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Tuesday,
November 26, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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‘Normalising ties with India first priority’ Women in Pak wage war against killings Pak provincial
govts sworn in
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Moscow, November 25 The death toll among victims of last month’s Chechen rebel raid on a Moscow theatre rose to 129, a city health official said today. A woman died in Moscow’s main emergency hospital yesterday after suffering a second stroke following the raid, said Lyubov Zhomova, the spokesman for the city’s health committee. Message from Bin Laden in circulation Controversy over X’mas story
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‘Normalising ties with India first priority’ Islamabad, November 25 “My top priority would be to improve and normalise ties with India and other neighbouring countries,” Mr Kasuri said in an interview published in the local daily Dawn today. “We are prepared to go half way or may be even a step further in improving relations with India,” he said. But these relations had to be based on rule of law and mutual respect, he said and hoped that the Indian leadership would respond positively to these sentiments. “India has also to play a role,” he said. Asked to spell out the message he planned to send to India, Mr Kasuri said: “We want to improve relations with India and wish peace and prosperity for the people of India.” He said Pakistan was sincere in its desire for peace with India and urged the Indian leadership to reciprocate in the same spirit. “We want principled peace with honour and justice in resolving all issues, including Kashmir”, he said, adding that any solution to Kashmir issue would have to take into account the aspirations of the Kashmiri people. “The desired objective of solution to the Kashmir... can only be achieved through what is acceptable to the Kashmiri people,” he said. Observing that strained relations had cost both Pakistan and India dearly, he said it had a negative impact on the social and economic development of the two neighbours. Mr Kasuri’s overtures to improve relations with India followed remarks by President Gen Pervez Musharraf after the swearing in ceremony of the civilian government on Saturday.
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Women in Pak wage war against killings Islamabad, November 25 Such murders — where a man kills a woman he views as having sullied his “honour” — are on the rise, the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRC) says, “with more and more reported from areas where they had once been unknown”. In 2001, at least 226 women in the southern province of Sindh were killed — usually by their husbands or brothers — while some 227 honour-related killings took place in Punjab, according to the HRC’s annual report issued earlier this year. “The real figures are likely to be higher,” says the commission’s Kamila Hyat, adding that figures were not compiled for Pakistan’s other two provinces because of the sketchy nature of reports. Academic Tahira Khan, who has spent five years studying honour killings, agrees that the trend is upwards, “not only in Pakistan... but all over the Muslim world where honour killings were occurring before.” At the heart of the killings are ingrained social attitudes towards female sexuality, and changing attitudes of women to their own sexuality through greater exposure to the rest of the world, she says. Such new attitudes have led them to “protest against forced marriages, assert their right to get married according to their own choice, or reject marriage”, which can lead to a family backlash as serious as murder. But killings can occur over actions much less momentous — a mere flirtatious look misconstrued as a sign of an illicit relationship can be a catalyst to murder. Finding a female relative in a so-called “objectionable” or “compromising” position with another man, often meaning that the two are merely alone together in the same room, is often used to justify honour killings. Perhaps most worryingly, so-called fake honour killings are surging to the point of being an “epidemic”, Khan says. Fake honour killings are when a man kills a woman, usually a relative, to cover up the real reason he has murdered another man. Alleging his honour was outraged by saying he saw them in a compromising position is enough to win him a lesser sentence under Pakistan’s court system, says Shahnaz Bokhari of the Progressive Women’s Association. “This violence is on the rise because the prosecution rate is negligible... men know they can get away with it,” she fumes.
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Pak provincial govts sworn in Islamabad, November 25 The Punjab Assembly, the country’s largest with 371 seats, was sworn in by the army-backed Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid’s (PML-Q) Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, a former House Speaker. In the NWFP capital Peshawar, 121 members of the 124-seat house took oath. The six-party Islamic alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) took 68 provincial seats in a sweep of last month’s polls in the NWFP, giving them firm control of the all-important Afghan border province. The MMA’s Akram Durrani is expected to take up the chief minister slot by the end of the week. Assemblies in southern Sindh province and south-west Baluchistan province, bordering Iran and Afghanistan, are to be sworn in on Thursday. AFP SAHI SPEAKER OF PUNJAB ASSEMBLY ISLAMABAD: The Parliamentary party of the Pakistan Muslim League
(Quaid-e-Azam) has nominated Muhammad Afzal Sahi as Speaker and Sardar Shaukat Mazari as Deputy Speaker of Punjab Assembly. The meeting, chaired by its President Pervez
Elahi, was also attended by Punjab Assembly members of the National Alliance, Pakistan Muslim League
(Jinnah), the PML (Junejo), and other allies, according to a report in the Pakistan-based daily ‘Millat’.
