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Monday,
July 23, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Army selects Hayat
for PoK PM’s post Wahid
announces state of emergency Between senses and statistics Your first days in Moscow can make you wonder whether your reading eye is letting you down or your seeing eye. All your senses, including the one which is called “common” but isn’t, tell you that you are in the wealthy capital of a rich country. But when you read about it the scene changes, and if you try too hard to reconcile the two your mind can get cross-eyed. So I won’t try that, and will let the seeing eye have the first say, because the scene is overwhelming, particularly if you still remember what you had seen in your earlier visits, as I do. Recollections of a visit as recent as the mid-1990s do not prepare you for what you see today. |
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US President George W. Bush (R) stands with Russian President Vladimir Putin after the G8 Summit in Genoa
on Sunday. World leaders, shaken by the scale of violence at their Group
of Eight summit, on Sunday wrapped up three days of talks marred by the
tragic death of an activist and ferocious street clashes.
Russian offer on Kyoto Pact accepted Kathmandu, July 22 Maoist rebels in Nepal have freed 22 of the more than 70 policemen they captured in recent attacks on security posts, government officials said today.
Gurdwara fire: priest hurt
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Army selects Hayat
for PoK PM’s post Islamabad, July 22 Qayyum’s Muslim Conference (MC) has won a simple majority in the elections to the 40 seats of the PoK legislature last month and staked its claim to form the government. However, a piquant situation has arisen following the army openly expressing its preference in favour of one of MC leaders, Sikandar Hayat Khan as “Prime Minister” instead of Qayyum who was preferred by the majority of the party’s elected representatives, media reports here said today. The Dawn reported that the military government has given its blessings to Hayat Khan, who was one of the elected legislators. “However, the army’s reported decision has sent a wave of anger among the supporters of Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan in the 30-member parliamentary party of Muslim Conference who are said to outnumber those who are siding with Sardar Sikandar Hayat,” the newspaper said. Quoting sources it said that the army’s General Officer Commanding of Murree division , Major-Gen Shahid Aziz, who is in charge of PoK affairs, had held separate meetings with Hayat Khan and Qayyum last Friday during which he informed them of the army’s decision. It said Qayyum did not anticipate this decision but remained calm and composed. He was offered the office of the “president”, but declined it. Qayyum, however, wanted to resign his seat in protest but decided to wait, it said. The Muslim Conference Parliamentary Party would meet in its capital, Muzaffarabad, tomorrow a day ahead of the first session of the new assembly and discuss the leadership issue. The party had won a majority defeating the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Government headed by Sultan Mehamud. Dawn said rumours were also rife that the federal government was considering appointing a retired Major-General from the PoK southern belt as “president”. The reasons for army’s reservations in backing Qayyum, who was known to pursue an independent line from the Pakistan Government’s stated Kashmir policy, were also not clear. Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan’s criticism of the military regime of Gen Pervez Musharraf cost him the “Prime Minister’s” chair. The chairman of the MC Special Committee, Sikandar Hayat Khan, is expected to be sworn on Tuesday as the new leader of the PoK assembly in Muzaffarabad. Major-Gen Shahid Aziz, sought the cooperation of Mr Qayyum for the election of Mr Hayat Khan as new “Premier”, but met with failure, party sources said. When Mr Qayyum realised the military government was against his candidature for the post, he offered to field his son Sardar Atique Ahmed. This proposal was also rejected.
