because “p” is “r” and “h” is “n”. When capital N stands on its head it is “ee” as in feel, and when on its heels it is “H”. B is V but small “b” is big B. “E “ looks never to the right, as it does the world over, but resolutely to the left though the country has stopped doing so. Then came the second surprise. A scholar diplomat, once posted in Delhi, had been deputed by the Academy of Sciences to meet me at the airport but was nowhere in sight, and when he came he said he was caught more than once in traffic jams. But traffic jams is one thing I had never known in Moscow. The city not only has a superb underground system, which is a specific remedy for traffic jams. It is also as blessed with such broad roads and avenues as only a communist city can have, because a Communist planner can draw lines on a map and every builder or driver must obey them unless he prefers a term in jail. And as a good communist city, Moscow had also been deficient in cars, the most typical and fastest moving symbol of pride in private property. So what kind of a jam had he been in ? But I did not have to wait for long for an answer. We had barely left the airport behind us when we came to be held fast in honest to God traffic jams, one after another, and six lane highways carpeted with cars. “A million cars are now added to Moscow every year”, my friend said, and the number is rising as I learnt later. But waiting in jams helped my friend in educate me further. In one area there were furlongs of smart new houses on both sides of the road, and I remarked that I had not seen them before. “These are the homes of the New Russians”, and when I asked what the term meant he replied “the ones who have globalised us by spiriting billions and billions into foreign banks in the name of opening up the economy. They also own the cars which have flooded our streets.” But not everyone minds that term now. A few days later I saw a spanking new restaurant named “ The New Russians”. Reminded of one in New Delhi called “ Richy Rich,” a derisive term at one time. In another traffic hold up he wagged his finger angrily at an old looking house and said “ That is Guzinsky’s”. That would not have meant anything to me if I had not read the previous day’s papers on the plane. They had reported the most sizzling details of two of the worst scams that have hit the scam prone Russia which Putin has inherited from Yeltsin. In one of them, out of the earnings of Gazprom, the richest state-owned company in Russia, $ 15 billion are said to go unaccounted every year. In the other, as a detailed and hitherto uncontradicted report has it, some of the best known newspapers in Moscow will readily publish a favourable report on your company if the price is right. Guzinsky is in the thick of the media scene. That the media publish these reports is one of the biggest changes taking place in Russia today. They take the pants off the worst free marketeers, collectively calling them “the oligarchs” and some as “the Yeltsin family.” But fortunately media exposes have also confirmed foreign reports that both America and Germany, major sources of aid for and trade with Russia, have warned Moscow that this drain on the country’s foreign exchange resources must stop before they will pledge more aid , direct or through the international aid agencies. Most Russians I met later welcomed the threat though some were also a bit cynical because they believe the drain could not have worked without the complicity of large financial interests and institutions, whether Russian or foreign. But the best episode in this learn as you drive process occurred as we stood immobilised in a traffic jam in front the most publicised landmark of the great transition From Lenin to Yeltsin , the While House, or the parliament building. Yeltsin had fired his guns on it some eight years earlier in an action which had driven Gorbachev and his perestroika period out of Russia and which an ignorant (or blindly anti-Communist) world had hailed as the dawn of democracy in a Communist citadel. The building no longer carried the huge black marks of smoke I had seen on it during an earlier visit. But the smell of that firing still lingers, as I was to learn a few days later. As I settled in a bit, I ventured to ask what was Moscow ‘s hindsight view of Gorbachev and Yeltsin now. The replies came in different words but with the same refrain: Gorbachev, who meant well, had blundered. But he would never have done, knowingly, what Yeltsin did in his closing years and with his eyes open: he allowed Russia’s enormous wealth in natural resources and military technology to be plundered by western commerce and finance while the western media serenaded him as the hope of democracy in Russia. But whether already democratic or not yet, and however painfully strung out on what the best known scholar about the country, McFaul, has called “Russia’s Troubled Transition From Communism to Democracy” to quote the title of his latest book, Moscow has never looked better to me than it did this summer. What towers above the muck of the scams is the grandeur of Moscow, the grandest pivot of the huge Eurasian landmass which stretches from London and Paris at one end to Shanghai and Tokyo on the other. No single country in the world forms such a long span of the history of this landmass, which is also the most fertile seed bed of the history of the world. Moscow may look dreary when it is buried under snow. But on a sunny day in summer it spreads out a visual feast of history before you. Its past continues to shine in the period architecture of many a street, and many of the buildings therein are jewels of harmony between proportions, balance, style and embellishment. Appropriately, one of them houses the National Institute of Architecture. Other buildings are massive not only in size but in the imperial power they embodied once, before the Russian revolution made Kremlin the seat of history’s second greatest superpower. Because of these buildings, in their day the homes of famous barons and merchants , the perspective from many a street corner offers a fascinating display of the period costumes of architecture. Between these streets, crowded with time, there are verdant parks which are made even more beautiful by their