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UN team for inspections in Iraq Larnaca (Cyprus), November 25 “It is an absolutely crucial test, cooperation is figured into the success of weapons inspections, and this is what we will be paying close attention to,” International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) spokesperson Melissa Fleming said. A total of 17 inspectors will leave on a UN-chartered Hercules C-130 plane from Larnaca airport to begin the first probe of Iraq’s weapon capabilities for four years. They are scheduled to start their first inspections on November 27, but the site earmarked for the debut visit is a closely guarded secret. “We know where it is, but we are not telling anyone where it is,” Fleming said, adding that “unannounced inspections are the key to our mandate.” Iraq has strongly denied having any weapons of mass destruction and says the inspectors will find nothing incriminating. The inspectors are operating on behalf of the IAEA and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.
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Russian theatre hostage toll 129
Moscow, November 25 A woman died in Moscow’s main emergency hospital yesterday after suffering a second stroke following the raid, said Lyubov Zhomova, the spokesman for the city’s health committee. The overwhelming majority of victims were killed by what Russian doctors identified as an opiate-based gas used to knock out the gunmen before Russian special forces entered the theatre on October 26, 58 hours after the rebels took about 800 persons in the building hostage. Fortyone attackers were killed in the storming, according to officials. Human rights activists and liberal lawmakers have criticised the authorities for failing to immediately inform doctors about the gas precise composition and for failing to organise more timely treatment for victims. Russian officials have insisted that doctors had enough information for treatment. Eight victims remained hospitalised as of today. Five others had been readmitted to hospitals after their initial release. AP |
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Message from Bin Laden in circulation London, November 25 Details of the 4,000-word letter from the terrorist leader emerged as the British Government issued, its strongest warning on Saturday night that attacks by Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida organisation on the UK are “inevitable”. Foreign Office Minister Mike O’Brien said: “We face an enemy who will attack us in Britain as well as overseas... British workers in New York or tourists in Bali or residents of London or Birmingham.” Mr Brien said there was a threat of “well planned attacks” on “British national institutions, commercial and financial infrastructure and on many aspects of our everyday life”. The security authorities in Europe and the USA are concerned that the Al-Qaida is planning a major strike. Two weeks ago Bin Laden issued a message on an audio cassette, proving he was alive and raising fears it presaged new attacks. Britain, with its close support for the USA in the war on terror and Iraq, is a prime target and analysts believe any military action against Saddam Hussein will provoke a spate of revenge attacks by Islamic militants. Sources described the mood in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard as “jumpy”. The translated letter was originally posted in Arabic on a Saudi Arabian website, previously used by the Al-Qaida to disseminate messages. Within the last two weeks British Islamists have translated the letter, the most comprehensive explanation of Bin Laden’s ideology to be issued for several years, and posted it on English-language websites run from the UK. The letter was sent to hundreds of subscribers to an email list run by Mohammed Al-Massari, the UK-based Saudi Arabian dissident whose Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights has opposed the Al-Saud regime for more than a decade. Al-Massari denied on Saturday that he supported terrorism in any way. Al-Massari’s email and bin Laden’s letter show ideological similarities. Both stress that the “holy war” is defensive. Bin Laden issues a direct threat to the West: “Anyone who tries to destroy our villages and cities, then we are going to destroy their villages and cities. Anyone who steals our fortunes, then we must destroy their economy. Anyone who kills our civilians, then we are going to kill their civilians.”
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Controversy over X’mas story London, November 25 When ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ was first performed in Edinburgh this summer, without any pre-publicity, the author received anonymous death threats and abusive phone calls, in addition to complaints from the US Consulate. But the team behind ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ are determined to defend its shocking content as a relevant piece of drama and a demonstration of the important British right to the freedom of speech. The play, which next month begins a 12-night run at Etcetera Theatre in North London, tells the apparently innocent story of a shopping mall Father Christmas in Florida who is frustrated with the materialistic attitudes of the shoppers he sees around him. Even the children who visit him, he complains, are obsessed with listing the presents they want to receive. By the end of the bizarre show it is clear, though, that this subversive Santa Claus is in fact Osama bin Laden in disguise. The point is made even more clearly when Santa’s fur-lined red cloak is pulled back to reveal a suicide bomber’s belt full of explosives. The controversial play, which is written and performed by Andrew Dallmeyer, came to the attention of the police in Edinburgh after a series of abusive calls and threats to those involved with its production. Dallmeyer knows he will find himself under attack again in London.
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