PTI, UNI |
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Wahid announces state of emergency Jakarta, July 22 The announcement was made at a nationally-televised press conference, hours before he was due to appear before an impeachment hearing of the National Assembly. The President also said he had "frozen" the Opposition Golkar Party, and would set up a body to hold elections within a year. "As the President of the Republic of Indonesia, I announce the following steps," Wahid said. "Freeze the MPR and the DPR (the upper and lower houses of Parliament.) "Second, return the sovereignty to the people ... Hold elections within a year." He said that in the "name of the
people of the Republic of Indonesia, he was forced to take
extraordinary steps with "the conviction and the responsibility
to safeguard the nation." AFP |
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MOSCOW NOTEBOOK Your first days in Moscow can make you wonder whether your reading eye is letting you down or your seeing eye. All your senses, including the one which is called “common” but isn’t, tell you that you are in the wealthy capital of a rich country. But when you read about it the scene changes, and if you try too hard to reconcile the two your mind can get cross-eyed. So I won’t try that, and will let the seeing eye have the first say, because the scene is overwhelming, particularly if you still remember what you had seen in your earlier visits, as I do. Recollections of a visit as recent as the mid-1990s do not prepare you for what you see today. I mean I remember the streets were empty of traffic except for run down trams and buses that trundled along on broken down roads. Shops were equally empty, with long queues of people who waited for hours and then went home, clutching the few coins with which they had hoped to buy something. And even the metro, a magnificent work of Soviet planning and execution, begged for a little post-Soviet maintenance. All that has gone. Yes, there are many footprints and finger prints of time, the pot holes here and there in which water stagnates after a shower, and the plaster peeling from some buildings which go back a hundred years or more, and public toilets which are generally best avoided. But what is new is dazzling. Corporate buildings shine with steel and glass and imaginative architecture. Cars don’t let you see the road very much. The metro is back to its proud self. The traffic management is great, whether underground or above. Flyovers, huge and numerous already, are being multiplied all over the town, in fact are being laid down as carpets, in double and triple layers, by machines which match those in use in any country. “Moscow’s roller coasters” is what a visitor called them. Broad avenues and boulevards which snake through and in and out of the city are flanked on both sides by mile after mile of ten or twelve-storied buildings of flats. Some are still reminders of the stolid construction of Soviet days but many are of elegant new styles, and have small but numerous green spaces between them. Equally numerous within the older parts of the city are the shining golden domes of scores of Orthodox Christian churches which have been renovated at great cost by the authorities, both spiritual and temporal. Like the curly domes of the Kremlin, these churches and their gorgeously costumed priests tell you if nothing else had done it yet that you are out of the “Europe” you are familiar with and at the edge of the Asian drama. The crowded shopping bazaars of central Moscow and the weekly farmers’ markets at the edges may fascinate a newcomer with the variety of their ethnic faces and fare. But in fact they are struggling for survival against the growing and high powered competition offered by what still go by the name of super markets but better deserve a name which is growing popular, “hyper markets.” Such are the lavish stocks they hold, of the finest cheeses and wines and all things good. You can buy the latest cars in them but do not ask for a box of matches. Also scattered throughout the city, inner or outer, are elaborately decorated fashion houses bearing all the most glamorous names you can see, a shade less conspicuously than in Moscow, in any European or North American metropolis. You have only to stand 10 minutes at a street corner to see what fashion, be it home made or branded, indigenous or imported, more expensive or less , has done to the old image of the drab Russian maid, wrapped in layer after concealing layer of thick woollen clothing to protect her against the harsh Russian winter. Heavens! How she has
changed. To see her at her best, wait for the time when Moscow’s brief but glorious summer begins. Then the landscape blooms, and so does the humanscape, especially the feminine part of it. As the woollens are replaced by flimsy cottons that fly about in the slightest breeze; as the day gets warmer the need is felt for strategic ventilation — then concealment ends and revelations begin. It is possible — just possible — that in sheer chic a street corner view in Paris scores a few points over its equivalent in Moscow. But not in the beauty of figure and face glowing in good health and shades of peach. Bottled beauty, the kind that comes out of make-up kits that could cost you half of your monthly wages, is much less in evidence than in counterpart capitals. But much more on display, till the sidewalk looks like a catwalk for thousands of nature-made models, is the beauty of sheer youthfulness. The same seems to be true of their clothing. High fashion and high cost clothing stores are not exactly teeming with custom, and what is so becoming on so many people that pass you by is not the result of high budgets. It is just that they carry it off so well with their smart forms and firm steps. And with just a touch of flaunting! Perhaps because they are conscious of how good they look. But may be more because of the good taste left in their mouths by the new sense of freedom they have, to be and to do what they wish. But while their statistics may be stunning, the country’s are not. Most people on the street who look older than 70 are probably 10 years younger. They look older because their adolescence was burnt out of them by the terrible 1940s and 50s, when the Soviet Union lost 28 million people during the war and perhaps a few additional millions also in the years of acute distress which followed before some recovery took place. Then there are further millions more who saw their wages and pensions snatched out of their hands by the collapse of the currency in the early 1990s and again a few years later. And now they are without the safety net which the Soviet economy had provided them until it was blown away by the winds of “reform”. Their condition is distressing, though it is noticeable that there is hardly any begging on the street except some by those, mostly Chechens but some Russians too, who have been recently crippled by the war in