tranquility, by the wealth of excellently executed statuary which commemorates more writers and poets than soldiers and kings, and this time of the year are carpeted by “snow “ — myriads of fluffs of cotton shed by the catkins of a poplar variety which has adopted Moscow. During the day they are sent swirling up by the warming air, and during the balmy night they float down to become playgrounds for children. |
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Impeachment hearing against Wahid begins Jakarta, July 21 The supreme People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) started meeting at the parliament complex, guarded by hundreds of police, razor wire and at least a dozen armoured personnel carriers. Moments before it opened, Mr Wahid dismissed the hearing, expected to last for several days, as illegal and said he would not comply with its summons to account for his turbulent rule. In a nationally televised speech from the heavily guarded and barricaded presidential palace, he appealed to his millions of followers not to resort to violence, but warned he could not control them. “I can assure you that I’ve been saying to the crowd everywhere...’please don’t come to Jakarta — I’m against violence’,” said Mr Wahid, appearing calm and undisturbed and wearing a Muslim peci cap embroidered with his nickname Gus Dur. “But don’t blame me if the crowd takes care of everything by themselves.” The MPR is widely expected to dump the ailing Muslim leader 21 turbulent months into his five-year term and replace him with his popular deputy, Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia’s founding president. The political showdown has stoked fears violence may erupt around the battered nation. The world’s fourth most populous country has never had a peaceful transition of power. Mr Wahid repeated his threat to declare a state of emergency, giving himself widespread powers and allowing him to dissolve the assembly and the parliament and call an early election. And he left open the possibility of calling an emergency before his self-imposed deadline of July 31. The capital Jakarta was calm, with shops and schools open as normal. There was no sign of the thousands of Wahid supporters who have flooded the capital in the past. The MPR session, originally scheduled for August 1, appears set to demand Mr Wahid come before the assembly by Monday to account for his leadership.
Reuters |
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G-8 leaders disagree on Kyoto Protocol
Genoa, July 21 “Regarding the Kyoto Protocol, there was discussion and the well-known positions were maintained,” said Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s spokesman, Paolo
Bonaiuti. “The objective was shared by all — better environment and better quality of life. How to achieve this objective is an issue on which there are some divergences,” he said. The G-8 leaders agreed on the need to work harder for agreement, the Italian official said. One European source said French President Jacques Chirac and Mr Bush held a forceful discussion on the matter.
AFP |
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UN accord on small arms trade United Nations, July 21 Weary delegates hammered out the final sticking points of the two-week-long conference at a tense, all-night meeting, and nearly all concessions on language were made to keep from crossing a series of “red lines” that Washington had threatened would torpedo any accord. At the end of the session, the delegates were forced to drop the two most contentious clauses in the agreement — government sales to “non-state actors” and restricting civilian possession of small arms — because the USA opposed them. “I’m happy to tell you that we have a document that reached consensus on this very important issue for all of us. It has been an extremely difficult process,” said Ambassador Camillo Reyes of Colombia, the conference president, who praised the African countries for their diplomacy. “Obviously, we could have obtained a better document, no doubt,” he added when asked about the shortcomings of the final agreement. “But at the same time I think we have a good start” to begin “eradicating the illicit trade of small arms and light weapons,” he said. The delegates are expected to meet later on Saturday to formally adopt the plan of action. Though many participants were disappointed at the extent of compromise needed to bring the USA on board and the non-binding nature of the agreement, most agreed the pact was still an important step forward, if only a first step, toward grappling with an enormous challenge. Many delegates accused the George W. Bush administration of pandering to the US gun lobby, including the politically powerful National Rifle Association, but said it was clear that there would be no agreement unless they yielded. The plan sets out broad guidelines for national and international measures to better track and crack down on the $1 billion-a-year business of illegal trade in small arms. The United Nations says such weapons has been used in 46 of 49 major conflicts since 1990, contributing to some 4 million deaths, 80 per cent of them of women and children.
Reuters |
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