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Talks on
disarming N. Korea end without breakthrough Window
on Pakistan Suicide bomber alive,
says mother
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Family feel Oscars
Immigrants
swear loyalty to Britain
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Talks on disarming N. Korea end without breakthrough Beijing, February 28 Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing closed the four-day session saying all sides had agreed to set up a working group and hold the next set of talks in Beijing before the end of June. ‘’Differences, even serious differences, still exist,’’ Li said at the closing ceremony, without specifying what gaps remained. China’s chief negotiator, Wang Yi cited an ‘’extreme lack of trust’’ between the US and North Korean sides and said further discussions were needed on the scope of both the North’s proposal to freeze its nuclear programmes and the US demand for dismantling all atomic arms schemes. A senior US official declared the talks that also involved South Korea, Japan and Russia ‘’very successful’’, saying all but Pyongyang had agreed to the goal of a nuclear-free North. ‘’The event has exceeded my expectations in a very important respect. It has been very successful in moving the agenda towards our goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear programmes,’’ the US official said. Russia’s chief delegate Alexander Losyukov, said the talks achieved ‘’modest’’ results. He called the working groups ‘’a reasonable base for the continuation of discussions of those problems arising from the different positions’’. Analysts said Washington and Pyongyang could both dig in their heels in this US presidential election year. “North Korea does not have to strike any agreement now, ahead of the November elections in the USA,’’ said Yu Suk-ryul of Seoul’s Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. ‘’The USA has a need to avoid collapse of the talks before the elections,’’ he said. There was little evidence the gulf between North Korea and the USA had narrowed. In the end, they settled on a chairman’s summary statement instead of a joint declaration. ‘’They (the Americans) have not succeeded, but they have not failed and they can always say the process is under way,’’ said Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley. North Korea, whose 11th-hour rejection of language in a proposed agreement prolonged the talks for hours and prevented the parties from signing a joint declaration, repeated its denial that it had an enriched uranium weapons programme. The crux of the dispute and the reason for the six-party talks is a US accusation — which North Korea denies — that North Korea is pursuing a uranium enriching programme for bombs. Japan’s chief negotiator Mitoji Yabunaka voiced support for the US goal of eliminating the North’s nuclear programmes, which he said were a ‘’grave threat to our country’’. The North wants aid and a security guarantee in return for a nuclear freeze.
— Reuters |
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Window
on Pakistan Gen
Pervez Musharraf has begun cracking a whip on the jehadis, a fact which many mainline newspapers would like people to believe. It is also widely recognised that the General and the President of the Islamic Republic for the first two years had been encouraging these very elements. He virtually handed over a large political area to the religious extremists and made it difficult for the moderates to stay alive. It is now the American pressure that is working. But in a limited way. Tensions at the social levels remain high between the two, the fundamentalists and the moderates. Writing in the popular newspaper Dawn, columnist Ayaz Amir summed up by saying: “If the foreign policy is veering in the right direction, the domestic scene is stagnant, Musharraf is still operating in a political vacuum. For after him, who or what? Shaped by expediency and resting on sand, his political structure is about as strong as Ayub Khan’s, which collapsed when Ayub fell.” Asserting that if the military rulers removed those ordinances, which feed extremism, Pakistanis could breathe much easier. He wrote, “The problem, however, is not with the maulanas, but our military masters who look towards the sky to discover new planets only when pushed by their American friends. The Americans are interested in Osama bin Laden, George Bush’s ticket to re-election, not the Hudood Ordinances. Which means we are stuck with them.” Extremist politics is one major reason for tensions in the region. It is not for nothing as Nawa-e-Waqt reported ex-ISI chief Hameed Gul predicting only doom for South Asia. He said, “India was in a cleft stick because it needed energy to survive, but energy from Central Asia was available only if Pakistan allowed the pipelines to cross its territory. India, therefore, was forced to agree to Pakistan’s demands, only if Pakistan were to play its cards well. If India gave Kashmir to Pakistan it would go to pieces and if it did not, then there would be nuclear war in South Asia in which both countries would perish. Vajpayee therefore, was now trying to get Pakistan to drop its visa system and join India in a single currency. That would make sure that there was no Pakistan.” Commenting on this, Khalid Ahmed in Daily Times wrote, “Aslam Beg and Hameed Gul are the ‘strategists’ of Pakistan. That’s why the country has come close to annihilation. Let’s see the logic of his argument. He says India needs the Iranian pipeline like a hole in the head. But Pakistan wants Kashmir, first. And if India gives up Kashmir it is finished. And somehow if India doesn’t go to pieces as a result of giving up Kashmir, then there will be a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, resulting in the destruction of both countries. The General has set the stage for an eternal deadlock in which giving ground is simply not possible. He is an intellectual suicide-bomber and wants to take Pakistan down with him. Then, out of the blow, he credits the most far-flung bit of imagination on the part of Vajpayee and tends to believe it.” Ahmed’s comment came straight: “This way too one country is destroyed and that is Pakistan. Pakistanis love Hameed Gul. It is a kind of death wish and a sign of intellectual exhaustion. The Hameed Guls of our day are the flotsam of a warrior state that has fallen on its face and has brought nothing good to the people of Pakistan. He is the chief lemming leading his flock to the precipice while his own economic base is sound and all comforts of life are supplied to him and his family by a nation who is belly-up because of the shenanigans of the swashbuckling soldiers of His ilk.” New International was worried about the peace initiative in the sub-continent. It wanted India to end human rights violations in Kashmir. Commenting on the peace talks between the All-Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and the Indian Government it wrote, “It was due to the failure of Delhi to control the excesses by its Army and paramilitary forces against civilians in its held part of Kashmir. The irony of the situation is that the more repressive the Indian Army becomes, the more active the militants turn. This nullifies any chance of peace at a time when Delhi itself is pushing for peace in the region. With suppression begetting resistance, the conflict has the ability to act as a major obstacle in the India-Pakistan talks.” The News also wished, “ We are sure India would not like its efforts to bring about normality in the region to suffer a serious blow due a separate policy it follows in occupied Kashmir state. Some of the normalisation and peace must be directed to the badly mauled territory of Kashmir if the settlement of the dispute is to top the agenda for the talks.” |
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Suicide bomber alive, says mother Islamabad, February 28 The ousted Taliban have claimed repeatedly, through a spokesman in contact with AFP from southern Afghanistan, that the man responsible for the January 27 suicide bombing was Mohammad Abdullah. But his mother, Maha Elsamnah, told a select group of reporters here in Islamabad: “Abdullah is alive and living in Pakistan.” Elsamnah said Abdullah did not live with his family out of fear of being arrested, but that he wanted to clear his name while in Pakistan as he had never been involved in any activities related to Al-Qaida or the Taliban. “My son is not a type who believe in suicide bombings,” she added. A suicide bomber, so far only identified as a male aged roughly between 25 and 40, walked up to a Canadian International Security Assistance Force convoy in Kabul on January 27 and detonated explosives strapped to him, killing a Canadian soldier and an Afghan civilian and injuring more than ten others.
