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Saturday,
August 17, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Govt to
announce poll schedule: WINDOW ON PAKISTAN Police fails to produce suspects in
Pak ‘shouldn’t disrupt’ J&K poll
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Indians’ software against ultra attacks Call for accountability on Gujarat: NRIs
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Govt to
announce poll schedule: Pak EC
Islamabad, August 16 The EC has argued that it cannot do so under the court ruling, and it is for the government to announce the elaborate polls programme plus the date of polling, The News quoted an official as saying. According to the court judgment, the government is required to hold the elections to the national and provincial assemblies and the Senate before October 12. The government has prepared the schedule, but as per the ruling the schedule has to be announced at least 45 days before the polling day. Therefore, the court judgment is unlikely to be followed as far as elections to the Senate is concerned because as these, in any case, cannot now be held before October 12. The official said the government had consulted top constitutional experts on preparation of the election schedule, particularly keeping in view the time-frame given in the Supreme Court judgment. Meanwhile, the EC announced that the poll for the Upper House of Parliament, the Senate, would be held on November 12. Nomination papers for contesting national and provincial assembly elections can be filed from Monday to Saturday next week. Returning officers will then have three days to decide which candidates are eligible. Appeals against any rejection of nominations will be made on September 4, with a week set aside for the appeal process. The last date for withdrawals will be September 13. Members of the provincial and national assembly form the electorate for the Senate poll. Legal experts said the decision to hold the Senate election in November violated a May 2000 Supreme Court order validating President Pervez Musharraf’s rule for three years. It had instructed him to hold elections for national and provincial assemblies and the Senate before October 30. In May the government decided to hold the Senate election through a direct vote, but later changed its mind to allow parliamentarians to elect Senate members as provided in the constitution. Musharraf won five more years as President through an April referendum which independent observers say was heavily rigged in his favour. He is also seeking to strengthen his grip on power through a set of proposed constitutional amendments. Major political parties, including former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and former Premier Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League, oppose the changes. UNI Reuters
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WINDOW ON PAKISTAN With a dubious referendum in his pocket, Gen. Pervez Musharraf was a scared ruler on the eve of Pakistan’s 56th independence day. Gone were open public meetings and his efforts to look every inch a civilian ruler; he was feeling uneasy in a shervani. He spoke briefly to a handpicked gathering of country’s ruling elite and vowed to have a vibrant democracy. His attack on religious extremists, “a handful of lunatics” was very straight and stringent. Forgetting that his ISI had created and nurtured that group and continues to do so, he vowed to keep up his support for “the Kashmiri brothers fighting against Indian occupation.” The contradiction looked very sweet to the General. He was very angry with “the terrorists” for killing people in Pakistan, but in the same breath patted “the militants” in Jammu and Kashmir. Musharraf seemed to be aware of the world watching his democratic experiment from the sidelines. Unlike his predecessor Zia, who had only sidelined Benazir Bhutto and not Nawaz Sharif, Musharraf was not sure of what the final result would be. One, both the leaders have succeeded in creating new political outfits and second the two major political alliances may emerge politically stronger. Here is what Najam Sethi, editor of the Friday Times said. “On the play of dice so far, it would seem so. Mr. Sharif has bitten the bullet and handed over the PML (N) crown to Shahbaz Sharif. Ms Bhutto has been equally pragmatic, sidestepping the hurdles and clearing the way for the PPP via the PPP Parliamentarian. Both believe it is better to live and fight another day than to fight and lose today.” All three leaders — Benazir, Sharif and Altaf Hussain (MQM) — would canvass for the October elections not from Karachi but London. That is the dubious success for the self-anointed President. Handcuffs await these leaders the moment they put their foot into the country. Nevertheless, there are over 70 parties and groups that have fulfilled the yardsticks laid by the Election Commission and would be contesting. For the General, it should have been the more the merrier. But somewhere he is scared despite that the new Prime Minister under his constitution would be a little more than a figurehead. Noted columnist Khalid Ahmed found major political parties in total crisis. He said: “The biggest crisis that hit the PML, led by Nawaz Sharif, was that it split quickly after he was deposed in 1999. The big leaders got together in PML(Q) and readily agreed that since Nawaz Sharif had transgressed, Musharraf was right in removing him. “ The PPP was greatly weakened after Ms Bhutto’s government was dismissed. The 1997 election saw the PPP defeat because its