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Wednesday,
May 15, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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2 Palestinian officers shot
Back to politics: Left gets ready to take on Chirac Move on Iraq: vote
postponed US raid leaves five dead in Afghanistan |
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Scribe of Indian origin arrested HuM “not a terrorist outfit” Unmanned flights worry Tigers
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2 Palestinian officers shot
Hebron (West Bank), May 14 He said troops also arrested 14 wanted Palestinian militants in an overnight swoop on villages in parts of the West Bank handed to Palestinian rule under interim peace deals in the 1990s. Israeli troops reoccupied Palestinian-ruled towns in the West Bank last month in an offensive the government said was aimed at rooting out militants blamed for a wave of suicide bombings in a Palestinian uprising launched 19 months ago. The army has pulled out of the towns but continues to encircle them and stage ad hoc raids in what it calls an effort to seize leftover suspects and pre-empt further suicide attacks. An army spokesman said troops raiding the southern town of Halhoul early on Tuesday shot dead Khaled Abu Knaam, local commander of the Palestinian Authority’s General Intelligence Apparatus, and another officer, Ahmed Abdel Aziz Zomareh. He said both were wanted for “many attacks against Israelis” in the Hebron area of the southern West Bank and were shot when they ignored orders to halt and tried to flee from a house that troops had surrounded. Washington: Notwithstanding Israel’s ruling Likud Party voting against it, the USA has again supported the creation of a Palestinian state. “President George W. Bush continues to believe that the best route to peace is through the creation of the state of Palestine, and side by side security with Israel,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters on Monday. “That’s what the President believes, that’s what the President will continue to push for,” Mr Fleischer said. Reuters,
PTI |
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Back to politics: Left gets
ready to take on Chirac Paris, May 14 In fact, the re-election of Jacques Chirac, who cornered a record 82 per cent of the votes in the second round of voting, was not close at all. But his decisive victory over Jean-Marie Le Pen, godfather of the racist far-right National Front, still leaves the country in disarray. The harsh truth is that Chirac’s triumph was neither that of his personality nor of his party, an assemblage of Right-wing forces dedicated to unravelling much of the social legislation enacted under the hapless Left-wing government of the past five years. Chirac won only 19 per cent of the votes (5.7 million) in the first round of the election on April 21, when Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was narrowly eliminated from the contest. His score was inflated to 25.5 million on May 5 by millions of Left-wing, anti-Le Pen voters, who in no way were out to support Chirac. The President himself recognised this reality in declaring on the night of his re-election that France had voted to ‘to defend the Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity”, rather than endorsing his programme. This is certainly what happened. And yet, the result did not promise sunny tomorrows. While humiliated at the polls, Le Pen nevertheless registered a total of 5.5 million votes nationally, the highest score for the far right in history. That support indicates a continuing rejection of the traditional parties, whether of the Right or the Left, by whole communities that have become totally disaffected from the political process. Next month, Le Pen will seek to manipulate his voters — particularly on the Mediterranean Coast, in Alsace and around the Channel ports in the far North, where his support was greatest — to confound Chirac’s candidates in the parliamentary elections on June 9 and 16. He is a spoiler, who would rather see France ungovernable than under the thumb of his arch-enemy Jacques Chirac. And where does the disrupted and demoralised Left figure in all this? Orphaned by the sudden departure from political life of Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Party is cudgelling together a new programme, designed to be more to the taste of the droves of working-class electors who voted for extreme-Left parties or stayed at home on April 21. At the same time, the parties of the ‘pluralist Left’ — the Socialists, Communists, Greens and Left Radicals who formed the last government — are desperately trying to come to an electoral agreement that will save their representation in Parliament from being decimated. Chirac, as ever a smart operator (at 69, he has been at this game for over 40 years) tried to give his cause a softer look this week by appointing a cuddly-looking Prime Minister from the provinces, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who has the task of running the government to his master’s instructions. Those instructions are to enact quickly (by decree) a beefed-up system of policing to combat street crime and to give the promise of substantial income tax cuts if the right wins a parliamentary majority next month.
