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Monday,
September 10, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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4 die as
suicide-bomber strikes at rail station
Norway
resumes mediation Sindhis
deplore Pak army rule |
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No interim
govt before 2002: Pak Taliban
expel US aid workers Bhutan
People’s Party chief assassinated
70 killed
in Nigeria clashes
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4 die as suicide-bomber strikes at rail station Jerusalem, September 9 The attack coincided with efforts to arrange a meeting between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on a possible truce after nearly a year of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Channel One said it received reports from the police and rescue workers that four persons, including the bomber, were killed in the blast. A spokesman for the Magen David Adom ambulance service could not confirm the number of dead, but said there were fatalities. Witnesses reported hearing a huge explosion and seeing smoke rise from the train station in Nahariya, crowded in the morning with soldiers returning to their bases from leave at the start of the Israeli work week. The Mediterranean coastal city is on Israel’s border with Lebanon and had been a frequent target of Katyusha rocket attacks before Israel’s troop pull-out from southern Lebanon in May 2000. “It was a suicide bomber,” Mr Yaakov Borovsky, chief of the Israeli police force’s northern district, told Israel Radio. Mr Avi Zohar, another Magen David Adom spokesman, said: “There are about 20 wounded, among them four critically.” Meanwhile, Palestinian gunmen shot dead two Israelis in an attack today on a van carrying teachers to a school in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, settler spokesmen said. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian guerrilla and wounded his accomplice during an attempt to slip into Israel, Palestinian sources said. Spokesmen for Jewish settlers in the occupied Jordan valley, said Palestinian gunmen opened fire on the teachers’ van in the early morning on a main road. A source in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) said the two men belonged to the group and were on a mission to strike inside Israel. The violence came less than 24 hours after Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles at an office of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction yesterday. GAZA: The Palestinian Authority condemned two Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel on Sunday that killed three Israelis and called Israeli’s retaliatory missile strikes in the West Bank a “military escalation”. Israeli officials said the Palestinian Authority was responsible for the suicide bombings in northern and central Israel. “The Palestinian leadership rejects completely Israeli allegations that the Palestinian Authority is responsible for what happened today,” the PA said in a statement. “The Palestinian leadership condemns all operations that target Israeli and Palestinian civilians,” the statement added.
Reuters |
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Norway resumes mediation Colombo, September 9 Consultations with Norwegian representatives will begin tomorrow with a mutually arranged ceasefire to figure high on the agenda, Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar said on national television yesterday. The radical Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, People’s Liberation Front) was not averse to a cessation of hostilities agreed upon by the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), he said. Mr Kadirgamar’s announcement came as a JVP demand that the Norwegian peace bid should be shelved till the Tigers renounced separatism fuelled speculation that there was no possibility of peace negotiations for some time. “The government’s stand and the JVP’s stand on the ethnic issue are different,” the JVP’s general secretary Tilvin Silva was quoted in the Sunday Times as saying. “The government’s stand is to devolve power. Our stand is to give equal rights and to restore democracy to solve the national issue. It is obvious there is a conflict of ideas,” Mr Silva said. President Chandrika Kumaratunga went on national television over the weekend to insist that the Norwegian effort was still on track. “The talks with the LTTE are in no way affected. We haven’t even talked about it in the agreement (with the JVP). And the talks will go on. The government has continuously been in touch with the Norwegian facilitators,” Mr Kumaratunga said. She blamed the LTTE for the two-month hiatus in the bid to open peace talks. “The LTTE has told the Norwegians ‘we think the government is unstable,’ so they have refused to talk.” LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham said Mr Kadirgamar’s offer to invite the group for peace talks and willingness to comply with a “mutually agreed ceasefire” was an attempt to override the deepening political crisis that threatens to topple the government. Meanwhile, in a fresh bid to topple the government, the opposition United National Party is collecting signatures from opposition members for a fresh no-confidence motion. The signatures would be handed over to the Parliament Secretary-General after the new Cabinet is appointed by the President, according to UNP Deputy Leader Karu Jaysuriya. With the PA-JVP coming together, the government has now 119 members on its side while the opposition has 105 in a House of 225 members (excluding the Speaker). Though the speaker belongs to the UNP he has a casting vote.
IANS, UNI |
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Sindhis deplore Pak army rule London, September 9 “Sindh has been denied its socio-economic, cultural, civil, political and historic national rights, besides much
trumpeted status of an independent, autonomous and sovereign state as envisaged in the Pakistan Resolution of 1940,” the resolution adopted at the three-day World Sindhi
Congress. The Congress, attended by delegates from India, Pakistan, the UK, USA and several other countries, adopted as many as 28 resolutions, including one deploring military rule in Islamabad and expressing extreme concern at the suspension of fundamental freedom of the people of Pakistan. The meeting, attended among others by India’s former Law Minister Ram Jethmalani, observed that ordinary citizens, specially in Sindh, “are being harassed, imprisoned, and victimised on the pretext of accountability and law and order, while the new rulers have not even touched the top corrupt elite and civil and military bureaucracy.” In his address, Mr Jethmalani said, “We are not talking of the survival of an individual or a country but the very survival of a civilisation, which can hold a candle to every civilisation in the world.” Describing himself as a ‘respectful student of Islam’, Mr Jethmalani said “The holy Koran contains the germ of democratic society and Islam means freedom of thought”. Senator Makhdoom Khalique-uz-Zaman said, “The crude majority of Punjab was responsible for the division of Pakistan and to save the autonomy of Pakistan in the global village, Pakistan has to give autonomy to Sindh.” Sindh Democrats’ chairman Yousuf Laghari claimed that human rights organisations of the world were taking up causes of individuals while it was totally silent “when the whole Sindh nation is in the chain of slavery”. “We joined Pakistan by social contract but what happened to our culture? Our language is not recognisable,” he said. Mr Munawar Halepota, chairman of the World Sindhi Congress said the Congress recognised the threat posed to the integrity of the ‘Sindh motherland’ from the evil campaign of ‘Muhajiristan’ and de facto partition of Sindh. “The Congress strongly deplores the military rule in Pakistan and expresses extreme concern at the suspension of fundamental freedom of the people of Pakistan,” another resolution said. “This august gathering demands that all discrimination against Sindhis must be brought to an end, and the right to self-determination, as ensured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, must be restored forthwith,” it said.