— AFP |
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Family feel Oscars Los Angeles, February 28 Then there’s director Jim Sheridan, his wife Fran and daughters, Naomi and Kristen, who will be sitting in a row, their fingers crossed tightly, praying for the luck of the Irish to pull off what some might call an Oscar miracle. Sheridan and his daughters are up for an Oscar for best original screenplay for their ‘’autobiographical’’ film ‘’In America’’ which has also garnered nominations for best actress (Samantha Morton) and best supporting actor (Djimon Hounsou). The movie, a small, heart-warming tale, borrows heavily from Sheridan family history as it tells of an Irish family who sneak across the Canadian border in a beat-up car to take up residence in New York City, most specifically in a wreck of a tenement building in the heart of pre-Yuppified Hell’s Kitchen, once one of the city’s most notorious slums. The family, two young daughters, a wife recovering from the loss of a young son named Frankie and a husband emotionally deadened by that experience, fall in love with the Big Apple, despite the usual assortment of transvestites, heroin addicts and hookers, and recover from their spiritual ailments. To hear Fran Sheridan tell it, the film is Sheridan family fact only up to a point, but all that’s in there was definitely hammered out at the Sheridan family table. The family did sneak into the USA in the 1980s, did take up residence in Hell’s Kitchen, although their apartment was in much better shape than the one in the film, and yes, Jim Sheridan, then an aspiring theater director, did lug a hugely heavy air conditioner up four steep flights of tenement stairs to bring his children some relief from the relentless New York summer. But, said Fran Sheridan over coffee the other day at a posh Sunset Boulevard hotel, a far, far distance from either Hell’s Kitchen or Dublin, the Sheridan family did not hesitate for a moment to change their life story to fit the silver screen. ‘’I didn’t have a child who died but Jim had a brother Frankie who died at age 10 when he was 17. But I did have a premature baby in New York, just like in the movie, but I don’t think I reacted as emotionally as Samantha Morton did in the movie,’’ Fran Sheridan said, adding that she only met Morton once before filming so the actress really did not try to play her. (Although when Morton received an Oscar nomination, Fran Sheridan did boast to her husband that her role got the recognition, not his.) Jim Sheridan, whose other films include ‘’’My Left Foot,’’ which won an Oscar for Daniel Day Lewis and ‘’In the Name of the Father,’’ had the idea for ‘’In America’’ in the late 1980s but never got it off the ground. He enlisted his two oldest daughters, both of whom have careers in film, to assist him in writing the screenplay and pretty soon, father did not know best. He says the girls began to whittle his role out as they expanded theirs. Fran Sheridan says that still wasn’t enough to get the film going until her husband of 32 years had a brainstorm. ‘’That’s when Jim brought in the story of Frankie and that is how it all came together. how it finally jelled.’’ Life, Jim Sheridan has pointed out, does not have neat beginnings, ends and middles. But films do.
— Reuters |
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Immigrants swear loyalty to Britain London, February 28 Led by Indian-born Mriganka and Aparna Chatterjee and their four-year-old son Rajarshi, the Prince shook their hands and presented the certificates that made their new status official. The Prince said, “It is uplifting and appropriate that we are all gathered here to congratulate you and to welcome you to your country and into your local community. I very much hope this ceremony has added something to the significance of acquiring British citizenship and it has reinforced your belief, if indeed any reinforcement is required, that you belong here and are very welcome. I also hope being a British citizen becomes for each one of you a great source of pride and comfort for the rest of your life.” Mr Chatterjee, 32 and his family moved to London seven years ago. Their four-year-old son, Rajarshi, was born in London, where Mr Chatterjee works as an IT analyst. Mr Chatterjee said the official welcome was an emotional experience. “I am not a monarchist in India or in England but that is not what was important about the day. It was a historic moment. Taking the oath reinforced my feeling that it was my duty to return something to the country.” The couple want their children to adapt Indian and English traditions but are sceptical of testing for
“Britishness”. “It could become something you forget as soon as the test is done,” Mr Chatterjee said.
— UNI |
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