supporters simply lost interest. Asif Zardari had caused a lot of depression within the top rung party leaders. Together with Imran Khan’s Insaf Party, and Aftab Sherpao’s PPP faction in the NWFP, Millet Party counts on netting the vote of the PPP. Both Leghari and Imran are carefully pitching their appeal to members of eroding mainstream parties. In Punjab, the largest and most influential province, where the power contests are finally decided, there is an incipient trend towards accepting the PML (Q). PML remnants are now breaking cover and joining the PML (Q). Some local PPP leaders have also read the signal and are accepting the “favoured” Muslim Leaguers. But the Punjabi is quite pragmatic when it comes to politics as means of getting to the levers of power. Changing loyalties does not torture the conscience in this province. Nawaz Sharif has been abandoned by his partymen before and he should be comforted by the fact that they would lose no time in rejoining him if circumstances change drastically. In central Punjab, the local leadership is supposed to ward off the PML(N) sympathy vote, but in south Punjab, the scene is uncertain as always. There are a number of “sure shot” feudal winners. In the NWFP, PPP and PML(N) are trying to manufacture an “electoral arrangement”. The ANP, once a PML (N) ally, has favoured Musharraf’s change of policy on Afghanistan, but has no potential partners. Aftab Sherpao has gone into the PML(Q) fold, while the religious parties hope to assert themselves under the banner of Muttahada Majlis Amal. Down in Sindh, the Grand Alliance has thrown up Sindh Democratic Alliance as the government’s answer to the rural dominance of the PPP and the urban dominance of the MQM. Given this scenario no massive one is expected and form a strong government in Islamabad. The religious parties had become popular because of “jehad” in the 90s and the steadily falling governments of the PPP and PML. Religious leaders became more visible as media manipulators, openly laying down the foreign policy of the state and threatening to bring internal Islamic reforms to roll back the influence of mainstream political parties. Owing to their exemption from law and their weaponisation, they encroached on the executive and ideological power of the state. They tasted power without being elected to power. Most newspapers agreed that the end result after the elections would be fractured politics with Kashmir being still higher on the agenda. |
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Police fails to produce suspects in car-bomb case
Karachi, August 16 Judge Aale Maqbool Rizvi adjourned the hearing until Monday after prosecutors failed to produce the three accused men, who are being held at Karachi Central Prison. “The police did not produce the accused persons in the court and the judge had issued a show-cause notice to the jail authorities,” defence lawyer Abdul Waheed Katpar told AFP outside the Karachi Anti-Terrorism Court. The notice is a formal demand for the head of Karachi Central Jail to explain the absence of the accused. Three militants, Mohammad Imran Bhai, Mohammad Hanif Ayub and Mohammad Ashraf, are charged with murder, conspiracy to murder and terrorism. They were captured in this volatile southern port city last month and allegedly confessed to plotting to assassinate General Musharraf in April and planning the suicide car-bomb attack outside the US consulate here on June 14. The police identified their network as the Harkatul Mujaheedin al-Alaami, a previously unheard of offshoot of the Harkatul Mujaheedin militants who are operating in Kashmir. The police has said the three militants confessed to planning to blow up a vehicle on a main Karachi road as General Musharraf was passing during a visit here in April. The detonator failed, and the same vehicle was allegedly later used in the blast outside the downtown US consulate building. The explosion killed 12 Pakistanis. A fourth man, from the Pakistani Rangers, has also been charged over the General Musharraf murder plot and is being held separately. The judge waited for two hours today before adjourning the hearing. No prosecutors or jail officials were present at the court. An official at the high-security Central Prison said earlier that Sindh provincial authorities had ordered the trial to be held inside the prison for security reasons. “The Home Department has issued notification that the trial will be held inside the prison,” the official said. But the judge made no reference to holding the trial in prison, and a court official said he was unaware of any notification. Police have alleged that the three militants are key office-bearers of the Harkatul Mujahedin al-Alaami group. But speaking to reporters at a court appearance on Saturday, where the three were formally arrested, Imran denied the charges. “I am a jihadi (holy warrior) like any other Muslim. I went on jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir several times. “When I went to sleep I was a jihadi, when I woke up I became a terrorist. But I repeat I am not a criminal and was not involved in the two cases for which I am accused,” he pleaded. AFP
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Pak ‘shouldn’t disrupt’ J&K poll