PTI |
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No interim govt before 2002: Pak Islamabad, September 9 “An elected government will be set up and democracy restored in the country in accordance with the road map of democracy announced by President Pervez Musharraf,” chief government spokesman Rashid Qureshi told IANS. Pakistani newspapers have been speculating that the government was working on a plan to set up an “interim government” consisting of some politicians to preside over next year’s elections. The media speculation was prompted by General Musharraf’s meetings with Mr Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Vice-Chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). He was being tipped as the head of the “interim government”. “The reports in media are baseless and unfounded,” Mr Qureshi said. The PPP, headed by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, has declared it would not accept any position under the military government.
IANS |
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Taliban expel US aid workers Kabul, September 9 The arrested Afghan workers were employees of the International Assistance Mission (IAM), a self-declared Christian aid organisation, that was shut down more than one week ago. The foreign staff, who were mostly American, were expelled. The Taliban accused both IAM and SERVE — another newly outlawed Christian-based organisation — of preaching Christianity. The 35 Afghan IAM employees, now in jail, were arrested after they followed a Taliban directive to pick up their salaries at the Planning Ministry, which is responsible for foreign aid organisation. But when they went to collect their salaries they were arrested. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the Afghan staff were picked up for questioning or whether the Taliban planned to lay charges. So far the Taliban had not commented on the arrests, even to confirm them. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court today resumed the trial of eight foreign aid workers held for allegedly preaching Christianity in Afghanistan but no detainees, diplomats or journalists were present, officials said. “We have asked the detainees whether they want to defend themselves or engage lawyers,” a Taliban court official said. “We are meanwhile scrutinising the files of the case submitted to the court by the investigators.” He said the accused would not appear every day and the court would summon them when it thought it necessary. In their first public appearance most of the defendants denied they had been trying to convert Afghan Muslims to Christianity. Officials did not allow diplomats, journalists and relatives of the detainees to monitor the proceedings . The authorities were also not allowing foreign journalists and photographers to leave their hotel after some reporters took pictures of the detainees.
AP, AFP |
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Bhutan People’s Party chief assassinated Kathmandu, September 9 The radio, quoting the police and local eyewitnesses, said that Budathoki was slain by six or seven knife-wielding assailants at a Bhutanese refugee youth office in Damak in the district of Jhapa, 350 km east of Kathmandu. There are almost 100,000 Bhutanese refugees in camps in Jhapa district and most offices of Bhutan’s outlawed political parties are also located there. All political parties are banned in Bhutan. According to the radio, Budathoki was relaxing in the office of the Bhutanese Youth Organisation after meeting with a group of students when six or seven persons came up to him and asked to speak with him. They took him to an upper floor of the building where they killed him with knives. The assailants then jumped out from a window and escaped in a waiting car, the radio report said.
DPA |
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Qarase to be
PM; Chaudhry refuses to yield Suva, September 9 Presidential secretary Jeremaia Waqanisau said Fijian United Party leader Laisenia Qarase was to meet with President Ratu Josefa Iloilo early tomorrow, after Mr Qarase wrote to the President, saying that he had a put together a majority of legislators to form a new governing coalition. Plans for swearing in a new Cabinet were set for Wednesday. Even as the ceremony was announced, former ethnic Indian Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry refused to rule out cobbling together a governing coalition. Mr Chaudhry, ousted in the May 2000 coup which led to last week’s election, said his party was still in talks with a group of centrist moderates and the hardline nationalist Conservative Alliance Party as it looks for 10 seats it needs to form a government. “We need some more moderates,” Mr Chaudhry said, adding that his negotiators would hold further talks. A negotiator for Mr Qarase’s party, also known as the SDL, said Mr Qarase would take up the premier’s post. Mr Qarase claims to have the support of the moderate block, which controls the six seats he needs for a majority in the 71-seat Parliament.
AP |
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70 killed
in Nigeria clashes JOS (Nigeria), September 9 Residents said people went to church in the first tangible sign of a gradual return to calm in the usually tranquil tin mining city and Plateau state capital. But the official said a night curfew decreed on Friday and tightened on Saturday remained in force. Authorities had also barred any movement of people into or out of Plateau state in an effort to check the spread of rumours likely to further inflame the situation, he said.
Reuters |
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