Observer News Service |
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Move on Iraq: vote postponed
United Nations, May 14 At the heart of the new regime is a 300-page list of items which would require greater scrutiny by the council. But the items not on the list could go to Iraq after a 10-day review by the UN staff. The list includes items ranging from advanced telecom systems to trucks and heavy equipment. Russia and the USA took almost a year to agree on the list. However, the resolution does not contain provision for monitoring of possible illegal sale of oil by Iraq to the neighbouring countries as Washington had proposed. The USA dropped the proposal after it ran into almost unanimous opposition from other members. The postponement was agreed to after an experts committee rejected all amendments to the resolution proposed by Syria which included recognition of Iraq’s right to self-defence. The amendment was in the context of Washington’s threats to topple President Saddam Hussein and no-fly zone being imposed by the USA and Britain on parts of the country. The resolution, which also extends the “oil-for-food” progamme for six months till November 25, could have been adopted without Syria but the USA wants a unnanimous vote. Syria at one stage, had said it would abstain but wanted to consult its government and western diplomats believe it would come on board and vote for the resolution.
PTI
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US raid leaves five dead in Afghanistan
Washington, May 14 The raid was launched yesterday on a compound near Deh Rahwod, about 80 km north of Kandahar, the officials said. “Five persons were killed and 32 taken into custody,” said Marine Lt-Col David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman. The compound was believed to be a sanctuary for senior Taliban or al-Qaida fighters, spokesmen for the Pentagon and the US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, said. But no major figures were believed to have been netted in the raid, said a Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said the compound was believed to be a Taliban rather than an al-Qaida hideout. “There were no big guys, we don’t think,” the official said. The prisoners were taken to the Bagram airbase north of Kabul for questioning, said Lieutenant Commander Matthew Klee, a Central Command spokesman. He said the US forces suffered no casualties in the raid. “There were five occupants of the compound that fired on Americans, and those were the ones killed,” he said. AFP
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Scribe of Indian origin arrested
Islamabad, May 14 “Amar Deep Bassi was arrested on Friday. The British national produced his press card, which showed his affiliation with a weekly magazine — Sunday Mercury — but failed to register his name at Torkham checkpoint,” The News said today, quoting an official at the Pak-Afghan border. Mr Bassi, along with his local helpers in the tribal area, had been illegally travelling between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the newspaper said. He will be interrogated by the joint interrogation team (JIT), a combination of several secret intelligence agencies, officials of the political administration in Khyber said. The official said Mr Bassi visited Pakistan a few days ago and had acquired visas for Pakistan and Afghanistan but did not report at the border checkpost while leaving for Kabul and did the same on return to Pakistan. “This created suspicion which led to his arrest at Torkham,” he said, adding that Bassi was dressed like local Pushtuns and had grown beard to dodge the border guards. “His origin is from Jalandhar (India) but he is holding a British passport (No-0496213)’’, the official said. Bassi also failed to get the special travelling permit required to pass through the tribal areas of Pakistan on way to Afghanistan.
UNI
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HuM “not a terrorist outfit” Islamabad, May 14 The News, quoting sources in London and Washington, said the Hizb’s policy of not attacking civilian targets and opting for suicidal bombing basically saved it from being declared a terrorist group. “The administrations in the USA and Britain refuted allegations and evidences of the group’s involvement in targeting civilians and involving in suicidal bombings,” it said. During the recent campaign against the militant aspect of Kashmir militancy, the main target was the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the newspaler said.
UNI |
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Unmanned flights worry Tigers
Colombo, May 14 The head of the political wing of the Tamil Tigers, S. P. Thamilchelvan has urged the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission chief, Maj-Gen Trond Furuhovde, to advise the government to desist from such provocative action so as to stabilise the conditions of peace and normalcy in Tamil areas. Thamilchelvan lodged a formal protest with the SLMM chief, pointing out that the flights of these reconnaissance aircraft was “a negation of the confidence-building exercise undertaken by the Government of Sri Lanka”. “This aerial surveillance constitutes a violation of the spirit of the truce agreement,” he has said in the letter. UNI
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