Geneva, August 16 Human rights groups, who are attending the 54th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights here, said it was incumbent upon Pakistan to ensure that the “people of Jammu and Kashmir are given a chance to participate freely in the coming elections without fear of being made targets of jehadi guns.’’ Interfaith International, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation and International Institute of Peace, expressed dismay at Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s indirect exhortation to boycott the elections. “Let the people of the state be given the freedom to use their right of franchise in a tension-free atmosphere and not under the shadow of the gun,’’ they said. These groups also made a presentation to the UN Commission on Human Rights. A meeting of prominent Pakistan occupied Kashmir leaders was also held to discuss the current politico-security situation in South Asia. UNI
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Indians’ software against ultra attacks Chicago, August 16 Mr Alok Chaturvedi and Mr Shailendra Raj Mehta, Director and Co-Director, respectively, of the Purdue e-Business Research Centre, were recently invited by the Science and Technology Policy Office at the White House to brief them on the potential use of technology for homeland defence. The programme, which took seven years of research, is called Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulations (SEAS). “It allows us to recreate a situation using a combination of human and artificial agents and populate it with real data.” “We can then move backwards and forwards in time to decision support, forecasting, scenario planning and strategy planning, all in an integrated environment,” Mr Mehta said. Using the software, the duo created a “fully functioning” programme termed homeland security bio-terrorism decision-making environment. Using two IBM supercomputers, they created a “synthetic” model of the USA with 250,000 ‘agents’ representing the position, movement and well-being of citizens in case of a bio-terrorist attack. Nine teams of human “players” from the offices of homeland security, law enforcement agencies, centres for disease control and health and human services made decisions in real time on issues like closure of roads, airports, vaccinations, quarantines and resource allocation. “By doing this exercise virtually, we can make mistakes and learn from them,” said Mr Chaturvedi. “We model the communicability of infectious agents from host to host (small pox, influenza) and from the environment to the host (anthrax),” added Mr Mehta. The SEAS can model all aspects of the economy through the use of “intelligent software agents”. These agents, said Mr Mehta and Mr Chaturvedi, are distinct entities such as types of customers and suppliers, citizens and competitors. “Agents can be used to model any group of people whose actions are important to the organisation. The agents’ behaviour is defined by actual data on how they have acted in the past. The project has got several million dollars in funding from the National Science Foundation, Intel, Office of Naval Research and other agencies. Mr Mehta and Mr Chaturvedi have also founded a company, Simulex Inc., to which the software has been licensed. Mr Mehta said they were working with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi to explore how the technology could be applied for simulating various economic and security issues facing India. Mr Chaturvedi graduated in mechanical engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology in Ranchi while Mr Mehta got his bachelors degree from the Delhi School of Economics.
IANS |
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Call for accountability on Gujarat: NRIs
London, August 16 In a resolution adopted yesterday at the Conference on Human Rights and Minorities in India, the NRIs expressed “shame and anguish” at the sectarian violence of the past six months in Gujarat. “We are concerned at the role of the state and its organs in the recent violence. The state and central governments... the administration and the police, have undeniably failed to protect constitutional rights of citizens and ensure their safety and security,” said the resolution adopted at the conference titled “Indian Independence? Healing the Wounds”. The conference held at Gandhi Hall and attended by prominent British Asians like Lord Meghnad Desai, Sir Gulam Noon and Mr Ram Gidoomal, CBE (Commander of British Empire), also expressed concern at some aspects of media coverage and the failure of citizens and organisations to respond adequately. “Human rights are not the gift of the government. They are inherent in individual citizens. Every country needs a ‘health check’ on its human rights record,” said Lord Meghnad Desai of the London School of Economics. Mr Harsh Mander, Action-Aid India Director, said he was “ashamed to witness the pitiless brutality against women and small children by organised bands of armed young men in the name of religion.” Describing the carnage as “unspeakable mass terror and savagery unleashed by our people on our people,” Mr Mander, a former civil servant, said he was appalled at the role of the state authorities who “enabled or abetted the planned massacre and destruction.” “The carnage that has convulsed the state of Gujarat has left a profound human tragedy that does not heal or abate,” he said. PTI
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Floods affect 4.2 m Germans Berlin, August 16 European Commission President Romano Prodi has also been invited to Berlin for the afternoon gathering, the sources told AFP, adding that prime ministers Peter Medgyessy of Hungary and Leszek Miller of Poland may also come. Some 4.2 million Germans have been affected by the floods, prompted by rainstorms that left large swathes of central Europe under water.
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