Chechnya and its fall-out on the margins. Who then keeps the tills ringing at the hyper markets ? Take another statistic for that. Metro AG, a German company, is said to be the world’s third largest wholesale and retail chain. It is going to open six outlets in Moscow in the next two years according to The Moscow Times, at a cost of US $ 150 million. It says it will recoup that cost within six years, and it is obvious it will, because a gold mining loop is at work here for laundering money. A UN study says “According to some estimates up to US $ 100 billion have been laundered (in Russia) in just one single year.” Another report quotes President Putin as saying that just last year Russia lost US $ 20 billion of investible capital because it fled the country. It is not surprising that, according to another study, Cyprus, rightly described as an off-shore haven for illegal flows, has become the largest investor in Russia’s non-banking sector. Read that with what AG Metro says, that 60 per cent of what it will sell will be imported. At the prices of imported goods the customers can only be that numerically small but fabulously rich circle of elite Russians who are collectively and derisively called by the man in the street as “the oligarchs.” They are also the ones who are estimated to have siphoned a thousand billion dollars out of the country in the past 10 years. That is the money with which the stores will be built, which will buy abroad what will be sold in Moscow, which will earn the clean 16 per cent profit Metro says it will make, and which will be smuggled out again in an economy in which evading taxes has become a national sport. Hence it is that a country which is among the richest in the world in natural resources is rated, by Standard and Poor, as the lowest in the world, higher only than Ecuador, in terms of safety of investment, and is rated by Price Waterhouse Cooper as the world leader in corruption. |
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Bush-Putin accord on new arms ties Genoa, July 22 “Offensive arms and...defensive arms will be discussed as a set,” Putin told reporters at a joint news conference with Bush at the end of a Group of Eight summit in Italy. He said the agreement to link the two issues had come as a surprise and that a “joint striving” existed to reduce the two countries’ offensive nuclear stockpiles, but it was too early to discuss specific numbers. Both leaders said they were optimistic on reaching an accord. “I believe that we will come up with an accord about both a new strategic framework for defensive weapons as well as a need to reduce offensive weapons,” Bush said. The statements by the two leaders indicated Bush had moved toward Putin’s aims of negotiating mutual reductions in offensive weapons while Putin had not shut the door to Bush’s aim of deploying a missile defence system. Putin said an agreement on a new strategic relationship would mean Russia would never have to increase its deployment of nuclear warheads as he had threatened to do if the United States unilaterally abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Meanwhile, world leaders, shaken by the scale of violence at their Group of Eight (G8) summit, began wrapping up three days of talks marred by the tragic death of an activist and ferocious street clashes. At least 66 activists were injured, and 12 of them treated in hospital after the police swoop to seize computer discs and other material, a police source said.
Reuters |
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Russian offer on Kyoto Pact accepted Bonn, July 22 “We welcome the Russian proposal to convene in 2003 a global conference on climate change with the participation of governments, business and science as well as representatives of civil society,” the Group of Eight industrial powers said in a statement in Genoa. In the former German capital Bonn, top environmental officials were holding their last scheduled day of talks aimed at fleshing out some of the details needed to bring the 1997 Kyoto Protocol into force. That pact calls for industrialised states to trim carbon dioxide emissions by 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012, although none of the major polluters have yet ratified it. The head of the Russian delegation, Alexander Bedritsky, said a 2003 forum could answer many questions on the possible human causes of global warming. Most researchers, including the United Nations’ chief climate change scientist, say man-made emissions have contributed to a rise in world temperatures. But U.S. President George W. Bush has questioned some of the science behind the most pessimistic global warming forecasts. Bush told the G8 on Saturday that the U.S.A. the world’s biggest polluter, still had no intention of adopting the Kyoto Protocol. But Bedritsky, head of the Russian weather service, denied Moscow supported the U.S. position that further study was needed before making commitments on global warming. However, Ukrainian Environment Minister Serhiy Kurykin said scheduling a major conference for 2003 could delay efforts to reach a comprehensive global warming deal. “It’s an attempt to delay decisions to later,” he added. Other officials said Moscow might be motivated more by the prestige and financial gain that hosting such a conference could bring. “This (2003 conference) is to add to the political weight of Russia,” Alexei Kokorin, a Worldwide Fund for Nature official in Russia, said. Despite severe environmental problems, Russia stands to gain as much as $10 billion a year if the Kyoto Protocol goes into force because it will be able to sell spare emission allowances to countries unlikely to meet their targets under the pact.
Reuters |
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Nepal Maoist rebels free
22 cops
Kathmandu, July 22 News of the release of the policemen came as the ruling Nepali Congress Party was set to choose a new Prime Minister, following the resignation of Mr Girija Prasad Koirala, who was blamed for failing to stem the Maoist insurgency. Home (Interior) Ministry officials said 12 policemen were released in
Rolpa district in West Nepal, 10 days after rebels raided a police post and captured 70 men.
Reuters |
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Gurdwara fire: priest hurt Toronto, July 22 There were seven persons in the building at that time. Of them, only Prithvipal Singh Sethi, (72), granthi of Ramgarhia Gurdwara in suburban Mississauga, west of Toronto, was severely burnt. His injuries are not life threatening and he’s recovering in the burn unit of a Hamilton (Ontario) hospital, where he was transferred, the Peel regional police said. The police said the seven persons were preparing for morning prayers when the fire started. The other six escaped unharmed through a rear door of the building.
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